Therapy Approach
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
Acceptance and commitment therapy, or ACT, helps you stop letting painful thoughts and feelings make your decisions for you. Rather than trying to get rid of them, it builds your ability to have them and still do what matters. Vanessa Gross, LMFT, uses it to help you get clear on your values and act on them.
The Idea Behind ACT
ACT, said like the word "act," starts from a common experience: fighting a thought or feeling usually keeps your attention on it. Trying not to feel nervous before a presentation keeps your mind on the nerves. Avoiding every situation that sets them off can quietly cost you things you care about.
ACT teaches you to notice a difficult thought, let it be there, and keep doing what you care about. Four of its central ideas are values, willingness, defusion and committed action.
Values: Choosing What Matters to You
In ACT, values describe how you want to act, such as being a dependable friend, a curious learner or an honest partner. Goals can be finished, while values keep giving direction. You can attend a friend's birthday dinner, and being a dependable friend continues after the dinner ends.
Values help when a decision feels stuck. If you are weighing a job offer, ask which option fits what you care about. That question can cut through a long list of pros and cons. To find your values, Vanessa might ask what you would want the people close to you to say about how you treated them.
Willingness: Making Room for Discomfort
Willingness means letting an uncomfortable feeling be present when it shows up on the way to something you care about. It differs from liking the feeling or resigning yourself to it. It is a decision to stop spending your energy on pushing the feeling away.
Say you want to speak up in a team meeting, and your heart starts racing as soon as you think about it. Willingness means noticing the racing heart, letting it stay, and making your point anyway, shaky voice and all. What you are after is a fuller life with the anxiety in it, and sometimes the anxiety eases as a side effect.
Defusion: Getting Some Distance From Your Thoughts
When you are fused with a thought, it feels like plain fact and quietly decides what you do. Defusion is the skill of seeing a thought as something your mind produced, which you can notice without obeying.
A common exercise is adding a phrase in front of the thought. "I'm going to mess this up" becomes "I'm having the thought that I'm going to mess this up." The words barely change, yet you are now looking at the thought rather than through it.
You can also give a familiar thought a name, like the "everyone else has it figured out" story, and carry on with your day.
Committed Action: Turning Values Into Steps
Committed action is where ACT gets practical. You pick a value, choose one specific action for the coming week, and notice what your mind says when the moment arrives. Often it is some version of "what's the point" or "not today."
If the week goes off track, you look at what got in the way and choose the next step. A few examples of values turned into actions:
- Valuing your health: taking a walk after lunch on two workdays.
- Valuing connection: texting a friend you have lost touch with.
- Valuing honesty: telling your partner you felt hurt instead of going quiet.
- Valuing creativity: picking the guitar back up for twenty minutes.
How Vanessa Uses ACT, and When It Fits
Vanessa blends ACT with mindfulness-based and attachment-based work, and with CBT when looking closely at a thought would help more. ACT often fits if you have tried to think your way out of worry and ended up exhausted. It also fits if you know what you want but keep waiting to feel ready.
It suits stress that has built up over years, and the decisions that come with life transitions. In both, ACT spends less time waiting for the discomfort to pass and more on what you want to do while it is there.
Questions
Frequently Asked Questions
Both pay close attention to thoughts, but they handle them differently. CBT often examines a thought and looks for a more accurate version. ACT changes how much power the thought has, without debating whether it is true. Vanessa uses both, since some thoughts respond well to a closer look and others are familiar loops that arguing only keeps going.
Acceptance in ACT applies to your inner experience: thoughts, feelings, memories and body sensations. It does not mean accepting mistreatment, staying somewhere that is harming you, or giving up on changes you can make. Often it works the other way, because energy that went into fighting a feeling becomes available for changing what you can.
That is common, especially if you have spent years focused on what other people needed from you. One way in is working backward from what hurts. Loneliness often points to a value around connection, and boredom at work may point to learning or creativity. Vanessa works through this with you, and your answers can change as your life does.
Related Pages
CBT
CBT looks at how thoughts, feelings and actions feed each other, and Vanessa pairs its practical exercises with a client-centered relationship.Read More
DBT Skills
Vanessa teaches DBT skills for strong emotions, hard moments and difficult conversations one-on-one, as part of individual therapy.Read More
Stress and Burnout
For exhaustion, cynicism and overwork: therapy that looks at striving patterns, boundaries and values, with sessions held online.Read MoreCareer Change
Online therapy in Texas for adults leaving a long-held career path or starting over, with support for identity, money worry and grief.Read More
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