Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) · Chicago, IL

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is a mindfulness-based, evidence-supported approach that focuses on changing your relationship with difficult thoughts and feelings rather than trying to eliminate them. Unlike CBT, which works to examine and reframe inaccurate thoughts, ACT teaches you to observe thoughts without judgment and without letting them drive your behavior, regardless of whether the thoughts are accurate. Unlike traditional talk therapy, ACT is action-oriented and values-focused: the question is not only what you are feeling but what matters to you and how you can move toward that even when discomfort is present. What makes ACT particularly distinctive is its emphasis on psychological flexibility — the ability to hold difficult internal experiences with openness while still moving meaningfully toward the life you want.

ACT is particularly well-suited to anxiety because it addresses something that other approaches sometimes miss: the struggle against anxiety often intensifies it rather than reducing it. When we treat anxiety as an emergency to be eliminated, we paradoxically give it more power. ACT teaches a fundamentally different relationship: making room for anxious thoughts and feelings without fighting them, observing them without attaching meaning, and choosing to move toward the life you want anyway rather than waiting for the anxiety to go away first. Over time, this changes the relationship with anxiety in a way that allows for genuine freedom rather than just temporary relief.

Yes, and ACT has a particularly important and distinctive contribution to make in the treatment of depression. One of the defining features of depression is getting stuck — unable to take meaningful action because the emotional weight feels too heavy, waiting to feel better before engaging with life again. This waiting often deepens the depression rather than resolving it. ACT addresses this directly by helping people identify what actually matters to them and take small, value-aligned steps even in the presence of depression, rather than waiting for the depression to lift first. ACT for depression is not about forcing positivity or pretending to feel differently than you do. It is about reconnecting with meaning and action even when everything feels flat, heavy, or meaningless.

Yes. I use ACT regularly with adolescents in my Chicago practice and find it genuinely effective when adapted appropriately for their developmental stage. The core ACT ideas resonate with teenagers once they are framed in language that connects to their actual experience. The idea that thoughts are not facts, that struggling against pain often makes it worse, and that you can take meaningful steps toward what you care about even when you feel anxious, sad, or uncertain — these ideas make intuitive sense to most teenagers. The bus metaphor, for example, tends to land particularly well with teens.

ACT and ERP are a natural and powerful combination for OCD treatment because they address complementary dimensions of the problem. ERP addresses the behavioral component by helping you face feared situations and resist compulsive responses, allowing the anxiety to decrease naturally over time as the brain learns that the compulsion was not necessary. ACT addresses the cognitive and psychological flexibility component by helping you observe intrusive thoughts without judgment and without treating them as meaningful signals that require a response. Together, they change both the behavior and the relationship with the thoughts that drive it. When I work with OCD clients in Chicago, I typically integrate both approaches because each one covers ground that the other alone does not fully address.