Acceptance therapy
Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) – is a type of mental health therapy that helps you acknowledge your relationship with your thoughts and feelings. You learn to understand your feelings instead of changing them. You’ll work on reframing your values and adjusting your behaviors to better match them.
Developed within a coherent theoretical and philosophical framework, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a unique empirically based psychological intervention that uses acceptance and mindfulness strategies, together with commitment and behavior change strategies, to increase psychological flexibility. Psychological flexibility means contacting the present moment fully as a conscious human being, and based on what the situation affords, changing or persisting in behavior in the service of chosen values.
Based on Relational Frame Theory, ACT illuminates the ways that language entangles clients into futile attempts to wage war against their own inner lives. Through metaphor, paradox, and experiential exercises clients learn how to make healthy contact with thoughts, feelings, memories, and physical sensations that have been feared and avoided. Clients gain the skills to recontextualize and accept these private events, develop greater clarity about personal values, and commit to needed behavior change.
What to Expect in ACT Therapy:
The first sessions of ACT therapy focus on clarify values with a client, Lev explains. Subsequent sessions then focus on helping people connect to those values and apply them in their lives.
Lev explains that a typical ACT therapy session involves:
1. Reviewing the previous week and identifying and rewarding behaviors that were consistent with the individual's values
2. Examining behaviors that were not in alignment and work to understand the barriers that led to such actions
3. Using the six ACT processes to work through barriers so the individual can move toward their values in the future
Deborah R. Glasofer. What Is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)? Retrieved from: https://surl.li/gmbbqc
ACBC Association for contextual behavioral science. Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT) Retrieved from: https://surl.li/rjkuqt
Cleveland clinic. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) Last reviewed on 09/30/2024. https://surl.li/lrgkdq