Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
Do You Feel Stuck in Some Parts of Your Life?
Do you find it difficult to stay in the present moment with the people or activities that matter most to you?
Does it ever feel like your mind is a broken time machine, where you are either stuck ruminating endlessly about past regrets or worrying about what the future holds?
Do you feel out of touch with your authentic self, wishing you could go back to the person you used to be when you felt whole and full of life?
Are you exhausted from being caught up in a constant battle with your own inner thoughts and feelings?
It can feel exhausting and isolating living day to day when you are struggling with your mental health. You are resilient and find ways to cope and make it through the day, although a part of you knows that things could be easier.
When the Search for Happiness Becomes the Source of Suffering.
When you feel anxious, scared, overwhelmed, or stressed out, it’s only natural to gravitate towards things that will help you feel better. You have probably invested an incredible amount of time and energy into trying to reduce your distress and increasing a sense of happiness and joy. Whether its reading countless self-help articles, practicing deep breathing or meditation, distracting yourself with work or social media, finding escape by using drugs or alcohol, avoiding stressful events, or trying to think your way out of it, there’s no shortage of solutions the human mind can come up with to cope with suffering and discomfort.
Unfortunately, happiness and joy are quite transient emotional states, and no matter how hard you try to seek or hold onto them, inevitably they will be replaced by more difficult inner landscapes. You are left in a pit of anxiety, depression, or unease. You may very well be totally exhausted with a lingering sense of despair and hopelessness from an endless inner battle. It may feel like you are holding back a tidal wave of anxiety or stress, waiting for the second it will come crashing down. Fortunately, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (or ACT ) can teach you skills to let go of control, move around your fears, and re-focus your energy on building a rich and meaningful life.
Your Mind Has Evolved to Keep You Stuck
While fighting endless internal battles with your thoughts and feelings likely leaves you feeling alone and isolated, you are actually in very good company. In fact, in the United States alone, it is estimated that one in five adults (or 52.9 million people) are currently living with a diagnosed mental health condition.
One of the primary reasons for this has to do with the very nature of the human mind. Your ancient ancestors lived in much harsher and punishing conditions than most people today. Because of this, your brain have become excellent at surviving. Unfortunately, the survival center of your brain that’s responsible for emotions and anxiety (located in the limbic system) , has much of the same wiring as it did millions of years ago. Your mind is very adept at treating difficult inner experiences (like thoughts, feelings, sensations) as dangerous threats that need to be contented with by fighting, fleeing, or freezing. While it’s only natural to relate to your painful inner experiences as threats, it unfortunately leads to much misery and suffering.
What You Resist Will Persist
At the core of it, the more you fight or resist your painful inner experiences, the more painful experiences you will have. This explains why, despite everything you have tried to do to feel better, your symptoms inevitably come back. It's all too easy to add suffering to your already difficult experience when you respond in ways that re-activate your minds flight vs fight response. For example, many people with anxiety try to think through or over analyze upcoming situations they are uncertain about. While this may lead to some initial feelings of re-assurance and control, their minds will inevitably come up with more and more ‘what if thoughts’ about everything that could go wrong, leading to much more anxiety and stress than was initially present.
Have you ever had a similar thought to the flavor of “oh no, what if I am stuck with this anxiety forever, how horrible would that be? What if this will never goes away. I just want to feel better!” When you respond to difficult inner experiences with resistance, your brain is programmed to release more stress inducing chemicals (like cortisol and adrenaline) that make you feel even more anxious and panicky, which leads to more worry, and a renewed anxiety cycle. The good news, however, is that with a qualified ACT specialist, you can learn how to fundamentally change your relationship with your difficult thoughts and feelings. This will allow you to finally break the anxiety cycle and allow to experience the long term sense of peace you have been looking for.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) Can Help You Get Unstuck
It’s only human to feel stuck on something in life and need some extra support to get back to living to your full extent. The therapists at Beachfront Anxiety Specialists strive to create a warm, trusting, and collaborative therapeutic environment where you can feel emotionally safe enough to take a step back and identify how your relationship with your inner experience has been keeping you stuck. Not only will you gain valuable insight into the factors that maintain your sense of stuckness or emotional turmoil, but you will be empowered to make the necessary changes to fully engage in a rich and meaningful life.
We are highly trained and seasoned in using ACT to help our clients free themselves from various problems such as anxiety disorders, OCD, depression, relationship struggles, chronic pain, stress, identity concerns, and trauma. Our therapists not only talk the talk, but we walk the walk. We all deeply strive to live by the core principles of ACT in our own personal lives. Essentially, this means being able to live in a way that is congruent with our deeply held values, such as kindness, curiosity, learning, growth, compassion, without allowing difficult internal experiences to dictate the type of people we choose to be. ACT is an incredibly powerful way to connect with your authentic sense of self and gain distance from painful past or present experiences that keep you stuck.
