The Importance of Behavioural Goals
ACT for BeginnersI briefly want to explore the very important difference between emotional goals and behavioral goals. Emotional goals describe how I want to feel. An emotional goal is something like I want to feel x or I don't want to feel why. And the vast majority of clients come to therapy with emotional goals. Here are some examples of common emotional goals that clients present with, recover from depression.
Stop feeling so anxious. Increase self-worth. Build self-esteem. Get over what happened. Get my old self back. Feel happy. Feel good. Have more confidence. Stop doubting myself, feel calmer, reduce anxiety. Stop getting so angry. And so on and so on. And what all of these goals boil down to is this.
Get rid of my unwanted thoughts and feelings and make me feel good. Now, of course, emotional goals are normal. You know, we all want to feel good. We all want to stop feeling bad and this is what drives the vast majority of our clients to therapy in the first place. However, emotional goals are problematic. Because they feed into experiential avoidance, which is of course one of the core pathological processes that we're targeting in ACT.
Remember, we want to actively undermine experiential avoidance in the ACT approach and convert it to the alternative agenda of acceptance. So as soon as possible in therapy, we wanna start undermining these emotional goals, and if possible transforming them into behavioral goals. But we don't want to do this through direct confrontation. We don't wanna say to a client. You know, we don't try to get rid of your difficult thoughts and feelings.
We're not gonna try to control your emotions. This isn't about feeling good. You know, if we said that to our clients, they'd run out of the room screaming. So we've gotta be kinda clever, in how we go about this. So if emotional goals describe how I want to feel, behavioral goals describe what I want to do. And as soon as possible, ideally on the first session, we want to start establishing these behavioral goals.
And one very simple way to do this is by exploring the towards moves arrows on the choice point. What are kinda towards moves you're currently making? What are towards moves that you used to do that you'd like to start doing again, what are kind of towards moves you'd like to start doing?