Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: An Experiential Approach to Behavior Change

by Steven C. Hayes, Kirk D. Strosahl, Kelly G. Wilson

Most therapists and clients believe that a more vital life can be attained by overcoming negative thoughts and feelings. Yet despite efforts to achieve this goal, many individuals continue to suffer with behavior disorders, adjustment difficulties, and low life satisfaction. This volume presents a unique psychotherapeutic approach that addresses the problem of psychological suffering by altering the very ground on which rational change strategies rest. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) focuses in particular on the ways clients understand and perpetuate their difficulties through language. Providing a comprehensive overview of the approach and detailed guidelines for practice, this book shows how interventions based on metaphor, paradox, and experiential exercises can enable clients to break free of language traps, overcome common behavioral problems, and enhance general life satisfaction.

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction, Mental Health, Self Help, Counselling, Social Work, Audiobook

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Steven C. Hayes, PhD, is Nevada Foundation Professor in the department of psychology at the University of Nevada. An author of thirty-four books and more than 470 scientific articles, he has shown in his research how language and thought leads to human suffering, and cofounded ACT, a powerful therapy method that is useful in a wide variety of areas. Hayes has been president of several scientific societies and has received several national awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapy.
He runs the leading Ph.D program in Behavior Analysis, and coined the term Clinical Behavior Analysis. He is known for devising a behavior analysis of human language and cognition called Relational Frame Theory, and its clinical application to various psychological difficulties, such as anxiety.
Hayes has been President of Division 25 of the American Psychological Association, of the American Association of Applied and Preventive Psychology, the Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy (now known as the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies), and the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science. He was the first Secretary-Treasurer of the American Psychological Society (now known as the Association for Psychological Science), which he helped form.
Hayes' work is somewhat controversial, particularly with his coined term "Relational Frame Theory" to describe stimulus equivalent research in relation to an elaborate form of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior (also referred to as verbal operants).
An author of 38 books and 550 articles, in 1992 he was listed by the Institute for Scientific Information as the 30th "highest impact" psychologist in the world during 1986-1990 based on the citation impact of his writings during that period.
According to Time columnist John Cloud, "Steven Hayes is at the top of his field. A past president of the distinguished Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies, he has written or co-written some 300 peer-reviewed articles and 27 books. Few psychologists are so well published".

Reviews

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a therapist-in-training and as someone who has gone to therapy, I love Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). It integrates several helpful parts of other mainstream therapeutic modalities: the search for insight from psychodynamic, the emphasis on meaning from existential, and the action-oriented components from behavioral therapies. The main thesis of ACT is that we should strive to recognize and accept the painful emotions, thoughts, and events in our lives, and then take action in the direction of our chosen values anyway. This book describes ACT well, and ACT comes across as a hopeful and involved therapy, where the client has to do a significant amount of work to yield a significant amount of reward.

It would take forever for me to write all that I appreciate about ACT, so will focus on a few qualities. I love the concept of reducing experiential avoidance and increasing acceptance - instead of hiding or trying to change the most painful parts of ourselves, we can learn to accept them without judgement or shame. Another principle that resonated with me: staying with the present instead of living in the past or the future. So many of us forget to enjoy and to immerse ourselves in each of our waking moments, so I feel glad that the authors incorporated elements of mindfulness here. Finally, I am enamored with ACT's orientation toward values. Instead of only prioritizing what society wants us to (e.g., money, having a romantic partner, etc.) we can learn to act based on our own chosen values, whether that be living with compassion, pursing a love of learning, cultivating one's independence or interdependence, etc.

Overall, five stars because I find ACT such a rich and rewarding therapy and way of living. I would so recommend it if you are interested in mental health, mindfulness, and/or general psychology. While some parts of the book were a little dense, and more work should be done to see how ACT applies to minority groups, I have hope that the modality will only improve with time.

