The ACT Therapist's Stance: A Guide to Effective Therapy
The basic psychological stance of an ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) therapist is fundamental to providing effective treatment. This stance involves connecting with the "space" from which ACT naturally flows and modeling psychological flexibility for clients.
Like many therapeutic approaches, ACT emphasizes therapist warmth and genuineness. This stance emerges naturally from understanding human suffering from an ACT perspective. When therapists see clients trapped by language, they recognize the same patterns that generate their own pain, creating an "I and thou" perspective that forms the foundation of the therapeutic relationship.

by Todd Schmenk

Core Competencies of the ACT Therapeutic Stance
Equal and Vulnerable
The therapist realizes they are "in the same soup" as the client and speaks from an equal, vulnerable, genuine, and sharing point of view.
Holding Contradictions
The therapist models willingness to hold contradictory or difficult ideas and feelings without needing to "resolve" them.
Compassionate Stance
The therapist takes a compassionate approach toward the client's suffering, avoiding criticism, judgment, or taking a "one up" position.
Experience-Centered
The therapist always brings issues back to what the client's experience is showing, not substituting opinions for genuine experience.
The Therapist's Approach to Client Interaction
Non-Coercive Approach
The therapist does not argue with, lecture, coerce, or attempt to convince the client of anything. If you find yourself trying to change a client's mind, stop – you're not doing ACT.
Authentic Interventions
The therapist avoids using "canned" ACT interventions. Instead, interventions are responses to the particular client being treated, tailored to fit their language and immediate life experience.
Client-Led Discovery
New metaphors, experiential exercises, and behavioral tasks are allowed to emerge from the client's own experience and context, rather than being imposed by the therapist.
The ACT therapist remains flexible, sequencing and applying specific interventions in response to client needs, and is ready to change course at any moment. Self-disclosure about personal issues is appropriate when it makes a therapeutic point, that is, it is useful for the client. Therapists should also avoid explaining the "meaning" of paradoxes or metaphors to develop "insight."
Developing Acceptance and Undermining Control
Validate Wholeness
Therapist communicates that client is not broken, but is using unworkable strategies.
Examine Experience
Therapist helps client examine direct experience and detect emotional control strategies.
Explore Paradox (Creative Hopelessness)
Therapist helps client make direct contact with the paradoxical effect of emotional control strategies.
Apply Workability
Therapist actively uses concept of "workability" in clinical interactions and encourages experimentation with willingness as an alternative to control.
The therapist helps clients investigate the relationship between levels of willingness and sense of suffering, making experiential contact with the cost of being unwilling relative to valued life ends. Through exercises and metaphors, clients learn to experience the qualities of willingness as a choice and behavior.
Undermining Cognitive Fusion

Identify Barriers
Therapist identifies client's emotional, cognitive, behavioral or physical barriers to willingness.

Create Separation
Therapist uses tools to create separation between the client and their conceptualized experience.

Reveal Experience
Therapist uses interventions to reveal the flow of private experience and show it's not "toxic".

Examine Stories
Therapist helps client elucidate their "story" and contact its arbitrary nature.
The therapist actively contrasts what the client's "mind" says will work versus what their experience shows is working. Through language tools, metaphors (like "bubble on the head" or "monsters on the bus"), and experiential exercises, clients learn to detect "mindiness" (fusion) and experiment with "having" difficult experiences using willingness as a stance.
Getting in Contact with the Present Moment
Therapist Presence
The therapist can defuse from client content and direct attention to the present moment, bringing their own feelings or thoughts in the moment into the therapeutic relationship.
Expanding Experience
The therapist uses exercises to expand the client's sense of experience as an ongoing process, tracking content at multiple levels and emphasizing the present when useful.
Modeling Presence
The therapist models coming back to the present moment, detecting when clients drift into past and future orientation and gently returning focus to the now.
Teaching Skills
The therapist teaches clients to recognize when they're drifting from the present and develop skills to return their attention to the current moment.
Present-moment awareness is a core component of ACT. By helping clients develop this skill, therapists enable them to engage more fully with their experiences and make choices based on what's happening now rather than being caught in past regrets or future anxieties.
Getting in Contact with the Present Moment
Therapist Presence
The therapist can defuse from client content and direct attention to the present moment, bringing their own feelings or thoughts in the moment into the therapeutic relationship.
Expanding Experience
The therapist uses exercises to expand the client's sense of experience as an ongoing process, tracking content at multiple levels and emphasizing the present when useful.
Modeling Presence
The therapist models coming back to the present moment, detecting when clients drift into past and future orientation and gently returning focus to the now.
Teaching Skills
The therapist teaches clients to recognize when they're drifting from the present and develop skills to return their attention to the current moment.
Present-moment awareness is a core component of ACT. By helping clients develop this skill, therapists enable them to engage more fully with their experiences and make choices based on what's happening now rather than being caught in past regrets or future anxieties.
Distinguishing Self-as-Context from Conceptualized Self
Differentiate Evaluations
Therapist helps the client differentiate self-evaluations from the self that evaluates through techniques like "thank your mind for that thought" and "naming the event."
Practice Mindfulness
Therapist employs mindfulness exercises like "the you that you call you," "chessboard," and "leaves on the stream" to help client make contact with self-as-context.
Use Metaphors
Therapist uses metaphors to highlight distinction between products and contents of consciousness versus consciousness itself, such as "furniture in house."
Assign Tasks
The therapist employs behavioral tasks like "take your mind for a walk" to help client practice distinguishing private events from self.
This process helps clients understand the different qualities of self-conceptualization, just noticing events, and simple awareness. By recognizing that they are not their thoughts but rather the context in which thoughts occur, clients gain psychological flexibility and freedom from limiting self-concepts.
Values and Committed Action
Valued Directions
Clarifying what matters most to the client, including their aspirations and guiding principles.
Psychological Flexibility
The foundation for values-based living, enabling adaptability in the pursuit of meaningful goals.
Committed Action
Building patterns of behavior aligned with values, fostering a sense of purpose and fulfillment.
Clarify life directions, set valued goals, and build action plans for values-based living. Therapists guide clients in identifying their core values, setting goals that align with these values, and developing actionable steps to integrate these values into daily life. This process enhances psychological flexibility and promotes a life of purpose and meaning.