Acceptance & Commitment Therapy

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a type of therapy that helps you to change your relationship with difficult thoughts and feelings, while also encouraging you to move forward in the direction of your values and what is important to you. ACT aims to increase acceptance of those things that are outside of your control, alongside supporting you to commit to action that will improve and enhance your well-being, leading to a more meaningful and fulfilling life.

What is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy?

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy uses a range of experiential exercises which aim to reduce the power and significance of difficult thoughts and emotions. This can help you to take a step back from them and free yourself from their grip.

Your psychologist will work with you to help you develop an awareness of your own thought processes, and the way you talk to and treat yourself. Once you have more of an awareness of your inner voice or self-talk, you will be able to recognise what thoughts you have that help move you forward, and what thoughts are unhelpful and perhaps holding you back.

As well as teaching you some of these skills around observing and managing your thoughts, your psychologist will also spend time focusing on your values; what is important to you and what kind of person you want to be. Getting in touch with your values can help you to see a way forward and give you a positive, meaningful direction to move in.

What can ACT be used to treat?

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy can be used to treat a wide range of different conditions. As this type of therapy becomes more widely used, more evidence emerges to suggest that it is an effective treatment for common mental health difficulties, as well as helping people to adjust to some physical health conditions. ACT therapy is commonly used with:

Our Psychologist Says...

Our Clinical Psychologist, Dr Gayle Watts has advanced training in delivering Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and has found it transformative for several clients she has worked with.

Dr Watts said: ‘It is great to have a therapy model which acknowledges that difficult thoughts and feelings are part of being human and that we can learn how to manage these thoughts and feelings rather than trying to suppress them or argue with them. ACT can be particularly helpful for people whose negative thoughts are completely rational and justified but are holding them back and keeping them stuck. ACT gives them the tools to move forward, in the direction they want to go in’.

Acceptance & Commitment Therapy

How does ACT work?

Our psychologists will work with you to teach techniques and strategies that focus on each of these different processes:

Acceptance

Encouraging you to open up and make room for difficult or painful thoughts and feelings, allowing them to come and go without engaging in a struggle to try and ‘get rid’ of them.

Cognitive Defusion

Creating distance between yourself and your thoughts, learning to not always see your thoughts as facts, and being able to let go of unhelpful thoughts that are standing in the way of you living towards your values.

Being Present

Ensuring that you can engage fully with what is happening in the here-and-now, and using all of your senses to be fully present.

Self as Context

Encouraging you to recognise that your thoughts and emotions are constantly changing, but they do not in themselves change your core self. No matter how you feel, or what thoughts you might be having in the moment, you are still you.

Values

Helping you to get in touch with what is important to you and what values or principles you want to live by. Our values can give us a sense of direction, or purpose. They can teach us about what we might need to do more of (or less of) to have a meaningful, fulfilling life.

Committed Action

This ACT process is about taking action and making concrete, tangible steps in the direction we want to move in to ensure we are making positive changes. This might involve setting goals that are in line with your values or learning to observe and accept difficult thoughts or emotions.

Structure of an ACT session

One of the most important aspects of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is that it uses lots of experiential exercises and metaphors to help people understand their thought processes, and observe what is going on internally.

For this reason, most sessions of ACT will include an experiential exercise – for example, a mindfulness exercise, or an exercise that gets you to tap into your values and identify what is important to you.

Your psychologist will also ask you to spend time outside of the session doing ‘homework’. This is very important as the work you put in outside of sessions can have a big impact on the amount of benefit you get from therapy. Your psychologist will set your homework with you in session, and then at the beginning of your next session, they will review how you got on and you can feedback on any successes or difficulties you might have had.

Does Acceptance and Commitment Therapy help?

In a word, yes! ACT is an evidence-based model of therapy that has been proven to provide benefits for a range of different mental and physical health conditions. As ACT becomes more widely used, more and more clinical trials have been taking place showing it to be highly effective at reducing symptoms of depression and anxiety disorders, as well as other common mental health difficulties.

Our highly trained psychologists have many years of experience carrying out a range of mental health therapies, including ACT. We offer regular face-to-face appointments at our modern and comfortable clinic in Hoults Yard, Newcastle or we can offer online therapy via Zoom if you live further afield. Contact us and start your consultation now.

Get in touch today

A psychologist will then be in touch to arrange a free 15-minute no-obligation call, where we can discuss your requirements in more detail and you can get a feel for whether Turning Tides is the right psychology practice for you.

If we’re not right for you, we’ll try and signpost you to somewhere that is.

Please note – Turning Tides is not a crisis service, and if you feel you need urgent support or are experiencing a mental health crisis then it is important that you contact your GP if they are available, or attend A&E.