What Is Acceptance And Commitment Therapy?

My name is Lulas Brigado,

Peer Review Trainer in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy,

Otherwise known as ACT,

With the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science.

So what is ACT?

Simply put,

ACT can be viewed as a mindfulness-based,

Values-directed form of therapy that situates psychological flexibility as its explicit aim.

Psychological flexibility can be viewed as our ability to consciously contact the present moment with awareness and openness to our thoughts and feelings while connecting with our values and committing them to action.

When we bring this skill set together,

It allows us to live a more meaningful and fulfilling life.

Rather than judging thoughts,

Feelings,

And behaviors as inherently good,

Bad,

Right,

Wrong,

Or true or false with respect to some subjective or objective reality,

In act we're interested in how workable these experiences are.

If a particular thought or feeling can be useful with respect to living the life we long to live,

Well then we make use of it.

Otherwise,

We just allow it to come and go of its own accord.

If engaging in an action is aligned with their values and supported by a given context,

We would call that workable.

On the other side of the coin,

Act holds that psychological suffering is primarily mediated by our fusion or entanglement with language and cognition.

This includes worries,

Rumination,

Self-criticism,

Rules,

Or are avoidance of or attempts to escape from unwanted thoughts and feelings.

While fusion and experiential avoidance are natural human processes,

They tend to interfere with living a meaningful and fulfilling life when left unchecked.

In response,

ACT takes a process-based behavioral approach towards cultivating psychological flexibility skills that serve to alleviate human suffering and promote well-being.

Given its focus on these broadly applicable processes,

ACT has been shown in thousands of studies to be effective across a wide range of human conditions,

Including anxiety,

OCD,

Depression,

Trauma,

Substance misuse,

Chronic pain,

Chronic illness,

Parenting,

And intimate relationships.

And experiential exercises,

Which is actually how I got started in my own learning journey.