Hello Friends!

ACT Has 6 Core Processes in what is lightheartedly called The Act Hexaflex:

• Contact with the present moment: Be Here Now
• Defusion: watch your thinking
• I’m Acceptance: open up
• Self-as-context: the noticing self
• Values: know what matters
• Committed Action: do what it takes

Contact with the Present Moment

• Flexibility paying attention to our experience in this moment: narrowing, broadening, shifting, or sustaining your focus, depending on what’s most useful
• May involve consciously paying attention to the physical world around us or the psychological world around us, or both at the same time, connecting with and engaging in our experience

Defusion

• Learning to “step back”and separate or detach from our thoughts, images, and memories
• We step back and watch our thinking instead of getting tangled up in it; we see our thoughts for what they are — nothing more or less than words or pictures We hold them lightly instead of clutching them tightly; we allow them to guide us, but not to dominate us

Acceptance

• Opening up and making room for unwanted private experiences: thoughts, feelings, emotions, memories, urges, images, impulses, and sensations
• Instead of fighting them, resisting them, running from them, we open up and make room for them
• Allow them to freely flow through us — to come and stay and go as they choose, int heir own good time

Self-As-Context

• There are two distinct elements to the mind: a part that thinks and a part that notices
• When we talk about “the mind”, we mean that part of us that is thinking — generating thoughts, beliefs, memories, judgments, fantasies, plans, and so no
• We don’t usually mean “the part that notices” : that aspect of us that is aware of whatever we’re thinking, feeling, sensing or doing in any moment

Values

• Desired qualities of physical or psychological action; in other words the4y describe how we want to behave on an ongoing basis

Committed Action

• Taking effective action, guided by our values; this includes both physical action and psychological action
• It’s all well and good to know our values but it’s only though action that life becomes rich, full and meaningful
• As we take this action, a wide range of thoughts and feelings will show up, some of them pleasurable and others very painful
• Committed action is “doing what it takes” to live by our values, even when that brings us difficult thoughts and feelings
• Involves goal setting, action planning, problem solving, skills training, behavioral activation and exposure; laso includes learning and applying any skill that enhances and enriches life — from negotiation, communication, and assertiveness skills to self-soothing, crisis-coping, and mindfulness skills