Introduction
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (said as one word, ‘ACT’) is an evidence-based psychological intervention that uses acceptance and mindfulness techniques alongside behaviour change strategies to help you live life according to what really matters to you. Based on recent breakthroughs in understanding how language works, ACT offers a genuinely original perspective on the human condition and the challenge everyone faces in living a life with meaning and purpose.
ACT is all about doing the things that really matter to you and not letting your mind get in the way. Often, without you realising it, your mind — what goes on in your head — can push you around and interfere with your daily life. You’re so connected with your thoughts that you don’t always notice what they do and, importantly, what they stop you doing. But your mind is really just a tool and, like all tools, is good at solving certain problems and pretty hopeless at addressing others. ACT shows you how to use your mind for what it’s good at and then to set it aside when your thoughts are less helpful.
To help you get on with the life you want to be living, ACT uses a range of exercises to enable you to become more open, aware and active:
- Openness involves stepping forward into life and accepting all that comes with it.
- Awareness means increasing your connection with the world around you rather than living in your head.
- Being active is about doing the things that truly matter to you.
This is an exciting time for ACT. Every month, new research articles and books explore how it can be applied in different settings and to a host of human problems. In fact, so many new applications are being developed that there’s insufficient space in this book to cover them all. Rather, we provide a general introduction to ACT with the aim of helping you understand the central principles, ideas and practices that underpin the model. Contrary to popular belief, doing the things that really matter to you can be quite difficult. And the reason for that, according to ACT, is human language. While language enables you to do amazing things, it also allows you to ruminate on the past and worry about the future. And when you become overly entangled in your thoughts you stop living the life you want to be living — and instead your life is dictated by your anger, fears, worries and doubts. This insight isn’t particularly new, but where ACT differs to other approaches is in how it responds to these events. Rather than tackling this negativity head on, ACT shows you new ways to relate to your thoughts, feelings and emotions so that they have less impact on your day-to-day life.
About This Book
If you want to know more about ACT and how to apply it to your own life, then this book’s for you. In broad terms, we:
- Describe how the ACT model builds your psychological flexibility by helping you become more open, aware and active.
- Explain the scientific processes and concepts upon which ACT is based and how these relate to your everyday life.
- Provide exercises and activities to help you understand ACT and create positive change in your life.
- Offer an explanation of the new theory of language, Relational Frame Theory (RFT), which underpins ACT.
- Relate ACT to real-life challenges, such as weight problems and anger management, as well as more complex mental health difficulties, like anxiety and depression.
Developing new ways to relate to your own thoughts, feelings and memories (collectively, your ‘mind’) takes practice and can’t be achieved through the understanding that results from reading alone. Understanding how to relate to your thoughts differently isn’t enough; you actually need to practise the necessary skills directly to be able to do it. It’s rather like learning to swim — no amount of reading or knowledge about swimming will ever be a substitute for getting into the water and learning how to swim directly. The exercises in this book aim to help you ‘learn to swim in your mental world’. While these experiential exercises aren’t always easy to do, they’re central to ACT and we recommend that you try as many as possible.
While reading the whole book will give you the fullest picture of what ACT involves, it’s not necessary for it to be useful to you. It’s better to think of this book as a general reference guide about ACT rather than a manual that needs to be read sequentially. That said, we do recommend that you read the chapters in Part I sequentially because we wrote it that way to take you through the key features of the ACT model. Reading those chapters in the order in which they’re written, while not absolutely necessary, enables you to find out about ACT in a systematic way, without any gaps. The chapters in the rest of the book can be read in whatever order you fancy.
Of course, the downside of ensuring that each chapter has enough information in it to make sense on its own is that some repetition of ideas exists. We’ve endeavoured to keep this to a minimum but you will note some recurrence of key points. On the upside, it means you’ll have multiple opportunities to make sense of the core principles, ideas and exercises.
Throughout the book you’ll find sidebars that provide additional detail that’s interesting but not necessary to understanding the main text. You can read them if you choose.
Foolish Assumptions
We’ve assumed some things about you and why you’re reading this book:
- You have little or no prior knowledge about ACT or the ideas that underpin it.
- You’re a layperson who wants to know more about how ACT works and how to apply the ideas to your own life, or you’re a professional therapist who wants to broaden your knowledge.
- You’re motivated to try all the exercises because you understand that to benefit from ACT you have to directly engage with it.
Finally, a comment on the technical language we use from time to time. While we try to avoid being overly technical, sometimes ‘therapy speak’ is necessary because an understanding of the subject matter isn’t fully possible without it. When you come across technical terms and explanations, we advise you to stick with them but not worry about understanding them all in one go. It’s often better to skim read the text a couple of times to get the general picture and thus not get bogged down and frustrated. Because the chapters often repeat or build on ACT concepts, you gradually come to understand the technical details.
Icons Used in This Book
For Dummies books use icons to alert you to important details in the text. We use the following:
We use this icon to signal a new term you may not have encountered before, or at least not in the way we use it.
This icon draws your attention to a key point or something that’s useful to bear in mind for the future.
This icon highlights practical advice and guidance that can help you understand how to apply an ACT principle or work through an exercise.
This icon points out practical exercises and activities.
Where to Go from Here
A good place to start is Chapter 1! It sets out some of the basic ideas that we expand on in more detail in subsequent chapters. After that, you can read the rest of the chapters in Part I as we recommend, or check out the contents and jump into whichever chapter you feel is relevant to you at the time.