Psychological Flexibility for Behavior Analysts: The Six Repertoires

Psychological flexibility, in Board Certified Behavior Analyst (BCBA) terms, is six repertoires you can watch a person do: acting in line with rules, with emotions, with time, with self, with values, and with action. A client says "I feel just fine" while crossing both arms in front of their chest. That gap, between what they tell you and what you read on their body, is where this skill lives. Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACT) calls these processes. Dr. Tom Szabo's recommendation is to call them what they are. Repertoires. Things people do. Things you can score.

This page is for the BCBA who has read about the hexaflex, nodded at it, and walked back into session not quite sure what to do with it. The work here is not theory. It is learning to discriminate six classes of behavior in the room with you and coach what you see.

What psychological flexibility means in behavior analytic terms#

Most descriptions of psychological flexibility lean on private states. Acceptance. Defusion. Present moment. Useful words for a clinical psychologist. Less useful for a BCBA writing goals against a task list.

Szabo's reframe is to drop the fuzzy nouns and treat each ACT process as behavior under the control of a specific class of variables. Acceptance becomes behavior under the control of emotional stimuli. Defusion becomes behavior under the control of thoughts treated as thoughts, not facts. Present-moment work becomes behavior under the control of current cues instead of remembered or imagined ones. Selfing becomes behavior under the control of "who I am right now" versus a rigid story. Values becomes behavior under the control of long-horizon reinforcers. Committed action is the behavior itself.

Once the six are repertoires, you can do what behavior analysts do. Observe. Measure. Teach. You also stay in scope. You are not treating thoughts. You are training a skill.

You can use the psychological flexibility model or ABA as a clinical social worker or as a clinical nurse or as a clinical psychologist, but you can also use the same model slightly differently in a training format as an applied behavior analyst. You don't have to be a psychotherapist to be making use of it. From the talk — Dr. Tom Szabo

The shift in role matters. Same model. Different hat. The therapist treats. The behavior analyst trains.

The six repertoires you are watching for#

Here is the list in plain words, with what each one looks like when a person is doing it well and when they are not.

Rules. A person who tracks rules flexibly says, "that rule used to work, this one fits now." A person stuck in rules says, "I always have to do it this way." Watch for words like always, never, have to, can't.

Emotions. Flexible emotion behavior sounds like, "I'm angry and I'm still going to listen." Inflexible looks like leaving the room, shutting down, or insisting the feeling is not there. Crossed arms with a flat "I'm fine" is a classic miss.

Time. Flexible time behavior is contact with what is in front of the person right now. Inflexible behavior is living in last Tuesday's argument or next month's panic.

Self. Flexible selfing sounds like, "in this context I'm a parent, in this one I'm an employee, in this one I'm a friend." Inflexible selfing is one fixed story, usually a bad one. "I'm a screw-up."

Values. Flexible values behavior is choosing the harder action because it points at something that matters. Inflexible behavior is whatever pays out fastest.

Action. Flexible action is moving with the discomfort still present. Inflexible action is waiting until the discomfort is gone, which usually means never.

Discriminate between those six repertoires of behavior that I was describing to you. Discriminate behavior with respect to rules and emotions and time and self and values and action. And so my recommendation is to get with people who break it down. From the talk — Dr. Tom Szabo

Tells versus reads: what to listen for and what to watch for#

A tell is what a person says. A read is what their body says while they are saying it. Both count. They often disagree, and the disagreement is the signal.

Tells include the actual words, but also the way the words come out. Word choice. Volume. Pitch. Pace. Repetition. A client who says "fine" three times in five seconds is telling you something with the repetition that the word "fine" alone does not carry.

Reads are everything else. Eye contact and where it goes. Eyebrow position. Shoulders. Hands. Whether they are looking at you or at their phone. Posture changes when a topic comes up. A jaw that tightens at one specific word.

Listen for what people tell you but also look for reads, look for body language. Yeah, I feel just fine but what are you doing with your arms? Oh, I'm just, okay, I'm angry. You see, you should be able to not just listen for what people say but also look at how they're saying it. From the talk — Dr. Tom Szabo

The crossed-arms example is the whole skill in one moment. Tell says "fine." Read says "angry." A BCBA who only counts the tell misses the whole session. A BCBA who reads the arms gets a starting point.

