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ACT often deepens the work you have already done in therapy by helping insight become something embodied, not just understood. You recognize where patterns come from, yet still feel pulled into familiar reactions. ACT supports you in relating differently to what arises, so awareness turns into meaningful choices.
ACT weaves your previous therapy work into everyday life, helping insights translate into real, moment-to-moment change. You are supported in practicing flexibility with thoughts and emotions as they arise, so your values can guide choices in your relationships, work, and the ongoing process of healing.
Stop fighting what is beyond your control, and learn how to respond with clarity, flexibility, and care for what you can influence and choose.
It can feel like a tug-of-war, the harder you push against pain, the stronger it gets. ACT helps turn off that struggle switch, teaching you to make space for what shows up without pushing it away.
ACT focuses on staying present and grounded while learning to see thoughts as words, not facts.
Together, we clarify your values as a guiding direction and take small, meaningful steps forward, even when discomfort is present, so life can be shaped by meaning rather than avoidance.
If you’re ready to take the next step, please book a consultation or request an appointment today!
My life looks steady on the outside, but inside, things still feel heavy, tense, and unresolved. My anxiety is just under the surface. My emotions can swing from out of nowhere. Triggers from old wounds keep resurfacing in relationships and work, even though therapy has given me a lot of self-awareness.
I still rely on substances, addictive patterns, or constant busyness to cope with stress, shame, and overwhelm. Change often feels driven by guilt or pressure, and my reactions tend to come from survival rather than choice, even when part of me longs for peace and steadiness.
Trauma can leave you feeling fused with painful thoughts and memories, as if they define who you are. Avoidance, rigid thinking, or control can become ways of coping, pulling you out of the present moment and away from what matters, even when you long for peace.
Many people who seek trauma-focused therapy describe these experiences:
Before ACT
With ACT
Trauma shapes daily life through chronic tension, emotional reactivity, hopelessness, and patterns that repeat despite efforts. ACT works by helping you stop fighting against yourself as the enemy, using mindfulness to stay in the present, step back from unhelpful thoughts, and commit to taking small, concrete steps toward change.
Addiction
ACT supports a shift in locus of control by helping you recognize that while urges, thoughts, and emotions can feel unmanageable, your response to them remains within your control. Rather than relying solely on external pressure or sobriety milestones to feel stable or successful, motivation grows from within.
As values guide your decisions, a deeper sense of agency grows, fostering self-trust and reducing the risk of relapse.
Anxiety and Panic
ACT helps with anxiety and panic by teaching you to stop fighting anxious thoughts and physical sensations and instead accept them as temporary. Rather than trying to eliminate anxiety altogether, you learn to witness sensations with openness, see thoughts as just words rather than threats, and stay anchored in the here and now.
Through acceptance, mindfulness, and gentle exposure to discomfort, anxiety loses its power. Your core values can then guide choices, supporting a fuller, more meaningful life even when anxiety is present.
Complex Trauma and PTSD
ACT helps by creating enough inner space where you no longer have to battle against trauma. You are better able to sit with fear, shame, flashbacks, and hypervigilance without being swept away.
Mindfulness and diffusion diminish the power of trauma-driven thoughts, while defining clear values helps you recognize how your resilience and strength have always protected you.
This work supports taking committed actions towards building a life you deserve through intentional choices, courage and a steadier sense of self, despite what trauma tried to take.
Depression
ACT helps with depression by changing how you relate to self-critical thoughts, low motivation, and emotional heaviness. Instead of believing thoughts like “I am a failure,” you observe “I am having the thought that I am a failure.” You can even label thoughts as familiar stories or say them in a playful way to loosen their grip.
Mindfulness practices help you stay present when rumination takes over, grounding you in the body and moment. These small, meaningful actions allow life to gently reopen without waiting to feel better first.
Childhood Neglect and Abuse
ACT supports healing from childhood trauma by helping you step out of the exasperating struggle with memories, beliefs, and unmet needs. Diffusion helps thoughts like “I am broken” or “It was my fault” be seen as mental narratives, not truths.
Practices like thanking your mind, saying “thank you, mind, for that memory of neglect,” reduce the power of painful thoughts. Mindful grounding, observer self practices, values clarification, and validating long-ignored needs support rebuilding safety and self-trust.
Relationship Patterns and Attachment Wounds
ACT helps with relationships by changing how you relate to the thoughts and fears that get activated in closeness. Instead of believing fears like “I’m unlovable” or “I’ll be abandoned,” you learn to see them as attachment wounds, not facts. Willingness and acceptance support staying present with vulnerability instead of withdrawing or clinging.
