Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
Our Treatment Approach
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is an evidence-based therapeutic approach that provides patients at Pathlight the skills they need to deal with difficult thoughts, feelings and emotions.
Instead of “changing” or “getting rid of” one’s sad or painful thoughts, feelings and emotions, ACT emphasizes flexibility — encouraging us to connect with our chosen values — even in the presence of negative thoughts, feelings and emotions.
Used extensively in mood disorder and anxiety disorder treatment here at Pathlight, the goal of ACT is to help patients create a rich and meaningful life while also being able to accept the pain that inevitably comes with life.
What is ACT?
The process of ACT is at the heart of its acronym:
A: Accept your thoughts and feelings
C: Choose a valued direction, or move towards something you value
T: Take Action
In other words, ACT effectively addresses two key questions in the recovery journey:
- What do you want to move towards in your life? What motivates you?
- What stands in your way? What thoughts and events are hindering you from living the life you want to live?
Guided by Pathlight's compassionate clinical experts, ACT helps people learn how to accept their thoughts, feelings and emotions—even the sad, painful ones. This approach helps our patients understand that humans have very little control over what comes to mind. ACT helps to increase our awareness of the ways that our mind works and teaches practical skills for tolerating the pain that all humans inevitably experience.
How does ACT help people in recovery?
The goal of ACT is to help patients create a rich and meaningful life while accepting the pain that inevitably goes with all of our lives.
In a sense, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy regards the mind as a double-edged sword. Our minds do many things well — allowing us to speak, sing, paint, dream and imagine— but if we don’t learn how to handle it effectively, it can hurt us. At ERC Pathlight, ACT helps patients learn how to:
- Accept their thoughts and feelings
- Choose a valued direction for their lives
- Take action toward that end
ACT not only facilitates insight, but is a powerful catalyst for meaningful behavioral change in the treatment environment.
In ACT, we start from the assumption that the normal psychological processes of a normal human mind readily become destructive, and sooner or later they create psychological suffering for all of us. ACT speculates that the root of this suffering is human language itself.
ACT for anxiety and mood disorders
ACT is particularly effective in addressing mood and anxiety disorders because it addresses “experiential avoidance” — one’s tendency to avoid difficult thoughts, feelings and emotions. Experiential avoidance tends to be high in patients struggling with mood and anxiety disorders. ACT teaches individuals to replace experiential avoidance with helpful, values-consistent behaviors to move towards a life worth living.
Values work is very important in ACT and helps patients:
- Identify what they want their lives to stand for
- Create more certainty in the direction they are taking
- Set goals and decide on actions that will help them move toward their values
Instead of one’s unpleasant thoughts, feelings and emotions driving their actions, one learns how to notice, neutralize, allow or release them in order to make choices in alignment with their chosen values.
ACT for Trauma
Pathlight recognizes how ACT effectively addresses the needs of those in treatment for trauma. Pathlight's patients are given the tools to change their relationship with difficult trauma emotions so they are free to make the choices that will move them towards their valued lives. ACT specifically includes each of the components of PTSD treatment that are known to have the most effective outcomes in managing symptoms that occur following a trauma:
- Psycho-education
- Anxiety management
- Exposure/tolerance/acceptance work
In addition, ACT targets both mood and anxiety symptom management and stabilization.
In summary, ACT is a simple yet powerful therapy that can bring patients to new places and support lasting recovery from mood and anxiety disorders and trauma-related conditions. Reach out to us to learn more about treatment with ACT.
Bad things do happen to good people. It does not have to be for a reason. Often, things are beyond our control. Trauma survivors know how deeply this reaches. ACT helps people learn to let go of the 'we are in control' when that is no longer working. Instead it walks through the process needed to come into the present moment, and to still care, and to move toward the lives we want to live. ACT creates a way to help trauma survivors to be themselves, to be present, and to care, without first trying to create some kind of order of the mix of thoughts, feelings and traumatic experience they leave behind.
Trauma sufferers often work hard to avoid anything that might “trigger” the thoughts, feeling or memories of their traumatic experience. Avoidance behaviors can often spiral into evasion of many other things that aren’t directly related to the trauma.
