Clients are Stuck, Not Broken
ACT as a Brief InterventionOne of my favorite sayings in act is that clients are stuck, not broken. Start from the assumption that clients already have lots of strengths and resources that we can utilize. And One way you can think about what we're doing is that we're helping clients develop further skills and abilities that they already have. You know, everybody has got some ability to be present, to open up and do what matters.
And what we're doing is, with our interventions, ramping up those abilities and helping the client to apply them to the issues that they're struggling with. When we get caught up in DSM disorders, it's easy to start seeing our clients as broken. And we get caught up in all the problems and the complexity of the client's issues. It's easy to start seeing the client as broken. So we really wanna come back again and and again to this idea of the client stuff.
Not broken. What does ACT mean by stuck? Well, it's a convenient label that refers to fusion, avoidance and unworkable action when we're really fused, when we're really caught up in experiential avoidance, when we're pulled into ineffective patterns of self-defeating behavior that pull us away from the life we want to live. That's stuck. And it's very, very different to broken because we can intervene in any one of those areas very rapidly.