Depression is one of the most common mental health issues in America and every year the number continues to grow at an alarming rate. New York City is no exception. For the afflicted, the chronic feelings of sadness, hopelessness, and lack of energy can seem impossible to overcome. However, acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), as offered by psychotherapists in NYC, offers a holistic approach to healing depression by letting you embrace your internal experiences without judgment, connecting with your personal values, defusing your negative thoughts, and helping you take purposeful action.
Mindfulness: Accepting Thoughts and Emotions Without Judgment
In essence, ACT is the practice of mindfulness, which involves making you deliberately pay attention to the present moment with openness and curiosity. If you are struggling with depression, mindfulness provides a way by which you can observe your thoughts and emotions without getting caught up in them. Rather than trying to avoid or suppress sad feelings and self-defeating attitudes, ACT teaches you to acknowledge them without judgment.
By noticing thoughts and emotions as they arise without reacting or attaching meaning to them, you’ll notice that their intensity and grip over us begins to loosen. Mindfulness allows you to see that you are not just your feelings or beliefs. Painful thoughts such as feelings of worthlessness can simply be noticed and labeled as just another thought, rather than the absolute truth. You’ll notice that low moods come and go like clouds moving across the sky rather than permanent storms.
The more you become aware of and separate from your negative internal events the lesser their control over your behavior tends to get. You can act with values and purpose even when depressed thoughts and emotions arise. Mindfulness gives you the space you need to make choices aligned with your hopes rather than your fears.
Clarifying Values to Guide Healing
In the midst of depression, connecting to your personal values that give your life meaning and purpose provides you with the essential motivation and gives a direction to change. Values reflect your deepest desires for how you want to interact with the world. They might include being a loving friend, caring for animals, learning and creating, activism for social causes, connection to nature, travel and adventure, nurturing family relationships, generosity, or spirituality.
Psychotherapists in NYC using ACT to heal people struggling with depression would guide you to identify your core values through writing, discussion, and experiential exercises. Once clarified, these values offer guideposts for setting goals and moving forward with committed action. Even when your depressive feelings would return, your values would remind you why your recovery matters.
Rather than getting lost in the haze of depression, you can use your values to take small ongoing steps toward living a vital, meaningful life. Using your values to inform your goals and actions fosters hopefulness and empowers change.
Defusing Negative Thoughts Through Cognitive Defusion
Depression often goes hand in hand with recurrent negative thoughts that can seem endless and inescapable. Cognitive defusion techniques used in ACT helps you relate to your thoughts in a different way that reduces their believability and impact.
Rather than engaging and arguing with depressive thoughts, defusion helps you disentangle from their grip. You start to see your thoughts as simply words and stories generated by your mind rather than the literal truth. Techniques such as thanking your mind for the thought, labeling the process of thinking, and repeating a thought until it loses meaning create psychological distance. This allows you to move forward with values-based action even when negative thoughts continue to arise in your mind.
Defusion as a method of psychotherapy counseling also involves noticing when you are fused with or consumed by certain thoughts. When you feel stuck in a depressive thought pattern, you can ask yourself whether the particular thought that is weighing you down or holding you back is helpful and consistent with your values. This perspective will help you gradually diminish the power of thoughts to dominate your consciousness and behavior.
Taking Committed Action Toward Vital Living
While acceptance, values, and diffusion lay the groundwork, committed action is integral for creating meaningful change. ACT guides you to turn your values into concrete goals and steps forward. By experimenting with small actions, you build self-efficacy and motivation to keep moving ahead.
For someone struggling with loss of meaning, a first step might be showing up for coffee with a friend. For another whose depression prevents exercise, walking 10 minutes a day could provide a sense of accomplishment. Willingness to feel depression and anxiety makes committed action possible, rather than avoiding life until you feel better.
ACT validates that depression recovery is an ongoing process, not perfection. Setbacks provide you opportunities to clarify your values and adjust your actions. Over time, your consistent steps in valued directions, facilitated by psychotherapy counseling, will help you counter the stagnation of depression. You’ll experience the possibility of vital living by doing what matters, here and now, one step at a time.
ACT Support Groups
While ACT can be practiced individually, group settings provide valuable opportunities to learn skills together and gain support. In groups, as a participant, you’ll practice mindfulness, clarify values, share struggles, celebrate successes, and feel less alone.Trained ACT facilitators, i.e., a professional mental health counselor, would facilitate experiential exercises, discussions, and goal-setting. Groups enable members to inspire each other’s growth.
Developing openness and trust together builds understanding that we all suffer from difficult thoughts and feelings at times. The compassion fostered in groups creates a safe space for healing. Connecting with fellow participants also shows there are many paths for moving forward based on what we value. By practicing ACT skills together each week, members gain depth of understanding and motivation to grow.
Here are a few frequently asked questions and answers about ACT for depression:
Q1: Do I need to stop taking antidepressants to do ACT?
No, ACT can be compatible with antidepressant medication and is meant to complement other treatments. ACT provides psychological skills for relating to thoughts and emotions in a healthier way.
Q2: Will ACT make my depressive thoughts go away?
ACT does not aim to eliminate depressive thoughts and feelings, which are part of the natural human experience. It offers a different relationship to depressing thoughts – one of self-compassion, distancing, and commitment to value-based action.
Q3: Is ACT effective for someone with severe depression?
Research shows ACT is effective for moderate to severe depression. By building psychological flexibility, mindfulness, and values-based action, ACT empowers change even when depressive symptoms persist. It offers hope for living a vital life beyond depression’s grip.
Q4: How is ACT different from CBT?
While Cognitive Behavioral Therapy aims to change negative thought patterns, ACT teaches acceptance of thoughts and feelings. ACT focuses more on clarifying values to guide actions versus challenging distorted thinking.
Embrace Growth through Acceptance
If you’re weighed down by depression, ACT administered by an NY psychotherapist would provide you with a lifeline for transforming your relationship to emotions, thoughts, and behavior. By cultivating mindfulness, clarifying your values, defusing negative thoughts, and taking committed action, you can break free from the depressive patterns of your thoughts. Though accepting depressive thoughts and feelings may seem counterintuitive at first glance, ACT teaches that openness and self-compassion provides you with the only path to lasting change.
Rather than wasting energy by resisting what you’re feeling, with ACT administered by a licensed mental health counselor in NYC, you can learn to welcome and embrace the reality of each moment. Your values will remind you why getting unstuck matters and orient you toward purposeful action. Small steps forward accumulate into meaningful change. While difficult feelings come and go like passing storms, your values and commitment shine light on the path ahead. Through the holistic approach of ACT, you can come home to ourselves, move in valued directions, and walk the path of vital living.
For people from NYC seeking a judgment-free space to unpack their mental health struggles, Gita Sawhney’s “GS Mental Health & Wellness” practice offers an inclusive, compassionate approach to psychotherapy in NYC. Gita, a licensed mental health counselor in NYC, firmly believes that mental wellbeing is a fundamental human right, and her passion is providing a safe haven for marginalized communities and people from all walks of life who are in need of psychotherapeutic assistance. With her expertise in supporting diverse clients through issues like depression, anxiety, trauma, OCD etc. and employing evidence based depression therapies like ACT, CBT etc, Gita facilitates holistic recovery from depression.
If you’re going through depression and you’re looking for a therapist whom you can confide in without the fear of being judged in any way, then Gita Sawhney’s GS Mental Health & Wellness is the right place for you to come and seek help regarding anything that’s weighing you down.
Through Gita’s adept application of psychotherapeutic solutions for depression, ACT being one of them, you’re sure to embark on a profound journey of healing and self-discovery.