What to Expect in Sessions
In our sessions, you and your therapist will work closely together to uncover the various ways your difficult inner experiences (e.g. like those related to OCD, stress, or anxiety) are keeping you stuck. Our therapists are highly skilled at fostering a warm and safe environment from the very first session, and we will conduct a thorough psychological assessment to ensure you are receiving high quality and comprehensive treatment. Over the course of the first several meetings, you and your therapist will get to know each other, assess your symptoms, and develop actionable treatment goals. You will learn how various ACT principles can apply to your specific symptoms, background, values, and context.
Once we have a solid understanding of how your specific mental health concerns are presenting, we will work closely with you to develop a treatment plan that tailors high quality, science-based interventions to your specific needs. ACT involves helping you explore the “function” of your behaviors. This means working on developing a sense of curiosity about what is driving your behavior in various contexts. You will gain deep insights about what needs are not being met and how your mind and body are making up for this in ways that come with unwanted consequences.
In ACT, we strive to help you become your own ACT therapist by teaching and practicing science-backed tools to help you move forward in your life. While treatment looks differently for everybody, some of the core ACT skills include:
Learning how to deeply connect with your values system
Practicing ways to gain distance from painful thoughts and feelings that lead you to spiral
Learning mindfulness tools to increase your capacity to stay present with the people you care about the most
Experiencing what it’s like to let go of the inner fight and make space for all of your thoughts and feelings to come and go
Gain tools and foster an attitude to become more comfortable with discomfort
When we are triggered by a painful experience, it can be like you are caught outside in a terrible storm, totally lost and being pelted by hail and cold rain. In ACT, you will learn to stop trying to control the uncontrollable weather, and instead to take the perspective of watching this storm from the safety and warmth of your house. You can observe the storm without getting caught up in it, and instead turn towards the people in your house that you want to spend time with.
Customizing Therapy Techniques for Your Needs
At Beachfront Anxiety Specialists, we never take a cookie cutter approach to your treatment. We view our roles as active collaborators and coaches as much as we are therapists. Our job is to help you feel empowered to take control over your mental health by providing tools, insights, and gentle guidance. You are always in the driver’s seat of your treatment, determining where we go and how fast you’d like to get there.
While ACT can be an incredibly powerful ingredient to improving your emotional and psychological well-being, our therapists are also highly trained in several other evidence-based modalities to help you meet your goals. We are able to weave in mindfulness, self-compassion focused therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, and exposure and response prevention. These approaches are powerful supplements to ACT by helping you identify and change maladaptive thinking patterns, grounding yourself in the present moment, soothing your nervous system by learning how to offer yourself kindness and warmth, and to systematically overcome your fears. Together, you and your therapist can integrate other evidence-based interventions to help you move forward with life.
You May Still Have Questions about Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
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ACT is an investment in your long-term sense of self and peace of mind. The goal of ACT is to help you develop mastery over your psychological symptoms, empowering you to become your own ACT therapist. Unlike traditional forms of talk therapy, ACT is active, collaborative, and goal-driven. Typical courses of treatment usually last between 6 to 12 months, although this can vary from client to client.
Our fees reflect the depth of our training and clinical expertise and allow our therapists to maintain smaller caseloads so we can devote more attention to each of our clients. While we are not in-network with any insurance company, we do offer superbills which you can submit to your insurance company for out-of-network benefits.
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We work closely with our clients to help them gently face their fears one step at a time. An ACT-based exposure exercise should never feel overwhelming or too scary, and you are always in charge of the process. The exposures will also be in service of your deeply held values, so it should be something that naturally you already want to do! We work to strategically face down OCD or anxiety in bite sized pieces, where you will feel empowered by developing wins under your belt as you chip away at the hold your symptoms have over you. We also teach powerful skills that will help you navigate internal discomfort with ease. These are tools that you will be able to take with you and use for the rest of your life.
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Traditional talk therapy is typically non-directive and non-structured. People bring up problems and struggles into therapy, where they feel heard and validated. While this tends to help people feel better in the short term, traditional talk therapy usually doesn’t lead people out of stuck cycles. At Beachfront Anxiety Specialists, not only will you feel truly heard and understood, but you will learn and practice actionable skills that you can begin applying immediately.
You Can Learn How to Break Free from Stuck Cycles
If you would like to schedule an appointment or discuss any questions you may have regarding Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), contact us below. We try to get back to all voicemails and emails within 24 hours. Before starting therapy, we always offer free 20 minute phone consultations to make sure we’re a good fit to work together.