ACT now! Leading a Values-Driven Life

When I was in residential treatment (crazy story, which you can read here!), the therapists there introduced me to a psychotherapeutic treatment called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT. I had never heard of it before, and they threw around terms like “radical acceptance” and “psychological flexibility” like I was supposed to know what they meant. This irritated me and when I asked questions, I received a lot of evasive answers which just made me angrier (this was during my angry season where I was angry at all the crap life had thrown me and I was falling into the hopeless/helpless mindset that nothing was ever going to help me or make me better). Thank goodness, I had a later therapist who was able to actually explain ACT more fully. Since then, I have tried to wrap my head around this type of therapy because I am convinced it has a lot to offer.

A LITTLE BIT OF HISTORY:

ACT is another subtype of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), just like Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) and Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT). Like all the other three-letter therapies, ACT has a lot of science to back it up. ACT is another way for therapists to reach out to patients who struggle with depression, and some people will resonate with it while others won’t.

I tend to think of ACT as another set of tools for the toolbox, another way of looking at the world, another intervention for sick minds and hearts. Honestly, it can seem like a lot of mumbo jumbo at times, and I have found it incredibly confusing at times. Once I understood more, I began realizing that some of my therapists were teaching me components of ACT but weren’t specifying, “Oh, we’re using ACT therapy by the way”. They snuck it in there amidst my other therapy.

The dude who developed ACT designed a model called a hexaflex which is a way to visualize the different components of ACT. Positive Psychology shows it like this.

ACT can be broken into two categories: mindfulness and behavioral change.

Mindfulness:

• Contact with the Present Moment (which is awareness of the pain and emotion of the moment, knowing they are transitory)
• Acceptance (of our thoughts, of our emotions, of our circumstances in life)
• Defusion (of our unhelpful thoughts or mindsets)
• Self as Context (which is observing our thoughts and feelings but not letting them define us)

Behavioral Change:

• Values
• Committed Action (goals that support values)

HOW IT WORKS:

Each of the six components act interchangeably with the others. There’s no right way or wrong order to use ACT. As one component is developed, others are likely to bubble up and need addressing. For example, as you learn strategies on how to defuse your thoughts because they make you uncomfortable, you might see the need to accept some of those thoughts and process through them instead. As you focus on one thing, like values, you might recognize that you need to take some committed actions to honor those values too.

We all have a unique set of DNA, life history, personality traits and collection of circumstances and therefore will each experience ACT in our own individual ways. According to Dr. Jessica Borushok (also known as the ACT Therapist), ACT is a lens through which we can understand our own experiences.

As we explore the different components of ACT and develop them in our lives, the goal of the therapy is to steer us away from suffering (which comes from us avoiding our thoughts and emotions that are unpleasant and uncomfortable) and towards greater fulfillment (which will result from cognitive and behavioral skills we learn through our ACT journey).

Phew, I feel like I’m just flapping my lips! I know that was a lot.

Note! Please remember that I am not a therapist. I highly recommend watching Dr. Borushok’s videos on ACT (here’s one) or visiting Dr. Russ Harris’ website called ACTMindfully

This series of posts is just me trying to understand ACT more myself while hopefully providing some helpful tidbits along the way.

GOALS ARE GREAT!

One of the major goals of ACT is to lead us towards living a value-driven life rather than a goal-driven life. But what even is the difference between values and goals?

Goals tend to be finite achievements, as in:

• Crushing that test.
• Obtaining a driver’s license.
• Earning a first paycheck.
• Making it into college or grad school.
• Getting that promotion.
• Raising a family.
• Having a nice house and car (and things!)
• Completing that bucket list.
• Retiring with lots of money in the bank.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with any of these goals. But once we meet these goals, then what? When we reach our goals, we celebrate our momentary wins, sure. Undoubtedly, we feel that jolt of fleeting happiness. But what happens after you reach that goal? There’s just another one on the horizon, right?

Dr. Russ Harris has a great video on this:

We are constantly striving, constantly wishing, constantly seeking success, constantly looking for happiness. But unfortunately, we are never happy for long because there’s always something else that we should do or go or be.

As Americans at least, we define our happiness and our success by how we’ve obtained our goals. When I was a young adult, I remember life being so stressful because it was always one thing after another – pass that test, learn how to drive, pass that test, get my driver’s license, pass that test, get my first job, pass that test, make it into college, etc. As an older adult, my goals started getting bigger. Get two bachelor of arts degrees instead of one, graduate college, start a career, go to grad school, get married for forever, have kids, own a nice house with nice things, earn enough money to be comfortable and not embarrassed, etc.

As some of those goals kept on moving farther and farther out of my reach, I not only faced enormous anxiety, but I also fell into a deep depression. The truth was, I was never going to be able to “arrive” at all the goals that the world around me said I should have or care about. Some of those goals (like the kids part) were a definite no in my life journey (not impossible, but a very bad idea for multiple reasons).

So, when I feel like a massive failure more times than I can count, no wonder I feel depressed and anxious. Failing to meet my goals did not cause my depression, but it definitely contributed to it.

BUT MAYBE…

Instead of goals being conquests that we have won and successes we have achieved that are supposed to make us happy, maybe we should start thinking of goals as milestones.