[Morgan Blackledge · Rating 4 out of 5]

ACT/RFT is revolutionary. It's literally a miracle as far as I'm concerned. The model essentially distills the finest features if the eastern contemplative traditions and practices and integrates them with applied behavior analysis, humanistic psychology, existential orientations such as logo therapy, as well as cognitive behavioral approaches. The end product is a humane, rational, evidenced based approach that reaches far beyond the scope of traditional psychotherapy.

Both Steven C. Hayes and Kelly Wilson are some of the most expressive, imaginative and effective writers and educators in the field. That being said, parts of this book are a bit opaque. I'm a fan of relational frame theory (RFT), and I even (pretend to sort of) understand it (sometimes). But the presentation of RFT in the early chapters of this book is not as well executed as others I've read.

That being said, ACT/RFT is an ambitious model. It's pretty comprehensive. I can forgive the authors if aspects of the model are less effectively condensed into chapter length summaries than others. The reason I am willing to cut these guys some slack is, I think they have done a fantastic job of making the model accessible, engaging, easily learnable, and downright entertaining where ever possible. In fact, most of this book is really readable (quite lovely even) w/o sacrificing depth or precision.

Setting this and similar formal criticisms aside, the ACT/RFT model is amazing and powerful and this is manual represents the most up to date, comprehensive presentation currently available. If you're a practicing clinician considering working within the ACT/RFT psychological flexibility framework, this book is definitely worth your time and effort.

[Edward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Where I work (in mental health for the Dept of Veterans Affairs) ACT is being pushed as an evidence-based psychotherapy. The VA is pretty hard-nosed about these sort of things, so you know that this approach must be pretty legit. I wanted to read this, especially because it was a fresh approach with a lot of research and some of the ideas really spoke to me.

This a very dense read, intended for psychotherapists, about Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT; pronounced "act"). The basic philosophical assumption underlying this approach is that people do not have to get rid of negative thoughts and feelings to get better (this is opposed to pretty mainstream psychological assumptions, for example CBT). I wonder, though, if this is such an error than how come CBT works for so many people?

A major concept is experiential avoidance: “[which:] occurs when a person is unwilling to remain in contact with particular private experiences (e.g., bodily sensations, emotions, thoughts, memories, behavioral dispositions) and takes steps to alter the form or frequency of these events and the context that occasion them” (58); instead, research shows that being in touch with oneself and open to experiences has the best therapeutic outcomes.

“Clients are frequently spending so much time evaluating how well they are doing, whether they are happy and what to do about it, that they lose contact with the content about which they might be happy… The result is that change—particularly that involves the visitation and working through of unpleasant events—is traumatic. The individual goes through the experience unwillingly, and the negative impact of the experience is magnified by the continual self-evaluation process it occasions" (69).

- Not FEAR:
Fusion with your thoughts
Evaluation of your experiences
Avoidance of your experiences
Reason-giving for your behavior

- But ACT:
Accept your reactions and be present
Choose a valued direction
Take committed action

“ACT is at its core, a behavioral treatment. Its ultimate goal is to help the client develop and maintain a behavioral trajectory in life that is vital and valued” (205).

A major problem for people is that the verbal over-dominates the experiential. This is espcially the case with evaluation. ACT reduces this, not by getting people so they shouldn’t say “should”, but by undermining language itself and instead “opening the window and letting a little (nonverbal) air in". This is done by using metaphors and experiential exercises (like those used in Gestalt therapy). For example, one excercise involves the therapist and client saying the word "milk" over and over again for 3 minutes.

We choose a valued direction when we ask "what do you want your life to stand for?"

[Jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The philosophy underlying Contextual Behavioral Science, of which ACT is a part, is pragmatic rather than material or ontological (as in elemental realism). The concern is not with what is materially true, but with what works. This is the same definition of capital-T “Truth” that Jordan Peterson prefers: the sense in which an arrow flies true.

