Concepts and ideas behind ACT

ACT is one psychotherapeutic modality within the larger family of behavioural and cognitive therapies (CBT). However, unlike classical CBT, which presupposes that identifying, analyzing and correcting distorted thoughts is required for clinical improvement, ACT focuses on the entirety of psychological events, that is, contents and contexts and not only elements that are considered to be problematic.

ACT builds on Relational Frame Theory (RFT) – a science-based psychological account of human language and thinking.

Figure 1. An illustration of RFT. Most English-speaking children in Canada are able to associate the word ‘meow’ with the word ‘cat’ and an image of a cat in their mind without the actual presence of a cat in their immediate environment.

RFT captures our ability to form complex and sometimes arbitrary relationships between objects or aspects of the world. This can occur even in their absence in the actual environment through the use of symbols and language and the resulting psychological associations and relationships. This ability has enabled humans to advance in many aspects of their lives (e.g., caring, trade, technology, arts, communication, etc.), but it has also increased our suffering when we are not able to distinguish our ongoing process of thinking from the products of thinking, i.e., our thoughts. Consequently, we mistake our arbitrary language and thoughts as the absolute reality and the essence of our being. For example, suffering occurs when we are not able to differentiate between ‘I am too skinny’ as a thought and ‘I am too skinny’ as a fused self-concept.

ACT is also grounded in functional contextualisim, in which psychological events are conceptualized as “a set of ongoing interactions between whole organisms and historically and situationally defined contexts” (Hayes, 2004, p. 646). Within this paradigm, a clinician or researcher focuses on the entirety of each psychological event, paying attention to how and when psychological events are related, and the function or impact these events have on the psychological wellbeing and functioning of the person.