Foreword

Successful businesses across the world apply this simple principle: focus more on the few things that do a lot, rather than the many things that do a little.

This is such a book.

If you look at the table of contents for this book you will see that after a handful or two of short chapters it bangs through a pretty incredible list of important topics: love, anxiety, depression, anger, pain, addiction, work and even psychosis. And every one of those later chapters shows how psychological flexibility applies.

Is that even possible?

It turns out that it is. ACT is about the few core things in psychology that make an important difference in lots and lots of different areas. Last time I counted there were over 125 controlled studies (and hundreds more of lesser kinds) showing that the small set of skills that ACT targets makes a difference virtually everywhere that human minds go.

This is an ACT For Dummies book, but you could also call it an ACT for When You Are Too Smart for You Own Good book. Minds do not know when to stop! They are figuring it all out even when what they need to do is just be quiet and let people learn new ways of being and doing. There is a conflict between how your analytical mind works and how learning by direct experience works. Our analytical minds are great for doing taxes – but they are awful at getting over past hurts. Your minds are great in the role of a tool and lousy when put in the role of being the boss or dictator. What ACT does is to teach you how to put your mind on a leash – so you can use it when you want rather than it using you when it wants.

This book will help. There is nothing dumb about that!

Steven C Hayes, PhD

Foundation Professor of Psychology, University of Nevada

Co-developer of ACT

About This Book

If you want to know more about ACT and how to apply it to your own life, then this book’s for you. In broad terms, we:

• Describe how the ACT model builds your psychological flexibility by helping you become more open, aware and active.
• Explain the scientific processes and concepts upon which ACT is based and how these relate to your everyday life.
• Provide exercises and activities to help you understand ACT and create positive change in your life.
• Offer an explanation of the new theory of language, Relational Frame Theory (RFT), which underpins ACT.
• Relate ACT to real-life challenges, such as weight problems and anger management, as well as more complex mental health difficulties, like anxiety and depression.

Developing new ways to relate to your own thoughts, feelings and memories (collectively, your ‘mind’) takes practice and can’t be achieved through the understanding that results from reading alone. Understanding how to relate to your thoughts differently isn’t enough; you actually need to practise the necessary skills directly to be able to do it. It’s rather like learning to swim — no amount of reading or knowledge about swimming will ever be a substitute for getting into the water and learning how to swim directly. The exercises in this book aim to help you ‘learn to swim in your mental world’. While these experiential exercises aren’t always easy to do, they’re central to ACT and we recommend that you try as many as possible.

While reading the whole book will give you the fullest picture of what ACT involves, it’s not necessary for it to be useful to you. It’s better to think of this book as a general reference guide about ACT rather than a manual that needs to be read sequentially. That said, we do recommend that you read the chapters in Part I sequentially because we wrote it that way to take you through the key features of the ACT model. Reading those chapters in the order in which they’re written, while not absolutely necessary, enables you to find out about ACT in a systematic way, without any gaps. The chapters in the rest of the book can be read in whatever order you fancy.

Of course, the downside of ensuring that each chapter has enough information in it to make sense on its own is that some repetition of ideas exists. We’ve endeavoured to keep this to a minimum but you will note some recurrence of key points. On the upside, it means you’ll have multiple opportunities to make sense of the core principles, ideas and exercises.

Throughout the book you’ll find sidebars that provide additional detail that’s interesting but not necessary to understanding the main text. You can read them if you choose.

Foolish Assumptions

We’ve assumed some things about you and why you’re reading this book:

• You have little or no prior knowledge about ACT or the ideas that underpin it.
• You’re a layperson who wants to know more about how ACT works and how to apply the ideas to your own life, or you’re a professional therapist who wants to broaden your knowledge.
• You’re motivated to try all the exercises because you understand that to benefit from ACT you have to directly engage with it.