While some take it as materially or ontologically true that syndromes like Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder “exist” in a real sense, so far science has failed to show that these meet the criteria for disease states. Even the American Psychiatric Association admits that “not one laboratory marker has been found to be specific in identifying any of the DSM-defined syndromes.” The focus has been on the form of symptoms rather than their function (how people relate to their symptoms). In other words, it’s possible that distress comes not from the actual internal states we experience, but how we relate to those internal states and therefore how those experiences function in our lives. In fact, experiential avoidance of internal states accounts for 16-28% of the variance in behavioral health problems.

Furthermore, our culture tends to overpathologize the human experience. I’ve been told throughout my training as a therapist that suicidal ideation “is never normal.” Really? Then why does half the population admit to having moderate to severe levels of suicidality at some point in life?

And while we’re on the topic, why don’t animals commit suicide? There must be something about the human condition that makes these behaviors so prevalent, and CBS believes the problem is the misuse of human language, or an over-identification with the mind. The creation story in Genesis seems to be about the loss of innocence through the knowledge of good and evil, another way of describing evaluative language processes that separate things into good and bad, acceptable and unacceptable. All religions have a mystical tradition of connecting with direct experience that is beyond evaluative language.

Human language is a double-edged sword - it has led to great achievement and creativity as well as to immense suffering. Life is not a problem to be solved but a process to be experienced. Our problem-solving mode of mind is not good at helping us navigate internal states of mind and heart. Human language probably evolved (or was divinely created) first as a means of social control, cooperation, and danger signaling, and then for complex problem solving. Infantile amnesia drops away as we learn deictic relations in language, such as I/here/now and you/there/later, so language is intimately related to consciousness and the experience of being human. If we can see language for what it is - a tool to be used - rather than taking it literally, we can make progress in reducing our suffering. If we can look at thoughts rather than look from thoughts, we’re making progress.

ACT researchers note that the process of challenging the ontological truth of thoughts in order to think different thoughts, as CBT aims to help people do, has not been proven effective. It’s not that CBT doesn’t work, it does. It’s just that we can’t prove that the reason it works is because people actually change the content of their thoughts. It’s possible that CBT works because challenging thoughts helps people defuse from thoughts and relate to them differently, not because the challenge leads to the elimination of negative or “irrational” thoughts. Furthermore, ACT is not opposed to anything that’s effective when used flexibly, such as cognitive reappraisal, but experience suggests that changing one’s relationship to thoughts is more effective than trying to change the thought content itself.


Notes:

- “This is just your mind speaking to you. The mind is not the same as you. You are the human being. Your mind is a verbal tool, not your master. But it is a very noisy servant and tricky to deal with at times.”

- Moderators explain when effects will occur (ex, gender: more women will improve than men). Mediators explain how or why effects occur (ex, specific factors: women scored lower on aggression so were less affected)

- Nothing can really be unlearned, only inhibited or forgotten. The persistence of memory makes cognitive restructuring very difficult

- Types of rule following:
1. Pliance - based on social consequences, ex: client does something to please the therapist
2. Tracking - based on natural consequences, ex: dressing warmly for cold weather
3. Augmenting - alters the degree to which an event will impact bx, ex: learning that bueno means good will change how reinforcing that word is

Problematic polarities:
1. Good vs. bad
2. Right vs. wrong
3. Fair vs. unfair
4. Responsibility vs. blame

- The fearsomeness of the world is constructed, not discovered, but fusion prevents a person from seeing that

- The goal is not to change the self story but to weaken the attachment to it

- Values are better said to be constructed rather than discovered or clarified, because they are freely chosen

- Qualities of fused speech to listen for: comparison/evaluation, complex/busy/confusing, adversarial, justifying/reason-giving, perseveration

- The Latin root of emotion is motion. We could relate to our emotions as if they were messengers trying to promote effective action rather than trying to kill the messenger

- Responsible originally meant response-able, as in capable of responding

- Reasons don’t actually cause choices, choices are made freely. Thoughts and feelings may influence behavior, but they don’t cause behavior



Potent Quotables:

*Nothing external ensures freedom from suffering.

