Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
ACT Therapy for your specific concerns
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Relationship Therapy
You’ve been in toxic relationships and want to feel like yourself again. You’re unhappy and your gut is telling you something feels off, but sometimes staying staying feels easier than leaving. You’re used to walking on eggshells and no longer feel present in social settings. ACT therapy helps you to develop healthy boundaries and build up confidence again.
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Grief and Loss Counseling
Acceptance doesn’t mean there isn’t also any pain or sadness. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy will help you learn tools to manage coping with the storm of emotions so that you don’t get swept away by them, but instead, can anchor yourself when the inevitable waves of grief come up to shore.
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Anxiety Counseling
We can’t control our thoughts and feelings, but we can control how we decide to engage with overwhelming and intrusive thoughts, ruminating, or “what if” thoughts about the future. ACT Counseling will help you diffuse from your thoughts so that you can still live a meaningful life.
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Depression Counseling
Depression makes life difficult when you don’t feel motivated. Difficult relationships are one of the main reasons people might feel depressed. Abusive or toxic relationships, divorce or breakups can lead to feelings of grief and depression. With ACT counseling, you’ll have tools that work to help dig you out of your funk, instead of distracting yourself and hoping this sinking feeling lifts on its own.
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Trauma Therapy
Trauma can happen after just one stressful incident or after prolonged exposure, over a long period of time, to an ongoing event. Traumatic events are stressful, distressing, life threatening, witnessing an event where someone else’s life was threatened, or difficult to cope with. With ACT therapy, you’ll be able to cope with PTSD symptoms, dissociation, (emotional) flashbacks, and find hope again.
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Young Adult Grief Group Therapy
With a Humanistic and ACT therapy approach, young adults can find community, hope, and tools to cope with the loss of their loved one, friend, or colleague. With an ACT approach you’ll manage the unpleasant emotions learning how to cope with grief, anger, sadness, helplessness, and more. It’s difficult to cope with situations out of your control, young adults will learn ACT therapy tools backed by research to assist in the grieving process.
What are the core principles of ACT?
“ACT uses acceptance and mindfulness processes, and commitment and behavior change processes, to produce greater psychological flexibility” (Bach, P. & Moran, D., ACT in Practice, 2008).
The goal is not to always feel happy or to get rid of sad feelings. The goal is to work towards behaving in the service of attaining goals or outcomes that align with your values.
Hexaflex Model from www.positivepsychology.com
The Psychological Flexibility Model
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a third-wave Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) approach. The essential components of ACT can best be shown with the Hexaflex Model diagram. The Hexaflex highlights each of the six core ACT principles that an ACT therapist utilizes to help their clients achieve greater psychological flexibility and life satisfaction. These six elements help clients achieve this psychological flexibility and open mindedness in order to move towards a life that they want to live. Psychological flexibility helps someone to be more present in their life, which is paramount to feeling content, since the present moment is all that we have, rather than ruminating on potential of someone or a situation, worries about the future or situations that you can’t change from the past. ACT counseling encourages behavioral changes so that one lives in line with their values in the long term. Utilizing interventions to increase one’s psychological flexibility helps someone to make behavioral choices and/or changes that align with their relational, work, or health values, so that they can recognize when their behaviors are no longer serving them. With psychological flexibility through ACT, one can notice their thoughts and behaviors and start to unravel patterns, making healthier choices for their present and future selves.
Contact with the Present Moment
Contacting the present moment in ACT therapy helps you to be in the here and now. Tools incorporated in ACT help you experience the present moment. In order to achieve being present ACT skills include science-based mindfulness techniques, defusion, and various grounding exercises. This allows you to experience life more fully and in line with your values. When your mind ruminates or takes you to the past or the future, contacting the present moment can help you realign with your values in order to make behavioral choices that move you towards the life you want to live. This increased awareness can help clients focus on the things that are within their control.
Acceptance
Acceptance doesn’t mean you like, want, or agree with what you’re experiencing. From an ACT lens, acceptance means you are willing to experience whatever it is that you are experiencing without resistance, avoidance, or trying to numb it away. Acceptance of who someone is, or the reality of a situation, doesn’t mean there isn’t also any pain or sadness along with it. It just means you are willing to sit with the truth, recognizing that the truth doesn’t change according to your ability to stomach it. ACT therapy helps you to let go of self-blame while increasing your willingness to sit with the present moment. All of this happens while engaging in behaviors that move you towards what you value in life. Utilizing acceptance interventions and the rest of the core ACT processes on the model help to embrace acceptance of one’s past, present, future, or inevitable emotions in life.
Defusion
Defusion is one of the six core ACT principles that helps change the way one interacts and communicates internally and, in turn, externally. Defusion techniques used with an ACT approach assist clients with managing unwanted / unpleasant thoughts and feelings. For example, we can get really hooked by our thoughts, like a fish on a hooking rod, and when hooked, they move us away from the life we want to live. For example, someone might think they aren’t a good mom/sister/friend/colleague because they’ve turned down an invitation in order prioritize their well-being. Cognitive defusion allows the person to remember their thought is just a thought, not necessarily a fact (example: I’m having the thought that I’m no good when I say no in order to catch up on sleep). The result of this ACT technique doesn’t necessarily reduce the frequency of these type of thoughts, but instead changes someone’s attachment to, or believability of the thought.
Committed Action
Committed Action is a behavioral change within the ACT process where someone sees this externally. When someone has identified their values, they then commit to taking actionable steps to move in their valued direction. This behavior allows someone to live in alignment with their values, which in turn, is more likely to make someone feel satisfied in life. Even going to therapy can be seen as committed action within ACT treatment. An ACT therapist will encourage clients to take steps that reflect effective behavior based on the client’s identified values. This is usually seen as the last step in the process, considering it takes noticing acceptance (and acceptance involves defusion), values, and contact with the present moment, in order to act on this core strategy. Committed action interventions are not necessarily unique to ACT since they draw a lot from traditional behavior therapy.
Self as Context
Self as Context refers to the place from which one observes or notices themselves. This is similar to mindfulness in increasing one’s mindfulness and perspective taking. Self as context in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) encourages you to notice your thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations. This is the place from which observations are made. Self as context is a helpful way to increase willingness and acceptance and can even provide a positive experience. ACT helps you to become present with the self and increase empathy for the experiences and sensations you notice of yourself.
Values
Values are ongoing qualities of action. They don’t have a destination, but instead are like arrows on a compass, helping you take action moment to moment. Values are chosen life directions that clients identify in various aspects of their lives from relationships and career to health and play. Values are always lived in the present moment and an ACT therapist might ask a client in session, “What do you want your life to be about? In what direction do you want to move?” (Bach & Moran, 2008). You might attain certain goals along the way of living in line with your values. For example, having more friends, getting married, or having a child might be goals achieved when you value having loving relationships. People often experience unpleasant thoughts, feelings, and sensations as they move in valued direction (i.e. feeling rejected when dating, the person in a committed relationship may lose their partner to separation or death, the person applying for jobs might experience doubt and anxiety). ACT assists someone so that they don’t restrict themselves or avoid these inevitable painful experiences, otherwise they might live a joyless life. ACT emphasizes how a focus on one’s values brings vitality and willingness to experience whatever pain might accompany a life that is well lived.
