A lot of people come to therapy wanting their difficult thoughts and feelings to go away. That is a reasonable thing to want. But ACT, which stands for Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, is built on a different idea. It does not try to get rid of hard feelings. It helps you change how you respond to them so they have less control over what you do.
This does not mean ignoring pain or pretending things are fine. It means learning to carry difficult experiences without letting them run your life. Research supports ACT for a wide range of concerns including anxiety, depression, trauma, addiction, and chronic stress. It was developed by psychologist Steven Hayes in the 1980s and has been studied extensively since then.
What ACT Actually Does
ACT focuses on two things: accepting what you cannot control, and taking action based on what matters to you. It works through six processes: acceptance, cognitive defusion, present-moment awareness, self-as-context, values clarification, and committed action.
The reason these six processes matter is that most people who are struggling are also fighting their inner experience at the same time. They are anxious about being anxious. They feel guilty about feeling depressed. ACT interrupts that secondary layer of struggle. When you stop fighting your thoughts and feelings, you have more energy to actually do things.
7 Benefits of ACT
1. It Changes Your Relationship with Difficult Thoughts
ACT uses something called cognitive defusion. This is the idea that thoughts are just thoughts. They are not facts and they do not have to direct your behavior.
Most people automatically believe whatever their mind tells them. If a thought says “you are going to mess this up,” the instinct is to treat that as true. Cognitive defusion teaches you to notice thoughts without accepting them as reality. You can have the thought and still act differently. This is particularly useful for people dealing with anxiety or heavy self-criticism, where the thoughts tend to be loud and repetitive.
2. It Builds Emotional Steadiness Over Time
Many people deal with feelings in one of two ways. They either push emotions away, which tends to make things build up, or they get completely absorbed in them. ACT helps develop a third option: feeling something without being taken over by it.
This is called psychological flexibility. It does not happen quickly, but over time you get better at sitting with discomfort without immediately acting on it or shutting it down. For people working through depression or emotional numbness, this gradually makes more of daily life feel manageable again.
3. It Reduces the Hold Anxiety Has on Your Choices
Most anxiety-focused treatments try to reduce anxiety itself. ACT takes a different approach. It focuses less on getting rid of anxiety and more on reducing how much anxiety controls your decisions.
When you make room for anxious feelings instead of avoiding them, those feelings tend to stop dictating your behavior as much. You can feel anxious about something and still do it anyway. For people who have been avoiding more and more things because of worry, anxiety therapy using ACT often helps them gradually reclaim those situations.
4. It Helps You Figure Out What You Actually Value
ACT includes a serious focus on values. Not goals or plans, but the underlying things that matter to you: how you want to treat people, what kind of work feels meaningful, what you want your relationships to look like.
A lot of people have not had space to think about this clearly. They have been reacting to life rather than choosing it. When values are clearer, decisions are easier to make. You have a reason to act even when things feel hard. This tends to be especially relevant for people going through life transitions or who feel generally stuck but cannot pinpoint why.
5. It Works for Depression Without Requiring Optimism
Depression often comes with a lot of self-criticism. People feel like they should be doing better or feeling differently. ACT does not add to that. It starts from the position that suffering is a normal part of human experience, not a sign of weakness or failure.
It also does not ask you to feel hopeful or motivated before you take action. You can feel bad and still do something small that lines up with what you care about. Over time those small actions tend to build on each other. ACT depression therapy is less about correcting how you think and more about helping you re-engage with your life as it is right now.
6. It Is Well Suited to Trauma Work
ACT does not push people to revisit painful memories before they are ready. It recognizes that avoidance often developed as a way of coping with something genuinely difficult, and it does not treat that as a problem to be immediately reversed.
Instead, ACT slowly builds the capacity to be with difficult experience in a more flexible way. It helps people develop a more stable sense of who they are beyond what happened to them. At Palisades, ACT is sometimes used alongside EMDR therapy or IFS therapy when that combination makes sense for the person.
7. The Skills Carry Over into Everyday Situations
A lot of what happens in therapy stays in the therapy room. ACT is designed to be practiced in real life. The skills, noticing when you are caught in a thought, coming back to the present, checking in with your values, are things you use throughout your week, not just in sessions.
This is why people tend to notice lasting changes with ACT rather than just feeling better for a little while. For people managing chronic stress or pressure that is not going away, having skills that actually work outside the office matters.
Who Can ACT Help?
ACT is not tied to a specific diagnosis. It has been researched across many different mental health concerns:
- Anxiety disorders, including generalized anxiety, social anxiety, and health anxiety
- Depression, especially where avoidance and withdrawal are part of the picture
- PTSD and trauma, within a trauma-informed approach
- Eating disorders
- Addiction and substance use
- Chronic stress and burnout
- Life transitions and identity questions
It works across different conditions because the core problem it addresses, struggling with inner experience in ways that make life smaller, shows up in most of them.
How ACT Compares to CBT
CBT works by helping people identify and change unhelpful thinking patterns. It focuses on the content of thoughts and tries to make them more accurate or balanced.
ACT is less concerned with whether a thought is accurate. It focuses on whether your relationship to that thought is limiting your behavior. Both are well-researched. Some therapists draw on both depending on what a person needs. If someone has tried CBT and found it did not suit them, ACT is often worth trying as it approaches things from a different angle.
What to Expect in Sessions
ACT sessions are not all alike, but they generally involve:
- Talking through what is happening in your life and where you feel stuck
- Mindfulness exercises to build awareness of thoughts and feelings
- Work on identifying your values
- Practical exercises you take into daily life between sessions
It is an active kind of therapy. You will be asked to practice things outside of sessions. That can feel uncomfortable at first, but it is also what makes the learning stick.
You Do Not Need to Feel Ready to Start
One thing that puts people off therapy is thinking they need to be in the right headspace first. ACT does not ask for that. You can start while still feeling anxious, stuck, or unsure. The work happens from wherever you are, not from some better version of yourself you have not reached yet. That is a small but important difference from how a lot of people think about getting help.
If something in this post sounds familiar, whether it is the constant worry, the self-criticism, the feeling of going through the motions, it is worth talking to someone about it
Palisades Counseling offers ACT therapy in Provo, Utah, with both in-person and virtual sessions available. You can call 801-356-0014 or contact us here to ask about getting started.