This therapeutic modality helps you explore and understand how to work with your thoughts and emotions to make significant behavioural changes. This works even if you can’t get rid of the unwanted thoughts, feelings, or sensations you might be experiencing.
Main Components
This modality teaches mindfulness skills to help you live and behave consistently with your values while developing psychological flexibility. It will help you recognize how your attempts to suppress, manage, and control emotional experiences create challenges.
Six-Core Processes:
- Acceptance
- Cognitive Diffusion
- Being present
- Self as Context
- Values
- Commitment to action
Benefits:
The critical benefit of ACT is that it can help you battle mental distress without using medication. It teaches you to change the way you relate to your negative thoughts and emotions so that these thoughts don’t take over.
Challenges:
It cannot be easy to discuss how you’re feeling. By recognizing and addressing these challenges, you can become better able to make room for values-based actions that support your well-being.
Goals:
The goal of ACT is to increase psychological flexibility. The therapist will help you become more aware of how you think and feel through mindfulness exercises and strategies. There is a focus on creating lasting behavioural changes through committing to new actions and thought patterns. You will learn to accept your thoughts and evaluate those thoughts to determine whether they are serving your life goals. If the thoughts are not helping you, we can work to instill new, more positive thoughts and actions.
