Everything IFS Blog

A free IFS Academy course on workability and creative hopelessness in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT): the control agenda and experiential avoidance, why suppressing feelings backfires, the workability question, clean pain and dirty pain, the struggle switch, and dropping the rope. Every lesson ends with an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy practice so you can begin applying the skill.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT, teaches a different way of relating to thoughts, feelings, and inner struggle. Instead of trying to control painful experiences, ACT helps you build psychological flexibility: the capacity to stay present, open to what is happening inside you, and committed to moving toward what matters. This free course from Everything IFS Academy introduces ACT from the ground up, including its origins, core principles, six central processes, and p

Living the ACT life means bringing the six core ACT processes into ordinary daily choices. This lesson gathers the course together around psychological flexibility: being present, opening to experience, loosening from thoughts, contacting the observing self, clarifying values, and taking committed action.

Committed action is where ACT becomes visible in ordinary life. This lesson explains how values turn into concrete behavior, why meaningful action does not require confidence or emotional readiness, and how small repeated steps build psychological flexibility over time.

Values are central to ACT because they give committed action somewhere to point. This lesson explains the difference between values, goals, feelings, and inherited obligations, helping learners clarify what genuinely matters and how they want to live.

Self-as-context is one of ACT’s most subtle and freeing skills. This lesson explains the difference between the storied self and the observing self, helping learners understand how painful identity stories can loosen when they are noticed from a larger place of awareness.

Acceptance is one of ACT’s core skills for changing the struggle with painful inner experience. This lesson explains experiential avoidance, why fighting feelings often makes suffering worse, and how acceptance helps people make room for difficult emotions while continuing to live toward what matters.

Cognitive defusion is one of ACT’s core skills for changing how people relate to thoughts. This lesson explains the difference between being fused with a thought and noticing a thought as a thought, helping learners understand how defusion creates space for choice, values, and psychological flexibility.

Contact with the present moment is one of ACT’s core skills. This lesson explains how attention often gets pulled into the past, future, worry, memory, or mental rehearsal, and how ACT teaches flexible, voluntary attention so people can return to the life that is actually happening.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy did not begin as an abstract clinical theory. It grew out of Steven C. Hayes’ own struggle with panic disorder, his failed attempts to control anxiety, and the discovery that living well may depend less on changing inner experience and more on changing our relationship to it.