Welcome to the Mathias J. Barker Podcast. My name is Mathias and I'm a psychotherapist here in Spokane, Washington.

And this is a podcast just about mental health and moving towards health and flourishing what's meaningful despite hardship.

And today we have a real treat.

I just got to talk to Dr. Stephen Hayes who, I don't know, if you follow my work for a while,

you know that I really love a school of

psychological thought called contextual behaviorism and that I function out of things like

relational frame theory and acceptance and commitment therapy so So those are like the genres of psychology

that I function in.

All my content is really kind of geared

within that behavioral lens.

And so Dr Stephen Hayes, he's the founder

and the creator of this entire system of psychology that I've studied in and that I use in clinical work.

And so he's the leading voice in acceptance and commitment therapy, relational frame theory and contextual behavior science. He's the guy. and all around the planet who are researching and adding to kind of this wealth of information

within contextual behaviorism.

But this is the guy who started at all.

He was a direct pupil of B.F Skinner, if you've heard of that guy.

He's really, I I think taking behaviorism into the current

modern era and so I was pretty nervous to talk to him because I just revere him so much and

I told them this at the end of the

interview was just funny like it took me maybe I don't know like 30 minutes to kind of

of warm up and to feel kind of comfortable like engaging in conversation and it felt a lot more fluid once I

warmed up because I don't know you're just you're talking to the master right so you don't

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