Introduction
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) could be defined as à 3rd Wave Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Based on scientific method, this therapy has been developped mainly by Hayes, Wilson and Harris. The main goal of the ACT therapy is to create changement in the patient life, based on facts and to make him “act” to improve his life. We see Act therapy as an integrative therapy, using new tools to understand human psychological issues in a new fashion.
Specificty of ACT therapy ?
Act therapy is now famous thanks to a therapeutical work focusing on 2 main things : Mental flexibility and people’s values.
Mental flexibility could be understand as the ability for someone to change his state of mind and his strategies according to the situations.
As a clinical psychologist, we would focus on :
- Cognitive Defusion : People often forget that a thought is still a thought. Our main goal, will be to focus on thought and our ability to change them. People have to understand that their own view of the world and the reality is one way to see it, that we can change and improve (Harris, 2007).
- Acceptance : People may suffer from not accepting their feelings, especially when they hurt. ACT therapy focus on integration of every feeling people could feel, and how they can live with those.
- Inscribing yourself in the present moment : Harris (2007) talks about the ability to focus on the present moment, focusing on what you’re living right now instead of focusing on destabilizing thoughts.
- Self-Observation : In ACT therapy, we focus on understanding how thoughts become thoughts and how we can take a look about it. Our goal is to give to people the ability to work and think about what they are thinking. We often use to word “metacognition” to define this dimension
- Clarification of your own values : To be happy and live a life worth living it, people have to take care of things they care about. The main goal of ACT therapy is to understand what’s really important for the patient himself, and not what people learned him to care about.
- Engaged Action : People often have values and things they care about but are not acting according to those values. The main goal trough this therapy will be to understand how people could act following their values without creating values conflict.
What we think about ACT therapy ?
The main thing with ACT therapy is that everybody can benefits from it. We now that in burnout or in depression, people suffer from mental rigidity, and could, thanks to ACT therapy, improve their daily life. It is something we appreciate about ACT therapy. As simple as it looks, dealing with your thought and focusing on your own values is a hard work by itself. We appreciate that ACT therapy focus more on things people can do instead of focusing on subconcious conflicts on which people will have really poor impact.
Myriam LANCINI
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Key words :
- Acceptance and commitment therapy : Thérapie d'acceptation et d'engagement
- Values : des valeurs
- Destabilizing thoughts : des pensées destabilisantes
- Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) : Thérapie cognitivo-comportementale
- Integrative therapy : thérapie intégrative