ACT Therapy in Seattle

You can name the anxiety. You can track the low weeks and notice when the old pattern fires. A lot of people who come to me have gotten good at managing, and the managing mostly works, at least from the outside.

What it doesn't settle is a different question: what do I want this life to be about? For some people that question shows up once a crisis has passed. For others it has been sitting under the anxiety for years.

What ACT is

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT, pronounced like the word) was developed by Steven Hayes and colleagues. Its central concern is psychological flexibility: being able to stay with difficult experience without being run by it, and to act on what matters to you rather than on what you're avoiding. ACT doesn't ask you to argue with your thoughts or trade them for better ones. It works on your relationship to them.

Acceptance, in ACT's sense, isn't approval or resignation. It means being willing to have the experience you're having without organizing your life around making it stop. That can include the tightening before a hard conversation or the urge to leave the room.

Values

I often start values work by asking what you've actually organized your life around, and whether that's what you would choose. Where do the hours go? Where does the energy go? When you imagine living differently, what specifically do you picture, and what does it cost you to picture it?

We look at what makes it difficult to act on what matters to you. Sometimes that includes things you've learned to avoid. Someone who wants closeness but hasn't let anyone see them in years may not be confused about what they value. Closeness may have cost them something before.

If wanting things was risky when you were young, or your life has been arranged around what other people needed, it can be hard to say what you would choose. We work on that directly.

Defusion

Your mind runs commentary. Some of it is useful. Some of it is old material on repeat: You're going to mess this up. They don't really want you here. Heard often enough, it stops registering as a thought and starts registering as fact.

Defusion is noticing the thought as a thought, without automatically treating it as fact. The thought I'm going to be rejected can be present, recognized, even loud, and you can still act.

How I use ACT

I named my practice after the phenomenological epoché, Husserl's word for setting aside your assumptions so that experience can show up on its own terms. I find defusion a useful companion to it. Both involve stepping far enough back from what you were living inside to see it. They come from different traditions with different commitments, and I don't treat them as the same thing.

I draw on ACT often, alongside existential-phenomenological work, EMDR, and Brainspotting. Values and defusion come up with clients whose anxiety has been making their decisions, and with clients working through developmental trauma who are trying to figure out what they want now.

Training and practical details

My ACT training is the ACT Intensive (PESI) with Daniel J. Moran and Steven C. Hayes. My licenses and other training are on my About page.

I see adults in person on Capitol Hill in Seattle and by telehealth in Washington and Colorado. Fees and insurance are on my rates page.