Quotes for Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT)

[Daniel E.]

"Acceptance is a tricky word. It comes from a Latin root—ceptere—that means 'to receive,' as if to receive a gift."

“Is it gone yet? Is it gone yet? And every time you ask that question, the answer is no—because you’ve just recalled that thought.”

"Backing up and noticing your thoughts...that’s already way helpful. You’re changing your relationship to the thoughts.”

"The deep meta-message of CBT is that you can behave differently, even in the presence of these thoughts. And that's very helpful."

~ Steven Hayes

 

[Daniel E.]

“What if there’s nothing wrong with you?” is about building the skill of acceptance.

~ Daryl Chen

 

[Daniel E.]

ACT and Existential Therapy - Contemporary Psychotherapy
Arwa Hussein

ACT is rooted in Relational Frame Theory (RFT) (Day, 1969), which emphasises the human ability to utilise language as a tool for making meaning and to make links between concepts (Hayes, Strosahl and Wilson, 1999). Though ACT differs from second-wave CBT therapies such as RFT, it remains committed to building an evidence-base for itself, whilst appreciating the value of avoiding internal experiences that lead to psychopathology (Yovel and Bigman, 2012). According to RFT, humans are able to experience fear and anxiety in objectively safe situations due to our ability to establish language-meaning relationships. Anxiety can be triggered simply through making a connection between a thought or idea and a particular meaning...

Suffering remains a basic human experience and maybe we should stop focusing on eradicating it and more on owning it (Sharp et al. 2004).

 

[Daniel E.]

Living Beyond OCD Using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: A Workbook for Adults

Stay "In the Moment," Not in Your Head!

 

[Daniel E.]

"With comparative and evaluative relations we can compare ourselves to an ideal and find ourselves
wanting, even though we are actually doing quite well. We can think we are much worse than others, or
(perhaps just as bad) that we are much better than others. We can be afraid of negative evaluations from
others, even if we haven’t ever experienced them, and we can become socially inhibited as a result...

A person as complex as you are has all of the cognitive tools needed to be tormented."

~ Steven Hayes, Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life

 

[Daniel E.]

Acceptance in ACT is not an end in itself. Rather, acceptance is fostered as a method of increasing values-based action. This is a key distinction because clients may lose sight of why they are being encouraged to "accept" their symptoms to begin with. Who in their right mind would want to "accept" something that feels badly, right?

~ Sarah-Nicole Bostan, M.A.

 

[Daniel E.]

“If you’re living a goal-focused life, then no matter what you have, it’s never enough.”

“Stop trying to control how you feel, and instead take control of what you do.”

“The actions of confidence come first; the feelings of confidence come later.
Genuine confidence is not the absence of fear; it is a transformed relationship with fear.
Negative thoughts are normal. Don’t fight them; defuse them.
Self-acceptance trumps self-esteem.
True success is living by your values.
Hold your values lightly, but pursue them vigorously.
Don’t obsess about the outcome; get passionate about the process.
Don’t fight your fear: allow it, befriend it, and channel it.
Failure hurts—but if we’re willing to learn, it’s a wonderful teacher.
The key to peak performance is total engagement in the task.”

― Russ Harris

 

[Daniel E.]

Acceptance-based therapy: the potential to augment behavioral interventions in the treatment of type 2 diabetes | Nutrition Diabetes

In contrast to CBT approaches, ACT does not teach individuals to identify and change irrational or maladaptive thoughts; rather, the focus of ACT is on changing how an individual relates to these thoughts and feelings. For example, someone who is trying to increase his or her physical activity may avoid exercising at a gym because this person worries about being judged by other patrons. In a CBT approach, this person would be encouraged to challenge or change that thought in order to go to the gym (e.g., considering “What is the worst that could happen?” “What are the odds that would actually happen?”). In contrast, in an ACT-based approach, this person would be taught acceptance skills that would encourage them to go to the gym to exercise even if they feel uncomfortable. The novelty and success of ACT-based interventions lie in its focus on self-regulation skills and its potential broad effectiveness across diverse populations. Further, ACT has proven successful for treating individuals for diverse medical and behavioral issues including chronic pain, substance abuse, high-risk sexual behavior, anorexia among adolescent females, and depression.

