Acceptance and commitment therapy: principles and applications

“I need motivation to keep working”, “without love I can’t move forward” or “I have to guarantee that I will get what I want to be able to move forward”. They are familiar phrases that we have all said to each other on occasion and that indicate a deep degree of discomfort. Acceptance and commitment therapy can help us.

The previous expressions are harmful and do not help solve our problems: they imply that there is a requirement and that without fulfilling it we will not be able to move forward. We are giving an explicit causal value to the content of thought and feeling, in addition to pointing out that some content or private events are negative.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is not a new or recent technology, although it is a third generation therapy. It has been developed over almost twenty-five years, although its popularity is recent.

Acceptance and commitment therapy is a form of experiential behavioral and cognitive psychotherapy based on the relational framework theory of language and human cognition. It represents a perspective on psychopathology that emphasizes the role of experiential avoidance, cognitive fusion, the absence or weakening of values, and the resulting behavioral rigidity or ineffectiveness in its appearance and course.

According to acceptance and commitment therapy, one of the patient’s problems is that they confuse the solution with the problem. The affected person follows a pattern of life in which he deliberately avoids private events (thoughts and sensations) with aversive verbal functions. (categorized as suffering, discomfort, anxiety, depression, etc.) and thus only amplifies the symptoms.

What does this all mean? The reader familiar with psychology will understand these terms without problem. However, it can be complicated for other people. We will try to clarify these terms as much as possible.

Principles of acceptance and commitment therapy

experiential avoidance

Pain is an inseparable part of human life, however suffering is “another story”. Feeling bad is a state that any of us want to avoid or, if we are already installed in it, escape. Thus, we work hard to eliminate negative emotions and feelings as soon as possible.

We all tend to avoid suffering to a greater or lesser extent (unless there are very powerful secondary rewards: someone might want to be “a little sick” to receive care), and this is logical and desirable. However, There are times when the price to pay to achieve this, for making a mistake in the way of doing it, becomes very high.
The important thing is to “realize” when avoiding suffering is not a valid solution. Once this is done, we will be in a position to learn to make “psychological space” for apparently negative private reactions if this leads to what one values ​​for one’s life. In other words, once we understand that it is of little use to go through life dedicating all our resources to avoiding suffering (which does not mean that we have to seek it), we can accept it when we feel it.

Cognitive fusion

Cognitive fusion is the most abstract concept that we are going to discuss in this article related to acceptance and commitment therapy. To understand we can think of our mind (train of thought) as a radio. A radio that can tell us how we feel or whether what we do is enough or not to achieve a certain goal. It can also crush our self-esteem by stating that we are not good enough for someone to like us. Many of our radios send these types of messages.

The problem appears when we “fuse” this type of messages with reality, when we give them this status, when we think that what our radio says is necessarily true. Hence the importance of meta-thinking, of thinking about how we think and adjusting it, of understanding that what our inner voice tells us is still a voice, like the many that exist in a radio debate.

On the other hand, This radio can be useful to us in the sense that it can give us information (on the radio there are not only opinion debates, there are also informative ones: the same thing happens in our minds). It can tell us if it is going to be hot, even give us its opinion on whether or not it is worth going out in that heat, but it is still a recommendation that we can follow or not. This radio, returning to psychology, can tell us that there will be tension at a party, even advise us not to go, but we are the ones who decide in the end. In this sense, in therapy it is very important to separate the fusion that has occurred between what the radio says and our probabilities of action.

The values

Acceptance and commitment therapy gives special importance to people’s values. Whether a person evaluates, for example, a certain object as ugly or pretty is, for the most part, a matter of the historical background of that person in the corresponding culture.

We notice changes in those evaluations: both across different cultures and over time. It is important that we begin to realize that many of our qualifying responses (ugly/pretty, good/bad, fun/boring, for example) They could have been completely different if we had been born in another time or place. The same thing happens with values ​​and especially when we put the magnifying glass around their limits or face moral dilemmas.

Behavioral rigidity

This term is easier to define. It consists of always performing the same acts because you do not have a broader repertoire. That is, many times we go around and around the same problem and never arrive at an effective solution. According to acceptance and commitment therapy, this is because we do not have more “solutions” to deal with the problems since we do not look for them either.

Disorders that appear due to trying to avoid suffering

Previously we defined what experiential avoidance was. There are many people who try to avoid what causes them chronic and generalized discomfort and, consequently, They live a very limited life. This pattern ends up spreading suffering to many facets of their lives.

These people live involved in this pattern of avoidance with a very high personal cost, for example preventing them from achieving many of their goals. It is in these circumstances that we speak of experiential avoidance disorder.
Western culture and its main transmitters, families, encourage the achievement of private events (thoughts, feelings or sensations) “correct” or “appropriate” to live. For example, it is encouraged that in order to function well and be successful, a certain motivational or emotional state or way of thinking about oneself is necessary.

The problem comes when the person’s experience is one of success and even so he tries to look for those private states that he has been taught as determinants to achieve what he has already achieved. To give a slightly extreme example, let’s imagine that man who has won the lottery. Since he was little he has been taught that money comes from work and that if he wants to be rich he will have to work hard. Well, even though he is rich, he still breaks his back every day trying to fulfill the first part of the association.

Thus, it is as if for many, success, what they seek, is only valid if suffering has existed before.. So when they reach it, they look for it or continue looking for it. Avoidance, on the other hand, would immerse the person in another type of circle. In this case, the person would like to be successful but has not won the lottery, however, for them, work represents suffering from which they want to escape, so they renounce success because they understand that working (suffering) is the only way to get there. he. Thus, she would settle into another suffering: that of not having what she wants.

Actually the solution is the problem

However, sadly, the facts show that the result obtained is contrary to the purpose that the person pursues: no matter how many efforts he makes to avoid suffering, the fact is that he continues to suffer. So, This avoidance pattern becomes paradoxical.

That said, we would be looking at a solution that is actually the problem. This is the real issue: a pattern of life that includes deliberately fleeing from discomfort, of suffering and anxiety and that only causes discomfort, suffering and anxiety to appear.

Experiential avoidance disorder appears when a person is unwilling to make contact with their private experiences of negative valence. (be these states or sensations of your body, thoughts or memories). A specific example of a negative private experience could be “undesirable” emotions, such as anger or sadness.
Thus, in experiential avoidance disorder, the person tries to alter the origin, form or frequency of said experiences so that they do not happen. For example, imagine the person who is in an emotional state in which sadness predominates. A common attitude in this situation is to treat sadness like a fly: try to swat it away. Faced with this impulsive and misguided strategy, the fly will continue to wage war; Well, with sadness, the same thing will happen.
In this sense we give ourselves permission to feel this way. We often forget that people “should” feel sad from time to time for the simple fact of being people. When we avoid this experience, it becomes more intense because everything we avoid or resist persists.

Beneficial in the short term, disastrous in the long term

Frequently, This pattern of behavior is apparently effective in the short term because it alleviates the negative experience. However, when it occurs in a chronic and generalized way, it extends negative experiences and produces a limitation in the person’s life.

In other words, a person ends up going against what is valuable to himself, suicide being the case…