Summit Counselling Services — Modality
Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT)What if the goal isn't to feel better — but to live better?
ACT is a modern, evidence-based therapy that changes your relationship to difficult thoughts and feelings rather than trying to eliminate them. The result is more psychological flexibility, less avoidance, and a life that moves in the direction of what you actually value.
What Is ACT?
A different way of thinking about mental health.
Most approaches to emotional suffering work from the assumption that the goal is to reduce or eliminate painful thoughts and feelings — to think more positively, to feel less anxious, to stop the rumination. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy takes a different view.
ACT is based on the idea that the attempt to control or suppress difficult inner experiences — thoughts, feelings, memories, sensations — often makes things worse rather than better. Avoidance of pain tends to narrow life. ACT offers a different path: learning to hold difficult experiences with more flexibility and less struggle, so that they no longer need to dictate what you do or don't do with your life.
The "commitment" in ACT refers to values-based action — clarifying what genuinely matters to you and committing to moving in that direction, even when the internal experience is difficult. ACT doesn't promise a life without pain. It offers something arguably more valuable: a life that is full and meaningful, even in the presence of pain.
ACT is part of what's known as the "third wave" of cognitive behavioural therapies — building on the foundation of CBT while incorporating mindfulness, acceptance, and values-work in a way that many people find both more accessible and more resonant than traditional CBT alone.
"The goal of ACT is not to feel good. It's to live well — and to discover that those two things are not as opposed as they might seem."
ACT is particularly well-suited for
- Anxiety — especially when avoidance is a significant pattern
- Depression — particularly the loss of engagement with meaningful life
- Chronic pain and illness — when the struggle against the condition is itself causing suffering
- Perfectionism and self-criticism
- Burnout and values conflicts at work
- Eco-grief and climate anxiety — holding the reality without being paralysed by it
- OCD and intrusive thoughts — changing your relationship to the thought rather than the thought itself
- Grief and loss
- PTSD and trauma — alongside or as an alternative to other trauma approaches
- Relationship difficulties — particularly when avoidance or rigidity is part of the pattern
- Life transitions and existential concerns
- Struggles with identity, meaning, and purpose
The Six Core Processes
How ACT builds psychological flexibility
ACT works through six interrelated processes, all of which serve the goal of psychological flexibility — the ability to be present, open, and engaged with what matters.
Acceptance
Opening up to difficult thoughts, feelings, sensations, and memories without unnecessary struggle. Acceptance is not resignation — it's making room for the experience rather than spending energy fighting it.
Cognitive Defusion
Creating distance from unhelpful thoughts so they have less influence over behaviour. Instead of being fused to a thought — "I am a failure" — defusion helps you observe it: "I'm having the thought that I'm a failure." A small shift with significant consequences.
Present Moment Awareness
Learning to be fully in contact with what is actually happening now — rather than lost in thoughts about the past or the future. This is the mindfulness dimension of ACT, and it's foundational to all the other processes.
Self as Context
Developing a stable sense of self that exists beyond any particular thought, feeling, or role — a perspective from which you can observe your inner experience without being defined by it. Sometimes called "the observing self."
Values Clarification
Identifying what genuinely matters to you — not what you think you should value, or what others expect, but what actually gives your life meaning and direction. Values in ACT are not goals; they're ongoing qualities of living, like a compass rather than a destination.
Committed Action
Taking concrete steps in the direction of your values — even when it's uncomfortable, even when the difficult thoughts and feelings are present. This is where ACT becomes behavioural: building a life through action, not through waiting to feel ready.
ACT vs CBT
How ACT differs from traditional CBT
Both are evidence-based and effective — the difference is in approach. Many therapists draw on both.
Traditional CBT
- Focuses on identifying and challenging unhelpful thought patterns
- Goal is often to change or replace negative thoughts with more accurate ones
- Works to reduce the frequency and intensity of difficult emotions
- Structured, skills-focused, and highly evidence-based
- Excellent for anxiety, depression, and a wide range of presentations
- Works best when the thoughts being challenged are genuinely distorted
ACT
- Focuses on changing your relationship to thoughts rather than changing the thoughts themselves
- Goal is psychological flexibility — being able to act effectively regardless of what the mind is doing
- Emotions are accepted rather than targeted for reduction
- Incorporates mindfulness, metaphor, and experiential exercises alongside structured skills
- Particularly effective when avoidance is central, or when the thoughts are not actually distorted
- Explicitly values-focused — what you do with your life is always the point
Where ACT Is Effective
What ACT can help you work through
ACT has a strong and growing evidence base across a wide range of presentations. Here's where it tends to be particularly powerful.
