Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
Feel more at home in yourself and more free to move toward what matters.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, commonly called ACT, has been central to my clinical development since 2014.
ACT offers a practical and compassionate way of understanding the difficulties that are part of being human. It helps us develop a more flexible relationship with thoughts, emotions, memories, sensations, uncertainty, and self-doubt so that discomfort does not have to make every decision.
In my practice, ACT complements somatic psychotherapy. Somatic work supports greater awareness of the body, nervous system, attachment, boundaries, and protective responses. ACT helps translate that growing capacity into choices, behavior, relationships, and participation in life.
What Is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy?
ACT is an active and experiential form of psychotherapy grounded in Contextual Behavioral Science.
It explores how thoughts, emotions, memories, bodily sensations, habits, relationships, and circumstances influence what we do. It also considers how attempts to avoid or control difficult internal experiences can sometimes narrow our lives.
ACT does not ask you to simply think positively or convince yourself that painful experiences do not matter.
Instead, it helps you develop a more flexible relationship with what is happening inside you so that discomfort does not have to make every decision.
The aim is greater psychological flexibility: the capacity to remain present, recognize what matters, and respond in ways that support the life you want to build.
Psychological Flexibility and Where We Get Stuck
ACT supports psychological flexibility: the capacity to remain present, open to experience, connected with what matters, and able to take meaningful action.
When we become psychologically inflexible, life can narrow around avoidance, control, repetitive thinking, fear, self-protection, or old patterns that once helped us survive but no longer support the life we want.
This can look like trying to eliminate every difficult feeling before taking a step, believing every painful thought as though it were a final truth, losing contact with the present moment, becoming trapped in a fixed story about who we are, disconnecting from values, or avoiding actions that would bring us closer to what matters.
ACT helps us notice these patterns with compassion and develop more choice in how we respond.
Core ACT Processes
ACT is often organized around six core processes. These processes are not steps that everyone must follow in the same order. They are ways of developing greater flexibility, awareness, and values-guided action.
Acceptance
Making room for what is already present without giving up on change or allowing discomfort to make every decision.
Defusion
Creating more space around thoughts so they do not have to function as literal instructions, predictions, or final truths.
Present-Moment Awareness
Learning to notice what is happening now with more openness, flexibility, and contact with direct experience.
Observing Self
Recognizing the part of you that can notice thoughts, emotions, sensations, memories, and roles without being completely defined by them.
Values
Clarifying the qualities of living that matter to you and the directions you want your life to move toward.
Committed Action
Taking realistic steps guided by values, even when confidence, certainty, motivation, or comfort is incomplete.
Committed Action
Taking realistic steps guided by values, even when confidence, certainty, motivation, or comfort is incomplete.
How ACT and Somatic Psychotherapy Work Together
My practice remains centered in somatic psychotherapy, and ACT expands the frame.
Somatic approaches help us notice how experience is organized through bodily sensation, posture, movement, breath, activation and shutdown, attachment, boundaries, protective responses, and relational contact.
ACT helps us attend to language, meaning, behavior, avoidance, perspective, values, habits, choice, and meaningful action.
Sometimes people know what matters but do not yet have enough nervous-system capacity to move toward it. They may value rest while becoming activated whenever they slow down. They may want to set a boundary while their body collapses or moves automatically into compliance. They may understand something intellectually while their nervous system continues to respond as though danger is present.
Somatic work can help us understand and support the bodily responses that make action difficult. ACT can help clarify why the action matters and identify steps that are workable.
Together, these perspectives can help connect bodily capacity, personal meaning, and effective action.
What ACT Sessions May Include
ACT is collaborative and experiential.
Sessions may include exploring what matters to you, identifying patterns that have become restrictive, noticing how thoughts influence behavior, practicing ways to create more space around repetitive thinking, making room for emotion and sensation, developing mindfulness skills, exploring different perspectives, examining the function of avoidance, clarifying values, identifying realistic actions, and reviewing what happens when you practice something new.
ACT does not need to feel like a collection of worksheets or techniques.
The model offers a way of understanding the larger process of change. How we apply it depends on your personality, needs, preferences, and circumstances.
My Training and Study in ACT
I began an intensive study of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Contextual Behavioral Science in 2014.
Since then, I have engaged in sustained learning through professional trainings, clinical courses, workshops, recorded lectures, treatment demonstrations, books, professional literature, experiential exercises, continuing study, and clinical application.
My education has included learning through programs and materials developed or taught by Steven C. Hayes, Russ Harris, Daniel J. Moran, Maarten Aalberse, and other educators within the ACT and Contextual Behavioral Science community.
My study has included ACT’s clinical processes as well as its broader theoretical foundations, including functional contextualism, behavioral analysis, and Relational Frame Theory.
ACT has been an important part of how I understand language, behavior, suffering, flexibility, values, and change for more than a decade.