What Is Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT)?

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (also known as ACT) is one of my favourite therapies to work with. My clients also like it because it makes sense. It's a values-based approach that uses mindfulness techniques to help us diffuse from our thoughts and encourages us to lean into our painful emotions rather than run from them. Through acceptance, we can commit towards a better way of life and happier existence. By re-assessing what's really important to you in life (your values) you can turn your life around in a better direction. It's not an easy process and it takes courage but with persistence and patience, you can really get some great results. So what is ACT, and where did this approach come from?

Steven C. Hayes developed Acceptance and Commitment Therapy in 1982 in order to create an approach that integrates both covert conditioning and behaviour therapy. The objective of ACT is not the elimination of difficult feelings; rather, it is to be present with what life brings and to "move toward valued behaviour".  Acceptance and commitment therapy invites people to open up to unpleasant feelings, learn not to overreact to them, and not avoid situations where they are invoked. Its therapeutic effect aims to be a positive spiral where a greater understanding of one's emotions leads to a better understanding of the truth. In ACT, 'truth' is measured through the concept of 'workability', or what works to take another step toward what matters (e.g. values, meaning).

ACT differs from some other kinds of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) in that rather than trying to teach people to better control their thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories and other private events, ACT teaches them to "just notice," accept, and embrace their private events, especially previously unwanted ones. ACT helps the individual get in contact with a transcendent sense of self known as self-as-context—the you who is always there observing and experiencing and yet distinct from one's thoughts, feelings, sensations, and memories. ACT aims to help the individual clarify their personal values and to take action on them, bringing more vitality and meaning to their life in the process, increasing their psychological flexibility.

The core conception of ACT is that psychological suffering is usually caused by experiential avoidance, cognitive entanglement, and resulting psychological rigidity that leads to a failure to take needed behavioural steps in accord with core values. As a simple way to summarize the model, ACT views the core of many problems to be due to the concepts represented in the acronym, FEAR:

• Fusion with your thoughts

• Evaluation of experience

• Avoidance of your experience

• Reason-giving for your behaviour

And the healthy alternative is to ACT:

• Accept your thoughts and emotions

• Choose a valued direction

• Take action

ACT commonly employs six core principles to help clients develop psychological flexibility:

1. Cognitive defusion: Learning methods to reduce the tendency to reify thoughts, images, emotions, and memories.

2. Acceptance: Allowing unwanted private experiences (thoughts, feelings and urges) to come and go without struggling with them.

3. Contact with the present moment: Awareness of the here and now, experienced with openness, interest, and receptiveness. (e.g., mindfulness)

4. The observing self: Accessing a transcendent sense of self, a continuity of consciousness which is unchanging.

5. Values: Discovering what is most important to oneself.

6. Committed action: Setting goals according to values and carrying them out responsibly, in the service of a meaningful life.

ACT principles have become very popular in modern psychology and many well-known writers have referred to the technique without referencing it. The best selling book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson essentially refers to ACT principles. In a nutshell, he says that there are only so many things in life worth giving a fuck about, so choose them wisely (by choosing a valued direction). Nothing else is worth worrying about. Or, in Manson's own words, "Most of us struggle throughout our lives by giving too many fucks in situations where fucks do not deserve to be given." If you choose (to use his words again) "shitty values" you are bound to feel unhappy and unsatisfied with life as your starting point for evaluating your achievements are poor and often unattainable.

Another modern philosopher Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now) also refers to the core principles of ACT with his focus on present-moment attention. His mantra is that anything other than focusing on the present moment (rather than ruminating on the past and worrying about the future) is the definition of madness because you can only live your life now and not in the future or the past. The now (or present moment) is all we will ever have. This short video is a brilliant example of his thoughts on this idea and strongly relates to core ACT principles:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4os0IxmGv8

If you are interested to find out more about ACT please get in touch. We can also discuss this therapeutic approach if you book your free initial 20-minute session online.

David

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