Purpose: Allow yourself to have whatever inner experiences are present when doing so foster effective action.
Method: Reinforce approach responses to previously aversive inner experiences, reducing motivation to behave avoidantly (altering negatively reinforced avoidant patterns).
When to use: When escape and avoidance of private events prevents positive action
Examples of acceptance techniques
| Unhooking | Thoughts/feelings don’t always lead to action |
| Identifying the problem | When we battle with our inner experience, it distracts and derails us. Use examples. |
| Explore effects of avoidance | Has it worked in your life |
| Defining the problem | What they struggle against = barriers toward heading in the direction of their goals. |
| Experiential awareness | Learn to pay attention to internal experiences, and to how we respond to them |
| Leaning down the hill | Changing the response to material – toward the fear not away |
| Amplifying responses | Bring experience into awareness, into the room |
| Empathy | Participate with client in emotional responding |
| In vivo Exposure | Structure and encourage intensive experiencing in session |
| The Serenity Prayer | Change what we can, accept what we can’t. |
| Practice doing the unfamiliar | Pay attention to what happens when you don’t do the automatic response |
| Acceptance homework | Go out and find it |
| Discrimination training | What do they feel/think/experience? |
| Mindreading | Help them to identify how they feel |
| Journaling | Write about painful events |
| Tin Can Monster Exercise | Systematically explore response dimensions of a difficult overall event |
| Distinguishing between clean and dirty emotions | Trauma = pain + unwillingness to have pain |
| Distinguishing willingness from wanting | Bum at the door metaphor – you can welcome a guest without being happy he’s there |
| How to recognize trauma | Are you less willing to experience the event or more? |
| Distinguishing willingness the activity from willingness the feeling | Opening up is more important that feeling like it |
| Choosing Willingness: The Willingness Question | Given the distinction between you and the stuff you struggle with, are you willing to have that stuff, as it is and not as what it says it is, and do what works in this situation? |
| Focus on what can be changed | Two scales metaphor |
| Caution against qualitatively limiting willingness | The tantruming kid metaphor – if a kid knew your limits he’d trantrum exactly that long; Jumping exercise – you can practice jumping from a book or a building, but you can step down only from the book – don’t limit willingness qualitatively |
| Distinguish willing from wallowing | Moving through a swamp metaphor: the only reason to go in is because it stands between you and getting to where you intend to go |
| Challenging personal space: | Sitting eye to eye |
These clinical materials were assembled by Elizabeth Gifford, Steve Hayes, and Kirk Stroshal