Finally, a comment on the technical language we use from time to time. While we try to avoid being overly technical, sometimes ‘therapy speak’ is necessary because an understanding of the subject matter isn’t fully possible without it. When you come across technical terms and explanations, we advise you to stick with them but not worry about understanding them all in one go. It’s often better to skim read the text a couple of times to get the general picture and thus not get bogged down and frustrated. Because the chapters often repeat or build on ACT concepts, you gradually come to understand the technical details.

Beyond the Book

In addition to the material in the print or e-book you’re reading right now, this product also comes with some access-anywhere goodies on the web. Check out the free Cheat Sheet at www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/acceptanceandcommitmenttherapy for helpful tips and pointers to help you understand ACT and how to apply it to your life. You can also find extra articles at www.dummies.com/extras/acceptanceandcommitmenttherapy.

Where to Go from Here

A good place to start is Chapter 1! It sets out some of the basic ideas that we expand on in more detail in subsequent chapters. After that, you can read the rest of the chapters in Part I as we recommend, or check out the contents and jump into whichever chapter you feel is relevant to you at the time.

Increasing Your Psychological Flexibility

You can counteract your inclination to avoid parts of your own experience by becoming more psychologically flexible.

Psychological flexibility is your ability to be open to all your experiences — good and bad — while simultaneously doing the things that are consistent with your values. With a strong sense of psychological flexibility, negative thoughts and feelings are no longer barriers to doing the things that you want to be doing.

ACT focuses on six core processes associated with psychological flexibility. Although they’re set out as distinct processes, lots of overlap exists between them. And, while they can be applied individually, ACT is really about all six processes functioning together as one.

The six core processes are:

• Values: Deciding what you want your life to be about and the on-going actions that take your life in those directions
• Committed action: Doing those things that bring your values to life
• Acceptance: Noticing, accepting and embracing all your experiences, especially the unwanted or negative ones
• Defusion: Noticing your thoughts and thinking processes, without being inside them or trying to alter or control them
• Contact with the present moment: Being fully aware of your experiences as they’re occurring here and now

• Self as context: Getting in touch with your deep sense of self — the ‘you’ who sits just behind your eyes, who observes and experiences, and yet is distinct from your own thoughts, feelings and memories

  We return to these six core processes in Chapter 3 so that you can really understand how they work and link together. Here, it’s important to understand that ACT aims to enhance your psychological flexibility so that you can get on with doing what matters.

Living a Life that’s True to Your Values

In ACT, the things you really care about, deep down inside, and want your life to stand for are called your values. They’re not specific items or goals that you can hold or achieve; rather, they’re statements that reflect how you want to behave in life on an ongoing basis. For example, ‘being a loving partner’, ‘being healthy’ or ‘reducing my impact on the environment’ are values as they describe how you want to behave towards other people, yourself or the world in general. You can think of values as the directions you want your life to be going in as they guide your behaviour to reflect what’s important for you.

Even though being true to your values leads to a greater sense of purpose and contentment in life, doing so isn’t always easy. It can involve doing things that you may not actually want to do at that particular moment — for example, communicating calmly with your children when you’re very angry or making a cup of tea for your partner when you feel upset with him. Doing these things in the service of your values of being a good parent and a loving partner means that you’re being true to what you hold most dear.

Accepting Life

Many traditional therapeutic approaches focus on changing or altering unwanted or troublesome thoughts and feelings. ACT is different in that it works to change how you relate to these events rather than to change them directly. The aim is to become more open to, and accepting of, your thoughts and feelings instead of battling against them.

ACT takes this approach because research carried out over the last 20 years or so indicates that people have much less control over their thoughts and feelings than they often think they do. For example, while you can choose to think about different things, such as a red car or a polar bear, you can’t sustain these thoughts for anything other than short periods before your attention moves on to something else. And if you try your best not to think about something, then the opposite happens and you end thinking about it all the more. These findings (and what does your own experience tell you?) mean that your efforts to control, minimise or avoid your thoughts can only ever have marginal success. Chapters 7 and 11 explain in more detail how your thoughts work.

