Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

Mindfulness-centered therapy to help you step out of painful cycles and move toward the kind of life you want to live. Online therapy based in Aptos and serving clients across California.

The more you fight your inner experience, the more stuck you can feel

The answer was never going to be forcing yourself not to feel anxious, uncertain, or overwhelmed. Anxiety and grief don’t respond to “trying harder” or “doing better.”

Let’s be honest- many therapy skills feel like they were designed based on a theory by someone who’s never actually lived through what you’re experiencing. You’re struggling with spiraling anxious thoughts or grieving the loss of someone you love, and you go through all the effort to get help and you hear that you need to “challenge your thoughts” or “just breathe through it” without anyone really helping you understand what to do with the pain.

If you’re still struggling, you must be doing it wrong. Just try harder.

ACT is a mindfulness-based approach based on the realities of life. 

At the center of ACT is psychological flexibility which is just a fancy way of saying that the goal is to help you be resilient, confident, and grounded through life no matter what happens. It’s not that bad things don’t happen, it’s that you know you can trust yourself to handle whatever comes your way. 

Instead of trying to control your inner world and micromanage all your thoughts and feelings, you learn to just notice what comes up without letting the emotions dictate what comes next. 

ACT helps you step out of autopilot and reconnect with the things that matter most to you. Rather than organizing your life around avoiding pain or trying to feel “better enough” before taking action, therapy focuses on helping you move toward your values even when difficult emotions are present.

ACT is about building a different relationship with yourself

ACT is just what it says on the tin: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. 

Acceptance is often the hardest part, but it doesn’t mean that you like the bad things that have happened, the losses you’ve experienced, or the anxiety that keeps you up at night. It means looking honestly at reality instead of getting stuck fighting against the fact that difficulty and pain are part of being human.

Commitment refers to the process of realigning your life so you’re building a life that reflects your values, priorities, and goals. During the process of therapy, you may realize how many parts of your life have been on autopilot this whole time, or places where you’ve been holding back out of fears of failure, rejection, or abandonment. Commitment challenges us to take risks, do hard things, and face our fears in order to create the kind of life we want to live.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy can help you…

  • Drop the exhausting struggle to control your thoughts, feelings, and circumstances

  • Notice when fear, perfectionism, or avoidance of discomfort are starting to control your choices

  • Reconnect with your values so you stay in the driver’s seat of your life

  • Move toward meaningful relationships, experiences, and goals even when the process feels uncomfortable

  • Build trust in your ability to handle uncertainty, vulnerability, grief, and anxiety

Your life doesn’t have to keep shrinking around anxiety, grief, or fear. Therapy can help you make space for discomfort while still moving toward a life that feels meaningful, connected, and fully yours.

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 Frequently Asked Questions about ACT

 

  • ACT is a mindfulness-based therapy that I personally really love (and use). It’s all about getting unstuck from patterns of fear, avoidance, or running on autopilot so we can live differently.

  • ACT is a kind of talk therapy where we’ll have weekly sessions relating to things that are going on in your real life. We’ll discuss your issues from an ACT lens and you’ll typically leave each session with something new to try during the week. And don’t forget, I’m always available between sessions if you’re struggling to apply what we’ve talked about to a situation you’re going through.

  • ACT helps you change the way you approach your life. It doesn’t claim to be a system of solving problems or fixing symptoms. Those things usually do come along as part of developing more psychological flexibility (ie, resilience, confidence, and self-trust), but they’re not the goal or purpose of ACT.

  • Yes, and there are more and more studies all the time. The ACT community is made up of a bunch of nerds who love to do research, so it has a huge evidence base. But research and evidence don’t do the work for you. You’ll still have to do the hard part and apply the things you learn to your daily life.

  • Technically, ACT is part of what they call a third wave cognitive therapy. It developed from Relational Frame Theory, or RFT which looks at the way human language and cognition help us form relationships between things. (Like associating a certain smell with the memory of your grandmother, or a certain intersection with the memory of getting in a car accident)

    Current CBT is part of the second wave of cognitive therapies which came out of the original CBT by Aaron Beck.

  • It does! One thing anxiety likes to do is to keep us stuck in thought cycles about things that happened or might happen. ACT teaches us how to observe thoughts without participating in them which takes us out of those cycles so we have the freedom to choose what we actually want to do with our time and mental focus.

  • Yes, but it’s very different from the ways we use ACT for other things. Grief is different from most other human experiences, and therapy for grief should reflect that. Grief isn’t a problem to be solved or a pain to be avoided. Your loss is important and shouldn’t be dismissed or pushed aside just to “feel better” as quickly as possible. There’s a natural cadence to grief, and ACT fits in well as a support to help you move forward with your life when you’re ready and also to help you sit back with the memories when you need to. ACT doesn’t make grief go away, it makes room for it as a part of your life.

  • Absolutely! ACT helps you step back from overthinking and get out of the cycles of stress or worry that fuel your racing thoughts. ACT also helps you explore the roots of your perfectionism and change the way you relate to the things that keep you from letting go.

  • Yes it can. Panic attacks often fuel themselves- once you’ve had a panic attack, the worry about having another one can cause a panic attack to happen! This cycle keeps itself going and makes you more and more anxious about when another panic attack will strike. ACT leans into the paradox- the more you learn to be okay with having panic attacks, the less stressed you’ll be and the less likely you are to have another one. My clients often report never having another panic attack again after a few weeks of therapy.

  • Yes it does! The ACT approach to OCD is very different from ERP. With ACT, we’re not trying to change your intrusive thoughts, compulsions, or obsessions. Instead, we focus on how you respond to the thoughts and emotions that come up when your OCD gets loud.