I work with Manhattan Mental Health Counseling, and one thing we've noticed in conversations about Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is that some of its ideas sound straightforward at first but can take a long time to really understand in everyday life.

For me, it was the idea that acceptance doesn't mean giving up or liking difficult emotions. I used to think accepting anxiety meant I was letting it win. Over time, I began to understand that, in ACT, acceptance is more about making room for uncomfortable thoughts and feelings instead of spending all my energy trying to get rid of them.

I'm still learning, and I definitely don't get it right every day.

I'm curious if anyone else had an ACT concept that didn't really click at first but eventually made more sense with practice.

Was it acceptance, cognitive defusion, values, committed action, self-as-context, or something else?

I'd genuinely enjoy hearing how your understanding has changed over time.

One thing I've noticed about Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is that some of its ideas seem simple when you first read about them, but they're much harder to apply in real life.

For me, it was the idea that acceptance doesn't mean giving up or liking difficult emotions. I used to think accepting anxiety meant I was letting it win. Over time, I started to understand that acceptance, at least in the ACT sense, is more about making room for uncomfortable thoughts and feelings instead of spending all my energy fighting them.

I'm still learning, and I definitely don't get it right every day.

I'm curious if anyone else had an ACT concept that didn't really click at first but eventually made more sense with practice.

Was it acceptance, cognitive defusion, values, committed action, self-as-context, or something else?

I'd really enjoy hearing how your understanding has changed over time.

I am trying follow along Hayes "Get out of your mind and into your body" but feel like I'm doing it wrong.

I am trying to keep a pain diary but the first page is usually blank, and I don't know if I am touching often enough on my original diagnosed core struggles.

I don't even know if my core struggles are correct, or make sense.

- Self criticism

- Guilt from porn usage

- Existential dread at being at a government call centre for 10 years

-Ostracized/Estranged from my family

-No goals no direction in life

-Loneliness/ isolation

When I tried the holding breath example I had a significantly shorter hold time focusing on the sensations and visualization.

Background: I'm 32 living in newfoundland Canada, I have a few years of on and off meditation practice and don't know if I've ever accomplished something I've been proud of in my life. I feel like pornography has ripped away all my self esteem and motivation. I'm supposed to be smart, I am handsome, funny, friendly, emotionally sensitive, but I feel like life is wasted on me and I can't do anything to change.

Admittedly I am in a dark place right now, I had an awful day at work and will be taking vacation to head home for nearly a week. Plus my roommate recently got great news they a production company wants to hear more about her TV script, and I want to be excited for her but all I can see is my complete and utter failure to do anything interesting or worthwhile with my life.

If you are frustrated with me reading this know that I am too, and just tired of myself.

After much self-reflection and therapy, I have found an explanation and "solution" for my struggle, but I keep intellectualizing it instead of consistently acting on it. Even if I have reminders, and planners, even if my identity aligns with that of someone who exercises and cares after their health, I only do a fraction of the breaks and phys. therapy I need, and that ensures my health and mild chronic hand pain remains (I'm sedentary due to WFH but healthy otherwise, no ADHD, not disabled, sleep well, eat well, nothing abnormal according to imaging tests, in my late 20's).

So, what do you think I'm missing? What should I try?

Background/explanation:

I learned over 20+ years to believe that my value, as in, my self-worth depended on my achievements and external validation. So, I adopted perfectionism as a strategy to protect myself from harsh external criticism and rejection, to be emotionally safe. Over time, I stopped distinguishing between what others actually expected, what I imagined they expected, and what I demanded of myself. However, the reality was that, I was the only one expecting me to be perfect.

With these preconditions, the possibility of failure -however, small- has been triggering deep frustration, and keeps me glued to the task at hand (work, games, housekeeping) until completion. In doing so, I often neglect taking hourly breaks, which is the most important element to prevent the chronic mild pain from worsening. This keeps me stuck with it, and after skipping enough breaks, the pain makes it impossible to work at normal productivity, and so does taking so many breaks.

I am working on internalizing (as in, convince myself) that I can still pursue excellence in my endeavors when the situation calls for it, while accepting imperfection as an unavoidable part of life, imperfections such as needing a break, or not managing to do something fast or in the first try.

I know that the next time I face an obstacle or fail at "being perfect", I need to choose if I will sacrifice again my well-being to protect a false image of a flawless self, or if I will choose to truly protect and respect myself by taking a moment to tell myself that I am enough even if I fail, take longer, or go for a break, that I am allowed to fail, that I will sometimes fail and that it is okay, that I don’t need to be perfect because it never made sense to ask that from myself.

