Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
What is ACT?
ACT is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy; it is a third wave version of CBT.
Its core belief is that you can lead a more fulfilling life by living according to your values and that you can do that by taking a different relation to any unpleasant thoughts\emotions. In some ways, happiness is a trap as emotions should be in service of a meaningful and valuable life, not a goal in themselves.
The key parts of ACT are acceptance, values and taking action.
The first aspect of ACT is to find your values, what is important to you, what really is worth suffering for, as it seems suffering is part of life, and suffering comes when we care about things.
The next aspect is acceptance, which is of your experience. You don’t have to like experience, but it is here, and oftentimes trying to avoid our experience, or struggle with it causes worse problems.
Acceptance is enabled through mindfulness, albeit much in its more informal way .
Whilst formal mindfulness might use a breathing meditation or a body scan, and this is included in ACT, a main part of it uses mindfulness in a descriptive, being with your experience (the phenomenological method from existential therapy), as well as an attentionally engaged way. By this I mean really being attentive to what you are doing, from washing the dishes to having a shower
Whilst aiming towards acting on your values, then this leads to managing your thoughts and emotions in service of your values. This is done in part by “unhooking” from thoughts. When you are hooked, you fully identify with your thoughts and we could say you are them, rather than have them. To unhook is to notice that you are not your thoughts, they aren’t necessarily true, and they certainly aren’t always useful to have. The key is to notice that thoughts are just that, subvocal speech that you have, and the only important thing, is, is it helpful for you to have this conversation.
There is a similar thing with emotions. We can tend to either obey them, i.e. act upon them as if they’re true, or struggle to get rid of them. So, feeling anxious we might either escape or douse the feeling with food or alcohol to get rid of it. The ACT approach is to observe the feeling, realise that you are not your feeling, and through describing it see it as a part of you, something that comes and goes, that doesn’t need to detract from acting in a way that’s important to you.
The final part of ACT is about taking valued action, again and again and again. Working out how to build things that are important to you into your day. How to encourage you as often as possible to act in ways that promote the life that is important to you, and not the life that isn’t.