Mindful awareness slows reactivity during conflict, while values-based questions like “What kind of partner do I want to be right now?” guide responses rooted in connection, compassion, and emotional safety rather than fear.
ACT brings awareness to your thoughts, emotions, and body sensations without trying to fix or suppress them. ACT isn’t about feeling happy all the time; it’s about building psychological flexibility so you can live a rich, full life, despite painful struggles. You learn to hold space for your inner experiences with openness, not avoidance.
From there, we work towards defining your top 10 core values and making choices that align with them. When you are clear about what truly matters to you and begin taking small, committed actions in that direction, you build stability and meaningful change rooted in safety rather than survival.
Acceptance (Making Room)
Acceptance is actively making room for painful thoughts, emotions, and sensations rather than struggling to control or eliminate them. This isn’t resignation, it’s allowing what is present to exist, so it does not run your life.
By acknowledging reality as it is, even when that reality is difficult, you begin to let go of resistance, harsh self-judgment, guilt and frustration about what cannot be changed. You can then focus your energy on what you can do.
With greater self-acceptance, you are able to take a nonjudgmental stance towards your imperfections and build self-trust in how you choose to respond differently to challenges.
Cognitive Diffusion
Cognitive diffusion is learning to see thoughts, images, and memories as mental events rather than absolute truths. Instead of being fused with what your mind says, you begin to notice thoughts as language, sounds, or pictures that come and go. This creates distance from self-judgment and painful narratives, reminding you that you are not the sum of your thoughts or the stories your mind repeats.
How it works:
Present Moment Awareness (Mindfulness)
This is a gentle practice of intentionally focusing on what is happening right now, in your thoughts, body, and surroundings, without judgment. By using anchors like the breath, bodily sensations, or the senses, attention is gently brought out of past regrets and future worries. This grounded awareness helps reduce stress, anxiety, and emotional overwhelm, supporting greater clarity, resilience, and a deeper connection to daily life.
How it works:
Self-as-Context (Observing Self)
Self-as-context, or the observing Self, is the part of you that can notice thoughts, emotions, and sensations without being defined by them. Like the sky holding passing weather, this perspective helps you recognize that experiences come and go while you remain steady, creating space to respond with choice, safety, and clarity rather than reacting from the experience itself.
How it works:
Values (Your Guiding Star)
Core values act as an inner compass, guiding how you want to live rather than what you want to achieve. Unlike goals, which are destinations, values are ongoing directions that reflect what truly matters to you. Because values focus on how you choose to act, not on outcomes you can’t control, they remain available even during difficulty. Clarifying values helps align daily actions with meaning, restoring purpose, motivation, and a sense of direction when life feels stuck or uncertain.
How it works:
Committed Action (Taking Steps)
Committed action is where values begin to take shape in everyday life. Once your values are clear, your focus shifts to taking small, concrete steps in that direction, even when fear, discomfort, or self-doubt are present. This work is about living your values now, not waiting until you feel ready.
How it works:
ACT supports other modalities by offering a flexible, grounding framework that helps therapeutic work integrate into daily life. By strengthening acceptance, presence, and values-based action, ACT allows insights from deeper approaches to unfold more steadily, safely, and sustainably over time.
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing)
ACT can support EMDR by helping create stability, presence, and psychological flexibility before, during, and after processing. Skills like acceptance, grounding, and defusion help you stay connected to the present while EMDR targets past experiences, allowing the work to integrate more gently and sustainably into daily life.
IFS (Internal Family Systems)
ACT and IFS work together by combining deep internal understanding with practical, values-driven action. IFS helps you identify and compassionately understand different parts, while ACT supports acceptance, defusion, and committed steps forward. Together, they build psychological flexibility, self-trust, and meaningful change rooted in awareness, compassion, and intentional living.
KAP (Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy)
Ketamine and ACT work together by creating safety first, then building lasting change. Ketamine can soften hypervigilance and emotional shutdown, opening a window for healing. ACT helps use that window to stay present, relate differently to trauma responses, and take small, values-guided steps that rebuild agency, meaning, and long-term stability.
Together, they support steadier healing and long-term change
How ACT Helped Me
ACT changed my relationship with myself long before I ever considered being a therapist. For years, I tried to control my inner turmoil and external circumstances through sheer determination. ACT helped me to embody the truth of the Serenity Prayer, accepting what I cannot not change, finding courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
ACT taught me that radical acceptance is not resignation. It is clarity. By accepting the harsh reality of things beyond my control, especially other people’s choices and problems, I gained the courage to refocus my energy on choices aligned with my core values. I finally let go of futile struggles with myself and others.