“The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the person who has the disease.” Dictum attributed to William Osler

People often dive into their mental machinery much as sailors would dive into the sea (i.e., not without some degree of delight).

When you are too busy being what your mind says you are, stepping outside of your normal habits becomes impossible, even when it would be useful to do so.

Being “right” about what’s wrong can become more important than living in a vital and effectual way.

Minds hate unemployment.

“Vision without action is a daydream; action without vision is a nightmare.” Japanese proverb

Building a vital life is not always a logical enterprise.

*The fundamental challenge of being human involves learning when to follow what your mind says and when to simply be aware of your mind while attending to the here and now.

“You can’t cross a canyon in two steps.” Zen saying

*Trying to be happy by achieving goals is living in a world where what is important is constantly missing.

*Outcome is the process through which process can become the outcome.

[K · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book review would take me way too long to write. I'll just say, I'm a convert. This theory really resonates with me.

The first book I read on the theory, The Happiness Trap: How to Stop Struggling and Start Living: A Guide to ACT, was a far easier read aimed at sharing the concepts with a popular audience. If you're curious about the theory but not up for a professional read (and have some tolerance for gimmicky, self-helpy style), read that instead. For clinicians who are interested in the theory, this seems to be The Book.

[Mithril · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tal y como se dice en el libro, la Terapia de Aceptación y Compromiso se fundamenta en principios conductuales de una forma total. (...) sus raíces se nutren profundamente del conductismo, el análisis funcional y la filosofía contextual funcional. Tiene detrás una gran filosofía, y es que el sufrimiento psicológico es inevitable y debemos usarlo para aprender y ampliar nuestro abanico conductual hacia una vitalidad valiosa para cada uno.
Como crítica a sus autores, más específicamente Hayes, tengo que decir que demuestra que es más bien un gran vendedor que un gran teórico. Sabe cómo dar publicidad al producto, sin más. Porque, más que traer algo novedoso, en realidad, son aspectos de los que ya se ha hablado de una manera o de otra. Aquí, de repente, son ideas revolucionarias.
Al fin y al cabo, el enfoque terapéutico de la ACT me parece muy bueno, porque tiene como objetivo final desarrollar pautas de conducta que le funcionen al cliente, (...) que el cliente emprenda acciones que encaminen su vida en una dirección que le resulte valiosa.

[Karate1kid · Rating 4 out of 5]

I believe that ACT is the most effective psychological treatment available today, so you've got to give the authors credit for its development. But the book is not written well, and I don't recommend it as a first introduction to ACT even if you are a researcher. The organization into chapters and topics is good, but the writing is unbelievably bad with disjointed sentences that will throw you off the path if you don't already know what to expect. I hope they'll get a better editor for the third edition.

[Marco · Rating 2 out of 5]

I loved the introduction but before I knew it the jargon tsunami started. Which was when I decided, based on a quick reflection on the shortness of life, not to put myself through that. You know, why say 'John drank water' when you can say 'John emitted a thirst-quenching conditioned operative behavior' and convince yourself you're oh so very scientific?

[Kim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Love ACT, but hated the book. Too much clinical jargon and convoluted sentence structure (which made the typos all that much more frustrating). Would love a more reader friendly ACT book if anyone has suggestions.

[Verónica Valenzuela · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is important reading for counselor a interested in mindfulness focused therapy. But this book is not an easy or necessarily enjoyable read which is unfortunate.

[Tuukka · Rating 4 out of 5]

ACT and psychological flexibility seems to be a great model of human behavior and suffering. This is a textbook, not a pop science book. Some parts were bit too theoretical for me

[Daniel Colorao · Rating 4 out of 5]

Manual obligatorio para terapeutas o futuros terapeutas de la Terapia de Aceptación y Compromiso (ACT) Manual de sus 3 creadores donde obtendrás un cocimiento, a grosso modo, de lo que implica ACT, tocando consideraciones tanto teóricas como prácticas.

