ACT - Acceptance & Commitment Therapy

​Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) gets it name from one of its core messages:
"​Accept what is out of your personal control, and commit to action that improves and enriches your life."  

​ACT is a form of psychotherapy commonly described as a form of cognitive-behavior therapy or clinical behavior analysis (CBA).
It is an empirically-based psychological intervention that uses acceptance and mindfulness strategies with commitment and behavior-change skills, in order to increase psychological flexibility.

It has been clinically proven to be successful in a wide range of psychological problems, as a therapy in which you actively learn new skills to improve your quality of life.

The aim of ACT is to help people create a full and meaningful life, while effectively handling the pain and stress that life inevitably brings.

​This is achieved by:​

1. Providing individuals with psychological skills to deal effectively with painful thoughts and feelings in such a way that they have much less impact and influence. These are referred to as mindfulness skills.
   ​
2. Supporting individuals to identify what they value in life and what is important to them, promoting change, commitment and connectedness and leading towards a more meaningful life.

ACT and Mindfulness

​
​Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is a powerful mindfulness-based therapy. 

Mindfulness is a mental state of awareness, focus and openness.  It involves an individual being fully engaged in what they are doing at that moment. In a state of mindfulness, difficult thoughts and feelings have much less impact and influence, and it is a state that allows us to exert more control over our actions.

ACT involves three primary mindfulness processes: 

​1)  Defusion: separating from unhelpful thoughts, beliefs, images and memories.

2)  Acceptance: making room for painful feelings, urges and sensations, and allowing them to come and go without a struggle.

3) Connection with the present moment: engaging completely with our here-and-now experience.

Through these mindfulness techniques Individuals lean to become an expert on their mind, thereby gaining control over how they respond to their thoughts, beliefs and also emotions. 

​In a state of mindfulness, we can effectively handle even the most difficult feelings, urges, memories, thoughts and sensations - and as we learn to do so - we can break self-defeating beliefs; rise beyond our fears and change our attitude in life-enhancing ways.