Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, basic concepts

Contents

• What is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)?
• The ACT Therapy Model
• Vital tips on ACT
• Who can benefit?

What is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)?

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (or ACT) is a form of behavior analysis that uses acceptance and thinking strategies to help increase psychological flexibility. While therapy is not considered a long-term treatment, it is considered useful in treating depression, anxiety, and other psychological disorders..

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy involves a series of practical exercises to bring out the power and importance of emotional, cognitive and behavioral processes. Its aim is to help people change their relationship with the negative thoughts and feelings they are having about their lives and in some cases they are greatly affecting their health and well-being..

It stands against experiential avoidance, the attempt to avoid or get rid of unwanted unpleasant thoughts and feelings, and offers a long-term solution to future health and happiness. This is generally applied in sessions with clients or in groups, using metaphors, visualization exercises, and behavioral tasks. The number and duration of the sessions will largely depend on the needs of the participants and the methods they practice of the therapist. The total duration of treatment should be relatively short, however this factor will also depend on each case..

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy or ACT bases its theoretical bases on using acceptance, understood as the human capacity to experience the here and now in thoughts, feelings, emotions, etc..

This ability to be aware is linked to the commitment to carry out actions in accordance with our personal values, as well as to the change strategies necessary to increase our psychological flexibility..

The ACT maintains that at the base of psychological problems is the language we generate, which produces thoughts and sensations that we experience as annoying.

The fact that these problems are mainly verbal makes it easier for people to tend to fight against our own private events and persist in it despite the fact that the results of such struggles are often counterproductive..

Through metaphors, paradoxes, and experiential exercises, ACT clients learn to contact thoughts, feelings, memories, and sensations, both those feared and avoided, and others that arise in the present. With this therapy, people learn the ability to re-contextualize these private events, it helps them clarify what really matters to them in their life, what they value deep down, and they acquire the commitment to the necessary changes in action..

1. ACT has a philosophy of life that counts human suffering as one of the conditions. To find solutions we have to go through a path of suffering.
2. Self-knowledge is one of the human summits, but also a source of disorders. The language is sometimes negative leads us to the hyperreflexivity characteristic of some disorders.
3. ACT offers a psychopathological alternative in the figure of experiential avoidance disorder.
4. ACT is a therapeutic innovation. ACT aims to dismantle common sense about the nature of the disorder (and suffering), promote orientation to life (to values) instead of cruelty against symptoms, discharge the person from their own problems.

Clients find meaning in their suffering on the path of responsibility towards the way of life they pursue and simply come to accept their condition as human beings.

Suffering, in the sense of going back to the hardships of life as one lives them and / or putting future suffering in the present.

The human being, aspiring to never suffer or for anything, has ended up causing suffering more and for more things.

The ACT Therapy Model

Although acceptance and commitment therapy is not a specific set of techniques, there are six basic processes used to establish psychological flexibility. Each of these areas are conceptualized as a positive psychological skill for individuals to avoid or prevent negative thoughts and feelings. THIS THERAPY FOCUSES ON THE FOLLOWING ASPECTS:

• Acceptance: Taught as an alternative to experiential avoidance, acceptance involves taking into account painful feelings and private experiences without trying to change their frequency or form. ACT therapy clients are encouraged to voluntarily open up and let go of their inner struggle with these unwanted problems. In essence, this can help you learn ways to cope with them..
• Cognitive fusion: Also known as emotional separation, it refers to a set of techniques that try to change the functions of negative thoughts and feelings and how they affect an individual. Procedures that can be followed include encouraging the individual to externally observe their unwanted problems, giving it a shape, size, color, speed or shape. By recontextualizing uncomfortable memories and experiences, people can learn to relate to them in a different way, which does not involve making any kind of particular value towards them..
• Getting in touch with the present moment: ACT therapy encourages clients to be psychologically present, to make a conscious effort to connect with what is happening in the here and now. For individuals to experience the world more directly than is thought to make their behavior and thinking more flexible. It is often used as a tool for people describing current events, rather than predicting and judging them.
• Self-observation: ACT therapy views the mind as a combination of two parts. One part is the "thinking self", which is responsible in a person for their thoughts, beliefs, judgments and fantasies, while the second part: "the observing self" deals with attention and awareness. The latter is the part of the mind that enables individuals to develop mindfulness skills.
• Values: Values ​​are the qualities that individuals have chosen to live with, and are essential for the development of the goals of therapy. There are a variety of exercises that are used to help clients choose a direction in life in various settings, such as family and career, and the performance of these usually comes from an individual's ability to follow through. of the processes of acceptance, merger and contact with the present moment.
• Committed Actions: The final stage of the ACT therapy model consists of setting concrete goals that are consistent with an individual's chosen values. It is considered essential that the person taking part commit to these objectives in order to promote the changes necessary to discover a greater meaning of life, well-being and wholeness. This process consists of elements of traditional behavioral therapy, such as skill acquisition, shaping methods, and goal setting. These behavior change efforts in turn help to address the psychological barriers that are already contemplated in other ACT therapy processes..

The paradox is to live in a more comfortable, safer, more precise, much less painful world and find ourselves overwhelmed by the suffering generated, precisely, by that world designed to seek happiness while avoiding suffering.

Vital tips on ACT

1. Behave according to your values ​​and then you will feel good, instead of first the feeling of well-being and then act or make your life.
2. Suffering is assumed to be normal and a sign that the client is very close to what the client cares about.
3. It is assumed that there is more life in a moment of pain than in a moment of joy.
4. The therapist assumes with his steps that all people hope, aspire, dream and want a broader, richer and more meaningful life.

Who can benefit?

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy can be beneficial for a wide range of people. To alter function more than the existence of unpleasant thoughts and feelings, and is especially useful in helping to cope with problems such as anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorders, trauma, substance abuse, eating disorders and even psychotic symptoms.

The mindfulness elements of ACT therapy are also effective in helping people improve their athletic or business performance. In many training and therapy models, mindfulness tends to be taught through meditation, however ACT employs a range of tools to teach different mindfulness strategies. This makes it a more attractive approach for those who want to quickly and easily master attention without having to meditate..

All Psychological Therapies