No le pongo las 5 estrellas que debería tener un libro de su talla por el uso tan desmedido de términos medios, es decir, el uso indiscriminado de términos descriptivos en lugar de términos explicativos. Dicho de otra forma, se agradecería, dado lo que implica este manual, que se permitirse ser un poco más técnico. Entiendo que son necesarios estos criticados términos medios, de cara a introducir a todo tipo de terapeutas, pero a mí parecer abusan demasiado de ellos, haciendo con ello un flaco favor tanto a terapeutas con un conocimiento previo de las raíces de ACT como a profanos.

Es un manual importante, pero quien desee profundizar en ACT no puede conformarse solo con este.

[Jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Notes:

Defusion
+ Instead of doing what your mind tells you to do, put it on a leash and do what is useful
+ For Leaves on a Stream or Soldiers on Parade with Placards: it doesn’t matter if the thought shows up again - if it does, it gets to float or march by again. It can go slowly or quickly, it doesn’t matter and we’re not invested in making it go away
+ “Your thoughts are not your enemy and they’re not your boss. They are your history showing up in your present”

Willingness
+ Experiential avoidance: the effort to eliminate the form, frequency, or situational intensity of thoughts, feelings, memories, or bodily sensations, even when doing so causes behavioral harm
+ If you are chronically avoidant, eventually you become ignorant, eventually you don’t know what you’re feeling. Alexithymia is the biggest correlate with experiential avoidance
+ “For a verbal creature, to avoid something deliberately means to attend, which is not avoidance” (In order to avoid something, you have to be aware of what it is you’re avoiding, which brings that object [thought, feeling, memory, sensation] into your present awareness. This is why efforts to avoid ultimately fail or backfire)

Observer
+ Watch for the ways we exaggerate and distort the truth to others and see how that shows we carefully cultivate an image (ego self) as distinct from our observer selves
+ We “yearn to belong, we’re motivated to be part of the group”
+ “Because of the human mind’s storytelling ability and its yearning to be right, we have an investment in being who we say we are, even if who we say we are is creating suffering”

Present
+ “Attention is a process of deliberately augmenting or diminishing the particular way that ‘the now’ impacts you”
+ “The flashlight beam of attention allows us to be in the present in a way that’s flexible, fluid, and voluntary”
+ Doing regular daily activities at half speed can make us more present

Values
+ Freely choosing is different from deciding. We choose WITH reasons, not FOR reasons
+ Ways into values
- The flip side of pain: we hurt where we care
- The sweet way: retirement party exercise, what touches our soft spot?
- Choose someone you know and admire that you’d want as a guide: what advice would they give you about how to be?
- Heroes: what qualities do they embody that you admire?
- Authoring your life: what story would you freely choose to tell?

[David Teachout · Rating 5 out of 5]

A theory and practice for the present

What’s fabulous about this book is that it isn’t just a collection of techniques cobbled together around a loose philosophy. This is solid critical analysis based on a long history of philosophical and empirical development. The techniques stem from the theory, they are not just thrown together on top of a disconnected one. As a result, this is less a cookbook and more a thoughtful jaunt through humanity; what makes us think, how we do our thinking, and the root of our suffering.

I’m not sure I’d recommend this to just anyone, as the philosophical writing can be a bit heavy for some, but anyone coming to this should walk away having been challenged and made the better for it.

[Sadaf · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the missing piece I was looking for. While you get a smoother moving therapy by using narrative therapy or motivational. Interviewing, and better conceptualization using cbt or rebt, this particular approach will help you deal with change. The philosophy behind it is wonderful and humble. This should be a required reading in clinical courses.

[Patricia · Rating 3 out of 5]

The content is good, I don’t like the narration

[El Dealer De los libros · Rating 5 out of 5]

Genialidad. ¡LEERLO SI ERES PSICÓLOGO!

