#199 – Lou Lasprugato on ACT Within The Therapeutic Relationship

In this episode of Better Thinking, Nesh Nikolic speaks with Lou Lasprugato about ACT within the therapeutic relationship, including process-based functional assessment and shaping psychological flexibility.

Lou Lasprugato is a psychotherapist and internationally recognized trainer in the field of psychology. He is a Peer-Reviewed Trainer in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) with the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science (ACBS), for which he also served as Chair of the Training Committee from 2022-2025. In 2025, Lou was elected into the ACBS Fellowship for his contributions in ACT dissemination.

Lou is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, with private practices in both California and Virginia (United States), working with both individuals, including college students, and couples. He also has extensive experience in facilitating skill-building and process-based groups. Lou specializes in therapy for intimate partners and the treatment of anxiety disorders, and is a member of the International OCD Foundation.

He has worked as a psychotherapist in a variety of settings, including county-operated crisis intervention services with underserved populations; a mental health and substance abuse intensive outpatient program at Kaiser Permanente that he subsequently managed; and an integrative medicine program at Sutter Health. Lou has taught mindfulness meditation to health care practitioners and facilitated over one hundred training events on ACT, including InterACT for couples and clinically-applied relational frame theory (RFT), as well as co-created courses on nutritional psychology and integrative mental health treatment.

Lou has also provided supervision to other behavioral/mental health professionals and students and continues to provide individual and group consultation on ACT and other contextual behavioral approaches. He earned his Master of Arts in Counseling Psychology, with a specialization in Holistic Studies from Lesley University, Cambridge, MA, following a career as a professional musician.