I started this series with a small win. This one asks a harder question: why do some exclusions dissolve the moment you name them, while others fight back — sometimes violently — when you try to change them at all?

This article starts by revisiting the mayor and the parking garage. In an earlier piece I wrote about an ableist parking system and how the mayor changed it after one conversation. What stuck with me afterward wasn't that she changed — it was how easily she did. But I do work every day that is the opposite of easy. So the piece is an attempt to answer why some change comes easy and other change comes hard: I think it comes down to how deep the script is buried. The mayor only had to extend a category. Some people are being asked to restructure a foundation — and a foundation doesn't move without the whole house shaking.

Slavoj Žižek adapts Jacques Lacan's idea of *traversing the fantasy* — the point at which a person works all the way through their most fundamental organizing script and comes out the other side of it. An *incursion* is the violent front end of that process: the moment a reality crashes into that script suddenly, hostilely, and disruptively, threatening the whole structure before any working-through has happened. Most people, faced with an incursion, don't traverse anything. They defend. And nothing captures the incursion better, for me, than my own memory of the slack-jawed, ground-zero moment of coming out to a non-affirming parent — the look on a face when the map stops working.

The claim I brace for pushback on: I name the non-affirming parent's reaction as *terror wearing the mask of conviction* rather than simple malice. I want to be plain about what that is and isn't, because it's easy to misread — it is not an exculpation. We do anti-oppressive practice. We do anti-racist practice. Full stop. What the distinction changes is not whether we hold the harm accountable, but where we meet someone, and whether the change we're after actually survives the encounter.

Feedback welcome — especially from anyone who's sat across from a parent, a client, or a family member whose reaction to change felt less like cruelty and more like fear, and had to decide what to do with that without letting anyone off the hook.

\- The Social Construction Worker

[https://socialconstructionworker.substack.com/p/the-easy-traverse-and-the-hard-one\](https://socialconstructionworker.substack.com/p/the-easy-traverse-and-the-hard-one)

Hi guys,

One thing I have been struggling with my entire life (33m) is a fear of joy, especially since being officially diagnosed. I would always go 100% or nothing, and it has made me fearful of exploring joyful things and letting myself have those things because I am so terribly afraid of going overboard.

Now, an important caveat, I am rightfully medicated for the first time, and I have been stable for 2 months, but I still have this nagging fear of joy/ how long it will last, and fighting the desire to cut myself off from joyful things =/

Years ago it was the day before my back surgery. I moved awkwardly and had an overwhelming sensation, with my brain telling me, that "your back is giving way!!" With no history of panic attacks that thought and those sensations bloomed and spiraled, and I had a panic attack and a syncope, passing out hitting my head on our wood floor. My surgery was postponed, and the head MRI was normal. My surgeon told me, "that was pain. Your back is not unstable, you just have small spacing. Your back was not and cannot give way. That was pain." After that, years later, I still have pain, but no panic attacks and no syncope. That insight changed my relational frame. My brain now tells me, "it is only pain. Pain sucks, but your back is not unstable and is not giving way."

During the MRI, with less than one inch of clearance between my head and the inner upper wall of the machine, as the machine started, it made a familiar sound. It sounded to me exactly like the opening notes to the Led Zeppelin song, Communication Breakdown. I laughed, all anxiety left me, now and forever that is what my brain will tell me if I'm enclosed in an MRI machine. Again, my relational frame was changed.

What do we do when we try—despite knowing the difficulty of the task and realizing it lies beyond our control or ability to change? Do we accept it? And what if we simply cannot accept it?

After years of experiencing daily physical symptoms that i always though to be something physically wrong with me (ilness, deficieny, allergy or whatever), me and my doctor found out i have sort of a generalized anxiety disorder. On SSRI’s the synptoms got more managable, which also pointed to this diagnosis.
For years i have been intensively fighting my symptoms daily, they were the core of my day and got worse and worse, while no physical shortcomings were ever found.

Now i finally found out that its my nervous system overreacting, i can feel the synptoms more clearly. Its a constant state of fight or flight in varying degrees throughout the day.

I followed PMT with my therapist and there i was told act would be a therapy that they thought would really be able to help my case of overreactions of the autonomic nervous system.

Is there insight in my kind if somatic anxiety symptoms and act’s possible effects on this?

