Zooming Out, an ACT Cognitive Defusion Technique

AN INTERVIEW WITH: DR. ASHLEY BRUMETT, PhD

Interview

WHAT IS THE CLINICAL APPROACH WITH ACCEPTANCE AND COMMITMENT THERAPY (ACT)?

With ACT, it’s a little bit different from typical approaches like CBT in the way that it’s not about challenging your problems, analyzing your problems, really delving into the content of your thinking. It’s zooming out and learning that you have the ability to disengage from rumination and thoughts that maybe keep coming up and keep fueling whatever is happening. It’s potentially maintaining a disorder is our relationship to our thoughts. So instead of necessarily challenging things or delving deeper into them, we’re going to zoom out and just kind of see them for what they are. So in a similar capacity to engaging in like mindfulness, you’re disengaging from this kind of rumination cycle, and there are different ways to do that. Mindfulness is definitely one of the spokes on the ACT wheel, but there’s also something called Cognitive Diffusion, which are different techniques to separate who you are from what you’re thinking, and to realize that not everything that we believe is necessarily true or necessarily means anything deeper about ourselves or says anything about our character.