Dr. David Van Nuys:Welcome to Wise Counsel, a podcast interview series sponsored bymentalhelp.net, covering topics in mental health, wellness and psychotherapy. My name is Dr. David Van Nuys. I'm a clinical psychologist and your host.
On today's show, we'll be talking about acceptance and commitment therapy, or ACT therapy for short, with my guest, Dr. Steven C. Hayes. Steven C. Hayes, PhD, is Nevada Foundation Professor at the Department of Psychology at the University of Nevada and author of 30 books and nearly 400 scientific articles. His career has focused on an analysis of the nature of human language and cognition and the application of this to the understanding and alleviation of human suffering.
In 1992, he was listed by the Institute for Scientific Information as the 30th highest impact psychologist in the world during 1986 through 1990. Dr. Hayes has been president of Division 25 of the American Psychological Association - that's the division of experimental behavior analysis. He also served a 5-year term on the National Advisory Council on Drug Abuse in the National Institutes of Health.
His popular book, 'Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life' was the number one self-help book, reaching number 20 overall on Amazon and briefly outselling Harry Potter for several days.
Now, here is the interview.
Dr. Steven Hayes, welcome to Wise Counsel.
Dr. Steven Hayes:Glad to be with you.
David:Yes, it's great to have you here. Now actually I heard about your work from someone else who suggested that you would make a great interview subject and so I must confess to being quite ignorant. I've been to your website and I see that you have a very full, rich, productive professional life, a very elaborate website that would take quite a while to thoroughly plumb and understand everything there, so I'm probably going to ask you some fairly naive questions. Hopefully you'll be tolerant of that.
Steven:Sure.
David:I know that you've developed a new approach to therapy that you call 'ACT', and do you call it 'A-C-T' or do you call it 'ACT'?
Steven:I call it 'ACT', 'A-C-T' to my ears always sounds like 'E-C-T' and I'm waiting to be shocked, but no, we call it 'ACT' just by tradition.
David:Yeah, well, that's good, because there's a theater company in San Francisco called 'A-C-T', so...
Steven:It's unbelievable.
David:Yeah, that's another good reason not to. And I also saw a lot of information about RFT, which somehow A-C-T comes out of RFT. Do you think it makes sense for us? And RFT stands for relational frame theory. A-C-T stands for acceptance commitment therapy.
Steven:Well, see, now you're going to have to call it 'ACT' if you're going to... When you say 'A-C-T'... Or are you going to say ACT?
David:Oh, right.
Steven:It's OK.
David:ACT is an acronym for acceptance commitment therapy. So should we start talking about RFT in order to get into ACT or...
Steven:Well, I think it's difficult work, especially for the lay public, but two things in there that are maybe useful. If I could just do an orientation for ACT, would that be helpful?
David:Yes.
Steven:I can link it a little bit to RFT.
David:Yeah, that'd be great.
Steven:You know, a lot of the therapy traditions that are out there are dealing with the issue of cognition in one way or another because it's just so central to human functioning, but there's been very little careful linking to more scientific approaches to cognition. Those dominant themes that are out there are more information processing kind of models, thinking people are computers and so forth.
And I really early on, although I come out of that tradition, ACT is part of the cognitive behavior therapy tradition, really and behavior therapy more generally, I was dissatisfied with the linkage between our understanding of what you and I are doing right now, or what anybody listening is doing when they're struggling with themselves in their own mind, worried about their own problems, evaluating their own experiences.
I became dissatisfied with understanding that process as how it relates to the process both of creating human suffering and of solving human suffering. So ACT is part of a larger effort to try to create a modern and new approach to thinking itself, and then out of that, trying to create technologies that are linked to those principles that you can test in carefully controlled studies and that we can teach other people through self-help and, of course, through therapy and other means - how to use these techniques.
So I can explain what the essence of RFT is and how it links to ACT, but that's at the level of process. What we're trying to do is go beyond simply a commonsense understanding or some of the scientific ways of understanding cognition that are, I think, harder to turn into real vital treatment programs. I don't think people really are computers and thinking of them as machines can only take you so far.
David:Oh, I totally agree with that. I'm not sure if we need to go into RFT. It sounds like that might be fairly technical. So perhaps we should stick with ACT.