The Freedom Room offers both CBT and ACT Therapy as part of the ongoing work we do with our clients to help with alcohol and drug misuse.
Cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) is a talking therapy commonly used to help people with a wide range of mental health challenges. CBT is based on the idea that how we think (cognition), how we feel (emotion) and how we act (behaviour) all interact together.
Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) focuses on helping clients to behave more consistently with their own values and apply mindfulness and acceptance skills to their responses to uncontrollable experiences.
What is Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy?
Cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) is a psychological treatment proven effective for a range of issues, including depression, anxiety, drug and alcohol use, marital problems, eating disorders, and severe mental illness. Numerous research studies suggest that CBT leads to significant improvement in functioning and quality of life. Research shows that CBT is as effective as, or more effective than, other therapies or psychiatric medications.
There has been advances in CBT, driven by both research and clinical practice. Scientific evidence backs CBT, demonstrating that its methods produce real change. In this manner, CBT differs from many other forms of psychological treatment.
CBT is based on several core principles, including:
- Psychological problems are based, in part, on faulty or unhelpful ways of thinking.
- Psychological problems are based, in part, on learned patterns of unhelpful behavior.
- People with psychological problems can learn better coping strategies, reducing symptoms and improving their lives.
CBT treatment usually involves efforts to change thinking patterns. These strategies might include:
- Learning to recognize one’s distortions in thinking that are creating problems, and then to reevaluate them in light of reality.
- Gaining a better understanding of the behavior and motivation of others.
- Using problem-solving skills to cope with difficult situations.
- Learning to develop a greater sense of confidence in one’s own abilities.
How it works
CBT treatment also usually involves efforts to change behavioural patterns. These strategies might include:
- Facing one’s fears instead of avoiding them.
- Using role playing to prepare for potentially problematic interactions with others.
- Learning to calm one’s mind and relax one’s body.
Not all CBT will use all of these strategies. Rather, the psychologist and patient/client work together, in a collaborative fashion. This helps to develop an understanding of the problem and to develop a treatment strategy.
CBT places an emphasis on helping individuals learn to be their own therapists. Through in-session exercises and “homework” tasks, patients/clients develop coping skills. This allows them to learn to change their own thinking, problematic emotions, and behaviour.
CBT therapists emphasize what is going on in the person’s current life, rather than what has led to their difficulties. Although a certain amount of information about one’s history is needed, the focus primarily remains on moving forward. In time this will help to develop more effective ways of coping with life.
What is Acceptance-Commitment Therapy (ACT)?
Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) teaches mindfulness skills to help individuals live and behave in ways consistent with personal values while developing psychological flexibility.
Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) is an action-oriented approach to psychotherapy. It stems from traditional behaviour therapy and cognitive behavioural therapy. Clients learn to stop avoiding, denying, and struggling with their inner emotions. Instead they learn to accept these feelings as appropriate responses to situations that shouldn’t prevent them from moving forward in life. With this understanding, clients begin to accept their issues and hardships. This allows them to commit to making necessary changes in their behaviour, regardless of what is going on in their lives.
What to Expect
Working with us, you’ll learn to listen to your self-talk, especially regarding traumatic events, relationships, physical limitations, or other issues. You can then decide if an issue needs action or acceptance while working on behavioural changes to improve it. Reflecting on past struggles helps the Recovery Coach break unhelpful thought patterns and behaviours. Once you accept your current issues, you make a commitment to stop fighting your past and your emotions. Instead, start practising more confident and optimistic behaviour, based on your personal values and goals.
How It Works
The theory behind ACT is that it is not only ineffective but often counterproductive, to try to control painful emotions or psychological experiences, because suppression of these feelings ultimately leads to more distress. ACT adopts the view that there are valid alternatives to trying to change the way you think, and these include mindful behaviour, attention to personal values, and commitment to action. By taking steps to change their behaviour while, at the same time, learning to accept their psychological experiences, clients can eventually change their attitude and emotional state.
Psychological flexibility, the main goal of ACT, typically comes about through several core processes.
- Developing creative hopelessness involves exploring past attempts at solving or getting away from those difficulties bringing an individual to therapy. Through recognition of the workability or lack of workability of these attempts, ACT creates opportunity for individuals to act in a manner more consistent with what is most important to them.
- Accepting one’s emotional experience is described as the process of learning to experience the range of human emotions with a kind, open, and accepting perspective.
- Choosing valued life directions is the process of defining what is most important in life and clarifying how one wishes to live life.
- Taking action may refer to one’s commitment to make changes and engage in behaviors moving one in the direction of what is most valued.
These processes are overlapping and interconnected, not separate. The person identifies and participates in these experiences during sessions throughout treatment. Psychological flexibility is simply “the ability to be present, open up, and do what matters. These processes overlap and are interconnected, not separate.”
Mindfulness and ACT
Mindfulness is described as maintaining contact with the present moment rather than drifting off into automatic pilot. Practicing mindfulness helps an individual connect with the observing self, which is aware of but separate from the thinking self. These techniques help people to increase awareness of each of the five senses as well as their thoughts and emotions. ACT does not attempt to directly change or stop unwanted thoughts or feelings but instead encourages people to develop a new and compassionate relationship with those experiences.
Mindfulness also increases an individual’s ability to detach from thoughts. Challenges related to painful feelings, urges, or situations are often first reduced and then eventually accepted. Acceptance is the ability to allow internal and external experience to occur instead of fighting or avoiding the experience. If someone thinks, “I’m a terrible person,” that person might be asked to instead say, “I am having the thought that I’m a terrible person.” This effectively separates the person from the cognition, thereby stripping it of its negative charge.
When people feel anxiety, they are encouraged to acknowledge it, breathe into it, and let it be without exaggerating or minimizing.