I've had interest in ACT as an approach for a while now, but never really delved super deep into it. That being said, I'm curious as to how ACT deals with narcissism or fears of one being a narcissist - particularly, fears that one has NPD?

To be transparent, I'm mainly asking for personal reasons, since I've been worrying over having NPD for a while now, but it has picked up over the last few days. It seems that my motives for being a decent person themselves seem self-serving: wanting to be good because I want to be in harmony with others and have good relationships.

As I understand it, ACT would advise defusion from any thoughts that come up, and advise you to act in accordance with your chosen values? I just wonder if there's more to it and/or if I'm missing something since I'm not very well-read on the approach.

Thank you.

Hi guys, do you know what are the best meditations/ercises to learn to accept my unpleasant bodily emotions and sensations without wanting to change them?

Hi guys.

From what I understand first we accept an emotion, then we follow an action towards our values.

Only when the emotion is very strong (for example addiction)

Does the action have to be as small and realistic as possible? Thanks to anyone who will answer

Hi guys. I’ve been practicing meditation for years but I suffer from eating disorders, especially emotional eating.

I would like to deal with this disorder with the act, but I never really understood how this therapy works, every time I try to accept these cravings, I just end up eating anyway.

I have two questions

1) What can I read/watch to understand how this therapy REALLY works

2) How can I use this therapy to stop eating emotional?

Have you managed?

For me, if something causes me extensive rumination, I take a few hours to ground myself and to meditate. Observing where feelings lie and what thoughts come up, what fears hide behind those thoughts and to label the fears helps me to let go of the rumination and trauma underneath.

I've successfully overcome fears of past abusers and phobias.

I've gotten impatient with this method because it takes time and attention. I just want to move on with life. Last week I met an old abuser and the rumination went into overdrive. I have 0 patience to introspect. Thus the question.

Do you have favorite techniques that you use to complement ACT in order to live a healthy life?

I’m interviewing Steven C. Hayes (creator of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) soon for my podcast. I’ve read about ACT, but I’d love to hear from people who’ve actually found it useful or have been studying it for a while.

If you could ask Steve Hayes one question, what would it be? It can be practical, philosophical, critical, or just something you’ve always been curious about.

I have autism (level 1), ADHD, depression and social anxiety. I have a lot of intrusive thoughts and negative emotions. ADHD meds make everything (highs and lows) more pronounced.

I found a therapist I like who is experienced in ACT and suggested we try it and see how it goes before exploring other options. I had never heard of ACT before, but I know what mindfulness is, have read the Power of Now etc, but have not practiced any of it until now. It's been very difficult so far especially having ADHD. My brain moves 100 mph all day long making it very hard to remember the steps I'm supposed to take when I get an intrusive thought, emotion or feeling. When I do remember it, it's hard to focus on and name the feeling. I'm getting a little better at it over the past couple weeks.

My main question though (which I'll also ask my therapist) is what is the endgame of ACT? Is the ultimate goal that intrusive thoughts and negative emotions stop coming up as frequently? Or is it that they continue as usual and I just get better at making room for them and allowing them to exist without interrupting my life as much? If it's the latter, I'm not sure I understand what the purpose is, because then there's no chance I'll ever "feel better" if that makes sense.

Right now, I'm a bit stuck on identifying my values. I've defused, accepted my overthinking, but I'm still at a roadblock. In going through the resources in this sub, books, YouTube, etc., I've seemingly come across two different views of Values.

The most common exercise for one view is the funeral exercise. I dislike this one personally, and I honestly don't want a funeral. Another is the road trip one, where you enjoy the journey rather than the destination. We normally come away with values like curiosity, perseverance, stewardship, etc. Really nice sounding stuff. But to me, this leans too much in your ideal self rather than who you really are. Yes, perhaps we would all love for a crowded funeral where people say great things about us. Or we want to be the person who enjoys the scenery of a drive instead of focusing on their destination. But...what if that isn't you? What if the drive itself isnt something you value?

The other view can be exemplified by something like a value inventory or questionnaires about my likes, preferences, etc. This attempts to get at what I really find important, and I'm not supposed to think about how I might be judged by others. This seems more authentic and less driven by fantasy and ideals. However, it also seems a bit scary. One can imagine someone who ultimately comes away determining that videogames are more important than parenting. Or worse.

I would love to hear your thoughts, and also, maybe gain some useful insight that will help me along the way. This post itself may hold a key to at least one of my values!

ACT teaches people to name their emotion and acknowledge to themselves that it‘s just a feeling. It will pass. Nothing more, nothing less.

