Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a theory and set of interventions designed to help you live in the present moment, focus on your values, and learn new ways of relating to your painful thoughts and emotions. With psychological flexibility as the ultimate goal, ACT teaches you how to stop avoiding pain and start embracing all facets of the human experience. Instead of combating difficult thoughts and emotions, ACT helps you stop the struggle, and lean into what matters to you. Suffering doesn’t happen because of your thoughts and emotions; rather, suffering happens because of your attempts to control, escape, or change those thoughts. Think back to your experience. Does this hold to be true?

Let’s get down to what you really want to know: How might ACT be relevant to my treatment at Maryland OCD & Anxiety Therapy?

We will start by exploring why you’re in treatment in the first place. What do you want to be doing with your life that you’re not doing right now? We then plot a course for how to get there. We’ll show you how to drop attempts to control your thoughts and feelings, and learn mindfulness skills to stay in the moment. You may learn to observe your thoughts without judgment, learn how to treat them as passengers along for the ride. So much of anxiety is past and future based (e.g. “did I leave the stove on?” and “will my family be safe if I have a bad thought?”), so we will show you how to notice those thoughts while bringing your mind back to the present moment.

If this style of therapy interests you, read “Our Approach” to see how we blend ACT with exposure therapies. For more information on ACT, please visit the Association of Contextual-Behavioral Sciences.