In this episode of Deeply Functional, Todd Schmenk explores how to work with trauma through a functional contextualist lens without getting stuck in the story or losing momentum toward change.

Rather than focusing on trauma as an event or diagnosis, this episode reframes trauma as what gets shaped over time, including avoidance patterns, fusion with fear based rules, narrowed identities, emotional numbing, and the quiet loss of values driven living. Todd examines a common challenge in trauma work, where clinicians hold space with care and compassion yet unintentionally stop shaping movement toward flexibility.

Listeners are guided through the core functional targets that often show up in trauma focused work, including fusion with the trauma narrative, experiential avoidance and hyper control, and values collapse into safety seeking. Through clear clinical framing and a brief case illustration, the episode demonstrates how therapists can validate suffering while still reinforcing defusion, willingness, self as context, and values based direction.

This episode is for clinicians who want to honor survival strategies without letting them define the limits of a client’s life, and who are looking for a process sensitive, context aware way to help trauma survivors build something larger than what happened to them.

Holding space matters.
Shaping flexibility matters too.

In this episode of Deeply Functional, Todd Schmenk kicks off a new mini-series on process-based work with specific populations by taking a functional, ACT-informed look at anxiety.

Rather than treating anxiety as a symptom to eliminate, this episode reframes anxiety as a natural human response and focuses on how people behave in its presence. You’ll hear why symptom management often backfires, how avoidance quietly shrinks a person’s life, and what it means to expand behavior even while fear is still onboard.

Todd outlines three core functional targets for anxiety work—fusion with threat-based language, experiential avoidance, and loss of values direction—and offers a clear clinical illustration showing how these processes show up in real sessions and how to intervene at the process level.

🎧 Episode Extras
This episode is accompanied by a written article and supplemental materials that expand on the functional framework, clinical targets, and in-session moves discussed here.

👉 Access the full article and extras

If you’re ready to stop managing anxiety and start helping clients live more fully with it, this episode sets the foundation.

In this brief update, Todd shares a small shift in where the RIACT Quick Blips will live going forward and why.

The short, practical ACT-in-Context episodes will now be available exclusively on RIACT.org, helping support the time, care, and sustainability needed to keep producing them.

The longer Deeply Functional episodes will continue right here every other week, just as before. No changes there.

This episode isn’t about restriction, it’s an open invitation to a space built specifically for clinicians who want grounded, functional, process-based tools they can use right away.