Acceptance and commitment therapy: A Christian translation

Pressure is mounting on Christian counselors, particularly those working under licenses, to use methods that meet criteria for being evidence-based. Even non-licensed counselors do well to draw from the best of scientific methods to provide the best counseling possible. Johnson (2007) has proposed translation as opposed to integration as a model for developing Christian approaches from ones framed in the scientific community. Given the compatibility of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) with Christian thought, a translation approach to this is offered. Core terms from ACT are considered, evaluated, and translated into the “Christian dialect”. These form the basis for an initial step at a complete Christian-accommodative translation of ACT, and a simple case is used to illustrate how this would be applied