Recover Life from Depression

Beyond Depression to Guiding Values

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy reminds me of the tense time I spent learning how to drive a car. Venturing onto a two-lane highway, I fixed my mind on the big worry – how to get where I wanted to go without crashing into anything along the way. The most important thing was to stay in my lane, and I had trouble with that. I divided my attention between the stripe down the middle of the […] Read more »

Before ACT – Doing Depression Right

Written by John Folk-Williams

When I started learning about Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), the idea that I was doing depression rather than having it as an illness didn’t make a lot of sense to me. I could understand that avoiding painful situations could worsen depression and that I often acted in self-defeating ways. But weren’t those the effects or symptoms of an underlying illness? Knowing that I had an illness called depression explained so much of my experience […] Read more »

Starting on a Path toward Acceptance

Written by John Folk-Williams

For some time I have been working with the idea of accepting depression rather than trying to fight it. That’s an approach to therapy based on mindfulness and an attempt to broaden the range of experience you can live with comfortably. Although I haven’t worked with a therapist trained in any of the acceptance and mindfulness therapies, some of the principles I’ve been learning about remind me of things I have been doing for some […] Read more »