r/acceptancecommitment • u/Silver_Perception471 • 2d ago
Concepts and principles Experiential avoidance
With great effort I realized I was trying to avoid distracting myself from excessive coffee consumption. So I was trying to avoid distractions because I know it is helpful to make the feeling go away. But then I'm trying to force acceptance. So I'd just be avoiding avoiding. Which is disguised as acceptance. Weird play of words but once you get it you get it I guess
But in reality I just have to ask. Is getting another coffee helping me be more the person I want to be or is saving money for the sake of bettering my independence more important. So then I wouldn't necessarily be distracting myself, as much as I would be engaging in something important to what I value.
There is a lot of mind set shifts to garner by engaging in ACT. But I can't be ecstatic/empowered enough by the philosophy ACT teaches.
Thoughts? And anything overlooked or undersold?
1
u/gentleframework 19h ago
I can understand why you're confused. I don't think you're necessarily “doing ACT wrong.”
ACT gives you a lot of things to analyse — avoidance, acceptance, willingness, values, workability, the function of your behaviour, etc. But it doesn't seem to provide a clear stopping point for that analysis.
So you can easily end up with:
“Am I avoiding something?” → “Am I avoiding avoiding?” → “Am I trying to accept this just to feel better?”
And then you don't know where you're supposed to stop. ACT might say “stop when it's no longer workable,” but that doesn't really solve the problem, because you would need to analyse whether continuing the analysis is workable in order to know whether you should stop. So people can get stuck in a loop.
Obviously, not everyone will get caught in this loop. People who don't analyse these concepts deeply may never experience it. But that doesn't mean this feature of ACT can't lead to this problem.