When something bad happens to us, our natural reaction is to reject it.
Whether that means telling ourselves it didn’t happen (a.k.a. denial), or letting it take hold of our lives through negative beliefs, rejecting what is can create a whole host of issues and problems in our lives.
But what if there was a different way?
What if the best way to get through your trauma or struggles was by wholeheartedly accepting them?
Sounds like a crazy—and maybe unappealing—idea, but let’s go with it.
This wild concept is actually a scientifically proven method called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).
ACT is a type of mindfulness-based therapy that focuses on your behavior and the context in which it occurs.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy’s 3 core values are accepting your reactions and being present, choosing a desired direction, and taking action to move in the desired direction.
Utilizing ACT, your therapist will focus on understanding your current problems while also considering your past and present environment and how those things are contributing to your problems.
In order to transform your pain, it’s absolutely vital to feel into and understand it rather than running away, ignoring, or avoiding it.
The goals of ACT are to help you objectively understand what you’re feeling and thinking, according to your values and desired outcomes, while also taking into consideration your past experiences in a way that helps you make peace with them.
Another important goal of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is developing psychological flexibility.
Psychological flexibility is defined simply as the ability to be present with your experience, open up emotionally, and do what matters to you.
We’re so confident in our extraordinary therapists that we guarantee you’ll love your match – or your money back.
At My LA Therapy, our highly-vetted Anxiety experts are selected not only for their clinical acumen but for who they are.
The core principles of ACT are overlapping and interconnected, not separate:
ACT’s core principles are developed through the direct experience of what is most helpful and important to you.
ACT emphasizes the importance of accepting a situation that’s out of your hands such as a personality trait that may be hard to control or an emotion that may take over against our will.
ACT focuses on coming to terms with reality and working with the cards that you’re dealt.
In other words, accepting what is.
This means allowing yourself to feel your feelings or think your thoughts without needing to change or act on them, allowing yourself to be imperfect, and allowing your emotions, feelings, and reactions to just be.
ACT isn’t just about getting rid of your symptoms.
Rather, we focus on changing your relationship with your symptoms, which can lead to powerful shifts.
When we change how we relate to our symptoms rather than simply trying to make them go away, we change our experience of ourselves and our problems.
This creates resiliency.
After all, the more you fight against certain things, the more power and energy you give them.
As the old saying goes, “what you resist, persists.”
Retooling your personal interpretations of events and creating new narratives about your experiences can completely change your life.
So often, we get stuck in a limited way of thinking that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
As we work together to teach you new ways of seeing yourself, others, and your life, you will experience a greater sense of freedom, peace, and vitality.
ACT looks at six interrelated processes: acceptance, defusion, contact with the present moment, self as context, values, and committed action.
Let’s break these skills down for you:
Using these six processes, you will be able to better understand yourself and therefore accomplish your goals and aspirations.
Acceptance does not mean you have to like your experience or current conditions.
Instead, acceptance explores the concept of willingness to experience our feelings “fully and without defense,” whatever those feelings are––pleasant or unpleasant.
Through ACT, we recognize the importance of taking responsibility for what is within our control and accepting that which is not.
Our ACT-trained therapists are ready to help you take empowered action to achieve your goals and discover a greater sense of peace, vitality, and freedom.
Therapy can successfully improve your life by helping you minimize your anxiety, identify and changing underlying thought and behavioral patterns that contribute to your struggles, and provide you with strategies to decrease discomfort while restoring an overall sense of peace.
ACT is an evidence-based, scientifically proven intervention that is demonstrated by research to be effective in addressing a wide range of psychological issues including depression, anxiety, and addiction, among many others.
Learn more about our empirically based therapy modalities by visiting our Methods page.
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I am blown away! I don’t write testimonials, unless I have been extremely moved by something. I was blessed to work with Brooke on a single session, and before this I was in therapy on and off with multiple therapists for the last 20 years of my life. Brooke was able to do more in one session than many years of work with my previous therapist. She has the true gift of great insight and compassion while also getting straight to the heart of your blind spots and unconscious issues in a way that has truly changed my life.
Skyler J.
There are people who are good at their work there are people like Brooke: who are born to do it. I cannot recommend Brooke more highly. I can only imagine where I would be today if I had started working with her years ago. From the beginning of our session, she knew exactly what tools and questions that would work for my particular psychology and my personal experience. No other therapist has been able to do that or anything close.
What I also really appreciate from our session is Brooke's ability to go directly to the source of the issue while also keeping a very gentle and kind energy with me. I felt very seen, understood, and supported. Everything and more that I could have ever asked for from a therapist. I have a severe trauma history and complex issues she was able to immediately identify and help. If she could help me, I know she can help you too.
Taylor E.
You did more in 45 minutes than my last therapist did in a year.
Jamie
With your help, I've finally started to understand that while my vivid imagination often wants to create terrifying monsters under the bed, in a lot of cases those monsters are nothing more than a heap of decidedly less-terrifying laundry I've avoided for too long that just needs to be aired out and put away. Which is definitely a lot easier than monster slaying. Thank you for shedding light in the dark places I was too afraid to face alone.
Morgan B.
I am extremely fortunate to work with Sydney, who is helping me create real internal change. The talent to listen well is Hall of Fame stuff, and she has that. She then follows with questions, strategies that are organic to the moment. I have come to believe that deep, radical, if occasionally deeply painful change ... and, then, healing can happen. I'm just at the lip of that last part - but would not have gotten there, AT ALL, without Sydney
Ric K.
The best therapist ever! Life-changing 🙂
Catherine H.
Right now, the work is changing my life, sometimes in inches, sometimes in miles.
Ric K.
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