What is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)?

in this video I'm going to give you a brief rundown about acceptance and commitment therapy or training as it's called in some contexts act so that you can better understand what act is how its model of psychological flexibility works and even how the theory under the hood relational frame theory informs all this acceptance and mindfulness work that we do in act all right let's get that intro rolling so acceptance and commitment therapy is a new way of working with people who are suffering and when I say new what I mean is that act or acceptance and commitment therapy was invented all the way kind of in its early conceptualization period back in the late 1970s it went through a development the 1980s where was rolled out as a program called comprehensive distancing and comprehensive distancing is just a fancy way of saying get some distance from your thoughts notice them acknowledge that there are some thoughts some content between your ears behind your eyes private behavior that's always going Olli is cranking out different judgments and in value evaluations and notice how that might impact your behavior the idea behind acceptance and commitment therapy or as we sometimes call it training when we're not in therapy contexts is that rather than teaching people to try and dispute or get rid of things that they don't want to feel to learn how to be in contact with those some people will think that acceptance automatically means you need to accept all of the difficult stuff that shows up and that is inherently not true in fact we want people to be more sensitive to what shows up because sometimes it's totally functional to escape and run away from the things that are painful we wouldn't make a blanket statement like somebody who's psychologically healthier very psychologically flexible is somebody who is always accepting of things that other people say no way sometimes you need to stand up and fight for yourself sometimes you need to assert yourself and that might be a functional improvement in someone's behavior and that's why we talk about psychological flexibility as our measure of Health what psychological flexibility looks for specifically is what does someone do in a specific situation now I know that sounds really simple and straightforward but imagine how much variability that has so if you and I are going out for a coffee together and you spill some coffee on the table and you feel really embarrassed maybe you're super psychologically inflexible and you say something out loud like I'm such an idiot I can't believe I did that and you get really angry with yourself and maybe if you could be a little more accepting that might be an improvement your behavior for you to pause and just sort of reflect on your embarrassment maybe you put your elbow on the table and you Leeman you say them like I'm really pissed off at myself right now Tim and maybe that's okay the idea behind psychological flexibility is we look at how people's behavior functions how it works in all these different situations now the second half of that acceptance on commitments we talked about the acceptance part but what about commitment well commitment is about the doing of what makes your life important these are situational specific they never get ticked off a list like if I tell you that I woke up this morning and said something really kind to my partner does that just mean that my commitment to being a loving partner is over no way that's a lifelong thing that you do you don't just take that off a list and say okay that'll get me through 20 years worth of marriage instead commitment is about the ongoing flow of doing your commitment to behavior change your commitment to wellness your commitment to creativity or whatever it is that's important in your life and who is important in your life so what we've done now is we've broken the acceptance and commitment therapy or training down into these two separate chunks there's an acceptance piece which is about being open to what hurts and actively choosing what you do next commitment now that little piece there that I just talked about actively choosing in order to be the locust of control in order to be firmly seated in the driver's seat you need to be open to your experience so that your experience doesn't rule use that you get to choose what you do next but here's where the important part comes in and this is why we talk about mindfulness or any of this meditation or contemplative work that we might be doing with our clients whether it be organizationally in training settings or in therapy with individual clients what we do with the present moment work is we help people to pay attention to what's happening right now to be open to everything that occurs to us so that we can actively choose what we do next you see there's so many experiences that go by without us paying attention to them things that we become insensitive to things that we just frankly take for granted as you're watching this video you're going to have thoughts and judgments you're going to have reactions as I'm speaking to you someone that I've never met I have thoughts and judgments and reactions like you think I'm doing a terrible job I talk too fast whatever it may be or you know maybe I have this thought like if only I was a little more insightful like Robin Walzer or if only I was a little more jovial like Kevin Polk or more to the point like Kirk Strasse or more creative like Louise Hays these are my favorite act trainers well if I could do those things you know my mind comes up with this condition like yeah that's and I would be a really good trainer that's what I would be doing a good job of this video and maybe that gets in the way of me actually producing this and releasing this and sending it to you instead I noticed that and I choose what I want to be about my values are about me sharing this work with you because I know how awesome it is so those are the three main components that inform psychological flexibility this being open to our difficulty this awareness that we practice that we can actively choose that we can be engaged with our lives we can break that into three chunks and say that it's about being open aware and engaged that's what's at the heart of acceptance and commitment therapy or again training in different kinds of contexts being open to our experience aware of how they impact us and choosing how we want to behave is at the heart of psychological flexibility now there's been more than 200 randomized control trials done on act showing that act is effective for everything from test taking anxiety all the way up to severe mental health related problems it works in organizational settings to boost your creativity to boost your productivity to give you more autonomy at work to reduce your