Pain, grief, disappointment, illness, and anxiety are inevitable features of human life… no matter how hard you try and shield yourself from these negatives, you will encounter them at various phases in your life. ACT Therapy teaches you to accept these inevitabilities and adapt to them – psychologically strengthening yourself, and building up defenses to protect you from the negatives hurting so deeply.
How To Develop “Thick Skin”
The phrase, “Learn to Develop Thick Skin…” is blunt and to-the-point, but is very practical, and is exactly what ACT Therapy does for you, metaphorically. It teaches you to not let hurtful things hurt you so much. It helps you to let-go of pain, grief, disappointment, illness and anxiety and not let these negatives affect you for extended periods of time or cause long periods of depression.
Within just a few sessions of ACT Therapy, you really will start to develop a thicker skin and will notice that even-though your problems still exist, they don’t seem to be bothering you as much.
What Can Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) Help With?
Any negative in life that affects you deeply can be “softened” with ACT Therapy. It hardens your natural defenses and keeps you prepared for a attack of negativity in life; with your defenses-up, you won’t get “sucker-punched” or caught of guard by an attack of life’s negativities.
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- Learn to Not Take Things So Personally — are you the type of person that obsesses over little things for long periods of time, and let it affect your mood and personality? ACT Can Help!
- Learn to Accept Criticism — Criticism, even constructive criticism, can cut like a knife (if you let it). With the “thick skin” that ACT Therapy provides, you can learn to not let criticism affect you negatively, which allows you to study the criticism as positive feedback rather than a sharp attack.
- Challenge Negative Voices In Your Head — One critic that usually only gives bad feedback and unhelpful criticism is the voice in your head. You will always be overly-critical of yourself if you only have 1 voice in your head and you allow it to tell you what to do. ACT Therapy teaches you how to counter that voice in your head with a second “voice of reason.” While voice 1 may tell you that you are worthless and offer only negativity, voice 2 argues back in your defense and builds your confidence.
- Learn to Engage Situations and Experiences That Scare You — ACT Therapy can help you to overcome your anxiety about the unknown and upcoming obligations or situations that give you fear or anxiety. It teaches you to accept the situation and engage with it to the best of your abilities. As your strength and confidence grows, you can take on bigger obstacles and experiences that once gave you too much anxiety to even think about.
- Learn to Enter a “Growth Mindset” — The ultimate goal of ACT Therapy is to be so strong and confident, and have such a thick skin, that you are not only defending yourself perfectly against negatives, but you go on the offensive: hunting-down experiences that once frightened you, and striving to overcome more obstacles in your life.
How Does ACT Therapy Work?
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) works by using acceptance strategies in combination with mindfulness to help ease the mind’s fear enough to bend the brain’s natural defenses against pain, anxiety, fear, grief, etc. While not completely breaking the defenses, the malleability allows for psychological flexibility. Much like a flexible bumper of a car is more resilient to damage than a rigid metal panel, so your mind becomes against damage and attacks.
Replacing Shame with Acceptance
“Acceptance” is one of the main tenets of ACT Therapy. Acceptance is the positive outcome of nearly all negative emotions, thoughts, and feelings. “Shame” is the opposite of acceptance, and is a very negative emotion that one can carry with them for years, if not properly dealt-with. Shame is the power the negative voice in your head uses to keep you down. Shame is the feeling that makes you feel worthless or less than others. It is also the negative emotion that allows traumatic experiences to continue to hurt you for years after they have already transpired.
Shame is one of the most toxic emotions a person can experience, and shame must be “let-go” in order to overcome the experiences that trigger the shame. The fastest way to overcoming shame is through acceptance. Acceptance is the final stage of the stages of grief, and it is also the final stage of processing the negative emotions of: pain, anxiety, disappointment, and illness. It is the final phase of reaction to a negative stimuli and offers a soothing positive affect to the mind.
Commitment Therapy
Commitment is simply engaging instead of running away; engaging your fears and anxieties, engaging triggers for depression or mental conditions, and engaging fully with your will. This means that you don’t do anything half-way, nor do you hesitate to jump-in. You become compulsive in your engagement of positive experiences and situations.
A strong commitment is like having a strong will, or a resilience to succeed against adversity. It is the strength that is left over after you have overcome shame, found your own self-worth, and want to move from the negative towards the positive. A person holding a lot of shame, anxiety, and other negativities might actually fear this part in the beginning, and that is completely natural. That is a sign that the negatives have a hold in your mind.
Therapists For Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
At AZRI, our therapists use and employ a lot of different psychotherapies and therapy techniques. All of our therapists are competent with ACT Therapy, and use the premises and foundations of the therapy in individual therapy sessions — where appropriate. Couples Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) can be helpful for dealing with both marital therapy and sex therapy.
“Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) is an empirically supported psychotherapy that offers promise for patients suffering from a wide range of mental and physical conditions, while addressing these gaps and challenges in the field.” — SOURCE
Is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) Right For Me?
Most likely, the premises of ACT Therapy are indeed right for you, as they are used in everything from Grief Therapy to Individual Counseling for Trauma. We implore others interested in ACT Therapy to continue to research more on how it works, and schedule a consultation to see if it fits into your needs for therapy.
