What is ACT?
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), is a type of therapy that focuses on shifting how you relate to your thoughts and feelings, versus trying to change, avoid, or suppress them. ACT teaches mindfully moving towards those difficult thoughts and feelings, with compassion, humor, and acceptance.
A common ACT metaphor is the finger trap - that paper toy that you might have gotten your fingers stuck in as a child. Similarly to a finger trap, your impulse to escape a difficult feeling might be to pull away from it, which only serves to make you more stuck, trapped, and fused with the very experience you want to break free from. When you instead gently and mindfully move towards that discomfort or pain, you’ll typically actually find more freedom and an ability to get unstuck (with the finger trap you push your fingers towards one another to break free, in case you forgot). ACT teaches mindfulness and defusion strategies to help you get unstuck from unhelpful thoughts or thinking patterns that you may be overly identified with as the truth.
ACT is also heavily grounded in values based committed action. Often, you may not move in the direction of your values due to fear based avoidance. For instance, maybe you value friendship, and yet you binge Netflix alone every night instead of trying to build or sustain connection, because you fear rejection or being hurt by letting others in. By identifying values, and working towards being able to make space for the difficult feelings you have instead of avoiding them, you can more readily move in the direction of what actually matters to you. Maybe, in a misguided effort to protect you, your fear has been in the driver’s seat of your car, with its foot on the break or even reversing you away from what would really bring more purpose and joy to your life.
ACT teaches how to compassionately allow your fear, and all your feelings, to be passengers in your car, as you stay in the driver's seat and move in the (sometimes scary) direction of what can make your life worthwhile.