so you're curious about act maybe you heard it on a podcast or someone recommended it to you as a type of therapy and you're wondering like what actually is this is this just cbt plus mindfulness or mindfulness plus compassion is this really anything new and how could it help me the good news is that act is awesome the bad news is that it's none of those things that i listed but it is really powerful and unique and backed by decades of research at this point today we'll go over a brief history of act what act
aims to do and how it works so by the end of it you'll have a better understanding of acceptance and commitment therapy in general but also a better idea of whether it might be a good fit for you and how it can improve your life and just so there's no confusion because this is very commonly mixed up but the shorthand version of acceptance and commitment therapy is act set as one word and not a ct now who am i to talk about act my name is dr jessica borshok i'm a clinical psychologist and private practice
here in california i am what's called a peer-reviewed act trainer meaning that i train other mental health professionals how to use act with their clients and how to use it into their own lives and i've co-authored a number of books on act including a award-winning book the act approach that teaches other therapists and other mental health providers how to do act now a lot of people think that act is this really new therapy but the truth is it's conceptualization happened back in the late 1970s with its first version called comprehensive distancing coming out in the
early 1980s the reason that you haven't heard about act until recently is that it started as a bottom-up approach see most therapies develop because some therapist has been doing things in therapy noticed a pattern and went hey i wonder why this is helping people or if it's helping people and a therapy is designed around that idea so they find out what works in practice and then they go back and research it but sometimes it can be hard to figure out kind of does this thing actually work what's actually happening here acts started a little differently
it started from a basic science model an understanding of how behavior and language works even kind of cognitive behavior so the way that we interact with our mind and that was studied over the last few decades and developed into a therapy that has been proven to work based on every component of it i think of act much more as a framework or an approach to life into our experiences rather than just kind of a collection of skills or exercises there are definitely those and we'll get into them but it's important to think about act as
a lens through which we can understand our own experience and that it can be applied to any situation we come in contact with that's why it's often referred to as kind of a trans diagnostic approach meaning that it's not it wasn't developed just for one specific therapy it's developed for the human condition and helped to alleviate suffering the philosophy of science underpinning act is something called functional contextualism and all it really means is act focuses on what works in a given situation right how something functions in a given context and i love this one it
makes it very unique to the individual but it's what helps us have that kind of trans diagnostic approach or framework because at any point i can ask myself how is this working in this moment how is this serving me in the long term in the short term in the long term is this moving me towards the life i want to live in the short term is this simply a way for me to escape or avoid or hide from something that's uncomfortable or difficult experiential avoidance which we'll talk about in a different video i love this
because it's not prescriptive or rule-governed or like everything must go this way because that's not how life works and it also means that we can bring in a lot of different practices and exercises and skills that work across different disciplines as long as we ask ourselves like does this work in this moment and by work in act we mean is this moving us towards the type of life that we want to have is this helping us to reduce suffering and engage in our values for example i work with individuals with ocd and i will often
combine erp exposure plus response prevention which is the gold standard of treatment for ocd with act incorporating that as this overarching framework for understanding why we're doing these exposures how we respond to thoughts and feelings and in our head and our body and what is really important to us in the long term so that we can be even more successful similarly i work with folks who have insomnia and i would do cbti because that is the gold standard but there are some gaps in that therapy model and so i think act actually kind of fills
that in and rounds out that experience so you get even more out of it same could be said for interceptive exposure for panic disorder and incorporating act principles into it all right so i got some of the nerdy background stuff out of the way but what does act actually do what is it act teaches us to come in contact with our full experience even the things that can be painful or scary or uncomfortable it teaches us how to understand our patterns and how to look at those patterns and see if they're really working in service
of us in the long term and if they aren't learning how to break those patterns and taking steps in a direction that's more meaningful to us in the long term in the direction of our values oftentimes we try to avoid the pain that we're experiencing in our life we try to eliminate any pain in our life whatsoever but that's impossible life involves pain if we care about things it means that we have the ability to lose them to be hurt by them to be disappointed or let down by them and so while trying to escape
pain or to avoid discomfort we end up bringing more suffering into our life and everyone has experienced this maybe it's as simple as not cleaning up your dishes immediately after cooking dinner and now the food has like hardened and congealed on the pan and it takes so much longer and so much more effort to clean or you've been procrastinating on a task and you put it off you put it off you put it off it seems overwhelming too much and now you get to the point where you're super close to the deadline and you don't
have any wiggle room you're feeling stressed and anxious and overwhelmed and you still have to do the project it didn't eliminate your pain or your discomfort it just delayed it and then reached into the future brought all of this discomfort and struggling and suffering and just piled it on top act helps us take a clear look at our life and our patterns and say hey is this working what am i reacting to what am i avoiding or trying not to come in contact with and develop strategies and skills and approach to sit with some of
the things that are uncomfortable to learn to not maybe be as reactive or afraid of them so that we can turn towards the life that we want to have so we can take the small steps that in the long run while our life might not be pain-free it'll certainly be meaningful and so at its core act works through increasing something called psychological flexibility and psychological flexibility exactly what i've been talking about it's learning how to come in full contact with our experiences learning to be present and to be the observer of our patterns and what
we want to do in our life so that we can live a meaningful life and take steps towards the things that really matter to us and psychological flexibility is based on these six core processes acceptance diffusion present moment awareness self as context values and committed action in the following videos i'm going to go into each one of them and give you an idea of what they are and some quick skills that you can use to start implementing these principles in your life the cool thing is that movement along any of these can increase our psychological
flexibility so there may be some processes that you feel really strong in and others that you might feel very lost or disconnected from or unsure how to move forward and so i'll be walking you through how to do exactly that and if you are living in california if you're an adult and you're interested in starting therapy go to the description check out my website see if we might be a good fit and so let's dive into that first part of acceptance and commitment therapy acceptance