brno act as like vitamin C it's just good for everything which is really cool so let me talk to you about a Family Therapy type of setting I would use psychological flexibility to understand how different behaviors work in certain situations help that person that I'm talking to you to Judah Kate whether or not that's the person that they want to be or how that behavior is working for them and then use some of these commitment to behavior change processes to get them to do new things now let's think about that in an organization maybe I'm working with a team of healthcare professionals who are having a really difficult time with their high workload and my stress levels they're also feeling really burnt out at work I can't make them not feel burnt out anymore but what I can do is help them to engage in their work in a meaningful way to be with that experience of burnout and to do things that are congruent with taking care of themselves that are congruent with the type of health care professional that they want to be we need to justify why we would want to get people to accept the painful stuff that shows up for them to pay attention to it on purpose and to hold it and move forward with it to engage in a more meaningful life and that's where this really cool relational frame theory comes into play you see what relational frame theory and I think it would be more aptly said as relational frame science because this is an alive and well research program what it shows us is that the way that we suffer with our thoughts it draws the same source as our strengths you see we're the only species that engages in this highest level of learning relational learning and even though it's allowed us to do amazing things like create the internet and I'm talking to people that I've never met and even though you're not in front of your difficulties they're actually figuring out how you're going to roll out acceptance and commitment training or therapy even though you're not presented with that situation you're able to actually listen to the words that I'm saying and relate to how you might use this in your practice setting it also explains why we suffer with the most difficult things that happen between our ears and behind our eyes the way that relational learning works is that we as humans can draw relationships between things that are seemingly not related whatsoever let's take for example if I hold out my hand and I have a diamond a nickel on my hand if you're socialized to the way that we deal with money and specifically change especially in the part of the world that I live in dimes are worth more money than the nickel you see we have this strange relationship with money even though the nickel is larger physically bigger than the dime we have arbitrarily placed some value on the diamond said you know we have this socially constructed relationship when we say that the dime is bigger well as it turns out we can learn in this relational network like that where we build these arbitrary these socially constructed relationships to all kinds of different things except the main problem is is that once we build that Network larger and larger we can't make the network any smaller so let's just take a silly example I assume that you've probably heard the nursery rhyme mary had a little and I didn't even have to say it out loud your mind probably filled in the blank with lamb that's right I didn't even have to say it before I didn't have to sing it and you filled it in now whether or not you're actually picturing the white fuzzy little creature or not doesn't matter maybe you were thinking back to lamb chop the their puppet from your childhood or you just thought of the word lamb or maybe you sang it in your head the point here though is is that we learn in these relational networks and now you can't delete that you can't easily remove that relational frame theory shows us that we can't get rid of those things that they keep popping up for us and that in fact they start popping up in relationship to other things as we build larger and larger relational networks so that's why we talk about acceptance even though it might seem like an inherently Eastern spiritual coming from a Buddhist wisdom practice it's actually not the layers of acts foundation really came at learning and language from this perspective of behavioral learning and that's where relational learning comes from so that's the whole theory that's the actual underpinning of act now it makes it easy for us to talk about some of these really heady behavioral concepts in spiritual ways like when I instruct you to pause here for a moment and notice that you can hear the sound of my voice you can acknowledge that that sound is there but you are not the sound of my voice you are separate you're the observer of that sound just as you're the observer of your experience that's has a little bit of a spiritual Bend we might call that the observer self or a transcendent sense of self and that makes good sense to a lot of people that's one of the more complicated pieces of this relational learning model is that we can start to see that we learn how one thing can be related to another and that we build networks for there and they can even be related in ways that aren't seemingly obvious or based on their physical properties but that we also can do other things like swap perspectives see things from someone else's eyes feel what someone else might be feeling even though we're not actually feeling what they're feeling we can start doing all of these different ways of playing with those relational networks so just as a recap act or acceptance and commitment training therapy is all about training people to be open to their experience to acknowledge that painful stuff shows up to be aware of it and to actually choose what they want their to behavior to be about next to engage with the life that's important to them acceptance and commitment therapy or training is all about putting the individual you in the driver's seat so that you're the one in control not your thoughts feeling sensations or memories that typically might control you I hope you found this video useful make sure you hit that like button it's super reinforcing to me makes me want to make more of these videos for you hit subscribe and we'll keep you updated on all the latest content from my channel and definitely share this video it helps me to get the word out there about my channel and also you never know who's gonna find this work useful in your world I hope you're diggin the channel and make sure that you check out more of the videos thanks so much

Channel: The Zen Social Worker

Views: 268,470

Keywords: what is ACT, acceptance and commitment therapy, introduction to ACT

Id: PmKEvlv9Cys

Length: 12min 53sec (773 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 11 2018