Saturday, July 23, 2011

ACT

Acceptance and commitment therapy is an empirically-based psychological intervention that uses acceptance and mindfulness strategies mixed in different ways with commitment and behavior-change strategies, to increase psychological flexibility.
ACT views the core of many problems to be due to the concepts represented in the acronym, FEAR:
Fusion with your thoughts
Evaluation of experience
Avoidance of your experience
Reason-giving for your behavior
And the healthy alternative is to ACT:
Accept your reactions and be present
Choose a valued direction
Take action
ACT commonly employs six core principles to help clients develop psychological flexibility
1. Cognitive defusion: Learning to perceive thoughts, images, emotions, and memories as what they are, not what they appear to be.
2. Acceptance: Allowing them to come and go without struggling with them.
3. Contact with the present moment: Awareness of the here and now, experienced with openness, interest, and receptiveness.
4. Observing the self: Accessing a transcendent sense of self, a continuity of consciousness which is unchanging.
5. Values: Discovering what is most important to one's true self.
6. Committed action: Setting goals according to values and carrying them out responsibly.

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