Warning: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

This morning, I took a three-credit Continuing Education seminar on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), and it has ruined my mind for the remainder of the day. It is a therapy of dissociation from the body – how one actually feels – and from the impact of one’s injurious history. It is a therapy of dissociating from our dissociation – “looking at thoughts, rather than from thoughts,”* when thinking itself is likely to be a defense and escape from deeper truth – and living in some disembodied “value” that we must doggedly commit ourselves to. As a theory that fanatically endorses only the cognitive realm and only superficial “I want” intentionality, it must use abstruse terms of smoke: “ACT brings direct contingencies and indirect verbal processes to bear on the experiential establishment of greater psychological flexibility primarily through acceptance, defusion, establishment of a transcendent sense of self, contact with the present moment, values, and building larger and larger patterns of committed action linked to those values.” It numbs one’s mind with cotton like: “Self-as-Context: The sense-of-self that is a consistent perspective from which to observe and accept all changing experiences”; the “ACT question: (1) Given a distinction between you and the stuff you are struggling with and trying to change, (2) are you willing to have that stuff, fully and without defense (3) as that stuff is, and not as what your language says it is, (4) and DO what takes you in the direction (5) of what is vital and meaningful (6) at this time, and in this situation? If the answer is ‘yes,’ that is what builds . . . Psychological Flexibility.” In ACT, you are “distinct” from your struggles, your thoughts, your emotions. This approach’s proponents may not realize you must also be distinct from your values. But then what would be left to you?

It disturbs my reliance on human rationality that PhDs and counselors, researchers and promoters of “empirically based principles” can jump over all historical psychological knowledge, can be so lost in this man-made dimension to believe this garbage. The therapist will see you the way an ideological partisan sees a naïve and wanting soul: empty of substance but for how he can mold you into his ideas – “psychological flexibility,” “commitment,” “behavior change strategies” – which he will frame as your idea. Your pain and confusion will be shoved aside by “mindfulness,” then replaced by a “value” and its henchmen “goals” and the brute-force signed contract to push yourself toward them; depression and suicide, anxiety and identity emptiness be damned.

It’s frightening and lonely, for me, to think that clients are taken away from their true needs for help, are given this absence of care for their real self. Be aware that you will be walking into a scam that is worse than some product bait-and-switch: an existential scam.

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* This and the other quotes are from the seminar’s PowerPoint material.