Once you have faced and accepted your current challenges, you can make a commitment to stop fighting your past and your emotions and, instead, start practicing more confident and optimistic behavior, based on your personal values and goals.ĪCT aims to develop and expand psychological flexibility. You may look at what hasn’t worked for you in the past, and the therapist can help you stop repeating thought patterns and behaviors that can cause you more problems in the long run. You can then decide if a problem requires immediate action and change or if it can, or must, be accepted for what it is while you learn to make behavioral changes that can modify the situation. Working with a therapist, you will learn to listen to your own self-talk or the way you talk to yourself specifically about traumatic events, problematic relationships, physical limitations, or other challenges. 'Acceptance, mindfulness, and values are key psychological tools needed for that transformative shift.'

We are treating our own lives as problems to be solved as if we can sort through our experiences for the ones we like and throw out the rest,' Hayes writes in a Psychology Today post. 'We as a culture seem to be dedicated to the idea that ‘negative’ human emotions need to be fixed, managed, or changed-not experienced as part of a whole life. Eventually, he vowed that he would no longer run from himself-he would accept himself and his experiences. The ideas that coalesced into ACT emerged from Hayes’s own experience, particularly his history of panic attacks. Hayes, a professor at the University of Nevada. With this understanding, clients begin to accept their hardships and commit to making necessary changes in their behavior, regardless of what is going on in their lives and how they feel about it.ĪCT was developed in the 1980s by psychologist Steven C. Clients learn to stop avoiding, denying, and struggling with their inner emotions and, instead, accept that these deeper feelings are appropriate responses to certain situations that should not prevent them from moving forward in their lives. Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) is an action-oriented approach to psychotherapy that stems from traditional behavior therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy.

Acceptance and change therapy