Enrich Your Life

…With acceptance and commitment therapy. This method can help you develop a more flexible attitude and provides a path to achieving goals based on personal values.

Accepting things you cannot control is among life’s greatest challenges. The primary goal of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, ACT, is to help you do just that – accept what is out of your personal control and commit to actions that can improve and enrich your life.

“This approach draws on the fundamental idea that there is a distinction between difficult circumstances and suffering,” explains Kauser Ahmed, PhD, a clinical psychologist at the Simms/ Mann UCLA Center of Integrative Oncology. “Difficulty is a part of human life, but we have a choice about suffering.”

Acceptance Can Relieve Suffering

ACT (pronounced as the word, not by the initials) blends mindfulness-based techniques with evidence-based modalities of cognitive behavioural therapy. It teaches people to recognize and accept thoughts and feelings without judgment and without trying to change them. By doing so, negative thoughts and feelings can have less influence on well-being.

So, instead of pushing away uncomfortable feelings, a therapist directs patients to experience what is happening in the moment without having to act on those feelings. For example, feeling anxious about an upcoming social event might foster overeating in an attempt to stuff down the uncomfortable emotion. Acknowledging the discomfort can dissolve it and remove the impulse to act on it.