[Billy · Rating 5 out of 5]

"...Don't believe a word in this book."
It took me a hot minute to finish this, but this book trumps all of the self-help books I've read. I was introduced to ACT therapy through a therapist with a holistic approach. IMO, CBT is grossly outdated. This book is circular in nature, but that's due to the nonlinear methodology of ACT. The authors clearly talk about their approach's limitations but provide convincing evidence for why it is viable.

ACT is even a good intellectual curiosity (though that's not its intended purpose). I have a linguistics background with an interest in psychology and philosophy, so this book was both practical and pleasurable. While it's designed for therapists, I believe that is why I enjoyed it. There are case studies and questions to guide your understanding. The book asks you to reflect because therapists are in the same boat as their clients. If you're tired of the formulaic self-help genre, this is a refreshing, albeit a bit dense, change of pace.

[Meredith · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am studying mental health counseling and absolutely love ACT. The six components of ACT (present-moment awareness, acceptance, defusion, self-as-context, values-based action, and values) are areas of each of our lives we all must work on to reach God's design for our mental and emotional health.

I did, however, disagree that there is not objective truth. We must pursue finding the truth of who God, others, and ourselves are to live the way God designed us to. I also felt Hayes' book was inaccessible for people who are not masters in language/philosophers. He could have written it with simpler language so that more of us could read it.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book and this approach. I realise that I have already used many of these techniques in my life but did not perhaps have the language or the understanding of how they were working for me or see them as a complete system. I look forward to reading more about this approach to behaviour change both for myself but also as a nurse for my clients. I listened to the audio book and I have to say the author's voice is so mellow it made it hard for me to really stay listening as I felt so lulled by his voice. A book to come back to

[Samuel Kinch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Starting this book over two months ago, I could not have imagined how influential and time-consuming this tome would be. On many occasions I had the experience of looking up and noticing that I had been reading for an hour, only to see that I had progressed ten pages. Finishing this book felt strange, as through the months I spent drudging through the hundreds of direct, vitamin-filled, tightly-packed pages, I found it hard to imagine that there would ever be an end.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy believes that "human suffering predominantly involves the misapplication of otherwise positive psychological processes of problem solving to normal instances of psychological pain" (19). Despite the utility of our planning, rational, decision-making, problem-solving brain in almost all other fields, when it confronts our psychic pain it has a tendency to fail us. In short, when we experience our unwanted private content (anxiety, traumatic flashbacks, etc) our instinct is to avoid them, sometimes at the cost of our relationships, values, or freedom. We also have a tendency to hold our idiosyncratic thoughts as reality, and even build our identities with them (“I’m just a sad person”; “I’ll never be able to truly connect with someone”; “I can’t do that because of my trauma”). At a base level, if we maintain that it is unacceptable to have our anxieties, and we start to feel them, isn’t that something to be anxious about? To some extent, we need to be able to willfully experience our unwanted feelings and thoughts.

The benefit of acceptance is that it allows us to work toward the things we really value in life, and not just spend our energy in the tug of war against our feelings. Hayes frequently asks his patients: “What would you do if you didn’t deal with your anxiety all day?” Many say they could be better parents or boyfriends, or travel, or have peace at night. Some say they don’t know. A major part of ACT is helping humans find their values and give them the freedom to live passionate, dedicated lives. One of the most important first steps in this process is the realization that we don’t have to hold our thoughts as reality. There is always a choice in between our thoughts and our actions. ACT prioritizes functionality over everything. Frequent questions asked by ACT clinicians are: “Does that description of the past help you move ahead?”; “What is this story in service of?”; “If you could set this thought or feeling aside for a moment, what would you choose to do?"

The answer to these holdups in our lives is psychological flexibility, the most important term in the ACT cannon. The processes that underlie this are: Flexible Attention to the Present Moment, Values, Committed Action, Self-as-context, Defusion, and Acceptance.