Many people, including those suffering from anorexia, bulimia, EDNOS and binge eating disorder, turn to numbing, addictive processes to try to be free of past painful experiences. While these harmful practices might give short term relief to the sufferings, untimely addictive processes add to the suffering problem, causing people to lose connection with the life they want and value.
Trauma recovery means being able to be fully involved in a life that is rich with value rather than one ruled by past painful experiences and avoidance strategies, no matter what thoughts or feelings or body sensations show up in the mind. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy processes are designed to help people learn how to take committed actions toward the life they want for themselves.
ACT for Eating Disorders
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy swiftly and effectively addresses the major factors maintaining an eating disorder, including rigidity, inability to see the big picture, isolation and most importantly, emotional avoidance.
Men and women struggling with eating disorders are masters of avoiding pain and controlling the natural disappointment of life. These patients often have very painful thoughts about sad and traumatic experiences on their minds, and they judge themselves harshly as a result.
Most patients are working to avoid having anything upsetting and painful from showing up in their minds. And we find, in treatment, adults with eating disorders hope that the treatment team will help them subtract those difficult feelings. But the mind doesn’t subtract, it only adds.
ACT teaches us that we have little control over what comes to mind. Because of how our minds work, even the happiest of people will have significant pain in their lives. We can have a memory that pulls us out of the moment, or we can begin to worry about something in the future that keeps us from experiencing and enjoying the moment we are in. The mind is good at jumping into the past, or worrying about the future. ACT shows us how to be aware of all of this and how to tolerate whatever shows up in our minds, instead of avoiding painful thoughts, feelings and sensations.
Trauma Recovery at Eating Recovery Center
From the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy perspective, people are not broken — rather, they are stuck. No one is taught the skills necessary to be able to tolerate pain and function after a traumatic event. ACT is focused on helping people change their relationship with the difficult emotions so their lives are not ruled by them and they are free to make the choices toward their valued lives.
At Eating Recovery Center, the trauma recovery process is based in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy processes and includes the following components:
- Medical and Nutritional Stability: Simply put, no one has the ability to do the hard work of trauma recovery without this basic platform. One of the first priorities at ERC Pathlight is to make sure patients are medically and physically stable.
- Values Work: Identifying values and valued life directions is a key part of trauma work. Values serve as a compass for people’s lives, helping to understand why change is necessary, even when it feels overwhelmingly difficult. People who have had traumatic experiences can be at risk of never focusing on or having developed an idea of what they value. Values work sheds light on the big picture, as opposed to the everyday small experiences which can fill our lives and steal our time.
- Mindfulness Skills: Mindfulness means being able to be present, as opposed to slipping into thinking about the past, or jumping ahead to worrying about what is next in the future. Gaining the skills to not turn to old addictive coping methods to manage the moment when having flashbacks or becoming flooded by emotion when discussing trauma is critical to trauma recovery.
- Grounding, Safety and Containment Skills: This set of skills allows the trauma sufferer to be able to tolerate that which shows up in her or his mind. These skills provide the “outlet” for painful feelings so that individuals do not become so overwhelmed that they turn to old behaviors to numb out and avoid emotions.
- Exposure Work: Cognitive and exposure-based treatments have empirical evidence of the best outcomes for treatment of trauma. Together with their clinicians, patients work to slowly tolerate exposure to the feared things so that they may learn to accept these things instead of being ruled by them.
- Cognitive Work: The ability to be able to “think about how we think” is a key part of trauma recovery. Patients cultivate the ability to examine their thoughts and perceptions, and learn to notice how their minds work, which thoughts show up and how they react.
- Psycho-Educational Work: Patients learn how the brain functions, including how they are wired and have been programmed into beliefs about themselves and others over the years. The brain likes to judge, evaluate, compare and make connections, and these simple mental processes can cause trouble until they are understood and managed.
To learn more about how ACT can help you recover from an eating disorder, trauma, or another mental health issue you are facing, please feel free to call a Member of our team to set up a free, confidential discussion at 1-877-711-1690.
