Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Quotes

“The process of living is like taking a very long road trip. The destination may be important, but the journey experienced day to day and week to week is what is invaluable.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“Does the client experience life as merely imposed or rather as something he or she can author in a meaningful and ongoing way?”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“ACT uses acceptance and mindfulness processes and commitment and behavioral activation processes to produce psychological flexibility. It seeks to bring human language and cognition under better contextual control so as to overcome the repertoire-narrowing effects of an excessive reliance on a problem-solving mode of mind as well as to promote a more open, centered, and engaged approach to living.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“Another key process in the cycle of suffering is experiential avoidance. It is an immediate consequence of fusing with mental instructions that encourage the suppression, control, or elimination of experiences expected to be distressing.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“Suffering occurs when people so strongly believe the literal contents of their mind that they become fused with their cognitions. In this fused state, the person cannot distinguish awareness from cognitive narratives since each thought and its referents are so tightly bound together. This combination means that the person is more likely to follow blindly the instructions that are socially transmitted through language. In some circumstances, this result can be adaptive; but in other cases, people may engage repeatedly in ineffective sets of strategies because to them they appear to be “right” or “fair” despite negative real-world consequences.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“The problem with problem solving is that it is a mode of mind that does not know when to stop.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“We are in this stew together. We are caught in the same traps. With a small twist of fate, I could be sitting across from you, and you could be sitting across from me—both of us in opposite roles. Your problems are a special opportunity for you to learn and for me to learn. We are not cut from different cloths, but rather from the same cloth.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“The goal is not to “fix” people but rather to empower them. What the psychological flexibility model provides is a characterization of key features that can be changed, but it does not specify how to link history to those features, nor precisely how to intervene in a step-by-step fashion.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“Vision without action is a daydream; action without vision is a nightmare.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“I begin to experience myself as a conscious human being at the precise point at which I begin to experience you as a conscious human being. I see from a perspective only because I also see that you see from a perspective. Consciousness is shared. Moreover, you cannot be fully conscious here and now without sensing your interconnection with others in other places and other times. Consciousness expands across times, places, and persons. In the deepest sense, consciousness itself contains the psychological quality that we are conscious—timelessly and everywhere.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“Deictic framing can be successfully taught, however, and when it is, perspective-taking and theory-of-mind skills improve”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“These skills involve consciously experiencing feelings as feelings, thoughts as thoughts, memories as memories, and so on.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“People whose cognitions fuse are likely to ignore direct experience and become relatively oblivious to environmental influences.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“The problem is that we are not trained to discriminate when the mind is useful and when it is not, and we have not developed the skills to shift out of a fused problem-solving mode of mind into a descriptively engaged mode of mind.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“You cannot be a good ACT therapist if you take words to be right, correct, and true rather than asking “How effectual are they?”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“The Dilemma
of Human Suffering Nothing external ensures freedom from suffering. Even when we human beings possess all the things we typically use to gauge external success—great looks, loving parents, terrific children, financial security, a caring spouse—it may not be enough. Humans can be warm, well fed, dry, physically well—and still be miserable. Humans can enjoy forms of excitement and entertainment unknown in the nonhuman world and out of reach for all but a fraction of the population—high-definition TVs, sports cars, exotic trips to the Caribbean—and still be in excruciating psychological pain.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“As human beings increasingly look inward, life begins to seem more like a problem to be solved than a process to be fully experienced.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“For example, the client who values education might be asked, “What if you received the education, but no one knew. Would that still be of importance?”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“Comparison and Evaluation. Listen for excessive comparison and evaluation in the client’s speech, as contrasted with description. The clinician can probe the strength of such patterns of fusion by asking the client to simply describe the troublesome situation and what it evokes without injecting evaluations. Clients with high levels of fusion may not be able respond at all or may quickly lapse, injecting personal evaluations into the ongoing narrative.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“To what extent does the client live in a world of “musts” and “shoulds” and “can’ts”? To what extent does the client live in a world of well-rehearsed excuses for why things are as they are—a world in which change is either impossible or for a time other than right now?”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“The classic self-problem seen in clinical settings is fusion with the content of verbal self-knowledge—such as “I am depressed” where “depressed” has the quality of a personal identity. This aspect of self—the conceptualized self—can be “positive” or “negative” or both, but its most dominant features are that it is rigid, evaluative, and evocative.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“Psychological flexibility can be defined as contacting the present moment as a conscious human being, fully and without needless defense—as it is and not as what it says it is—and persisting with or changing a behavior in the service of chosen values.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“Conscious content now is known in the context of a consistent locus or point of view that can integrate that knowledge. Infantile amnesia begins to drop away. Events are held in memory in a verbal temporal order. A conscious person shows up—not as the object of reflection but as a perspective from which knowing can occur.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“The key verbal relations in the development of perspective taking are “deictic,” which means “by demonstration.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“Hmmm. Let’s do this and see what happens. Say out loud, ‘I can’t stand up or I will have a panic attack,’ and then while doing that, slowly stand up”).”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“Once there is a verbally stated goal, however, we can assess the degree to which analytic practices help us achieve it. This option allows successful working toward a goal to function as a useful guide for science.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“It is based on a pragmatic philosophy of science called functional contextualism”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“The constructive alternative to fusion is defusion, and the preferred alternative to experiential avoidance is acceptance.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“In the ACT approach, a goal of healthy living is not so much to feel good as to feel good. It is psychologically healthy to have unpleasant thoughts and feelings as well as pleasant ones, and doing so gives us full access to the richness of our unique personal histories”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“Minds are great when it comes to inventing new devices, constructing business plans, or organizing daily schedules. But, by themselves, minds are far less useful in learning to be present, learning to love, or discovering how best to carry the complexities of a personal history. Verbal knowledge is not the only kind of knowledge there is. We must learn to use our analytical and evaluative skills when doing so promotes workability and to use other forms of knowledge when they best serve our interests. In effect, the ultimate goal of ACT is to teach clients to make such distinctions in the service of promoting a more workable life.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change