The 6 Core Processes of ACT Explained | What They Mean and How to Use Them

[Music] foreign [Music] it's great to be back my name is Tim Gordon I'm a social worker in Hamilton Ontario Canada and I am so excited to be giving you a bit of an updated perspective it's been geez 12 plus years that I've been learning about ACT writing about act giving trainings on Act so let's talk about act what is it how's it done let's look at act six core processes so as a therapist who for years more than 12 years I've been taking act workshops I've been learning about act I became a peer-reviewed act trainer

I wrote books about Act created all kinds of resources even created manuals for randomized controlled trial settings all kinds of different interesting stuff I gotta tell you my perspective on act has changed since I really started learning about it the first most important thing that I want to tell you about Act is that the six core processes are really Paramount Act is not a series of techniques or different kind of like things that you can do like exercises with your clients act inspires you it encourages you to be inspired to be creative and to use

the processes flexibly to introduce them to your clients so that they can generalize them into their own lives what I've noticed about myself over the years developing as an act therapist is that I no longer think about act as certain exercises or certain kind of tools or worksheets but instead I think about act as this completely organic alive process so let's start looking at those six core processes with acceptance It's typically where we start acceptance makes the most amount of sense because clients come to see me because they don't want to feel pain they come

to talk to me because they're dealing with something difficult and this is by the way almost Universal they have anxiety it's troubling them it's emotionally crippling them it's ruining their quality of life and they need to figure out how to get rid of anxiety they have a traumatic history that floods into their memory that disturbs their relationships to themselves to their work to their friends to their romantic Partners to their children they have attachment problems but again the theme Here is that they don't want to feel it there's something they want to go away acceptance

is key because rather than saying You must tolerate this in order to live well acceptance is saying you may not have control over this and if you don't have control over it how can you work with it differently and that's really what acceptance is about holding on to what hurts so that you're not busy fighting against it and putting all this energy and effort into struggling now if you think about that opposite of acceptance if you think about struggling if you think about rejection escapism avoidance that's what makes up the opposite of the whole act

model and that's really healthy because it helps us to understand why people do what they do when people come to me and tell me with a genuine vulnerability oftentimes With Tears in their eyes and you can hear it in their voice am I crazy that's a question I get asked so frequently well let's make sense out of what you do okay so you have crippling anxiety at work or at school and so you find yourself avoiding people at work or at school or you find yourself white knuckling your day through work in school and then

you find yourself numbing out with substances or video games or shopping you find yourself trying to do things like self-harm in order to down regulate all of this upset that doesn't sound crazy that sounds like you've come up with a strategy maybe not a sustainable one but you've come up with a strategy to try and fight what you don't want to feel now that we can understand how acceptance can be beneficial to somebody rather than hammering them with acceptance like damn it you need to stop fighting okay like you come back to me when you're

ready to hold this thing right no the other six core processes show us how we can work on acceptance we grow our lives around it so let's pivot from acceptance and now let's jump over to the values when we listen to somebody's hurt we hear their values when somebody tells me that they are struggling in their relationship and they don't think they want to still be married what I hear is this relationship this person what marriage means to me matters and so I'm going to ask them why is that important why does it matter and

continually over the years I say it in workshops I say it to my supervisees I say it in consultations and books but to this day I continue to be moved by the answers that people give me because what we hear is where people hurt is where they matter and that's where their values are now sometimes you have to be very careful in your values work because some people are so disempowered are so out of touch with their own sense of autonomy or self-actualization that they honestly don't author their values they can't grab them they can't

stick a claim to them and say this is what's important to me and that becomes complicated and so we have to start helping that person to unpack their life experiences and to start electing what is important to them and this is where contact with the present moment comes in when we're in contact with the present moment we can feel the difficult things that we're trying to accept and we can make sense out of them through the lens of well it hurts maybe it matters the present moment is our pathway into being with the difficulty and

it's from that pathway in that we can be let's move on to a fourth process now diffusion being at a distance from our thoughts our feelings our Sensations and our memories because when we don't in the present moment pay attention to them when we don't practice holding them and accepting them well oftentimes we implicitly just react and shove them the best way that I can literate this is like imagine you were sitting here with me and I grabbed this like oh nice like plush velvety couch cushion it makes this like really nice like ripping sound

