Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

You cannot program your way to a community where people feel genuinely safe, known, and accompanied in their suffering.

The thing that stayed with me was not the video or the discussion. It was that someone was being genuinely kind to me and wanted to make sure I had enough of the really good antipasto.

A parish that has genuinely internalized a culture of acceptance - of sitting with discomfort, naming struggle without shame, acting from values rather than from the discomfort of not knowing what to say - looks and feels different.

Up to now I've covered the first two thirds of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. If you have been trying the exercises, hopefully you have developed a little bit of confidence in being able to be present to the moment and your internal experiences (thoughts, feeling, sensations, memories, urges). To review, acceptance in this context is not approval, but awareness. Awareness so that these internal experiences are less likely to blindly influence your reactions, or drag you i

In the last reflection, we considered the call to return, over and over again, to the God who invites us out of fear and self-reliance. That “return” is not only a spiritual image but also something that happens in the most ordinary moments of our day. Each time we act, we are making a choice. In spirituality, the choice is between the choice that draws us closer to the person God calls us to be, or one that carries us away from that call. In psychology, this is named in a bi

“Even now,” declares the Lord, “return to Me with all your heart.” (Joel 2:12) The Christian life is a continual return. Again and again, God invites us to turn from distraction, fear, and self-reliance, and to come back to Him with trust. In the last blog, I spoke about the serious difficulty posed when trust is injured through highly chaotic relationships or trauma. But even in more ordinary circumstances, humans are ones to prefer to plan, to choose, and to control what ha

CCC 2734 Filial trust is tested - it proves itself - in tribulation. This blog was originally written following the shooting took place on August 27, 2025, at the Annunciation Catholic Church and School in Minneapolis, Minnesota. News of violence, especially connected to churches, can stir fear, anxiety, or anger. These emotions are understandable. They reveal our respect for life and the sacredness of the places we worship. But if left unchecked, they could pull us away from

The answer, in the words of my grad school professor Dr. James Werth, would be - it depends. Experiential Acceptance and Avoidance In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy learning to ride the wave of feelings and physical responses to life's situations (experiential acceptance) is a part of emotional health. I've focused a lot on emotions as an important source of information needed for our well-being. There is research which connects avoiding or repressing emotions to poorer ph

At the core of experiential acceptance is learning the skill of sitting with our emotions. It is letting ourselves be with our feelings, without trying to change them. As discussed in the last post, this is not only different from distraction or avoidance which seeks to shut down feelings. It is also different from getting entangled with emotions through analysis or stuck on dwelling on your feelings. This is allowing emotion to come and go in its natural cycle, neither pushi

Perhaps it was providential that I met with so many of my clients who have chronic health illnesses this week when I was formulating this article. This has become a bit of a sub-specialty of mine, in part because having a trauma specialty means that your client group experiences more chronic health problems than the general population. It's also been a part of my own therapeutic work because of a couple of (now) well managed chronic health conditions which still pop up every

In which I take something pop psych off the internet and dissect it. There’s a lot of content online that presents itself as solid...

"Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts". Psalm 139: 23 Being in the here-and-now, connected to our true self - it's something which sounds wonderful yet impossible for many. Our intellect is a gift, but things go awry. Why? Lock in, because this is going to be a bit of a long one. The Problem Solving Mind In an earlier post, I wrote about the mind as a problem-solving work of art. We can analyze the past, think about what went wrong, and cons

“Who is this, that even the wind and sea obey him?” (Mark 4:41) The Gospel tells us of a time when Jesus' disciples were caught in a terrifying storm. Waves crashed into their boat as the wind howled. They panicked and cried out, but Jesus was asleep. When they woke Him, He didn’t panic with them. He stood in His authority and commanded the storm, and the storm obeyed. In their fear, the disciples revealed that they did not yet understand who Jesus was. Jesus preached on fait

In the quiet of prayer or the chaos of daily life, we may find ourselves asking: Who am I, really? Am I the roles that I fulfill? My thoughts? My emotions? My past? Am I the pain I carry? Am I the sum of my failures or successes? Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) answers this with a confusing term called self-as-context. But it gives a more descriptive term for therapeutic use: the observing self. The observing self is framed as the "you" that is aware of your thoughts,

“Do not lose courage in considering your own imperfections, but instantly set about remedying them—every day begin the task anew.” St. Francis de Sales In my last post, I shared about the importance of the present moment. It is the place where God dwells, where relationship happens, and where ACT encourages us to return again and again as a basis of psychological well-being. But if you tried to actually stay in the present for any period of time, you probably quickly noted th

“Do not worry about tomorrow; tomorrow will take care of itself. Sufficient for a day is its own evil.” Matthew 6:34 (NABRE) In our fast-paced world, including in our spiritual lives, it’s easy to live anywhere but the present. We ruminate on the past. We worry about the future. Even our prayer time can become more about our thoughts and worries (or that horrible moment at work) than about a personal encounter with Jesus. But both modern psychology and Catholic spirituality a

"Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason." CCC §159 There is much which contradicts faith in the world. However, if we take seriously the pairing of faith and reason, and understand the arts and sciences as human contributions to creation, we can begin to see where truth shines through in the fields of counseling and psychology. That isn’t to say all psychological theory and practice is in line with the Catholic faith. Bu