Today, I can stay rooted in wisdom rather than acting from urgency. I can practice greater discernment, knowing when to accept what is present and when to act with courage by making better choices.
I help clients do the same so they can move towards resilience, self-compassion, and self-trust. They become empowered to live in alignment with their values, even when life remains difficult.
ACT therapy does not follow a fixed timeline. How long it lasts depends on what you are working on, your history, and what you want your life to look like as therapy unfolds.
For some people, ACT can be effective in a shorter, focused window, often 8–16 sessions, especially when the goal is learning skills to relate differently to anxiety, panic, or specific life stressors. In this phase, the work centers on acceptance, mindfulness, values clarification, and taking meaningful steps forward.
For others, particularly those healing from complex trauma, long-standing patterns, addiction, or attachment wounds, ACT is often used over a longer period of time. In these cases, therapy may last many months or longer, not because progress is slow, but because the work is depth-oriented and paced for nervous system safety. ACT becomes a way of living and practicing, not a quick intervention.
ACT therapy is best for situations where the struggle itself has become the problem. It is especially helpful when insight already exists, but life still feels constrained by internal experiences like fear, shame, urges, or old trauma patterns.
ACT is particularly well suited for:
ACT works best when the goal is not to eliminate pain, but to change your relationship with it. It supports learning how to stay present with what arises, loosen the grip of unhelpful thoughts, and move toward a life guided by values like connection, courage, and self-trust.
ACT therapy can be very effective, but it is not the right fit for everyone.
One challenge is that ACT does not focus on symptom elimination. For people who want anxiety, sadness, or intrusive thoughts to stop as quickly as possible, this approach can feel frustrating. ACT asks you to change your relationship with discomfort rather than remove it, which can feel counterintuitive at first.
ACT also requires a willingness to experience discomfort. The work involves staying present with difficult thoughts, emotions, or body sensations instead of avoiding them. For individuals who are not yet resourced or stabilized, this can feel overwhelming without careful pacing and support.
Some people find ACT less structured than approaches like traditional CBT. Because it emphasizes flexibility, values, and lived experience, it may feel abstract or unclear to those who prefer step-by-step techniques or concrete symptom tracking.
ACT is also not always sufficient on its own for complex or acute concerns. For severe trauma, dissociation, or significant substance use, ACT often works best when integrated with other modalities, such as trauma-focused CBT, somatic work, EMDR, or medication support.
ACT depends heavily on the therapeutic relationship and guidance. Without clear explanation and attunement, concepts like acceptance or defusion can be misunderstood as avoidance or “giving up,” which can limit its effectiveness.
Yes, ACT can help with PTSD, especially when symptoms are driven by ongoing internal struggle rather than danger in the present.
ACT supports PTSD by focusing on safety, grounding, and how you relate to trauma responses, rather than forcing repeated exposure or trying to erase memories. Many people with PTSD already understand what happened, but their nervous system continues to react as if the threat is still present. ACT helps shift that pattern.
Here’s how ACT helps with PTSD:
PTSD often leads to avoiding memories, sensations, places, or emotions. ACT gently reduces avoidance by building willingness to experience what arises, at a pace that respects nervous system limits.
Intrusive thoughts, flashbacks, hypervigilance, or shutdown are treated as internal experiences, not signs of current danger. This reduces their control over daily life.
Mindfulness skills help anchor attention in the here and now, which is essential when trauma pulls the body and mind into the past.
ACT helps create distance from rigid thoughts like “I’m not safe” or “I’m broken,” without arguing with them or trying to replace them.
Rather than organizing life around avoiding triggers, ACT helps rebuild life around values like connection, stability, purpose, or self-respect.
ACT is especially helpful for:
ACT often works best for PTSD in combination with other trauma-focused approaches, such as EMDR, somatic therapy, or medication support. In these cases, ACT provides the grounding, flexibility, and integration skills that help deeper trauma work feel safer and more sustainable.
You may seek ACT therapy when trying harder has stopped working. Many people come to ACT after years of managing, analyzing, or avoiding their inner experience, only to find that anxiety, trauma responses, depression, or urges still shape their life. ACT is helpful when the struggle with thoughts and feelings has become exhausting.
ACT is often needed when:
Visit our complete FAQs page for more questions about trauma therapy in Seattle.
