Using acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT)

Join IOCDF National Ambassador Ethan Smith and panelists Jesse Crosby, PhD, Mike Twohig, PhD, and Patricia Zurita Ona, PsyD to talk about how to use acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) skills in your everyday life. Bring questions!

[vitalitahealthnutritionand]

Great introduction to ACT approach for OCD, found it very helpful.

[CYV]

Enjoyed the video. Trying to learn more about ACT and how to implement it during those tough moments. Found it helpful.

[elizabethschrimpf]

I've been using ACT for a while but am rather new to working with OCD; this has been very helpful. Thank you for making it public!

[johnfourteensix]

All great info. Minute 32:30+, Ethan’s experience and Mike’s follow-up, pure gold!

[Sadiq]

Excellent efforts Ethan n Team...Go Ahead with ur Great Work...thanx a lot.

[GrandmothersGarden]

The question about OCD saying you wont' get better - it's called Meta OCD if you want to look up exposures and learn about the domain. Often it's the last domain in treatment - "What if all I'm doing doesn't work?"

[bettina_s]

ACT to me is very simmilar to ERP with mindfullness. Cause in ACT you also have to face your fears but while being aware why and for what. So yeah..it's a useful life style for any OCD sufferer.

[DiggsTheParadox]

thanks for the important work and advocacy!

[ajmarr]

ACT is right if you go a bit ‘Radical’!

Acceptance and Commitment therapy has been validated mainly through correlational studies between groups that use ACT and those that don’t, or ‘between group’ designs, that unfortunately leave a lot of room for debate for the relative efficacy of alternative therapies such as CBT and other talk therapies. Here is a validation from a ‘within’ subject design (mapping behavior to actual brain processes) that maps the concepts of acceptance and commitment to bio-behavioral events, or a radical behaviorism. It does not engage the complex syntactic structures of relational frame theory, and is therefore quite simple.

A Commitment to Values works, but best while in a resting or relaxed state. Here is why.

Positivity Simplified
Persistent positive or meaningful thinking in a resting state will increase pleasure and arousal, and avoid negative ideation that elicits opposing emotional states.

Positivity Explained
Any relaxation protocol from eyes closed rest to mindfulness is pleasurable, due to the release of endogenous opioids. If concurrent persistent positive or meaningful ideation occurs (meaning is defined as thinking of or doing actions that have branching novel positive implications, or virtual positive act-outcome contingencies), this induces a feeling of arousal as mediated by dopamine systems. Dopamine and opioid systems are synergistic, or when activated simultaneously reciprocally stimulate each other, causing feelings of greater pleasure and arousal, or ecstatic states. This explains why ‘loving kindness’ meditation, savoring, peak, or flow experiences that have rest as an entailment ‘feel’ different from resting states, yet nonetheless represent unremarkable and simple neural processes that can be explained and replicated with ease by anyone.

An Aside on ACT
Ironically, this procedure may be termed ‘relaxation and commitment’ in contrast to ‘acceptance and commitment’, as relaxation protocols by design involve the avoidance of negative ideation or an ‘acceptance’ of the status quo. The difference is that the former maps response contingencies to observable neurological events, while the latter is derived from metaphorical (e.g. cognitive defusion) cognitive processes that are mapped to a behavior analytic theory of language.


A formal explanation from a neurologically based learning theory or ‘radical behaviorism’ of this technique is provided on pp. 44-51 in a little open-source book on the psychology of rest linked below. (The flow experience is discussed on pp. 81-86.)

The Psychology of Rest, from the International Journal of Stress Management, and from the Journal ‘The Behavior Analyst Today’ by this author

More on Neurologically Grounded Learning Theory- Berridge Lab, University of Michigan
and The Psychology of Incentive Motivation and Affect (for a layman’s version)

[harishk]

I from india I have ocd but I don't have money for treatment I am hopless please help me

[babbypeaches]

I am going into a cpss a certified peer support in training and looking to learn more know dbt also due to working with clients

[thisiseusch]

I really like what you're all doing for the community. One request: would it be possible to invest in proper microphones? Sometimes people sound terrible. For instance most of the time Patricia Zurita Ona sounds like her head is in a fish bowl.