William’s Reviews > Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: An Experiential Approach to Behavior Change > Status Update

Moving from phase 1 to phase 2. Phase 1 challenges the client’s agenda to control (unsuccessfully) their inner experiences usually by avoiding triggers or suppressing thoughts and emotions. Phase 2 moves to teaching a client to be willing to experience difficult thoughts and feelings and then to break apart the hold that language (and thought) has had on the client. The writing has become densely academic again.

The author spends considerable time suggesting collaboratively challenging ineffective natural client strategies for change through a process he calls creative hopelessness (vs destructive hopelessness). Creative hopelessness helps a client free up energy from destructive coping (attempts to avoid, numb or eliminate unwanted feelings, for example), and creates space for strategies that work.

This last ten pages outlined the main approach of ACT and spent considerable time talking about how to help a client evaluate their current model for change to answer the practical question: is it working? Hayes argues that many people engage in types of problem solving with thought or emotional distress that are doomed to fail—and encourages clients to track the success of the methods they are using.

The author is making a compelling argument that the mind that does language is the mind capable of creating suffering through the same mechanisms that allow language to develop. And that the same strategies that lead a person to successfully navigate problems in the external world often produce distress when applied to the inner world. Lots of science and examples from clinical case work. Excellent, but dense.