ACT: Part One:What Happens to Us When Life Gets Hard?
Updated: Sep 22
Psychological Flexibility, and Recovering Our Ability to Choose
There are probably several versions of you.
There is the version who can be patient when nobody is testing your patience. The generous version who appears when you aren't feeling threatened. The thoughtful version who can listen carefully, consider another person's point of view, admit being wrong, and choose words with some care.
And then there's the version who becomes less like yourself precisely when life gets difficult.
Perhaps your spouse says something with that tone of voice you know all too well. Your boss sends an email containing the innocent but ominous sentence, Can we talk tomorrow? Someone criticizes something you worked hard on. A medical test comes back with a number you weren't expecting. Money gets tight. An adult child makes a choice you don't understand.
Suddenly the person you intended to be has become considerably harder to locate.
You react. Defend. Explain. Withdraw. Control. Avoid. Your mind runs three conversations ahead while simultaneously replaying the one that just happened. You may even recognize what you're doing while you're doing it and still have trouble stopping.
Later, when the emotional weather has cleared somewhat, you wonder why you handled it that way.
This is one of the problems Acceptance and Commitment Therapy—or ACT (pronounced “Act”)—was developed to address. Not how to become someone who never gets anxious, angry, hurt, jealous, ashamed, frightened, or overwhelmed. Something more realistic: How do we remain capable of choosing who we want to be when those things happen?
ACT calls that psychological flexibility.
When Our World Gets Smaller
Think about the last time you were genuinely upset. Before whatever happened, you probably had dozens of behavioral possibilities available to you. You could listen, ask a question, make a joke, wait, disagree respectfully, take a walk, offer affection, say no, apologize, ask for clarification, postpone the conversation, or decide the whole thing wasn't worth pursuing and tolerate uncertainty.
But when something touched a nerve, suddenly twelve doors became two.
Maybe you attacked or defended. Maybe you went quiet. Perhaps you needed the other person to understand you immediately. Maybe you needed to leave. You may have started trying to solve something that couldn't possibly be solved at that moment.
This narrowing is important. We tend to think psychological problems are primarily about having painful emotions. Anxiety is the problem. Anger is the problem. Shame is the problem.
Sometimes they are. But often the larger problem is what happens to our behavioral freedom when those feelings arrive.
Anxiety says, Get out, or hit back.
Shame says, Hide.
Fear says, Don't risk it.
Sometimes we obey before realizing there was another choice.
Psychological flexibility is largely about recovering that choice.
Six Ways Our Lives Get Smaller
ACT describes six processes that contribute to psychological inflexibility. The terminology can sound academic, but the experiences themselves are remarkably ordinary.
The first is cognitive fusion. We become so entangled with a thought that we stop recognizing it as something our mind is producing and begin responding to it as reality itself.
She's judging me.
He doesn't respect me.
I'm going to fail.
I can't handle this.
Maybe the thought contains truth and maybe it doesn't. The more interesting question is what happens to my behavior when I treat it as absolute truth?
Thoughts can also become stories about who we are: I'm the responsible one. I'm a failure. I'm the strong one. I'm the person everybody depends on. Some of these stories developed for good reasons and contain considerable truth. But a description can quietly become a set of instructions, until the person we've been starts deciding the person we're allowed to become.
We'll return to both of those problems later.
The Strange War We Fight With Ourselves
A second way our lives shrink is through experiential avoidance—our attempts to escape or control feelings, memories, sensations, and urges we don't want.
Suppose someone desperately fears rejection. He wants intimacy, but intimacy requires vulnerability, and vulnerability includes the possibility of rejection. So he protects himself. He doesn't say what he really needs. He keeps people at a safe distance. Perhaps he leaves relationships before someone else can leave him.
It works effectively for avoiding rejection.
Unfortunately, it also works potently for avoiding intimacy.
That's what makes experiential avoidance so tricky. It frequently works in the short run. Someone afraid of failure stops taking meaningful risks. Failure becomes less likely. So does growth. Someone who cannot tolerate conflict becomes extraordinarily agreeable. There are fewer arguments, but eventually there may also be less honesty.
The strategy succeeds at making life safer by making life smaller.
ACT offers acceptance as an alternative—not approving of pain or passively tolerating circumstances that should be changed, but becoming more willing to experience difficult internal things when doing so allows us to move toward something that matters.
What Matters When Feelings Are Loud?
That raises another question: What does matter?
Feelings matter enormously, but they aren't particularly reliable compasses. I can deeply love someone and be furious with them. I can be terrified while doing something courageous. I can feel like quitting something that matters profoundly to me.
ACT therefore asks another question alongside How do I feel?
What matters here?
ACT calls these chosen directions values. Values are different from goals. A goal can be completed. You can earn a degree, run a marathon, get married, write a book, or pay off a mortgage.
You never finish being loving.
Or honest. Or curious. Or courageous. Or compassionate.
Values are more like directions than destinations. You don't arrive at north. You travel north. When life becomes confusing, direction matters, so I think of values as something like a compass.
A compass not only points north. It helps us recognize when we've wandered off course.
We may not always notice when we're moving toward what we value because much of that happens quietly through ordinary choices. But we often recognize when we're moving away: That's not who I want to be. That's not how I want to treat this person. That's not where I want this choice to take me.
