Psychotherapist, Specialized in Burnout and Mood Disorders

Clinical Approach

What Is Process-Based Therapy?

Process-based therapy (PBT) is a clinical framework that targets the specific mechanisms maintaining a person's difficulty (the cognitive, emotional, physiological, and behavioral processes at work) rather than applying a standardized protocol to a diagnostic label. The framework was formalized by Steven C. Hayes and Stefan G. Hofmann in 2018, and expanded in their 2019 research agenda in Clinical Psychological Science, as an evolution beyond one-size-fits-all, protocol-for-diagnosis treatment.

Baseline Psychotherapy has worked process-based since opening in 2019, within the first wave of clinical adoption of the framework, and has kept refining that practice since. In practice, the assessment maps what is maintaining the difficulty before any treatment is chosen, and the choice among evidence-based approaches, integrated under one framework (CBT, ACT, somatic and mindfulness-based methods), follows from that map, not from a fixed menu. Two clients with the same diagnosis can require different treatments; the framework exists precisely to handle that variability.

Sessions follow a defined structure: review of progress, a focused clinical target for the current session, practical tools or interventions applied in real time, and a clear direction for what to work on between sessions. Progress is tracked in observable terms every session. If something is not working, we adjust. This is not open-ended exploration. It is structured, measurable clinical work with a defined trajectory.