Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Men: 6 Skills to Stop Overthinking and Start Living
Many men try therapy hoping for real change only to walk away feeling like they talked a lot but didn’t get anywhere. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT – pronounced like the word “act”) offers a different approach built around six practical skills that can help you handle your thoughts and emotions while actually moving your life forward.
Modern psychotherapy includes many different approaches – over 400 – each emphasizing different ideas on why people suffer, skills, and goals. No single counseling approach can work for everyone, which is one reason the field has so many diverse styles, theories, and approaches.
Some approaches, like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), focus on identifying challenging thoughts that may be distorted or unhelpful and the behaviors that result. CBT can be appealing to people who are very analytical and place importance on the mental aspect of the relationship between thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.
Other approaches emphasize emotional awareness, processing, and regulation to help people better understand and express what they feel and how that influences their behaviors. These can help cultivate emotional intelligence, which is something that comes up more in men’s helping spaces these days.
There are also approaches that focus on insight, helping people understand how past experiences and patterns have shaped their present struggles. For some, gaining this insight is what helps them to move forward and make the changes they want to make. This can be especially useful for people who have unrecognized traumas from childhood or early adulthood.
Many men find value in these approaches but, at the same time, some choose to leave therapy because they still feel stuck.
They may understand their problems better but still feel uncertain how to move forward. Others felt like they spent a lot of time analyzing thoughts or emotions when what they really wanted was help changing how they reacted to them. Some men appreciate the chance to talk things out yet also voice frustration when they feel like the talk alone wasn’t helping in their life outside of the therapy office.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy offers an alternative.
Instead of focusing primarily on changing thoughts or eliminating difficult emotions, ACT focuses on helping people respond to those experiences more effectively while taking meaningful action in their lives. Addressing thoughts and gaining better awareness of emotions is still part of the work, but the focus is on how the person responds to those thoughts and feelings when they show up.
This method has been studied and shown to be effective with various mental health challenges such as anxiety, depression, addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), social anxiety, stress, grief, and adjusting to life changes. It also effective in adapting to the effects of chronic pain, illness, or disability.
ACT does this by developing six core skills that promote what mental health professionals call psychological flexibility, which is the ability to engage in the present fully and respond to what shows up with conscious choices aligned to what’s important to you and the person you want to be. The goal of each process isn’t to make thoughts or feelings go away but, rather, increase your ability to handle them as you live a full, rich life.
You can compare the approach ACT uses to weightlifting. Training to squat 300 pounds doesn’t mean you made those 300 pounds lighter – it means you developed your ability to handle those 300 pounds with greater ease.
ACT achieves this by developing the skills of acceptance, cognitive defusion, present focus, self-as-context, clarification of values, and committed action.
Let’s take a look at each one in more detail.
“Acceptance” is often confused with surrender or passivity.
But acceptance is the strength to acknowledge reality without judgment or resistance — freeing you up to focus on doing what’s important to you.
Stop fighting your mind – Acceptance
Acceptance in this approach can be described simply as the willingness to experience uncomfortable thoughts, memories, emotions, and sensations as they arise rather than attempting to suppress or avoid them. This concept is often contrary to what we’re told about things like anxiety, distressing memories, or negative self-talk. Many people believe that happiness and good mental health mean never experiencing distressing thoughts or feelings, or at least having the ability to control them and make them go away.
But a rich, fulfilling life comes with a wide mix of feelings. Knowing the love of a pet means also knowing the pain of losing that pet someday. The joy of children also means experiencing the frustration when they act out or the fear that comes when they go off to their first day of school.
A life full of the things we want to feel and experience naturally means there will also be things we wish we didn’t have to feel or experience.
For men in particular, acceptance can be difficult because we’re often told to fight back, stand our ground, and refuse to accept anything we don’t like. But acceptance doesn’t mean you like the distressing experiences, approve of things that happened to you, or that you surrender. It simply means you acknowledge the reality of your thoughts, your feelings, or your situation so you can unhook from the struggle and do what matters to you.
After all, you can’t change a flat tire if you don’t accept the discomfort of having a flat tire.
You are not your thoughts – Cognitive Defusion
Cognitive defusion involves shifting your perspective to one that looks at your thoughts rather than from your thoughts. When two things are fused, they are usually so joined together that it’s hard to separate one from the other. We often get this way with our thoughts.
How often do you get lost in a memory or so caught up in your inner self-talk that you aren’t fully present in the moment? Have you ever been at a social event but so worried about what people think of you that you didn’t really enjoy yourself? How often do you get so wrapped up in anxious or gloomy thoughts that it colors everything you see and do?
Those are times when you’re fused with your thoughts.
Cognitive defusion, on the other hand, is a process that helps you step back from your thoughts and see them for what they are – words and images in your mind rather than the truth of you or your situation.
Men are often taught to see their minds as vessels for pure objectivity and rational clarity, but nothing could be further from the truth. Our minds are simulators that run all kinds of scenarios to pull from the past and make predictions about the future, but they can be notoriously biased toward assuming all kinds of gloom and doom scenarios and thinking the worst about ourselves.
Treating thoughts, memories, and emotions as objective reality is like walking around with a VR headset on and treating what we see and hear in that headset as real.
Get out of your head and back into the game – Present Focus
I’ll admit I’ve never been much of a sports guy – at least for the classic sports. Martial arts and archery were more my speed. But my grandfather was an athletic coach for much of his life and would often tell me, “Get out of your head and back in the game,” when encouraging me to focus on the present.
“Keep your eye on the ball,” was another favorite of his.
When we get fused with our thoughts and slip on that VR headset mentioned above, we’re often mentally living in the past or future rather than right here and now. People that struggle with anxiety spend a lot of time with their focus on the future and all kinds of predictions. Depression, grief, and struggles with changes in life may focus your thoughts on the past. PTSD often involves a trigger forcibly recalling a past event to make it seem like you are living in that moment even now.
