Nature of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

ACT was created out to the belief that traditional CBT interventions are escape oriented (Seligman et al., 2021), creating experiential avoidance and cognitive fusion, thus dysfunction (Ducasse et al., 2018). Experiential avoidance is when someone avoids unpleasant stimuli (Seligman et al., 2021). Cognitive fusion is “the tendency to take one’s thoughts literally” (Ducasse et al., 2018). The nature of ACT is to help clients gain psychological flexibility by embracing acceptance of their experiences, even unpleasant ones, so that the distress is less pronounced, thus diminishing their impact. When the impact of the distress is limited, then one’s behavior positively changes (Seligman et al., 2021).