Acceptance therapy for anxiety, particularly Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), offers a distinct approach compared to traditional therapies. ACT focuses on accepting thoughts and feelings rather than challenging or changing them. This approach is rooted in the belief that the struggle to control anxiety can often exacerbate the problem.
How Acceptance Therapy Differs from Thought-Challenging Therapies:
Traditional cognitive therapies, like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), often involve identifying and challenging maladaptive or irrational thoughts. The therapist disputes, challenges, or weighs the evidence for and against these thoughts. However, newer research suggests that directly challenging thoughts can sometimes intensify the struggle and increase anxiety.
Here’s a comparison:
- Traditional CBT: Seeks out and identifies maladaptive thoughts, disputes and challenges those thoughts.
- Acceptance Therapy (ACT): Teaches clients to notice, accept, and embrace their thoughts and feelings without judgment. ACT de-emphasises disputation.
ACT suggests that psychological suffering often stems from experiential avoidance, cognitive entanglement, and psychological rigidity, which prevents individuals from taking steps in line with their core values.
Advantages of Acceptance Therapy:
- For Clients:
- Reduces the Struggle: Acceptance therapy helps clients relinquish the battle with anxious feelings by “treating” the struggle as the problem.
- Focuses on Values: ACT encourages clients to identify their values and commit to actions aligned with those values, providing a sense of purpose and direction beyond symptom reduction.
- Promotes Psychological Flexibility: ACT aims to increase psychological flexibility, enabling clients to be open to present experiences, shift attention voluntarily, and develop habits that move life in valued directions.
- Encourages Acceptance: ACT promotes acceptance of internal experiences, reducing the need for experiential avoidance.
- Mindfulness: Mindfulness exercises help clients experience their experiences fully, including evaluations, thoughts, and memories, in a context where experiential avoidance is unnecessary.
- For Therapists:
- Addresses Core Issues: ACT addresses the underlying struggle to control unwanted thoughts and feelings, which is often at the heart of anxiety problems.
- Offers a New Perspective: ACT provides a different way of viewing human suffering and what it means to foster psychological health and wellness.
- Flexibility: ACT can be integrated with components of traditional CBT, particularly exposure techniques, within an acceptance and mastery of experiencing framework.
Potential Drawbacks:
- Counterintuitive Approach: The idea of accepting anxiety may be difficult for clients to grasp initially, as they may expect therapy to eliminate their anxiety.
- Requires Experiential Practice: Acceptance is unlikely to develop through instructions alone and needs to be experienced.
In summary, acceptance therapy for anxiety, such as ACT, differs from older therapies by focusing on acceptance rather than challenging thoughts. The advantages include reducing the struggle with anxiety, promoting psychological flexibility, and helping clients focus on their values. While it may be counterintuitive initially, acceptance therapy offers a compassionate and effective approach for both clients and therapists in managing anxiety.
Tags: acceptance therapy, ACT, anxiety, cognitive therapy, CBT, mindfulness, psychological flexibility