This moment right now, however, is the only moment that is your objective reality. ACT is designed to help you acknowledge what is showing up and defuse from it so that you can put your awareness on the present. Mindfulness tools can help with this by grounding your attention in the here and now.
Some men dismiss mindfulness as something flighty or “woo,” but all it really means is bringing your attention to the present.
When you get out of your head and back in the game, you are being mindful.
You’re more than what your mind tells you – Self-as-Context
Self-as-Context is probably one of the most misunderstood concepts in ACT. The term is pretty vague when you first look at it. What the heck does it even mean?
This process is closely tied to Cognitive Defusion. If defusion is the act of stepping back from your thoughts, Self-as-Context is the place to which you’re stepping back. Other therapies and even philosophies refer to this with terms like the Observing Self, Core Self, Wise Mind, or simply The Self.
It is the part of you that looks at your thoughts rather than from them.
This Observing Self is the part of you that understands you’re wearing a VR headset even when everything you see within that headset seems real. This is a particularly important concept for many men who identify themselves by their roles such as:
· Protector
· Provider
· Business leader
· Father
· Husband/Partner
· Manager
· Owner
When men struggle to live up to these identities, they might identify themselves as:
· A loser
· Hopeless
· A wreck
· An addict
· Imposter
· A failure
This can be further complicated for people from marginalized identities who experience bullying, persecution, exclusion, and labeling with slurs based on their sexuality, gender identity, race, ethnicity, or financial or disability status.
Learning to see yourself from that Observing Self can help you see that none of these are really you. They are things you do, labels you adopt, or labels that have been placed upon you.
What actually matters to you – Values
The last two processes of ACT, values and committed action, are often things worth looking at first. The six processes are sometimes summarized as, “Open up. Be Present. Do what matters.” But it often helps to determine what matters before you start learning to open up and be present.
After all, why would you choose to accept discomfort and be present with it unless you knew it was in the service of something important to you?
This is why I like to take an outcome-oriented approach to counseling. Moving toward things you consider worthwhile often helps give a sense of purpose and meaning when learning to sit with and manage discomfort rather than pushing it away or avoiding it completely.
There are many values a person can have. They include things like:
· Autonomy
· Authenticity
· Adventure
· Connection
· Courage
· Creativity
· Family
· Freedom
· Generosity
· Humor
· Independence
· Self-development
This is where ACT helps provide an approach that makes your work unique to you. Rather than measuring your progress by some clinical guide’s definition of what is “normal,” this approach looks at the things in life that move you toward or away from your values.
For example, a person who desires connection but struggles with social anxiety may become so fused with their worries that they avoid going to social events, even when friends or family invite them. This pulls them away from that value of connection. As they learn to accept that some anxiety is natural, defuse from their thoughts, be more present, and lean in to that Observing Self they can act more in line with that value of connection.
Becoming clear on personal values can also be especially helpful for men who struggle with socially-prescribed values and rigid thinking around “what it means to be a man.”
A stay-at-home dad may feel like he is not being a good provider because he isn’t earning a paycheck. Getting clear on his personal values that inspired the choice to focus on his kids can help with defusing from the idea that being a “good provider” is only measured by a paycheck and expand his role to being a provider through the actions he takes rather than the money he makes.
Move toward the life you want – Committed Action
Finally, we come to the commitment piece of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. This involves taking steps to act in accordance with your values and move toward a satisfying and fulfilling life. All of the other processes in ACT ultimately lead to this one, since our struggles with anxiety, depression, addiction, and more pull us away from being the person we aspire to be. We become hooked by uncomfortable thoughts, feelings, or sensations and get pulled away from the actions we want to take into ones that bring short-term relief at the cost of long-term distress.
For many men, a lack of committed action can lead to negative self-talk about being weak, undisciplined, or unambitious. This can pull them further away from living in alignment with their values, which leads to even more negativity that pulls them further away the man they want to be.
It can be a vicious spiral that leads to silent suffering and isolation.
While most therapies help by taking big, overwhelming goals and breaking them down into smaller steps that are more manageable, ACT helps by identifying goals and actions that feel aligned with what’s important to you. Stepping into the discomfort of challenge and growth because it serves what’s important to you helps provide internal motivation to do the hard work – rather than external pressure to “be normal like everyone else.”
This is also where using an outcome-oriented approach can help. Instead of a broad goal like “feel happier” or “be more confident,” ACT asks you to describe what you would do if you felt happier or more confident. By identifying specific committed actions – such as going to more social events, setting boundaries with someone, or making that switch to a new career – you can better determine what presently pulls you away from that and what to do about it.
Stop fighting your mind. Start living your life.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy presents a different approach to mental health that many men appreciate because it combines insight with practical action steps to move toward a life of purpose and depth. Many men also appreciate that this approach involves a high amount of self-determination that lets them decide on their personal goals rather than a clinical definition of “normal.” Others appreciate that ACT helps build the kind of mental flexibility that can support them in improving relationships, managing anger, navigating life changes like career transitions or growing older, and dealing with unexpected setbacks.
If you’ve tried therapy before and found it just didn’t work for you – or if you’ve put off trying therapy because you worry it might be all talk and no action – finding an ACT therapist in your area may be worth exploring.
Apply this in your life.
If you’re in Northwest Arkansas and want to learn more about ACT, MoonPath Counseling is putting together the Man of ACT-ion Men’s Group. It’s an 8-week group that combines structured learning, active exercises, and discussion to help you fit this approach into your life to tackle your challenges head-on. You can find out more and join the interest list using the button below.
If you’re elsewhere in Arkansas, feel free to join the interest list to find out when an online group will start to save your spot.