Milestones on the pathway of our life’s journey.

Steps to personal fulfillment rather than narrow ideas of success demarcated by checkmarks on a list of achievements.

BACK TO VALUES:

Values, on the other hand, may be more ambiguous than goals, but they are the deep-seated matters that are most important to us. Things like curiosity, justice, family, love, hard work, creativity, adventure, honesty, loyalty, beauty, etc. While goals tend to be the culmination of our effort and our achievements, values are what we prioritize, what gives us meaning, what offers us purpose.

It should be our values which define the direction of our lives rather than our goals. ACT says that our values act as arrows that point us in the direction of where we want our lives to go, while goals are the highlighted milestones that get us there.

The VA Office of Patient Centered Care and Cultural Transformation created a really helpful worksheet with some exercises you can find here, and they further differentiated values from goals by saying:

• Values are here and now.
• Values never need to be justified.
• Values often need to be prioritized.
• Values are best held lightly.
• Values are freely chosen.

You can see the dichotomy between values and goals, right? Goals lie in the future instead of the here and now. We always justify our goals because we want to give credence to why we work so hard at something, and we hold onto them very tightly (hence the anxiety in meeting them and the depression in failing them). And I don’t know about you, but goals are often not freely chosen but are handed down to me by society, by church, by family, etc. I am expected to want the goals they’ve given me, and I’m expected to reach those goals to be considered successful, desirable, and worthy.

Maybe we do just want wealth and prestige and power and popularity (those can be values, too). But I’m willing to bet that most of us have other, more meaningful things that we truly cherish in this world. Maybe it’s time we scrutinize what drives us and ask ourselves whether we are really ok with the direction our life is going.

Are we brave enough to admit we don’t necessarily want the same goals that have been handed down to us? Do we have the courage to pursue what really means the most to us?

HOW DO WE KNOW WHAT WE VALUE?

And what really means the most to us??

By the time I had made it to my first round of PHP (which stands for Partial Hospitalization Program, which is a step down from inpatient and residential psychiatric treatment), I honestly didn’t even know what I truly valued any more.

Sometimes we get lost along the way. I certainly did. I couldn’t seem to figure out where my values started and my goals ended, and trying to navigate between who gave me what was honestly overwhelming.

So, I was told to fill out worksheets and take these silly online tests to “figure out” what my values were. You can find a lot of free tests online, which are both a little bit fun and exasperating. Some of them honestly made my head hurt.

But here are some worksheets I came across along the way that were extremely helpful and may be to you as well.

• Your Core Values Worksheet
• Finding My Values
• Values Worksheets created by the Wellness Society
• Core Values Clarification Exercise
• Personal Values Worksheets

What really helped me to identify my values the most, though were probably these two questions:

1) What do I dedicate the most time to in my life?

2) What do I get the most impassioned about?

A FEW LESSONS I LEARNED:

• There are a lot of values out there that I hadn’t really thought of before like humor and safety and punctuality. And a few that I thought should be on more tests but weren’t, like nature/the environment/animals, justice, and health. All the tests and worksheets have different lists of values, so it’s best to just combine them all so you have a more comprehensive list.
• I was able to identify my top 5 values (not necessarily in this order) which were 1) compassion and kindness, 2) relationships and connection, 3) nature and animals, 4) curiosity and knowledge and 5) health and wellness. Of course, I value many other things too, like justice, integrity, respect, reliability, responsibility, and authenticity. But it was helpful for me to pinpoint what was most important.
• I realized that my life was not really being driven by my values. Rather, it was being driven by what others told me I should value and goals they told me I should strive towards. I was worried more over not being able to hold a job and therefore not having a respectable career than I was being compassionate to myself or being kind to my body. The things I wanted to spend more time doing, like connecting with family and friends, were often forced to the wayside because I had to finish that master’s degree or make that perfect grade. I neither had children (which was a huge goal foisted on me by what seemed to be everyone) nor had my life together (seeing as I was literally going crazy and my body was falling apart) and both of these things caused enormous amounts of stress in me. I also discovered that sometimes just being surrounded by other people who have different values makes me spend time on their values rather than my own.
• And sadly, when I identified my values, I recognized that my husband’s values and my values no longer matched up. That, somehow, along the way, they had deviated. My now-ex valued his career over relationships, money in the bank solely for retirement versus money to enjoy life with, and friendships rather than marriage. We still shared the same values in things like politics and religion, but our day-to-day lives had become so disconnected. I think it played a huge part in our divorce this past year.

CLOSING THOUGHTS:

Learning about ACT in my therapy was really helpful for me to understand some things. I know for myself that I want my life to be driven by my values, the things that I hold most dear, and not just a series of goals and successes in life. I also know that I want to be living my own life and not a life defined by what other people say I should value.

One of ACT’s functions is to help us identify our values so then we can also make committed actions (i.e. set goals) to fulfilling those values. Goals are important too, but they should be what enables us to fulfill our values, rather than the be all end all.

Theoretically, when we feel most fulfilled, this eases our suffering and makes us happier people. Basing my actions on values instead of goals certainly lessons my anxiety and depression, so yes, I guess it does help me be happier too.

ACT gives us four other ways on that hexaflex which help us on that pathway to easing suffering. They’re what we’ll examine next!