Do you set high standards for yourself? Do you feel constant pressure to live up to perceived expectations? Or are you fed up with worrying so much and not always feeling happy? Perhaps fear or insecurity is holding you back from pursuing your dreams. Or perhaps you’re not even entirely sure what you’d really like out of life… and you put off important decisions for as long as possible.
Do you recognise yourself in this? If so, this ACT group therapy might be just the thing for you.
Whereas many forms of therapy are based on the idea that you must be completely free of symptoms to be happy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) argues that having negative thoughts and feelings is part of life. After all, you can’t prevent or cure everything. So it’s much more normal than we think to feel down, anxious or helpless at times.
ACT helps you to step back from your thoughts and deal with them more flexibly. Often, we want to get rid of our thoughts and difficult feelings and try, in vain, to control or suppress them. With ACT, you learn to deal with them in a different way – namely, in a kinder way. ACT pulls you out of that spiral of thoughts and brings you back to the here and now.
ACT focuses on breaking patterns or overcoming mental barriers, such as situations you’d rather avoid or that one pitfall you keep falling into time and time again. It also helps you learn to let go of certain things that, for various reasons, you keep doing, but which actually cause you more discomfort than pleasure. The ACT group focuses on change and taking action. Participants in this group are expected to adopt an active attitude and be willing to step outside their comfort zone, however uncomfortable that may sometimes be. It’s not just about thinking about it and talking about it, but actually doing things differently, to experience how things can be done differently.