Acceptance Commitment Therapy (ACT)
Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) is a type of psychotherapy that emphasizes acceptance as a way to deal with negative thoughts, feelings, symptoms, or circumstances. It also encourages increased commitment to healthy, constructive activities that uphold your values or goals.
ACT therapists operate under a theory that suggests that increasing acceptance can lead to increased psychological flexibility.1 This approach can be beneficial particularly if you are caught up in rumination or over-analysing, it may help people stop habitually avoiding certain thoughts or emotional experiences, which can lead to further problems.
The goal of ACT is not to reduce the frequency or severity of unpleasant internal experiences like upsetting cognitive distortions, emotions, or urges. Instead, the goal is to reduce your struggle to control or eliminate these experiences while simultaneously increasing your involvement in meaningful life activities (i.e., those activities that are consistent with your personal values).
This process involves six components:
- Acceptance: This means allowing your inner thoughts and feelings to occur without trying to change them or ignore them. Acceptance is an active process.
- Cognitive defusion: This is the process of separating yourself from your inner experiences. This allows you to see thoughts simply as thoughts, stripped of the importance that your mind adds to them.
- Self as context: This involves learning to see your thoughts about yourself as separate from your actions.
- Being present: ACT encourages you to stay mindful of your surroundings and learn to shift your attention away from internal thoughts and feelings.
- Values: These are the areas of your life that are important enough to you to motivate action.
- Commitment: This process involves changing your behaviour based on principles covered in therapy.
During ACT, I will help you learn how to apply these concepts to your life. I may teach you how to practice acceptance and cognitive defusion, or perhaps help you develop a different sense of yourself that’s distinct from your thoughts and feelings. You are not your thoughts or feelings, instead you hold an awareness of what you are thinking and feeling.
Get in contact for:
Acceptance and commitment therapy Hastings
Acceptance and commitment therapy Eastbourne
Acceptance and commitment therapy Therapy Bexhill
Acceptance and commitment therapy Battle
Acceptance and commitment therapy East Sussex
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)
Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is a talking therapy that can help you manage your problems by changing the way you think and behave.
Inter Personal Therapy (IPT)
IPT targets depression and the connection between depression and relationships, our interaction with others.
Eye Movement Desensitisation Reprocessing (EMDR)
An EMDR approach looks at how past emotionally charged experiences are overly influencing their present emotions, sensations and thoughts about themselves.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
ACT is a type of psychotherapy that emphasises acceptance as a way to deal with negative thoughts, feelings, symptoms, or circumstances.
Workshop for confidence/ imposter syndrome
The workshops will focus on the problematic internal dialogue – what we think we are good at and how others might judge us – that can lead to Imposter syndrome.