 

[Daniel E.]

“You can say it this way: if you learn to be less reactive to stress through the cultivation of flexibility pivots, the body starts turning off those reaction systems, including genetic expression switches that may have been originally thrown not by you but by your parents and grandparents. How cool is that?”

“The central shift is from a focus on what you think and feel to how do you relate to what you think and feel. Specifically, the new emphasis is on learning to step back from what you are thinking, notice it, and open up to what you are experiencing. These steps keep us from doing the damage to ourselves that efforts to avoid or control our thoughts or feelings inflict, allowing us to focus our energies on taking the positive actions that can alleviate our suffering.”

“Pain and purpose are two sides of the same thing. A person struggling with depression is very likely a person yearning to feel fully. A socially anxious person is very likely a person yearning to connect with others. You hurt where you care, and you care where you hurt.”

― Steven C. Hayes, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters

 

[David Baxter PhD]

 

[Daniel E.]

Acceptance and commitment therapy - Wikipedia

Some published empirical studies in clinical psychology have argued that ACT is not different from other interventions. Stefan Hofmann argued that ACT is similar to the much older Morita therapy. ... Several concerns, both theoretical and empirical, have arisen in response to the ascendancy of ACT.

 

[Daniel E.]

“If you are not willing to have it, you do.”

"We all have self-doubt, we all suffer, we all fail from time to time, but none of that means we can’t live a life of meaning, purpose, and compassion for ourselves and others."

~ Steven Hayes

 

[Daniel E.]

"Mindfulness can be understood as a collection of related processes that function to undermine the dominance of verbal networks, especially involving temporal and evaluative relations. These processes include acceptance, defusion, contact with the present moment, and the transcendent sense of self."

~ Lindsay Fletcher & Steven Hayes (2005)

 

[Daniel E.]

"The very thing he wanted to run from, his pain, was the very thing that invigorated his life."

~ The Trauma Banquet: Eating Pain - Feasting on Life

 

[Daniel E.]

Cognitive Mediators of Treatment for Social Anxiety Disorder: Comparing Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy

To assess the relationship between session-by-session mediators and treatment outcomes in traditional cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and acceptanc…

www.sciencedirect.com

Rate of change in negative cognitions at the beginning of treatment is an important predictor of change across both ACT and CBT, whereas rate of change in experiential avoidance at the beginning of treatment is a mechanism specific to ACT.

 

[Daniel E.]

"If suffering is ubiquitous in life, the withdrawal from and avoidance of suffering is accordingly the withdrawal from and avoidance of life.”

“Learning to sit with ambiguity can be a very important start at a life liberated from anxiety—and the way to do it is to resist the urge to chase answers to questions that may actually be unanswerable.”

“It’s part of the human condition that we create stories about ourselves and about the world around us. Our stories are often filled with limitations, and we proceed to live our lives inside those limitations."

― Kelly G. Wilson

 

[Daniel E.]

"Far from being self-indulgent, self-compassion is both a kind and effective motivator."

~ Christina Chwyl

 

[Daniel E.]

Is Self-Compassion More Important Than Self-Esteem?

Is Self-Compassion More Important Than Self-Esteem?

www.huffpost.com

Instead of increasing self-esteem content what we need to do is increase self-compassion as the context of all we do. That deflates ego-based self-stories, as we humbly accept our place as one amongst our fellow human beings, mindfully acknowledging that we all have self-doubt, we all suffer, we all fail from time to time, but none of that means we can't live a life of meaning, purpose, and compassion for ourselves and others.

~ Steven Hayes

 

[Daniel E.]

“I’m still learning to love the parts of me that no one claps for.”

— Rudy Francisco (via Twitter)

 

[Daniel E.]

“I thought that the world did not want me,
but the truth was that I did not want myself.”

“Life isn't about overcoming your fears and then going forward, it is about lovingly embracing those fears and stepping forward together.”

“Miracles can be found in the most unlikely of places. I found the light not by swimming to the surface, but by letting myself drown in the seas of my deepest fears. Not by eradicating the dark, but by embracing it. I realized that there is no such a thing as darkness, only light and the absence of it. It is there in the light of unconditional love that I finally found the freedom I had been searching for so long.”

― M.M. van der Reijden, Winter Magnolia