Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

When this semester started, I was looking at some of the bulletin boards at school and out of everything that was there, my interest was piqued by a regular sized, yellow sheet offering some training. I'd heard about the type of therapy before, but thought it sounded kind of silly. I kept seeing that page, and the more I saw it, the more curious I got. I didn't take the training, but since then, I've been on a journey to learn more about the therapy, and so here I am.

The therapy, obviously, is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT (pronounced as the word, not saying the letters out loud), and it actually has a lot more backing than I originally thought. My wife bought me the first book, which was A CBT-Practitioner's Guide to ACT: How to Bridge the Gap Between Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which was a good introduction, as I'm familiar with CBT.

Lately, I've been reading Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: An Experiential Approach to Behavior Change, which really gets into the theoretical backing, as well as the application. I can definitely see integrating this into my work, if not having this lead my practice.

So yeah, while I missed out on the training, I'm looking for the next time the training comes around, or where I have to go to take it. In the meantime, I'm integrating some of my book learning with my work with clients.

So, does anyone have any experience with, or even impression of ACT? I'd love to hear your stories, if you do...

Letting go of perfection

First off, my practicum is going well. I'm seeing lots of clients and loving it. I have good supervision, and an even better cohort. We're very supportive of each other in so many ways.

One of the difficulties that I'm having is simply letting go of some things. I think about my clients way too much. There's this saying that's bandied about my agency a lot, and it's "Don't work harder than the client." I'm struggling with it a bit in that I take on so much responsibility...way too much. I'm researching, thinking, pondering and it's probably leading to burnout. I have to let go of this perfectionism of having to do all the right things all the time, and trust myself and the process...and the clients!

I've been catching myself and bringing myself back to the moment a lot lately. My mind will wander to a certain client or two, and I'll take a deep breath (well, to be honest, after admonishing myself for letting my mind go to this...shame, shame), and then come back to the present. If this means coming back to the breath, so be it! If it means distraction, so be it.

My mantra is "learning to live is learning to let go"...

Highest Stress for the Lowest Pay

Consumerist had a recent post about this topic. I opened the article already knowing the answer to which one was #1. Anyone else have a guess? ;)

Jobs With The Highest Stress For The Lowest Pay

Simple yet Complex

When we get an intake at my agency, the person is asked to describe the problem that they want to work on, but they don't give too much detail. When we practicum students get the intake, this is what where we start. I've learned to look at those plain old intake forms that show up in my box as a possible trip down Alice's rabbit hole, rather than the three sheets of paper that they are.

When the form says something really vague, what I've seen so far is that these are generally the most complex and interwoven. They look a lot like that mandala on the left. There are many elements that you won't see at first, and they're all interconnected in a way so that when you leave the room, your head will be spinning. You will walk down that hall with a sense of awe that this person that you just talked to for an hour can even get out of bed.

And that's what it is. A sense of awe that I have. These people, that are reaching out for help, possibly for the first time, sometimes for the 100th time, are strong and resilient and working against so many factors that affect their lives every day. And they just keep going.

I ask my clients what they hope to gain from therapy. So now I ask myself what I want from this post. Haha, I don't know! I look at that mandala above and consider how to make sense of it. The swoops and lines and those little bits of empty space. The divorce, the anger, the sadness and then those little bits of peace and joy.

How exactly does it all work?