Understanding ACT · 01 / 04
Why ACT?
Not every difficult thought has to disappear before you can get on with your life.
Many people try to control or get rid of uncertainty, anxiety, self-doubt or distressing thoughts. ACT asks a different question: what happens when the struggle against your inner experience has itself become part of the problem?
When getting rid of it becomes the problem
When something is unpleasant, the first impulse is usually: make it go away. There is nothing unusual about that – avoidance and control are among the most useful skills we have. With a hot stove, they work brilliantly.
With inner experience – with thoughts, feelings, memories – the same strategy often works differently. Many people recognise sentences like these:
- “I mustn't be nervous.”
- “I need to feel certain before I decide.”
- “This thought has to go.”
- “I can only start once I feel ready.”
Trying to get rid of a particular feeling or make a thought disappear can, over time, take up more and more attention, energy and behaviour. You wait for an inner state that is supposed to be the precondition for acting – and in the meantime you postpone, don't decide, or narrow your life down.
That doesn't mean control is always the wrong tool. It depends on the context: some things can be changed or steered. Inner experiences like thoughts and feelings, on the other hand, are often hard to control directly – and trying to do so anyway can become a burden in itself.
Two different questions
Neither column is right or wrong in itself. ACT simply invites you to ask the second question more often.
Control
How do I get rid of this feeling?
Flexibility
Can this feeling be here – and can I still do what matters to me?
Fighting thoughts
Noticing thoughts
Waiting for certainty
Acting with uncertainty
Avoiding discomfort
Making room for experience
Watching only the symptoms
Looking at direction and values
Not feeling less. Acting more freely.
Psychological flexibility is hard to pin down as a definition, but easy to describe as a movement – three steps that show up again and again in counselling.
Notice
What is going on inside me right now?
A first step before reacting at all: noticing what is here – in your thinking, in your body, in your behaviour.
Open up
Can I notice thoughts and feelings without immediately having to fight them?
Less struggle, more room – including for what feels uncomfortable right now.
Orient
What matters to me – and which next step fits that?
Not the perfect plan, but a direction that fits what counts.
Where this shows up in everyday life
Most people don't come to counselling because of these terms, but because of concrete situations – for example:
rumination · self-doubt · difficult decisions · setting boundaries · change · inner restlessness
“I'm going to regret this decision.”
ACT doesn't only ask whether this thought is true or false, but also: what happens if I let it dictate my behaviour?
Understanding alone doesn't change a life.
ACT connects two movements that are often thought of separately: mindfulness and acceptance on one side, values and concrete behaviour on the other. Neither is enough on its own. Only noticing and accepting, without deriving any action from it, leads nowhere. Only acting, without changing your relationship to difficult thoughts and feelings, often leads straight back into the same struggle.
Acceptance is not resignation.
Resignation means giving up because nothing can be changed anyway. Acceptance in the ACT sense means something else – acknowledging a difficult experience for what it is right now, so that you can stay able to act from there, instead of putting all your energy into fighting it.
The goal of ACT is not to be permanently happy, relaxed or confident. It is about being able to build a life that fits your own values – even when difficult experiences are part of it.
Scientific background
ACT emerged within behavioural psychology and belongs to what is known as contextual behavioural science. An important theoretical foundation is Relational Frame Theory (RFT) – a theory of how language and thinking shape human experience. Psychological flexibility – the ability to be present, to open up and still act in line with your values – is the central model.
ACT has since been examined in a large number of scientific studies, including in the context of stress, tension and processes of change.
If you'd like to go deeper, you'll find further terms – for example on Relational Frame Theory or the origins of ACT. Go to the Resources page →
In my counselling
I don't use ACT as a rigid programme, but as a perspective on situations in which thoughts, feelings and behaviour have got stuck together.
My work is psychological counselling and coaching based on ACT principles – not medical psychotherapy. That means: no diagnoses and no treatment of mental illness, but support in relating differently to distressing inner experiences and becoming more able to act.
Further reading
You don't have to understand ACT before we talk.
In a free introductory call we can see whether the way I work fits what you're looking for.
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Understanding ACT