A small-units coding exercise you can run with a supervisee#

This is the practice that turns the six repertoires from a concept into a skill. You do it the same way you teach any other discrimination. Small units first. Many trials. Build up.

Step one. Pick a short clip. Sixty seconds of a parent describing their week is plenty. A snippet from a session recording with consent works too. Avoid hour-long videos at the start. The point is volume of trials, not depth of any one trial.

Step two. Watch with a supervisee. Each of you, independently, scores the clip. For each utterance, mark which of the six repertoires the speaker is sampling and whether it looks flexible or inflexible. Two columns. One word per cell.

Step three. Compare codes. Where you agree, move on. Where you disagree, replay the clip and talk through what each of you noticed. This is where the learning lives. Not in being right. In hearing what your supervisee picked up that you missed.

Step four. Add a read column. Same clip. Now you are also marking body language. Crossed arms. Eye contact. Phone glance. Pace change. Track when reads disagree with tells.

Step five. Stack reps. The pattern Szabo points to is more clips, more coding, more comparing. Not longer clips. More of them.

Begin with the smallest possible units of analysis and work your way up to being able to code. The best ACT therapists code a lot. So code a bunch of different transcripts so that you ultimately begin to get a really good repertoire at discrimination. From the talk — Dr. Tom Szabo

The supervisee benefits. You benefit. Your inter-observer agreement on private events climbs without anyone having to read minds.

How to use what you observe in the next session#

Coding in the office is practice. The use case is the session you are about to walk into.

Pick one repertoire to watch for this week. Not all six. One. If you keep noticing rule rigidity in parent training, that is the one. If you keep noticing emotion avoidance in supervisee debriefs, that is the one.

In session, do two things differently. First, name the read out loud, gently, when you see it. "I notice your shoulders went up when we got to that part." No judgment. No interpretation. Just the observation. Second, ask one question that opens the repertoire. For a rigid rule, "is there a version of that rule that has worked for you before?" For an avoided emotion, "what would it cost to let that feeling be here while we talk?"

You are not running ACT therapy. You are coaching a skill in the moment you saw it.

Where new BCBAs usually get stuck#

Three patterns come up. Worth naming.

The first is treating the six as a checklist. Reading the hexaflex and walking into session trying to "do acceptance." That is not a target. The repertoire is the target. Watch for it. Reinforce it when it shows up.

The second is reading reads as mind reading. Body language is information, not a verdict. Crossed arms can mean angry, cold, or comfortable. The point is to notice and ask, not to label and move on.

The third is rushing. The first ten clips you code with a supervisee will be slow and awkward. So were the first ten functional analyses you ran. The same patience applies here.

Frequently asked questions#

Can you measure psychological flexibility with a single number?

You can measure it, but not with one number that means much. The honest measurement is rate or proportion of flexible responses in a specific repertoire, in a specific context, over a specific window. Counts of "flexible rule talk" in a 20-minute parent training session, for example. A single composite score loses the information you need to coach.

Is psychological flexibility the same thing as resilience?

No. Resilience usually means bouncing back after a bad event. Psychological flexibility is the moment-to-moment ability to act in line with what matters even when the inside feels rough. You can be flexible and never need to "bounce back" because you kept moving the whole time. You can also bounce back from one event and still be rigid in the next one. Different constructs.

How is this different from emotional regulation in a school setting?

Emotional regulation skills usually target one repertoire: emotion behavior. Calm down. Use the strategy. Get back to work. Psychological flexibility covers six repertoires, including the rule the student is following ("if I feel angry, I have to react"), the time frame they are stuck in (last recess), and the self-story they are telling ("I'm the bad kid"). Emotional regulation is a subset. Psychological flexibility is the larger frame.

Try it this week#

Pick one supervisee. Pick one sixty-second clip. Code it together using the six repertoires. Then watch the source talk for the full decision tree and the broader case for ACT inside ABA scope.