Acceptance & Commitment Therapy

 

The ACT Model

ACT is an orientation to psychotherapy that is based on functional contextualism as a philosophy and RFT as a theory. As such, it is not a specific set of techniques. ACT protocols target the processes of language that are hypothesized to be involved in psychopathology and its amelioration, such as:

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• cognitive fusion — the domination of stimulus functions based on literal language even when that process is harmful,

• experiential avoidance — the phenomenon that occurs when a person is unwilling to remain in contact with particular private experiences and takes steps to alter the form or frequency of these events and the contexts that occasion them, even when doing so causes psychological harm

• the domination of a conceptualized self over the “self as context” that emerges from perspective-taking and deictic relational frames lack of values, confusion of goals with values, and other values problems that can underly the failure to build broad and flexible repertoires

• inability to build a larger unit of behavior through a commitment to behavior that moves in the direction of chosen values and other such processes.

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Technologically, ACT uses both traditional behavior therapy techniques (defined broadly to include everything from cognitive therapy to behavior analysis), as well as others that are more recent or that have largely emerged from outside the behavior tradition, such as cognitive defusion, acceptance, mindfulness, values, and commitment methods.