Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

Psychological flexibility, and the six processes that make it up

Notes on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: workability rather than truth as the test applied to a thought, and the six processes that make up psychological flexibility.

Reading notes in Google Docs.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT, spoken as the word “act”) was developed by Steven Hayes with Kirk Strosahl and Kelly Wilson. Its target is psychological flexibility: staying in contact with what is happening and continuing to act on what you value, including while what is happening is unpleasant. The test it applies to a thought is not whether the thought is true but whether acting on it gets you where you want to go, which is called workability.

Concepts

The six processes, usually drawn as a hexagon.

• Acceptance. Allow the unpleasant feeling to be present instead of spending effort on removing it. The effort of avoidance is treated as the problem to solve.
• Defusion. Observe a thought as a thought rather than as an instruction or a fact.
• Contact with the present moment. Attend to what is happening now instead of to a rehearsed past or forecast future.
• Self as context. Notice the self that observes, which is not the same as the story told about the self.
• Values. Name what you want your life to be about, stated as a direction rather than as a goal that can be completed.
• Committed action. Take the step the value implies, now, at whatever size is actually available.