ABSTRACT

The purpose of this paper is to relate Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (“ACT,” said as one word, not A-C-T) to a Buddhist view of suffering and its amelioration. ACT was developed over the last twenty years from the confluence of behavior analysis, the human potential movement, and experiential psychotherapies. That development work refined the contextualistic philosophy upon which the therapy is based (e.g., Hayes & Brownstein, 1986; Hayes, Hayes, Reese, & Sarbin, 1993), developed a contextual theory of language and cognition (Hayes & Hayes, 1992; see Hayes, Barnes-Holmes, & Roche, 2001, for a book-length treatment), and generated a working account of relevant forms of psychopathology (e.g., Hayes, Wilson, Gifford, Follette, & Strosahl, 1996), as well as developing ACT as a technological approach (Hayes, Strosahl, & Wilson, 1999). Each of these areas will be touched upon in the present paper.