Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

No plum blossoms for us

Posted by RB in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Adrift in the culture, ANTI-STORY on March 23rd, 2008 , tagged with , .

Something I’ve been musing about for awhile is the strange way we in the West, including many of us interested in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, choose to convert spiritual work into psychological work.

Read more...

Invalidation versus presence

Posted by RB in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, ANTI-STORY, Stories about ourselves on February 9th, 2008 , tagged with , .

Invalidation is what happens to us as kids when we’re told to control our emotions, especially negative ones—anxiety, fear, anger, and the like. This happens more in some families than in others. If it happens to you a lot, and if you’re emotionally vulnerable, you may well grow up and become self-invalidating, prone to constantly [...]

Read more...

ACT Observer Exercise

Posted by RB in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, ANTI-STORY on January 13th, 2008 , tagged with , .

About a year or so ago, I came across a particularly neat-sounding exercise for Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT. It’s called “The Observer Exercise,” and it consists of a script for a therapist to read out loud to a client. The bare bones are pretty simple: the client sits in a relaxed, meditative pose [...]

Read more...

Marsha Linehan’s wonderful metaphor for “radical acceptance”

Posted by RB in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, ANTI-STORY, Related developments in psychology on June 22nd, 2007 , tagged with , .

I first came across this quote on the ACT public mailing list on Yahoo Groups—it had been posted there by Philippe Vuille, an ACT therapist working out of Switzerland. It’s from an article by Marsha Linehan titled “Mindful Acceptance and Change: The Central Dialectic in Psychotherapy.” Linehan is the founder of Dialectical Behavior Therapy, or [...]

Read more...