We don't have to condemn ourselves for getting off course.
We notice where we are and turn again.
Knowing the Direction Isn't Enough
Of course, human beings possess another remarkable ability: knowing exactly what matters and doing something completely different.
We value relationships and neglect them. We believe in forgiveness and keep rehearsing the grievance. We know an apology is needed and spend three days constructing a legal defense instead.
This is where ACT introduces committed action.
Values answer, What direction do I want my life to move? Committed action asks, What does that require me to do next?
Usually the answer is less dramatic than we would prefer. Make the phone call. Go to the appointment. Tell the truth. Stay in the conversation another five minutes. Take the walk. Say you're sorry without adding but. Turn off the phone and listen.
Large changes are built from surprisingly ordinary behaviors.
The difficulty is that we often have to do them while our thoughts and feelings are arguing against them.
Meanwhile, Where Did Today Go?
A fifth way we lose flexibility is by being everywhere except where we actually are.
Human beings possess the extraordinary ability to sit at breakfast while mentally attending next week's meeting and simultaneously reworking an argument from three years ago. Our bodies remain at the table. The rest of us is traveling.
That ability is a gift. Without it we couldn't plan, learn from mistakes, anticipate consequences, preserve history, or imagine a different future.
But every gift has a shadow.
We can become so occupied with remembering life, predicting life, explaining life, and protecting ourselves from what might happen in life that we become surprisingly absent from the life actually occurring.
ACT calls the alternative contact with the present moment, or being mindful of what’s going on now. I sometimes say don’t brood over the past as it leads to depression, and don’t worry about the future as it leads to anxiety. With either of these mental states, you can acknowledge what you’re brooding on and move back to the present by saying, “Yes but that’s not now.”
The point isn't that the present is always pleasant. Sometimes the present contains mortgages, arguments, pain, traffic, difficult decisions, and people who are getting on our nerves.
The point is that the present is where choices are made.
There Is More to You Than What Is Happening Inside You
ACT's final process has the least intuitive name: self-as-context.
The idea underneath it is simpler.
You have thoughts, but you aren't reducible to your thoughts. You have emotions, but no emotion is large enough to contain you. You have roles—spouse, parent, therapist, teacher, employee, caretaker, patient—but none is the entirety of who you are.
Something in us is capable of noticing all these things.
I'm anxious.
I'm having that old thought that I'm going to disappoint everyone.
I'm slipping into the role where I believe I have to fix everything.
The fact that I can notice these experiences means there is some space between the observer and what is being observed.
ACT takes that space seriously.
Because that is often where choice begins.
Acceptance and Commitment
The name Acceptance and Commitment Therapy begins making sense when these pieces come together.
Psychological Flexibility — making space to tolerate inevitable distress
Defusion — I need space around what I think.
Acceptance — I need space for what I feel.
Values — If thoughts and feelings don't choose, what does? Where is north?
Committed Action — Knowing north isn't the same as walking north.
Present Moment / Mindfulness — I can't choose my next step if I'm not in the here and now to notice the difference between the present and the past or future.
Self-as-Context — Who is the “I” standing here making the choice?
Acceptance without commitment could become passive: This is simply how things are.
Commitment without acceptance can become another war against ourselves: I'll start living once I finally get rid of my anxiety, shame, fear, grief, anger, or painful memories.
ACT puts the two together.
Make room for what you cannot simply command away. Accept that some distress and imperfection come with being human. Then move toward what matters.
The six processes—defusion, acceptance, values, committed action, present-moment awareness, and self-as-context—aren't six unrelated psychological tricks. They are different ways of recovering freedom when our internal world begins narrowing our choices.
Psychological flexibility isn't perpetual calm. It isn't always thinking rationally or reaching some state where nothing gets under our skin.
Psychological health may have more to do with what remains available to us when life isn't cooperating.
Can I be anxious and still show up?
Can I be angry and still decide what kind of person I want to be?
Can I hear the old story without automatically repeating the old behavior?
Can I experience uncertainty without demanding that life resolve it immediately?
Can I hurt and remain connected?
Can I be afraid and still move toward something I love?
ACT calls that psychological flexibility. I think of it more simply as having room to make choices.
What to Carry Forward
Three ideas are worth carrying into the rest of this series. Life gets smaller when stress reduces our choices. Psychological flexibility helps reopen them. And ACT isn't primarily trying to control what shows up inside us; it's helping us recover some freedom in what we do when it does.
The goal isn't to become unbendable. Life will continue applying pressure. People we love will disappoint us. Bodies age. Plans change. Old wounds get touched. We will occasionally say things we know better than to say and do things we had promised ourselves we wouldn't do again.
The six ACT processes are six ways of creating enough room to choose again.
We'll begin with perhaps the most persistent thing showing up inside us: our own thinking. The human mind is an extraordinary instrument, but it is also a narrator, critic, predictor, historian, mind-reader, and occasional catastrophizer.
It always has something to say.
Part Two begins with a different question: Does everything your mind says deserve to be believed?
© 2026 Thomas Kurtz. All rights reserved.
Published by Thomas Kurtz Counseling, LLC.
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