Anxiety & Avoidance
Anxiety thrives on avoidance. ACT disrupts this cycle by changing what you do with the anxiety rather than fighting it — allowing you to move toward things that matter even when anxiety is present. Effective for generalized anxiety, social anxiety, health anxiety, and panic.
Depression & Loss of Meaning
ACT addresses the behavioural withdrawal and disconnection from values that characterize depression — helping you re-engage with life not by feeling better first, but by acting in alignment with what matters and discovering that engagement itself shifts the mood.
Chronic Pain & Illness
ACT was originally developed in part for chronic pain — where the goal is not to eliminate the pain but to reduce the suffering caused by fighting it, and to build a meaningful life alongside the physical reality. Consistently one of the strongest evidence bases in pain psychology.
OCD & Intrusive Thoughts
The ACT approach to OCD — sometimes called ACT-based exposure — changes your relationship to intrusive thoughts rather than trying to neutralize them. This is often experienced as more sustainable than some traditional ERP approaches, particularly for thought-heavy presentations.
Burnout & Values Conflicts
When you're exhausted, disconnected, and can't remember what the point is — ACT's values clarification work can be clarifying and grounding. Understanding what actually matters, and what has pulled you away from it, is often the beginning of a real shift.
Trauma & PTSD
ACT can be used alongside or as an alternative to trauma-focused approaches. Rather than processing traumatic memories directly, ACT works to reduce experiential avoidance and build a life with meaning even in the presence of the traumatic history — a different but often equally valid path.
What Shifts
What people notice as ACT progresses
The changes in ACT are often quieter and more fundamental than people expect — and more durable.
Less ruled by thoughts
Thoughts still arise — the anxious ones, the self-critical ones, the catastrophic ones — but they carry less weight. You begin to notice them without being swept away by them.
More willingness to feel
Difficult emotions become less threatening when you're no longer organizing your life around avoiding them. A counterintuitive but consistent finding: people feel more, and suffer less.
Clearer sense of what matters
The values work in ACT often produces a kind of clarity that people describe as surprisingly unfamiliar — a genuine sense of what they care about, often distinct from what they thought they were supposed to care about.
More willingness to act
Waiting to feel ready stops being the prerequisite for moving. You begin to act in the direction of what matters even when discomfort is present — and discover that the discomfort is more manageable in motion than it was in avoidance.
Life gets larger
Avoidance shrinks life. As the things you've been avoiding become less threatening, the range of what's possible expands — relationships, experiences, risks, and choices that previously felt off-limits become available again.
A more stable sense of self
When you're no longer defined by your thoughts or your feelings, the ground beneath you becomes more solid. The "observing self" that ACT cultivates tends to become a reliable source of steadiness even in turbulent inner weather.
The ACT Approach
A life that's full, not just comfortable.
ACT asks a different question than most therapies. Rather than "how do we make you feel better?", it asks "what kind of life do you want to be living?" — and works backward from there. The distress is real. The difficult thoughts and feelings are real. But they don't have to be the walls of your world.
Psychological flexibility — the ability to be present with whatever is arising internally, while still moving toward what matters — is one of the most robust predictors of mental health and wellbeing in the research literature. It's also something that can genuinely be developed. That's what ACT builds.
Sessions are available in person at our Brewery District, St. Albert, and Windermere locations, and virtually for clients anywhere in Alberta.
Book a Session
Find us in Edmonton, St. Albert & Windermere
ACT is available in person at all three Summit locations, and virtually for clients anywhere in Alberta.
Wîhkwêntôwin ᐄᐧᐦᑫᐧᐣᑑᐃᐧᐣ (Oliver)
Grandin Plaza, 2nd Floor
Edmonton, AB
Common Questions
ACT — your questions answered
Our Therapists
Therapists who use ACT at Summit
The clinicians below have specific training and experience with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. A free 15-minute consultation is always available — no commitment required.
Related Approaches
Other modalities we work with
Stop waiting to feel ready. Start moving toward what matters.
Your first consultation is free — no commitment, no pressure. Just a conversation about where you are and whether ACT might be the right fit for you.
We acknowledge that our practice is located in Treaty 6 territory, on the traditional lands of the Cree, Saulteaux, Niitsitapi (Blackfoot), Métis, and Nakota Sioux Peoples, including our Brewery District office in Wîhkwêntôwin ᐄᐧᐦᑫᐧᐣᑑᐃᐧᐣ (Oliver). We recognize that healing and reconciliation is a responsibility shared by all.