Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) And Substance Abuse
Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) is a form of behavioral therapy that uses mindfulness techniques to improve your psychological ability to engage with negative emotions and thoughts without letting them lead to negative behavior.
At Discovery Point, we use this therapy to help you learn to stop obsessing on negative thoughts and make healthier choices when it comes to abusing drugs and alcohol. We have found ACT to be a very useful component of our addiction recovery program. It is an effective method of treating mental health disorders such as anxiety and depression that can lead to substance abuse.
We know that you may sometimes feel that using drugs or alcohol is the easiest way to deal with your negative thoughts and emotions, but substance abuse never solves your core problem – it only makes a bad situation worse. Through acceptance and commitment therapy, we help you see that you can face and “accept” your negative thoughts without letting them impact your actions or behavior.
ACT shows you how to accept those negative thoughts without judgment, then commit to taking positive actions that help you deal with them. This ultimately helps you change your relationship with negative emotions and troubling thoughts and achieve your goal of a successful recovery.
Benefits of acceptance and commitment therapy
There are many benefits of ACT that will aid in your addiction recovery journey and help you avoid relapse in the future. Among them:
- You learn to view your thoughts and experiences in a nonjudgmental way.
- You become less likely to feel controlled or trapped by your own thoughts.
- Instead of constantly worrying about the past or the future, you learn to “live in the present” with your thoughts and feelings.
- Becoming upset at the attitudes or mistakes of other people.
- You reach a better understanding of your core values and set goals for how you can act on those values.
By helping you evaluate your thoughts and learning a new, healthier way to view them, acceptance and commitment therapy at Discovery Point can help you ensure that your values and behavior are better aligned so that you can enjoy a healthier life without drugs and alcohol.