Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
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Values
Everyone has a set of values that they live by, and life is all about gaining as much satisfaction in as many values as we can. However, sometimes we don’t act on what is meaningful to us because we become focused on feeling better right now. We do things to make our stress go away in the moment, and often sacrifice our values in the long run. You may have been doing this so long you lost contact with your values, or maybe you have never really known them because life was always about surviving the week. What I will help you with is making sure you are aware of the aspects in life that are truly meaningful to you so you know what direction to go in your future.
Acceptance
As you attempt to move towards your values, you will notice that it doesn’t always feel too good. You might be anxious about a new thing, maybe you have a lot of thoughts that come up that make you sad, or you just have deeply engrained habits that feel very difficult to go against. Your instinct might be to start problem solving how to not feel these things, but we’re going to help you let go of your habit to make your uncomfortable feelings go away. A simple metaphor is to think about chinese finger traps and how when you pull away it gets tighter, but when you push in it loosens up. We will explore how you can lean into your thoughts and feelings, which paradoxically can help loosen them up.
Present Moment
A large portion of our stressful experiences is not in the present moment, but in the past or the future. When we are problem solving and worrying, we are often in the future, thinking of all the terrible things that might happen and how we can prevent it. This leads to an anxious state which can feel never-ending. Alternatively, if you are constantly thinking about past decisions and experiences, you may feel sadness, grief, and regret, which can make you feel hopeless and unmotivated. However, most of the time those thoughts are not helpful and it is much better to keep your attention in the present moment. This is tricky though and can feel scary, as if you need to be in the past or the future to feel safe and in control. But we will discuss how you can make a better balance.
Cognitive Defusion
When we are thinking we tend to believe our thoughts, and this is a big problem. Our minds are word machines and they have been programmed to spurt out thoughts all day long. The problem is that these thoughts are not always true, and certainly not always helpful. If we’re not mindful of them, they can control our feelings and our behaviors like a puppetmaster, dictating our lives. Cognitive defusion is a technique where we don’t try to suppress or change your thoughts, but we try to decrease their believability. We are typically fused to our thoughts, meaning we are attached to them and believe they come from ourselves, but we will help you try to de-fuse from them so you can see your thoughts from a different perspective and take them more lightly. By doing so your reactions to your thoughts will change and you will be more free to act how you want to, not how your mind says you should.
Self as Context
Imagine metaphorically that you are the sky. No matter what occurs in the sky it doesn’t actually hurt you. There might be a storm with lightning going on, it might have things flying through it, maybe banners with unkind messages, but no matter what happens in the sky, the sky will still be there. The sky is the context that these things happen in. Since you are the sky, then you are safe from all of your thoughts and feelings. A large part of ACT is helping people take the position of the sky so that they can become unburdened by what happens in their mind and their body. You can be and do whatever you want, you just have to be willing to allow whatever to show up in your sky, but as long as you take the position of the sky, then you will be less afraid of these things and more courageous to take action towards your true values.
Committed Action
All of these things I mentioned so far will help set the stage for making change, but at the end of the day it comes down to how you commit. Many people struggle to commit to change because they use vague statements like, “I’ve gotta stop doing this,” or they overcommit and say, “Never again!” Unfortunately, these tend not to work well and lead to frustration and avoidance of any future change until things get much worse. Rinse and repeat. Maybe you don’t know if you should change, maybe you don’t know what you should change, or maybe you don’t know how to change, all of these things can become barriers towards making an honest commitment to yourself. In our work together we will examine your commitment to change, how to make effective goals, and how to maintain the change that you worked so hard to make.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