On top of its theoretical strength, ACT has also performed incredibly in empirical research. Evidence from standalone studies and in meta-analyses has poured in, supporting ACT’s model. For example, there has not “yet been reported a case in which psychological flexibility processes moved differentially but outcomes were not differential” (371). Many ACT meta-analyses have not only been shown to provide consistently equivalent outcomes compared to CBT in symptom reduction, but also might do better for long-term well-being (e.g. Gloster et al. 2020, Bai et al. 2020). Another hallmark of ACT that its supporters love to bring up is its vast applicability to other problem areas, such as coping with diabetes, chronic pain, smoking cessation, and many more.

I loved reading this book. Any summary would be inadequate to convey how important this book is. One of the reasons why it took so long to get through, is that this book was compiled from literally decades of research. There is no fluff, no mediocre sort-of-useful parts. It has made the flame of clinical psychology inside me turn into a raging forest fire. Its processes and mechanisms have stuck with me, and I feel as if how I look at human suffering has changed forever.

“It is not possible to eliminate suffering by eliminating pain. Human existence contains inevitable challenges. People we love will be injured, and people close to us will die [...] Friends and lovers will betray us. Pain is unavoidable, and (owing to our symbolic inclinations) we readily remember this pain and can bring it into consciousness at any given moment. This progression means that human beings consciously expose themselves to inordinate amounts of pain—despite our considerable abilities to control its sources in the external environment. Even so, great pain is not in itself a sufficient cause for true human suffering. For that to occur, symbolic behavior needs to be taken a bit further.” (19)

“There is an inherent paradox in attempting to avoid, suppress, or eliminate unwanted private experiences in that often such attempts lead to an upsurge in the frequency and intensity of the experiences to be avoided (Wenzlaff & Wegner, 2000). Since most distressing content by definition is not subject to voluntary behavioral regulation, the client is left with only one main strategy: emotional and behavioral avoidance. The long-term result is that the person’s life space begins to shrink, avoided situations multiply and fester, avoided thoughts and feelings become more overwhelming, and the ability to get into the present moment and enjoy life gradually withers.” (22)

[Tori · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a wonderful introduction to acceptance and commitment therapy. As a graduate student, I appreciated the metaphors provided as well as the explanation of every ACT tenet. I look forward to reading additional books and improving in my ability to use these sorts of techniques with clients or in my personal life.

[Hugh Simonich · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my first introduction to ACT. I had heard about it before and thought - yet another type of psychotherapy. No, this is different. This is comprehensive, but also a very clear and well-structured book that is a must read for those first introduced to it. Couple this with A Liberated Mind by Hayes.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

ACT is the way to go

Throughout my trainings in ACT I have learned and then utilized the skills, mindset and experience to change not only the lives of my clients but myself as well. This book highlights the importance of the practice and also how to utilize, through in-depth knowledge and training, how to practice for yourself and as a practitioner ACT.

[Stryker794 · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first few chapters were mind bending and incredibly difficult (though not impossible) to understand fully. However, the 6 chapters on practical therapy were more useful and comprehensible. I can see how ACT would be useful for my future clients, and I know it is useful for me.

[Júlio]

Expose yourself to the situations you feel uncomfortable until you develop resilience to build something in and through them. Accepting the present reality as it is, plus taking responsibility and commitment to the future, are substantial requirements for a significant change.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great short intro to ACT

[Roberta Sorenson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I expected to like this, but my philosophy fits better with IFS, DBT, and Buddhism.

[Julie R · Rating 4 out of 5]

The main focus is the importance of psychological flexibility. Not the first ACT choice to recommend but good nonetheless.

[r ☁ · Rating 2 out of 5]

lol sometimes i surprise myself with the books i choose to tuck into. with this one i think u kinda get the point in the first two chapters and the rest is a ton of literature which is much more relevant for clinicians, so maybe i’ll come back to this one day! cool stuff tho!