ACT Flashcards
What does ACT stand for?
- Accepting your thoughts
- Connecting to your values
- Taking effective action
What is fusion?
When fusion is operating, you’re bonded to your thoughts and emotions. You believe that everything in your mind is the absolute truth.
What is as relational frame theory (RFT),
Relational Frame Theory (RFT) is a psychological theory of human language and cognition that explains how we develop complex language and thought processes through learned relational associations. Rooted in behavior analysis, RFT suggests that human cognition involves understanding and responding to relationships between stimuli rather than just responding to stimuli themselves. It posits that we learn to relate things in specific ways through a process called relational framing.
The 6 pathologies
- Fusion - Diffusion
- Avoidance - Acceptance
- Lost Values - Connecting to the present
- Attachment to self - observing self
- Uncertain Values - clear values
- Unworkable action - committed action
Avoidance
avoidance consumes a lot of time and energy, and it greatly interferes with the ability to live a purposeful, valued life.
Lost Value
that when turbulent thoughts and emotions erase the value of your experience, to the point where you feel that you no longer even have access to the things you value most in life, you can enhance your mental health and restore your well-being simply by connecting with the moment in which you find yourself—right now, right here—in the present.
Attachment to self
Being attached to self, the made-up self that is nothing more than a by-product of our thoughts and feelings, means buying into every idea or belief about ourselves that happens to cross our minds.
Just like you are not the broccoli you eat, You are also not the thoughts you think.
Uncertain Values
When you get caught in a whirlpool of a situation spinning around and around, and you can’t decide just how you want to escape from the whirlpool because you’re uncertain about the value of any one approach. So you just keep spinning.
Mindful
To be mindful is to be concerned only with what is going on right here, right now.
Unworkable Action
an unworkable action is anything you do to block yourself from creating a life you think is worth living. And a committed action? That’s the kind of action that puts values and meaning in motion—the kind that enhances your life.
Strategies for diffusion
- Labeling:
- I am aware that I am having the thought that…
- I am having a brain fart
- I’ve heard that thought before - Thoughts not facts:
- What is the story I am telling myself
- What radio station am I on? - Unblending: Identify the part and dialogue with the inner part. Ask it to “step back” or visualize yourself unblending from it.
- Externalizing: Give the problem a name, and dialogue with it as an external force. Visualize it as outside of yourself.
Strategies for acceptance
- RAIN
Are thoughts absolute truths?
No, they are temporary mental events.
The mind is a reason giver
The mind automatically attempts to make sense of events by providing reasons for it. This can produce unnecessary suffering
The mind is like a busy walking street
As you walk down the busy street there are kinds of people and vendors vying for our attention, trying to sell us judgement, anxiety, fear, anger. When we bump into one of them and start a conversation, argument, or dispute, we actually stop even though we are in a hurry to get somewhere, then we move on until we bump into the next vendor, and so we continue moving from one vendor to the next, never really getting to where we are going.
Diffusion is like walking down the road, but instead of stopping at every thought, we simply notice the vendors as they come into our awareness and then moving on as the slip out of our awareness and move on to our destination.
