Here at counsellingonline we work with online counselling using Aacceptance and Commitment Therapy, known as ‘ACT’ (pronounced as the word ‘act’). ACT is a mindfulness based behavioural therapy that challenges the ground rules of most western psychology. It utilizes a mixture of metaphor, paradox, and mindfulness skills, along with a wide range of experiential exercises and values-guided behavioural interventions. ACT has proven highly effective with a diverse range of clinical conditions; depression, OCD, workplace stress, chronic pain, the stress of terminal cancer, anxiety, PTSD, anorexia, addictions, schizophrenia and perfectionism.
Many young people experience issues around anxiety and social anxiety. This often has severe impacts on your people where they will avoid social situations or tolerate them in horror. Here at www.counsellingonline.biz we have been working with Australian adolescents and young people to develop their skills in psychological flexibility.
ACT teaches young people to identify thoughts and feelings that either push them to act against their values or interfere with them acting according to their values. ACT involves learning skills in accepting unavoidable events, uncontrollable emotions and thoughts. Young People learn to act in line with their values even while these thoughts and emotions occur.
There is also evidence that online counselling services delivered with acceptance and commitment therapy can have a vital impact in reducing binge drinking in young people. This is significant as more than one quarter of Australian teenagers and one third of people aged 20-29 years regularly binge drink.
ACT seeks to help young people increase psychological flexibility and contact direct contingencies (as opposed to indirect, cognitive ones; Twohig, 2009). A core target of ACT is psychological flexibility which is the ability to contact the present more fully as a conscious human being, and based on what the situation is to be able to change or persist with behavior that is value based.
Six core processes contribute to the development of psychological flexibility in ACT. These are acceptance (embracing thoughts and feelings without trying to change their form), diffusion (or seeing thoughts as thoughts), self as context (an I/here/now orientation, viewing oneself as the context where events are experienced), being present (nonjudgmental attention to events as they occur, values and committed action.
Young people can be particularly prone to experience unpleasant thoughts, emotions, or sensations. They feel a natural tendency to want to avoid these uncomfortable experiences – sometimes, at all costs. This is calledexperimentalavoidance. The irony and what we work with in ACT is that experimental avoidance maintains and aggravates psychological distress.
Young people can be also prone to self-harm anexperiential avoidance model of violence and self-harmpostulates that such acts are, in fact, attempts toavoid experiences such as thoughts, feelings,somatic sensations or other internal experiencesthat are uncomfortable or distressing. Therefore, a reduction in experiential avoidanceis therefore the fundamental goal of ACT.
There is a large consumer and client led desire for Online Counselling services In Australia. Matthew Reynolds, a qualified counsellor and founder of www.counsellingonline.biz is passionate about helping people lead the best lives possible. And where clients are struggling with addictive behaviour to show them strategies and techniques to stop struggling and start living.
Author Bio:
Matthew is a qualified counsellor and a regular blogger on Counselling Services Australia. To know about Online Counselling Australia and its benefits please read his articles and also there is further information contained on his website at www.counsellingonline.biz
