Why ACT? A love story.

Member-contributed post written by Jessica Goodnight, PhD

I was an insecure 22-year-old working in an OCD research lab when I first learned about ACT. Like many (most?) other mental health professionals I know, my own emotional difficulties were the true source of my initial interest in the field. In the academic medicine environment of a treatment research lab, I learned that it was very inappropriate to say so. I learned, in fact, that admitting such a thing to the wrong person might be the mistake that cost me my entire career.

Many times, I practiced my false answer to the question, "Why do you want to become a psychologist?" It wasn't allowed to be "I want to help people who've suffered like me" or "My entire family tree is a walking DSM." It definitely wasn't allowed to be the full truth: "I've been going to therapy and trying meds since I was 13, and experiencing the inside of my mind still feels like a form of torture. I'm desperate to find answers not just for me, but for my entire family, along with many other people I know and love." So I learned to smile, pretend to think carefully about the question, and offer my rehearsed purely-professional-interest fib.

It felt like a betrayal, to me, to lie about something so sacred - to pretend to agree that my real answer was a bad answer. I still think my real answer is one of the better reasons to be in the field, and anyway, it is almost certainly the most common reason, and encouraging students to hide this fact only prevents them from an honest self-examination of how their own pain might impact the work. But I jumped through the required hoops to get where I needed to go. It made me feel ashamed to do so, but I kept it in, holding the truth inside with a vice-like grip.

Imagine my relief when, in 2009, I came across a video interview called Finding a Career by Way of a Panic Attack by some psychologist I'd never heard of. His name was Dr. Steve Hayes. Without hesitation or shame, he discussed his own history of panic disorder and how it shaped his career. His personal struggle with panic hadn't just been a barrier in his way; it was his source of inspiration for developing a treatment called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. I had never heard of ACT before, and I was riveted.

Then he said this.

"If [feelings are] your enemy, then your history is your enemy. If sensations are your enemy, your body is your enemy. And if memory is your enemy, you'd better have a way of controlling your mind in such a way that you never are reminded of things that are painful from the past. Well, there is no such thing like that that's healthy."

I was stunned. I had whole-body chills. It was as if a huge Gordian Knot of suffering in my mind had suddenly been cut in half. I had done everything I'd ever been told to do in my mental health journey. I did every worksheet and exercise I was ever assigned. Not a bit of it had ever helped me, and just like that - I knew why. I was treating my pain like an enemy.

I voraciously studied ACT on my own for the next two years. I read every book I could get my hands on and participated in the ACT for the Public listserv, where Steve Hayes often generously answered questions of laypeople applying ACT in their lives. I found myself an ACT therapist and dove into the work. I took an extra year to apply to graduate school to prepare myself to get in to programs where I could study ACT.

Anyone who knew me at the time would tell you: ACT was the only thing I could talk about. It appealed deeply to both the scientist and the poet in me. I needed both. Growing up in a problematically religious home, I had seen firsthand how a beautiful, spiritually resonant idea could be twisted to manipulate entire communities - I could not lose the protection of the scientific lens. But a therapy built on logic and reason runs the risk of becoming heartless, treating human beings as disembodied machines instead of miraculous, living creatures. I could not lose the poetry of profound, embodied emotional experience.

ACT, in my experience, held both, losing neither in the integration. The underlying philosophy was coherent from the bottom to the top. Reading about functional contextualism and ACT felt like listening to a chorus in perfect harmony. The science was careful and precise, and using this precision, it had built a solid bridge from basic behavioral science to liberating spiritual and existential principles. It honored every human's right to discover what truly matters to them, beyond rules, bigotry, and cultural expectations - beyond everything they had been told they were supposed to value - with a solid net of science to catch them if they fell into an ideological trap. The model's values-based core felt to me as if the late poet Mary Oliver was whispering in my ear, encouraging me to let the soft animal of my body love what it loves. The model was, as ACT expert Dr. Kelly Wilson often says, "behaviorism with Man's Search for Meaning in its back pocket." I didn't just find the model inspiring and useful. I fell in love.

I was lucky to attend the first ACT bootcamp in 2012, and to be supervised and mentored for all of graduate school by Dr. Aki Masuda, one of Steve Hayes' former students. I learned ACT as a model to live and breathe, not a cookbook with prescribed recipes with specific ingredients. In the telephone game of ACT training over time, I have at times seen the heart of the model get lost. It's easy to think ACT is a set of prescribed metaphors and techniques, a protocol to learn and follow to the letter, if you learn the framework from someone who has never practiced and embodied ACT in their own lives. In behavioral science, we know very well that intellectual knowing does not offer the transformation that experiential learning does. You could read several mountains of books describing how to swim, and it wouldn't make you less likely to sink in the deep end. I am grateful that my training in ACT got me into the water and kept me there. I'm sure I would be sinking without it.

It was important to me that my love for ACT did not ossify into a cult-like, blind logic. I found a tremendous freedom using ACT in my own life, which offered a boon to me in the work but also a massive blind spot. To do justice to this sacred work, I needed to take a good look in the places I couldn't see from inside the model that transformed me. Luckily, unlike cults, the ACT community does not expect perfect allegiance. I have never felt a barrier in stretching my perspective to explore new ideas and techniques, from DBT to Inner Relationship Focusing to psychoanalytic theory. Even traditional CBT, which did me so wrong in my personal mental health journey, found a (modified) place in my clinical repertoire. Any perspective that held water could easily be incorporated into the organizing frame of a contextual behavioral lens. Though I journeyed far, ACT never constricted me. Like a palm tree, evolved to bend without breaking, its shape can flex to contain most any effective intervention.

Why ACT? Because it makes space for the complexity of the human experience. Being a therapist can so often feel like being lost in the wilderness with a client who can't even tell you where their home is. ACT does not presume that any therapy can offer a map to the intimate, deeply personal lands our clients are navigating. Instead, it offers a compass - one that lives inside the client’s deeply held values. It positions the therapist not as an infallible expert who has it all figured out, but as a fellow traveler navigating the same wilderness.

Why ACT? Because ACT offers both a model and a community where I belong as I am. There is no part of me I must hold back in a vice-like grip to be welcome in ACBS. I am permitted to have my own thoughts, to grow and change, to try and fail and try again, without ever having to pretend to be anything other than a human being who found her way home.

Jessica Goodnight, PhD is a clinical psychologist, trauma specialist, and owner of the group practice Anxiety and Trauma Clinic of Atlanta. She is an affiliate coordinator for ACBS GA.

*Note. Members of ACBS GA are invited to contribute posts to our community blog. If you would like to write a post for us, please submit your idea here for consideration.