ACT: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
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All 6 Terms & Definitions
- Psychological Flexibility
- The central therapeutic target in ACT: the ability to contact the present moment fully and consciously, and based on what the situation affords, to change or persist in behaviour in service of chosen values. Psychological inflexibility — maintained by experiential avoidance and cognitive fusion — is ACT's core model of psychopathology.
- Cognitive Defusion
- The process of creating psychological distance from thoughts — noticing them as mental events rather than literal truths. Defusion techniques (e.g. "I notice I'm having the thought that...") weaken the influence of thoughts without requiring their modification, contrasting with traditional CBT's thought challenging.
- Experiential Avoidance
- The attempt to suppress, escape, or avoid unwanted private experiences (thoughts, feelings, memories, sensations) even when doing so is harmful or unhelpful. Attempted suppression paradoxically increases intrusion (the ironic rebound effect), and organising life around avoidance progressively narrows the person's behavioural repertoire.
- The Hexaflex
- The visual model of ACT's six core processes organised around psychological flexibility: acceptance (opening to experience), defusion (distancing from thoughts), present-moment contact (mindful awareness), self-as-context (the observing self), values (chosen life directions), and committed action (values-consistent behaviour despite obstacles).
- Values in ACT
- Freely chosen qualities of action — directions the person wants to move in across life domains (e.g. "being a caring parent", "contributing to my community"), not goals to be achieved. Values motivate committed action even when difficult internal states arise; unlike goals, they are never completed.
- Relational Frame Theory (RFT)
- The basic science underpinning ACT. RFT proposes that human language and cognition operate through derived stimulus relations — learned ways of relating events that transform the psychological functions of stimuli. This accounts for why thought suppression worsens intrusion and why defusion strategies work.