Emotional Therapy: The Development Of Acceptance And Cognitive Therapy

Since the early 1990’s cognitive therapy and not cognitive behavioral therapy has been wildly recognized as a leading therapy in treating multiple clinical disorders including depression. Today there has been the development of what is being called “third wave” therapies that focus on acceptance and mindfulness techniques rather than a focal point on modifying their thoughts and distance themselves from their unwanted thoughts. Acceptance and Commitment therapy (ACT) is one of the “third wave” therapies that has gather much attention. Although CT and not CBT has been the standard evidence based treatment for depression over 60% of clients with depression fail to maintain improvements with pure CBT (Hallis, Cameli, Dionne, and Knäuper, 2016).

In altering the language around thoughts you change the context of the thought also known as changing defusing the person from the thought. To more easily understand the metaphor of buying versus having a thought is helpful. Once you buy a thought the client will take the thought as fact and see the world skewed based on that thought. Whereas having a thought the client is aware of the thought and that there are and can be many more thought; thus they do not become fused to the thought and buy into it.
The present moment is a unique component to act and contributes to this model being a third wave model. Present moment or mindfulness is a conscious awareness of the here and now. This state allows the client to become aware of their thoughts in the present moment and accept them non-judgmentally. The core process self-as-context helps the client to be in and maintain their present awareness by experiencing the event in the here and now. This process allows the client to become in contact with a deeper sense of self that allows the client to to experience thoughts and feelings but not be defined by

In one study, (Losada et al., 2015) examined the therapeutic effects of CBT versus ACT. Using an experimental design, there were three groups, a control Group, ACT group, and CBT group. The results of the study indicated that there was clinical significance in the effectiveness of CBT and ACT in comparison with the control group. At a follow-up to assess attrition and prevalence rate both CBT and ACT provided to have similar results and significant improvement to the control group. In both treatments, dysfunctional thinking was substantially changed; however, experiential avoidance was only changed in the ACT group.
Finally, to better understand how the ACT model conceptualizes and targets depression a general understanding of how people develop and maintain depressive symptoms such as thoughts, emotions, and behaviors is needed.