Approach · ACT
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
A great deal of energy goes into a fight nobody can win: the fight against feeling what you already feel. You are anxious, so you fight being anxious. You are grieving, so you argue with yourself about still grieving. ACT takes the position that the first feeling is not the problem to be solved, and that the effort spent wrestling it is what has narrowed your life. So we stop wrestling, and we look at what you would be doing with your week if that effort were returned to you.
Telehealth only, by secure video or audio, for people physically located in California. Laurie, LMFT.
What this looks like with me
We begin with an honest inventory of what you have already tried, because you have tried a lot. Distraction, reasoning with yourself, avoiding the situation, over-preparing, staying busy, drinking a little more than you would like to say. I am not going to add these to a list of your failings. I want to know what each one bought you in the short term and what it has cost over the years, because that ledger is usually the most persuasive thing in the room, and you are the one who reads it out.
Then we get some daylight between you and your thinking. When a sentence like 'I am going to make a fool of myself' shows up, you do not currently experience it as a sentence. You experience it as a forecast. We practice hearing it as words arriving: saying it slowly, noticing where you feel it, watching it come and go while you stay put. This sounds like a small trick and is not. The distance between having a thought and being run by it is where nearly all your available room is.
Alongside that we do the values work, and this is the part people find unexpectedly emotional. Not goals, which have an end point and a scoreboard. Directions: the kind of parent you want to have been, the sort of friend you mean to be, the honesty you want in a marriage, what you want your relationship to your own life and to God or Source or whatever name you use to be — and if none of that language is yours, we simply use the words that are. I do not import my framework into your life.
Then it gets specific and small. One action this week that goes in the direction you named, chosen so that it is possible with the anxiety still present rather than after it goes. We come back and look at what happened without either of us needing it to be a success story.
The pain is the first thing. The fight with the pain is the second, and it is the larger one.
A thought is something you are having, not an instruction you were issued.
Where I find this fits
A life that has gradually narrowed
Avoidance rarely arrives as a decision. It accumulates: one thing declined, then another, until the map of where you go is much smaller than it was. We widen it deliberately and in order, starting with what you actually care about rather than with what frightens you least.
Anxiety that has become the main project
When managing anxiety has quietly become the organizing principle of a week, the management is costing more than the anxiety. We change the aim from feeling less to living wider.
Chronic pain, illness and aging
Some circumstances do not resolve, and pretending otherwise is not therapy. Learning to hold what cannot be changed while still choosing a direction is real work, and I do a good deal of it with seniors.
Losing track of what you wanted
Common after long caregiving, a long marriage, or many years of putting your own preferences last. We reconstruct your values from evidence rather than trying to conjure them out of nothing.
Decisions that will not resolve
Stay or leave. Retire or keep working. Some decisions cannot be reasoned to a clean answer, and the endless deliberation is itself a way of not feeling the loss inherent in either choice.
How we would work
We start with a free 20-minute consult by phone, text or video. You describe what has narrowed and what you want back, and I tell you honestly whether I am the right fit for it.
If we go ahead, sessions are weekly by secure video or audio. I do not run this as a curriculum with worksheets. It moves alongside the rest of what I do: mindfulness to build the noticing this depends on, somatic work when your body reaches alarm before your thinking does, Internal Family Systems when a part of you has good reasons to refuse the new direction, and my own Positive Re-Narrative and Repatterning when the avoidance is one step in a much older loop.
I work with adults, seniors, couples and families. I do not treat bipolar disorder or schizophrenia.
- An honest ledger of what avoidance has cost and bought
- Practicing the difference between having a thought and obeying it
- Naming values as directions rather than goals
- One small committed action a week, possible with the feeling still present
- Reviewing what happened without needing it to have gone well
- Working within your own spiritual or secular framework, never mine
Questions people ask about this approach
- Does acceptance mean I have to be fine with what happened?
- No, and this is the word that causes the most trouble, so let me be exact about it. Acceptance here does not mean approving, excusing, or deciding it was for the best. It means stopping the second fight. There is the original pain, and then there is the enormous effort of arguing with the fact that you feel it. The first one is unavoidable. The second one is where most of the exhaustion lives, and it is the one we can actually put down.
- How do I find my values if I have no idea what I want anymore?
- Almost everyone who has been in a long caregiving season, a long marriage, or a long stretch of just coping says this. We do not start with a questionnaire. We start with evidence: what you resent, because resentment usually marks a value being stepped on; what you envy, which is often a value in disguise; what you keep returning to when there is no one to impress. Those are far more reliable than trying to introspect an answer out of a blank.
- Is this just being told to do things anyway?
- That would be advice, and you can get advice for free. The part that makes a difference is what happens right before the doing: noticing the exact thought that stops you, seeing it as a thought rather than as an instruction, and finding that the room for movement is already there. Without that, telling someone to act despite fear is just louder pressure, and most of the people I see have applied plenty of pressure to themselves already.
- Can this work alongside grief?
- It fits grief better than people expect, and grief is my primary specialty. Nothing in this approach asks you to stop grieving or to feel less; that would be both cruel and useless. What it offers is a way to carry the sorrow and still make choices in your actual week, so that the loss does not gradually shrink your life down to its own size. You can be in real grief and still plant the garden. Both are true at once.
Room for the feeling, and movement anyway
If your life has quietly gotten smaller while you managed something difficult, that is worth an hour of honest conversation. Text or email and we will find a time to talk. Telehealth only, by secure video or audio, for people physically located in California. Laurie, LMFT.