deepest wishes and longings. Commitment involves both persistence and change—whichever is called for in living one’s value (Hayes et al., 2004). Commitment also includes engaging in a range of behaviors. This is important because sometimes sustaining a valued direction means being flexible, rather than being rigidly committed to and persevering in unworkable actions.
Committed action is inherently responsible, in the sense that it is based on the view that there is always an ability to respond. This is not idealistic. The ability to respond about which we are speaking is the ability to link action to values in any situation. For example, a person in a prison may have a limited ability to show an overt commitment to family. However, being helpful in prison so that parole becomes more likely or being prepared for family visits can reveal this commitment. In fact, commitments can be revealed through all kinds of chosen behaviors. The specific form of committed action needed in a given situation depends on what that situation affords and what action would be most effective.
Committed action is the core process through which a therapist can best incorporate traditional behavioral methods into the ACT model. Exposure can be used for anxiety problems, skills training for social problems, behavioral activation for depression, scheduled smoking for smoking cessation, and so on. Because behavioral methods are so diverse, we can only deal with them in this section in the broadest sense. However, these behavioral methods are an essential part of ACT and should be included whenever called for in therapy. Research on ACT has occasionally excluded traditional behavioral approaches in order to make a scientific point. For example, in one study, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) was treated successfully without any in-session exposure (Twohig, Hayes, & Masuda, 2006) merely because positive results would otherwise be dismissed as nothing more than the well known effect of exposure. However, ACT is based in clinical behavior analysis, and behavioral technologies are a key feature of ACT. In-session exposure, for example, would normally be part of an ACT approach for OCD. In clinical practice, there is no reason to limit the full implementation of the model.
WHY COMMITTED ACTION?
If defining valued life directions provides the compass for the route, then committed action describes the steps of the journey. A well-lived life is ultimately the goal of all the other ACT processes (developing acceptance and present moment awareness, defusing from entangling thoughts, developing a transcendent sense of self, and clarifying one’s chosen direction). These processes help clients develop psychological flex- ibility and help clients persist in or change behavior, as needed in the service of their valued directions. Committed action encompasses the behaviors and therapy targets that are specifically aimed at helping the client move from inaction to action in the realm of overt behavior and to maintain the consistency of new, more flexible behavior over time.
THE LINK BETWEEN WILLINGNESS AND
COMMITTED ACTION
Willingness and commitment are so deeply intertwined that one could argue that commitment depends 100 percent on willingness. This is so because values are often linked to difficult internal experiences, and
conversely, difficult internal experiences are usually linked to values. Any committed action can evoke a whole host of private experiences, at least some of which will be evaluated as negative (Hayes et al., 1999). If a person is wholly committed to not experiencing any unpleasant or difficult thoughts, feelings, sensations, or images, then that person will be unable to commit to and maintain a course of action because every course will eventually evoke something that is unpleasant. With valuing love comes the experience of loss, with valuing community comes the possibility of
rejection, with valuing creativity comes a nega- tive evaluation of one’s abilities. Metaphorically, it’s as if you were on a journey called “living well” and you ran into a swamp that stretched as far as the eye could see. Swamps are no fun. They’re smelly, they’re icky, they’re scary, and yet swamps are part of the journey. Life asks, “Will you wade into the swamp or will you abandon your journey?” In order to choose to act on our values, willingness to experience difficult events is necessary.
This action of willingness has the quality of a leap of faith. The job of the therapist is to create situations in which clients engage in a leap of faith into a future that is unknown and—to the best they can tell—in the direction of their
values. A leap of faith implies the willingness to have whatever happens when one makes that leap, to touch down wherever one lands. We are looking for this quality in client commitments.
In a scene from the third Indiana Jones movie, Indiana is at the final stage of his quest to find the mythical Holy Grail. He finds himself just short of his goal, with a seemingly bottomless chasm between himself and his goal, and no way across. He is presented with the choice of either giving up his goal and turning back or facing his fear and making a leap of faith to step into the chasm. With trepidation, he steps into space, seemingly to fall to his death. Unbeknownst to him, a bridge is there, which has been painted to blend perfectly with the chasm below. He is supported by this bridge and makes it safely across to his destination. Committed action is like that. His willingness to face his own fear allows him to move toward his goal, and his commitment makes sense of his willingness.
Committed action also provides the opportunity to practice and build the capacity to choose to be willing again and again, over time. Clients should not be coerced in any way to make a commitment in ACT. Rather, therapists want to build opportunities for clients to choose to commit to actions in their lives because these actions are opportunities for pursuing the kinds of lives their clients want to live, rather than something they have to do. Ideally, commitments are made with 100 percent willingness. In the Indiana
Jones movie, the character’s leap of faith was seemingly into a chasm that could end his life. Some private
events appear threatening at the same level. Clients avoid these events just as they would avoid actual death. Committed action, however, allows clients to experience that thoughts, feelings, and sensations cannot literally harm them, but are only harmful if allowed control over how the clients act in their lives.
WHAT SHOULD TRIGGER THIS PROCESS?
Engaging in committed action typically follows work on defining valued directions. This can range from quickly exploring one valued area of living for a client seen in a primary care setting, to multiple sessions
spent helping a client define valued directions in a more conventional therapy setting. What’s important is that the client and therapist begin committed action work with a shared sense of what the client values.
Working on committed action can be useful when therapy becomes lifeless or dull, or when the client is talking about values rather than acting on them. If the client is not in contact with the barriers to valued action, beginning to work on this process will be sure to evoke those barriers. In a sense, committed action is a process that can provide the emotional and cognitive barriers to be addressed through the other ACT processes. For example, if a client is talking about the importance of intimacy and openness, but the therapist senses a lifelessness in the room, shifting to actual actions to which the client is willing to commit can sweep away the cobwebs. If even that is not enough, moving directly to the therapeutic relationship will almost certainly do the trick; for example, the therapist might say, “Could you apply that value to this moment? What is a difficult and more open thing you could say right now about our relationship?”
WHAT IS THE METHOD?
Once the therapist and client have a shared sense of what is important, then committed action can be broken down into four steps:
1. Pick one or two high-priority valued domains and develop an action plan for behavior change, based on a functional analysis, the best available evidence, or both.
2. Help the client commit to actions that are linked to values—to be accomplished between sessions—being mindful of the larger behavioral patterns that are being assembled.
3. Attend to and overcome barriers to action with acceptance, defusion, and mindfulness skills. 4. Return to step 1 and generalize to larger patterns of action, to other domains of living, to feared
or avoided private experience, or to other areas of psychological inflexibility, until the client has sufficient practice to be able to maintain a pattern of flexible and wise committed action without the therapist’s support.
This process is the core of translating abstract values, such as being healthy or engaging in a spiritual practice, into concrete actions that express and instantiate these values in the world.