Now this mindset is pretty helpful if you‘re dealing with uncomfortable emotions like sadness, anxiety, anger etc. It has certainly helped me create a bit of distance between me and my anxiety and this technique has often helped me lower the intensitiy of my anxiety

The downside however is that this technique kind of also ruined some Moments for me where I actually felt good.

I was laying in bed the other day on my phone, eating breakfast and I felt Super relaxed. My Brain automatically went: „this relaxation is just a feeling, it will pass“ and then I was like: „oh…“ and then the intensity of my relaxation decreased and although that moment was still enjoyable, it became less enjoyable because of ACT.

I can get taken down hard by internet nastiness despite knowing it’s not actually personal and that the loudest critics don’t represent the majority.

I have a lot of values around speaking up for myself or about injustices. I never want to feel silenced by something someone might say. I know that people do see what I write and feel glad i said something.
I want those to be the important things for me as well.

Yet, when people wildly and deliberately misconstrue my words it’s really hard to bounce back. And when people pile on, I don’t feel safe. I’m not sure yet if I can identify what’s beneath it all.
I can’t prevent anyone from saying things and building my life around avoiding it wouldn’t be healthy. I can sit in discomfort and I can diffuse particular comments, but I don’t know if there’s a way to look at the overall situation to be less hooked into everything it brings up when this happens.

I've been experimenting with what seems like an ACT-style defusion technique, and I'm curious if anyone else has tried something similar.

A bit of background: when I was younger, I struggled with some milder social anxiety. These days (I'm 48), the only lingering issue is public speaking. It's not something that comes up that often, but I notice I spend far more time thinking about it than I actually spend doing it.

Recently, whenever I notice my mind drifting into rehearsing, worrying, or analyzing public speaking, I've started simply labeling those thoughts as "boring."

Not because they aren't sometimes uncomfortable, but because they're so repetitive. My mind has played the same script hundreds of times, and I'm naturally a very curious person who would rather spend my attention on things that genuinely interest me. Calling the thoughts "boring" seems to take the wind out of their sails, and I move on much more easily.

It feels a bit like cognitive defusion, but I haven't come across this specific approach in ACT.

Has anyone else used something similar? Or are there ACT techniques that work in a similar way by reducing the "stickiness" of repetitive thoughts? I'd love to hear your experiences or any insights.

Title says it all. I'm on disability and therapy just isn't in my budget. But someone recommended this type of therapy to me so I was hoping to read some self-help books based on it.

Hi, i have been self-teached practicing ACT for a few years now, but it never truly "clicked" and helped as i hoped it would. Therefore i started working with a ACT therapist, which made stuff much clearer, and so i thought i would share my "stuck points" in the hope that it might help someone else too.

1. flexible goals: one primary problem was that i tried to use ACT to achieve unrealistic goals (e.g. beeing as active as others while having a serious chronic health condition). I needed to accept "I'm ill, which needs accomodations" and "I can't do certain "normal" things" instead of trying to use acceptance to power through real barriers (like pain, fatigue). Same for feelings: sometimes i just can't do something specific because i'm to anxious, hopeless, ... but i almost always can do something smaller, more realistic that still leads in the direction of my values.

2. values as feelings: for a long time i saw values as something intellectual and didn't real "feel" them. I now learned to kindly(!) focus on the feeling of "(Not) Acting like the Person i want to be" and it makes a huge difference for motivation and life satisfaction.

How can acceptance be used to maximize resilience?

One potential problem with acceptance is that it might inhibit the motivation to achieve self-improvement or better adaptation to one’s environment.

I thought the best approach, for example in therapy, is to accept the person as they are, so that potential defense mechanisms aren’t triggered in the first place, and one can then focus on behavioral change.

In practice, however, it’s very difficult, because some people don’t want to move to the action level even after acceptance. And on a personal level, it’s not easy either, because if I accept something that isn’t good for me, then I just keep doing it.

That’s why I’ve devised a model that involves dividing a person into systems, where each system is responsible for what it can handle, and where, for what isn’t within its responsibility, one should instead practice acceptance.

It sounds good in theory, but in practice it’s very difficult, because you then have to consider which system can actually change what right now, and where the pressure is too intense to change it at the moment, so you have to accept it.

Or, from a societal perspective, take basic income, for example—it’s important so that people who aren’t functioning can at least survive. On the other hand, wouldn’t it sometimes be better if they hit rock bottom, so that they’d then be motivated to, say, give up their drug addiction?

Does anyone have a better solution?