ABSTRACT
Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT) helps clients to explore what is actually important to them in life. In some respects, this becomes an existential therapy, asking the big questions. However, sometimes the answers are not big; sometimes they are quiet, small, and personally relevant, but deeply precious. ACT explicitly invites clients to use their values as the guide and take actions in meaningful ways. Where instinctual or automatic learning might suggest these are insurmountable or need to be avoided, ACT offers ways to skilfully respond to these experiences. Experiential avoidance and cognitive fusion are ways in which the automatic responses show up, and they become targets for ACT intervention, where they are unhelpful.
