A New Type Of Therapy To Try

If you’ve never gone to therapy before, then you might feel overwhelmed by the many different approaches you can take advantage of. Even if you’ve been going to therapy for some time, it can be very difficult to determine what’s the right type of therapeutic approach you should take. There’s cognitive behavioral therapy, eye movement, cognitive processing therapy, and so many others that can help you work through issues that you feel are holding you back.

As a therapist, we want to make sure that we can take the right approach to ensure your needs are being met and that means knowing what type of therapeutic approach will work best for you. One of those type of therapy that we now offer at Metis Center® For Psychological Services is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. For further information on our therapeutic approaches and how we can help you move toward a more positive life, contact us today.

What Is Acceptance And Commitment Therapy?

To better understand what this type of therapy is, we’ve broken down this therapeutic approach. The basis of ACT is to focus on mindful strategies that help to increase your psychological flexibility. This type of therapy will help you figure out your own core values and your goals to make you more confident and conscious in each moment of your life. By working to pair together your core values and your goals, you’ll be able to align your behaviors with these two factors and you’ll see some changes take place in your life. For example, by making an effort to situate your values and goals with your behaviors, you’ll begin to access the scary stuff and feel much less stuck in your head when it comes to issues that may have held you back in the past.

This type of therapy will help you learn how to stop avoiding and fearing certain facets such as physical sensations, feelings, thoughts, and memories. Many people want to avoid certain things because it causes fear or discomfort such as getting a new job or breaking off a toxic relationship, but with ACT, you’ll begin to move forward positively and embrace those things in your life that bring discomfort by working through them and facing them instead of hiding. This type of therapy practice brings together humanistic, gestalt, and psychodynamic psychology principles with a touch of Buddhist traditions centered around wisdom.

A Brief Introduction To ACT

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy has been around for several decades. It’s based on the relational frame theory, which is a type of therapy that focuses on cognition and human language. Researchers in the field of psychology have worked to create a therapeutic approach that is based on science and time limitations to help with conquering your mental health issues. This desire to create this type of psychology has manifested from focusing on a wide range of concerns that help with living a better, more fulfilling life. When it comes to long term recovery, ACT is made to be successful because it efficiently treats mental health conditions. The overall goal of ACT is to help to develop a desire to teach you to have a more fulfilling life and how to work through the pain because it is a normal part of life to experience psychological discomfort.

The Core Processes Of ACT

ACT has four core principles. The main goal of ACT comes down to these main principles because it helps with psychological flexibility.

• ACT can help with understanding the value of your behavior and the direction of your commitment to change. This core principle is about taking action and making it a commitment to change the direction of your behavior to make it much more beneficial and accepting.
• Another principle is accepting your emotional experience. This process can take a lot of learning and effort on your part because humans experience a lot of emotions that they are not always open to. By accepting the emotional experience, you will be able to be more open and accepting toward your own perspective. For example, when you feel negative about a situation, you’ll be able to work through the experience by being more open and accepting of the situation.
• ACT also helps you to choose a life of value and direction that’s important in your life in comparison to going through life not knowing what you want to do or be. By choosing a life that’s filled with value and direction, you’re able to live a life that you would generally wish to have and with ACT, you’re able to live how you want.
• Lastly, another principle of ACT is to explore your past attempts at solving issues and moving away from those difficulties to work through what’s more important to you. By recognizing your lack or workability in a certain situation or what worked in the past, ACT is able to provide you with a way to be consistent with working through your issues.

For more information on Acceptance and Commitment therapy, visit us.