Acceptance in ACT: The Chinese Finger Trap Metaphor
MidAmerican Psychological Institute
Pickslyde Consulting
Key Points
- If you want to act successfully on valuable behaviors, it will help to be open to those private experiences and willing to embrace the human condition.
- Judging emotions as negative often leads people to seek to get rid of them and simply have positive emotions.
- ACT highlight that emotions are natural. This can help us deal with them more effectively.
- Many ACT interventions use metaphor to introduce concepts to clients.
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Transcript
Acceptance according to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is defined as actively contacting psychological experiences directly, fully, without needless defense while behaving effectively.
Hayes, S. C., Wilson, K. W., Gifford, E. V., Follette, V. M., & Strosahl, K. (1996). Experiential avoidance and behavioral disorders: A functional dimensional approach to diagnosis and treatment. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 64(6), 1152-1168.
In other words, to reinterpret this definition, acceptance suggests that if you want to act successfully on meaningful endeavors in this life, you must embrace the idea that emotions are going to get lit up and you’ll have difficult feelings and sensations. And in order to act successfully, you’ll have to look directly at those private experiences and say, bring it on. I’m willing to have the human condition. But this is a culturally deviant approach if you think about it.