Some common examples are: I value loving my partner and children I value engaging with my life with curiosity I value working to reduce pain and suffering in the world I value having close, intimate connections with other people I value actively healing my past trauma. Freely chosen values are motivative statements that we build ourselves in response to what feels meaningful in our lives.
No one, not our families, partners, or culture, is responsible for telling us what direction we should drive in. Essentially, your values dictate the direction you’re driving and motivate you to, when necessary, ignore the signs and passengers urging you in other directions. This road metaphor can help us understand two ACT concepts: committed action and values. Even though your passengers can be convincing and some of the turn-offs look tempting, you keep your foot on the gas and continue driving toward your destination. However, you know where this road leads and it’s somewhere you really want to go.
Committed action act metaphor drivers#
There may also be some irritating backseat drivers in your car who keep telling you to change your speed, make a U-turn, or stop to read yet another sign. There are all sorts of signs on the road and many opportunities to turn off the road or to turn around. In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), this is called committed action. You have the power to live each day as though it represents the life you really want to live. This can be a bit scary to realize, but it can also be liberating. The sensation that there will be a time in the future where “it all comes together” is, arguably, illusory. The quotation above is both hopeful and daunting: how you live, today, right now, IS your life. These exercises " the polygraph metaphor" and " falling in love" are a little silly and stretch the point somewhat, but they are fun and engaging.“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” Other brief creative hopelessness exercises are available to shatter the myth that humans can control how they feel, what they remember, and what thoughts will occupy their minds. ACT returns to this process over and over again, repeatedly demonstrating or otherwise pointing out the ineffectiveness and costs of experiential avoidance. When we recognise that these old strategies do not help, the way is opened for the alternative agenda of mindfulness and acceptance, which is the opposite of control. The intention is create a sense of hopelessness around the client’s previous agenda of trying to control or avoid his or her thoughts and feelings. The exercise uses several different bodily responses to illustrate the difference between: (a) struggling as we have been in the past, or (b) responding with mindful acceptance, and how these two different attitudes affect our ability to commit to action consistent with our values.Ĭreative hopelessness - As well as introducing the basic idea of ACT, the Pushing against the clipboard exercise initiates a therapeutic process called creative hopelessness. The clipboard is used to represent all the thoughts, feelings, memories and fears that the person has been struggling with. Put simply, this exercise makes use of an everyday object that is readily available to practitioners in the helping professions, and which lends itself as a straightforward symbol of the pain and suffering that clients bring with them to therapeutic encounters – a clip board (a large hard backed book can also serve the purpose).
Some text illustrating this exercise can be found in pages 13-18 of his book, and an audiovisual demonstration of the exercise is available at The exercise is called “ Pushing against the clipboard”. Harris (2009) uses an experiential exercise to introduce the basis concept of ACT for the purpose of ensuring that the client is giving informed consent to participate in this work. To get around the difficulty of explaining concepts in words, ACT therapists use a lot of metaphors and experiential exercises in order to demonstrate the meaning in more tangible ways. The ideas behind ACT are complicated and explaining them to clients is challenging.
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