Acceptance

Acceptance

Rather than trying to better control your thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories and other private events, it is easier to “just notice”, accept, and embrace your private events, especially previously unwanted ones. Active Mind Control is associated with reduced levels of happiness.

The aim is to get in contact with a sense of self known as “self-as-context” — the you that is always observing and experiencing but is distinct from your thoughts, feelings, sensations, and memories.

You need to clarify your personal values and to take action on them. This brings more vitality and meaning into your life and increases your psychological flexibility.

The core conception of the Acceptance technique is that psychological suffering is usually caused by experiential avoidance, cognitive entanglement, and results in psychological rigidity that leads to a failure to take behavioral steps in accord with core values. This is summarised by the acronym, FEAR:
▪ Fusion with your thoughts
▪ Evaluation of experience
▪ Avoidance of your experience
▪ Reason giving for your behaviour

The healthy alternative is to ACT:
▪ Accept your reactions and be present
▪ Choose a valued direction
▪ Take action

ACT commonly employs six core principles to help develop psychological flexibility:
1. Cognitive defusion: Learning to perceive thoughts, images, emotions, and memories as what they are, not what they appear to be.
2. Acceptance: Allowing them to come and go without struggling with them.
3. Contact with the present moment: Awareness to the here and now experience with openness, interest, and receptiveness.
4. Observing the self: Accessing a transcendent sense of self, a continuity of consciousness which is changing.
5. Values: Discovering what is most important to one’s true self.
6. Committed action: Setting goals according to values and carrying them out responsibly.