It’s estimated that nearly half of adolescents have struggled with some type of mental health challenge in their lives, according to the U.S. Office of Population Affairs. While you may think of therapy as a one-size-fits-all approach, there are a number of different methods that your child’s therapist may employ. 

One type of therapy is called acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). ACT is an approach to psychotherapy that focuses on accepting negative thoughts, feelings or circumstances rather than avoiding or denying them. This approach to therapy is all about mindfulness and staying focused in the present moment to improve mental health. We’ll explain how ACT works, its core principles and the goals of this form of psychotherapy for your child. 

What’s acceptance and commitment therapy used for?

Different mental health conditions may require different therapy solutions. However, ACT is a type of therapy that can have a positive impact on a number of different kinds of mental health challenges, such as:

• Anxiety disorders
• Chronic pain
• Depression
• Eating disorders
• Obsessive-compulsive disorder
• Phobias
• Post-traumatic stress disorder
• Psychosis
• Stress regulation
• Substance use disorder
• Academic stress

If your child has one of the above conditions, ACT may be the right therapy option for them. It’s also a common practice for therapists to use multiple types of psychotherapy to best address specific challenges.

What’s the goal of acceptance and commitment therapy?

The idea behind ACT is for patients to learn to listen to how they think and talk about their experiences and challenges, figure out how to accept them, and begin to move forward. 

Your child can’t always control what they experience, but they can learn how to control their response to those situations. This is sometimes known as psychological flexibility. When your child has the ability to open up emotionally and adapt their thoughts and behaviors, it becomes easier to make progress even if their circumstances don’t change.

What are the core principles of acceptance and commitment therapy?

When it comes to implementing ACT, there are six core principles to keep in mind. Your child’s therapist will walk through these and help them learn how to use the principles in their own life:

• Defusion — Cognitive defusion means your child can separate or distance themselves from distressing thoughts and experiences. This can help reduce the harmful effects these experiences may cause. Some techniques that may help them practice cognitive defusion include:

• Observing their thoughts without judgment
• Envisioning the thoughts drifting away as if on a cloud
• Acknowledging their automatic response to these thoughts and choosing to change it

Changing an adolescent’s thought and behavior patterns takes time, but cognitive defusion can help them achieve this.

• Acceptance — Acceptance is all about acknowledging and honoring the thoughts, emotions and behaviors that are bothering a person rather than trying to change or deny them. This is an active process where your child can consciously acknowledge these thoughts so that they can let them go. Things that can help them better understand acknowledgment and acceptance in this context include:

• Exploring self-compassion
• Nonjudgmental meditation
• Emotional exposure
• Using positive or kind phrases toward themselves and their thoughts
• Learning to look at their emotions or thoughts objectively, also called physicalizing

The goal of acceptance isn’t to force thoughts to change. It’s to create an objective and nonjudgmental awareness and relationship with them.

• Being present — Being present means staying mindful of one’s surroundings and the current moment while observing one’s negative thoughts. This can help your child to shift their attention away from internalizing those thoughts and instead focus on the world around them. The goal of being present is to help them build greater awareness of the present rather than getting sucked into negative thoughts, memories and feelings.

• Self as the observer — This means a person can look at their negative thoughts and separate them from themselves and their identity. The idea behind this exercise is to remind people that they are more than their:

• Thoughts
• Feelings
• Experiences

This is another way that your child can make space for and acknowledge their thoughts and feelings without getting bogged down by them.

• Values — This principle means actively choosing personal values and working to live in accordance with them. Your child’s instinctual thoughts and feelings do not have to dictate the values and actions that they choose to live by.

• Committed action — The goal of this principle is for your child to now take the thoughts and values that they have chosen and put them into action by changing behaviors. They can now take concrete steps to implement changes according to their new goals. This may involve exposing themselves to challenging situations or thoughts in order to progress toward living out their values system.

It may take your child time to incorporate these six principles into their daily life. The goal of ACT is to achieve long-term progress toward a better mindset and actions that align with who they want to be.

At Embrace U, our licensed clinical experts help adolescents aged 10 to 18 navigate their mental health challenges. We offer a complete program that combines a number of different psychotherapy methods to help your child take control of their mental health. 

When you’re ready to help your child gain control over their mental health challenges, contact our team today for more information or to schedule an initial appointment.