ACT Therapy (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy)

lyricalliaisons

Well-known member
Has anyone tried ACT therapy? If so, how did it go for you?

I have never really tried any formal therapy, save for a bit of CBT which did not help at all. I am considering going to a new place if my insurance will pay and get ACT if they offer it. If not, then formal CBT. My current, and only, mental health facility only offers talk therapy and I want something else.

To anyone who hasn't heard of ACT, this is a description:

Acceptance and commitment therapy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Basics
ACT is developed within a pragmatic philosophy called functional contextualism. ACT is based on relational frame theory (RFT), a comprehensive theory of language and cognition that is an offshoot of behavior analysis. ACT differs from traditional cognitive behavioral 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 that 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.[3]

While Western psychology has typically operated under the "healthy normality" assumption which states that by their nature, humans are psychologically healthy, ACT assumes, rather, that psychological processes of a normal human mind are often destructive.[6] 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 behavioral 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 behavior
And the healthy alternative is to ACT:

Accept your reactions and be present
Choose a valued direction
Take action
Core principles[edit]
ACT commonly employs six core principles to help clients develop psychological flexibility:[6]

Cognitive defusion: Learning methods to reduce the tendency to reify thoughts, images, emotions, and memories.
Acceptance: Allowing thoughts to come and go without struggling with them.
Contact with the present moment: Awareness of the here and now, experienced with openness, interest, and receptiveness.
Observing the self: Accessing a transcendent sense of self, a continuity of consciousness which is unchanging.
Values: Discovering what is most important to one's true self.[7]
Committed action: Setting goals according to values and carrying them out responsibly.
 

Earthcircle

Well-known member
I read a book about it, and tried to do some of it while skipping the workbook aspect of it. I hate workbook exercises.

The basic idea of not fighting anxiety or sudden disturbing thoughts seems to me to be fundamentally good advice. I think it's on the right track. (But I still have night terrors.)
 

MikeyC

Well-known member
My psychologist told me about acceptance and commitment therapy, and has gotten me to do it in the past.

The first thing you should know is that it's not easy. ACT is basically accepting bad thoughts are there, and focusing on the better thoughts, or what's important to you. You are supposed to undertake ACT when unwanted thoughts appear.

I have not mastered it, after all this time. Negative thinking is still one of the biggest issues plaguing me today, but the best you can do is keep trying with it. It takes a long time to get the hang of it. It's difficult to implement when you're depressed, because you are in self-destruct mode. Sometimes your thoughts turn to the negative without you even realising what's happening (or maybe that's just me?). The point is to continue trying. The more you do it, the better you'll become, and you'll be able to focus on the things that are important to you.

Keep in mind that ACT is not trying to eliminate bad thoughts or feelings, rather than acknowledging they exist and focusing on the positives instead.
 

lyricalliaisons

Well-known member
My psychologist told me about acceptance and commitment therapy, and has gotten me to do it in the past.

The first thing you should know is that it's not easy. ACT is basically accepting bad thoughts are there, and focusing on the better thoughts, or what's important to you. You are supposed to undertake ACT when unwanted thoughts appear.

I have not mastered it, after all this time. Negative thinking is still one of the biggest issues plaguing me today, but the best you can do is keep trying with it. It takes a long time to get the hang of it. It's difficult to implement when you're depressed, because you are in self-destruct mode. Sometimes your thoughts turn to the negative without you even realising what's happening (or maybe that's just me?). The point is to continue trying. The more you do it, the better you'll become, and you'll be able to focus on the things that are important to you.

Keep in mind that ACT is not trying to eliminate bad thoughts or feelings, rather than acknowledging they exist and focusing on the positives instead.

Thanks :) Your last sentence is why I want to try it.
 

Earthcircle

Well-known member
My psychologist told me about acceptance and commitment therapy, and has gotten me to do it in the past.

The first thing you should know is that it's not easy. ACT is basically accepting bad thoughts are there, and focusing on the better thoughts, or what's important to you. You are supposed to undertake ACT when unwanted thoughts appear.

I have not mastered it, after all this time. Negative thinking is still one of the biggest issues plaguing me today, but the best you can do is keep trying with it. It takes a long time to get the hang of it. It's difficult to implement when you're depressed, because you are in self-destruct mode. Sometimes your thoughts turn to the negative without you even realising what's happening (or maybe that's just me?). The point is to continue trying. The more you do it, the better you'll become, and you'll be able to focus on the things that are important to you.

Keep in mind that ACT is not trying to eliminate bad thoughts or feelings, rather than acknowledging they exist and focusing on the positives instead.

Everyone says it's very hard, but the advice to accept negative thoughts and feelings without fighting them and to act in agreement with one's values sounds easy to me. I've been trying to do this, and I believe I am doing better as a result. Better, but not great. I still don't know how to talk to people. I get very tongue-tied, and don't know what to say in social situations. It's not simply anxiety, but an actual lack of knowledge.
 

MikeyC

Well-known member
Everyone says it's very hard, but the advice to accept negative thoughts and feelings without fighting them and to act in agreement with one's values sounds easy to me. I've been trying to do this, and I believe I am doing better as a result. Better, but not great. I still don't know how to talk to people. I get very tongue-tied, and don't know what to say in social situations. It's not simply anxiety, but an actual lack of knowledge.
That's great that you're doing better with its implementation. :) I have found it hard simply because I can't stop the intensity of the negative thoughts. However, what is hard for some can be less difficult for others, and it's good to hear you've got some results out of it. :thumbup:
 

sunny404

Member
Lyricalliasons,

Did you end up trying ACT?

I have some experience with it myself and though it can be very challenging, I think it can be helpful in ways that traditional CBT isn't.

Doesn't hurt to try something different.
 

Earthcircle

Well-known member
One part of the ACT book on anxiety disappointed me. I was supposed to imagine some of my negative, intrusive thoughts and quickly find metaphors for them. The author predicted that I would metaphorically imagine something hard clashing with something hard. To the contrary, I imagined something hard damaging something soft. When the author then proceeded to talk about how it is good to be soft, I began to feel squeamish.

But I still think that the idea of not fighting intrusive thoughts is on the right track.
 

Sacrament

Well-known member
ACT pretty much teaches you how to properly filter and process your thoughts. People who are often too overwhelmed by their bad thoughts tend to desire for those thoughts to go away. ACT teaches you that it's not gonna happen, because everyone has bad thoughts. It's the mind's way of alerting you for possible dangers that more often than not never come true (unless you believe them so much that you start making them come true yourself). It shows you that words are just words, and bad images are just bad images with no practical effect on your life.

One thing I really like about Russ Harris' The Happiness Trap is that one of the tools he uses to show you how words are just words is to take one some of your worst fears and repeat them in different says (say, in a Homer Simpson or Peter Griffin voice, or to the tune of the Happy Birthday song), which helps you learn more about how harmless they can be if you strip them of the overwhelming power they have over you (and that you gave them in the first place). I advise anyone who's interested in this particular therapy to read the book I mentioned, it's like the bible when it comes to ACT.
 
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