Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT for short, is a type of therapy which uses mindfulness techniques like diffusion in the service of living one’s values. The idea here is that when we are struggling to stay in the present moment, for example by becoming overly focused on our thoughts and emotions, (what ACT calls fusion), it makes it much harder to make choices which are in line with our values or how we would like to show up in the world. Act provides strategies like diffusion techniques where we are able to get distance around problematic thoughts and feelings. This in turn makes it easier to re-focus on living a life which is in line with our purpose and allows us to take steps towards who we are trying to become. For example, if we are ruminating about some negative experience we had and it is making it harder for us to stay present and to connect with our values we could use a diffusion technique. One diffusion technique, as there are many, is to imagine that we are putting our thoughts on a leave and then sending that leave upstream as we observe it flowing through the water. With ACT the goal here is not to immediately get rid of our thoughts and feelings, which ACT would consider problematic, but to change how we relate to them. You might have heard the old adage “to not let your emotions get the best of of you”. ACT provides a method to make that reality possible.
References:
Harris, R. (2019). ACT made simple: an easy-to-read primer on acceptance and commitment therapy (2nd ed.). New Harbinger Publications.
