Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)

Trauma survivors adapt to their circumstances by developing beliefs that help safeguard them against future threats. Thoughts, feelings, and actions focused on these beliefs become all-encompassing, limiting survivors' capacity to devise more flexible and creative ways to approach their lives.

By expanding mental and emotional flexibility, ACT helps decrease intense negative emotions like despair, fear, hopelessness, and anger. This is accomplished through:

Acceptance

Acceptance means allowing your thoughts and emotions to arise naturally without trying to change or control them. It's counter-intuitive, but research has shown that this release of control reduces the intensity and duration of emotional suffering.

Cognitive Defusion

ACT teaches that there is nothing inherently problematic about intense thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations. Instead, it is their mental associations with traumatic experiences that make them unbearable. Cognitive defusion helps to disrupt the automatic nature of these associations by putting greater distance between you and your emotional suffering.

Present-moment Awareness

Present-moment awareness draws on the principles of mindfulness meditation to help survivors reduce the intensity and duration of painful feelings.

Self as Context

Trauma survivors are more than the sum of their thoughts, feelings, and experiences. ACT deconstructs restricted, self-limiting beliefs to expand your identity beyond that of a trauma victim.

Values

ACT helps to bring attention to long-deferred needs and values that bring greater meaning and purpose to life.

Committed Action

ACT helps identify value-driven, concrete actions to be implemented to achieve a more fulfilling life.