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Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a branch of cognitive-behavioral therapy, an empirically based psychological intervention, that uses acceptance and mindfulness strategies, together with commitment and behavior change strategies, to increase psychological flexibility.

Psychological Flexibility includes:

• Mindfulness and Acceptance Processes
  • Acceptance
  • Defusion
  • Self as Context
  • Experience as Content

• Commitment Processes and Direct Behavior Change
  • Contact with the Present Moment
  • Values
  • Commited Action

ACT Defined: ACT is developed within a pragmatic philosophy called functional contextualism. ACT is based onRelational Frame Theory (RFT) a comprehensive theory of language and cognition that has emerged within behavior analysis. ACT differs from traditional Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) in that rather than trying to teach you to better control your thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories and other private events. ACT focuses on what you can control more directly: your arms, legs and mouth. ACT teaches you to "just notice," accept, and embrace your experiences, especially previously unwanted ones. ACT helps you get in contact with a transcendent (above and beyond the range of normal or merely physical human experience) sense of yourself known as "self-as-context" ... the YOU that is always there observing and experiencing and yet distinct from your thoughts, feelings, sensations, and memories. ACT aims to help you to clarify your personal values and to take action on them, bringing more vitality and meaning to your life in the process.

Core Conception: ACT states that psychological suffering is usually caused by experiential avoidance, cognitive entanglement, and resulting psycholgocal rigidity that leads to a failure to take needed behavioral steps in accord with your core values. As a simple way to summarize the model, you can say that ACT views the core of many of your problems to be FEAR:

• Fusion with your thoughts
• Evaluation of your experience
• Avoidance of your experience
• Reason giving for your behavior

And the healthy alternative to FEAR is to ACT:

• Accept your reactions and be present
• Choose a valued direction
• Take action

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To accomplish great things, we must not only act,
but also dream; not ony plan but also believe.

_Anatole France_

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Similarities: ACT is sometimes grouped together with Dialecticcal Behavioral Therapy (DBT), Functional Analytic Psychotherapy, and Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) as The Third Wave of Behavior Therapy, which Steven C Hayes defined as: "Grounded in an empirical, principle-focused approach, the third wave of behavioral and cognitive therapy is particularly sensitive to the content and functions of psychological phenomena, not just their form, and thus tends to emphasize contextual and experiential change strategies in addition to more direct and didactic ones. These treatments tend to seek the construction of broad, flexible and effective repertoires over an eliminative approach to narrowly defined problems, and to emphasize the relevance of the issues they examine for clinicians as well as clients. The thrid wave reformulates and synthesizes previous generations of behavioral and cognitive therapy and carries them forward into questions, issues, and domains previously addressed primarily by other traditions, in hopes of improving both understanding and outcomes."

Similarities are also found with the awareness-management movement in business training programs, where mindfulness and cognitive-shifting techniques are being employed to generate rapid positive shifts in mood and performance.

ACT has also ben adapted to create a non-therapy version of the same processes called Acceptance and Commitment Training. This training process, oriented towards the development of mindfulness, acceptance, and values skills in non-clinical settings such as businesses or schools, has also been investigated in a handful of researh studies with good preliminary results.

The emphasis of ACT on present-mindedness, directions and action is similar to other approaches wtihin psychology that are not as focused on outcome research or consciously linked to a basic science program, including more humanistic or constructivist approaches such as Narrative Psychology, Gestalt Therapy, Morita Therapy, or Re-evaluation Counseling among many others.

It is also similar to many eastern approaches (particularly Buddhism), and the mystical aspects of most major spiritual and religious traditions.

Source: Wikipedia