Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a highly researched and efficacious therapy approach. ACT is based upon the premise that difficult thoughts and feelings are unavoidable. ACT suggests that all of our maladaptive behaviors are born out of an unhelpful avoidance of negative feelings, while simultaneously over-valuing positive emotions (“The Happiness Trap”). ACT helps to develop skills supporting increased psychological flexibility and acceptance.
ACT incorporates acceptance and mindfulness strategies, values-driven guidance, and exercising committed actions. ACT helps create new pathways of choice, by enabling expansion around your existing thoughts and feelings, that broaden your scope, and increase your quality of life.
ACT isn’t interested in changing your thoughts. ACT asks that you consider evaluating your thoughts using litmus lenses that reveal their functional importance: “Is this thought helpful or effective?” + “Is this a thought guiding me toward behavior that aligns with my values or one that is taking me further away from my values?”
ACT Therapy: A Metaphor
ACT offers space for many creative and metaphorical applications. A metaphor I have thought up and like to use to help explain ACT is “shifting the tail of the kite”. Many times, when a person enters therapy they are operating as the tail to their “thoughts and feelings kite”. As the tail, you are forcefully pushed, pulled, and fused with your thoughts and feelings at the head of your kite, and you respond accordingly.
The most common feeling this existence elicits is “overwhelm”. ACT shows us how to shift YOU into being the head of the kite, and your thoughts and feelings into the tail position. You, your thoughts, and your feelings are still co-existing, inseparable, and needing to work together. You, your thoughts, and your feelings are still vulnerable to the factors of uncertainty ahead of you (wind variability that day). Only now, YOU are the one course-correcting, leading, and in charge. Your thoughts and feelings are still present and still a part of you. They cannot be detached or avoided by you. But you are the one choosing which direction to take with them.
In therapy, you can learn how to become an empowered kite instead of an overwhelmed kite tail.
To learn more about ACT, please visit https://contextualscience.org/act
Learn More About Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) with Sara Watts
If it would help, I would be pleased to offer a 15 minute complimentary call to introduce myself and my approach to acceptance and commitment therapy.
Please feel free to contact me today.