when I pull it off and imagine I throw it at you right now not in a violent horrible cruel malicious way but imagine I'm just going to throw it at you you're going to react you're not just going to be like oh didn't know you're going to do that Tim but you're probably gonna like bat it away or you're gonna catch it you might laugh and be like what was that impose you're going to react diffusion shows us that if we can see the couch cushion being ripped if we can see it being hucked towards

us and choose how we want to react and so I might pick up the couch cushion again I might have you throw it back and pick it up again and say okay I'm gonna throw it back at you but this time I want you to do something different and it doesn't matter what it is you could sing out loud as you catch it you could just hold your hands up and reflect it you could do anything you want but just do something different I want you to not react I want you to choose how you

interact with this couch cushion that's what diffusion is see it notice it acknowledge it and choose how you interact with it from a diffused perspective we might be able to do something different based on our values if I'm really fused right now not defused with the thought that this is uncomfortable and kind of stupid and nobody's around and nobody's probably going to watch this video anyway and I'm going to put my wife through all the effort of like having to edit this and take the time away from her successful like Photo Video Studio oh I

could get like this crippling anxiety and get my head and like turn everything off and pack up and just go home if I'm defused from that I noticed that thought I can pay attention to the fact that creating quality content matters to me putting stuff out there for you that's meaningful and useful trustworthy and reliable that's what I care about so of course self-condemnation and difficult thoughts show up I'm noticing them even right this moment so I can pivot into acceptance I can have those thoughts and feelings I'm here now in the present moment I

can have them and I can be diffused from them so they can choose to do what I want and what I want is continue this video to create some really cool content for you so that's a commitment we're now moving on to the fifth the second to last process commitment it's the doing or it's the enacting of these psychological flexibility processes bringing Act of life in your life so when I work with a client and I'm trying to talk to them about commitment I'm not trying to talk to them about something as simple as just

do it I'm trying to talk to them about meaningfully putting the effort in their life into the things that matter to them it's not easy it's why we call it commitment we want to purposefully take the time to move in the direction of what matters and remember sometimes values are a moving Target sometimes they change over time they evolve sometimes our values are unachievable but it doesn't mean that we don't continue with our commitment to what's important to us the last of the six processes is the selfish context it's seeing who you are as the

context of your experience seeing that you are the vessel that holds your experiences that you're not the experience themselves you are not cancer you are not anxiety you are not a narcissist perhaps narcissism perhaps anxiety perhaps difficulty emoting and connecting perhaps cancer is something that you experience but it doesn't Define you once you can see yourself as the vessel holding this perhaps you can be curious and diffused from it perhaps you can elect what your values are in the presence of it and choose to do something different perhaps you'll choose to walk with it in

acceptance but you can be here now in the present seeing yourself is not what you think can feel if I have the thought this is stupid Tim you're stupid that could spiral me into that crippling anxiety that causes me to pack up and go home that's not what I want to do I can notice that I'm having that thought and see that that's not who I am this self is the context is seeing who you are as separate distinct you are the Observer of what you think and feel and sense remember you are not those

experiences so at the beginning of this video I talked about this concept that act and its six core processes all brought together create an organic approach and what I mean by organic is it's a way that you can live at any time in Victor Frankel's Man's Search for meaning one of the Cornerstone Publications that brought about the existential Psychotherapy movement Victor Frankel describes between stimulus and response there is a space and in that space is freedom and it's how Frankel Justified staying in Auschwitz dealing with Nazi Germany and the atrocities and indignities that he was

exposed to but made the choice to stay to caregiver for other prisoners who returned at Auschwitz I think that makes perfect sense when we talk about act being an organic approach being generalizable and coming about in anybody's life in any given moment between what you notice and how you react there's a space and inside of that space you can choose it's your freedom you can choose values you can choose escapism and sometimes escapism is necessary to your survival it's not good or bad it's what works in the moment and what I would argue for you

is learning how to pay attention to your different experiences on purpose so that you can choose Thank you so much for following Along on this journey it is so great to be back if you appreciated this video make sure you hit the like button if you didn't appreciate this video really teach me a lesson hit that down button twice make sure you're subscribed because there will be lots more content in the future and please do share this content with your colleagues with your friends people that you think could benefit from it thank you [Music]