A similar situation exists with your emotions. What you feel depends on what’s happened to you, and this means that you can’t change how you feel at any one point in time without first changing your past. Of course, that’s impossible, and so attempts to manage or change your feelings in the present won’t be successful.

The aim of ACT is to help people live open and fulfilling lives, which is difficult to do if they’re spending lots of their time trying to change, control or avoid things that can’t be easily changed, controlled or avoided. For this reason, acceptance is so important. When faced with things you can’t change, your best option is usually to accept them. This challenge is nicely summed up by Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer:

Grant me the serenity to accept the things
I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.

Acceptance provides an alternative to experiential avoidance as a way to engage with life. In practising acceptance you create the space to do the things that really matter to you rather than waste your time and energy on trying to control the uncontrollable. This doesn’t mean that everything you do will be successful. Some things you do will work out and others won’t, but at least you’re now doing the things that are important to you rather than trying to control or avoid the things you don’t like. At the end of each day you can then rest your head on the pillow and fall asleep knowing you’ve lived according to your values.

And something else happens when you practise acceptance: life becomes less scary and less focused on the negatives. It transpires that your unpleasant thoughts and feelings aren’t as bad as you think they are. Sure, they’re not very nice, but they aren’t something you need to unduly worry about much of the time. And they certainly aren’t things to which you need to devote significant energy trying to avoid or control.

Defusing from Your Thoughts

Human language can occur in the public domain (speech and writing) and the private domain (thoughts and cognitions). While human language is an essential part of modern life and helps you with all kinds of challenges and problems, when you become too attached to its literal content it can also lead to difficulties.

When you believe that your thoughts reflect the world accurately (as it ‘really’ is), they can have a greater influence over how you behave. Allowing your thoughts (and language in general) to direct your actions is problematic for a number of reasons. For a start, your thoughts are usually negative and often wrong. And even when they’re accurate, your thoughts aren’t always useful to you in terms of living in line with your values. Consider a young woman who wants to quit smoking. She might have the thought, ‘A cigarette right now would relax me’. And such a thought may be accurate; having a cigarette may indeed allow her to relax. However, being ‘fused’ with (believing it literally) and acting on that thought would move the young woman no closer to her value of healthy living.

Defusion is the process by which you gain some distance from your thoughts, cognitions and language by reducing their believability. It involves becoming aware of your thoughts (and your thinking processes) and not being stuck inside them. ACT uses lots of different experiential techniques to help you discover how to become less attached to the literal content of your thoughts.

When you see your thoughts as just bits of private language in your head, you reduce their influence on your behaviour and this enables you to act in line with your values.

Recognising that ACT Is an Experiential Learning Process

ACT is an experiential learning process. Most chapters in this book contain exercises for you to complete and learn from. While we can describe what ACT involves (such as its six core process and psychological flexibility; check out Chapter 3), doing so won’t tell you what these processes feel like or, more importantly, what they do. For that, a direct experiential process is necessary. You can only learn how to swim (and what swimming is like) by getting in the pool — and ACT is the same.

The good news is that, while the exercises take some effort, they’re often also fun.

Think of ACT as an acronym for three basic steps:

1. Accept your thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations. Because you can’t really avoid or control how you think and what you feel, you’re better off accepting these experiences.
2. Choose your life values. Spending your time trying to manage or avoid the things you don’t want isn’t a positive way to exist; instead, put your energy into identifying what matters to you — your values — and defining how you want to live.
3. Take action. Start doing the things that matter to you. Begin with small steps and gradually build bigger and bigger patterns of behaviour that are informed by your values. If you want to become fitter, for example, begin with a gentle walk or short jog. Soon you’ll be able to run farther and faster and eventually you may run a marathon!

Accepting those things in life that you can’t change is the challenge everyone faces. It isn’t easy, but it’s often your best option nonetheless. Next, you need to decide what’s important to you and how you want to live your life, so that you can focus on what matters. This can be tricky too, but the prize is everything — it’s a life filled with purpose, vitality, meaning and fun.