Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is an evidence-based approach that helps you stop fighting your own mental experience and start building a life driven by what actually matters to you. Available at Des Moines Mental Health Center. Same-week appointments. Medicaid and all major insurances accepted.
WHAT ACT IS
Where CBT focuses on changing the content of thoughts, ACT focuses on changing your relationship to them. The goal is not to think more positively. It is to stop letting thoughts and feelings dictate your behavior.
ACT uses mindfulness skills, values clarification, and psychological flexibility techniques to help you respond to difficult internal experiences without being controlled by them. For a lot of people, this is the piece that was missing from earlier therapy work.
The name captures the approach. Acceptance of what cannot be controlled. Commitment to action in the direction of what matters. Those two things together produce movement even when circumstances have not changed.
THE SIX CORE PROCESSES
Making room for difficult thoughts and feelings rather than fighting them. Resistance is often what makes them louder.
Learning to observe thoughts as thoughts rather than facts. A thought that says 'I am a failure' is not evidence. ACT teaches you to hold it differently.
Bringing attention to what is actually happening right now rather than replaying the past or rehearsing the future.
Getting clear on what actually matters to you, separate from what anxiety, depression, or other people tell you should matter.
Building patterns of behavior that move toward your values even when discomfort shows up. This is where the work becomes concrete.
Developing a stable sense of yourself that is not defined by any particular thought, feeling, or experience. The observer behind the content.
WHO ACT IS FOR
Anxiety and the avoidance behavior that sustains it
Depression and the withdrawal that deepens it
Chronic pain and health-related distress
Work stress, burnout, and perfectionism
Grief and loss
Substance use and the psychological patterns around it
Life transitions and identity questions
Anyone who has tried other therapy and felt like something was still missing
