Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (often referred to as ACT, pronounced "act") is a form of psychotherapy belonging to the larger family of cognitive-behavioral therapies and the primary psychological framework on which OptimalWork is based.

At OptimalWork, we incorporate much of the model of ACT into our own coaching and education, with two primary clarifications:

• Values are clarified as ideals.
• The structure of willingness is clarified as involving reframing, mindfulness, and challenge.

Theoretical Foundations

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The History of ACT

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy was developed by the clinical psychologist Steven C. Hayes, Ph.D., in the 1980s, in primary response to several themes and questions that had arisen in his practice.

First,

When ACT was being developed during the 1980s, it was designed as a transdiagnostic treatment approach based on the common core processes that we thought might account for human psychological suffering. We started with some fairly simple and straightforward questions: How is it that bright, sensitive, caring people who have everything they need to survive and prosper in life must endure such suffering? Are there ubiquitous human processes that somehow are linked to widespread suffering? Can we develop a solid theoretical understanding of how suffering develops and then apply psychological interventions to neutralize or reverse the core processes responsible?

ACT within the CBT Family

• Cognitive-behavioral therapy as good because of how it helps us face internal and external challenges
• Internally, it practices a primitive version of reframing, better conceptualized as deconstruction of the negative self-concepts and core beliefs about the world that we happen to have
• Externally, it embraces exposure therapy to help us

Over time, however, one of the core complaints about CBT in this capacity is:

• Continued sense of pathology-as-pathology; of anxiety as a disorder.
• Still fundamentally based on unwillingness — or, rather, not yet fundamentally based on willingness. When it comes both to thoughts and to external triggers that sound the alarm (so, when it comes to negative thoughts and feelings), the conception is still one of pure tolerance (and often tolerance in the service of getting rid of the symptoms).
• There is a growing sense that the rigid efforts to control our thoughts and feelings are exactly those things that make it worse.

Psychological Flexibility

The creators of ACT see psychological flexibility as their unified model of human functioning. This is true insofar as flexibility always allows one to be embracing challenges. [Hexaflex]

What does someone who's learning about OptimalWork need to know about ACT?

Third-wave cognitive-behavioral therapy - Incorporates challenge and mindfulness - Includes psychological flexibility - Has the potential to include the principle of challenge and reframing even though these aren't fleshed out - Acceptance is RMC applied to one's internal life; commitment is RMC applied to one's external world - Also introduces - Has the idea of suffering as a part of life and the idea that the pathology is the cure, and that the fear of the pathology is the pathology itself - Willingness as the solution in 2 dimensions

• Why act in accord with ideals? Because this is how you grow.

Also has the component of somebody

The ACT Hexaflex

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These are ACT's six core processes of psychological flexibility.