Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: An Experiential Approach to Behavior Change

"In my opinion, this is still the core ACT book to read. This book is just packed with a wealth of information, insights, and novel approaches to clinical problems. There is no other ACT book written to date that matches this one in its scope, overview, and coherence in terms of explaining the ACT model and linking it to the basic behavioral principles with underlie the approach. Even though I've had this book for almost a decade, I still refer to it's dogeared and underlined pages almost every week. If you are a therapist interested in ACT, this book should be in your hands."
~ Written on 2008-04-03

"A really good overview and also in depth approach to a new therapy that could well be the next CBT - easy to read and with some very clear examples and analogies. I recommend it to anyone that has found that CBT has some gaps in regards to recurrance and behaviour change. "
~ Written on 2005-09-08

"Hayes and colleagues have made an excellent contribution with their book Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) by drawing together many years of theoretical work and practice into a very readable work. The first half of the book outlines the theoretical foundations of ACT. Many recent books in clinical psychology claim to offer a new psychotherapeutic technique or a new approach within a particular conceptual framework. In contrast, Hayes and colleagues present a new and comprehensive conceptual foundation for psychotherapy. They seek to challenge some of the cherished notions in mental health (e.g., that mental disorders always arise from abnormality) and critique some of the central ideas in many popular therapies (e.g., the idea in Cognitive Behaviour Therapy that mental health will be improved by changing the content of one's thoughts). Their argument identifies language and our use of it as both one of the key reasons for humanity's success and our inability to rid ourselves of many mental health issues. For a reflective practitioner or academic, the arguments presented will give the reader much food for thought.

The second half of the book outlines the practice of ACT and as such illustrates the fist part. This sections is excellent in that even thought it uses language to describe ACT, it attempts to use the principles of ACT upon the reader and gives the reader examples to work though at the end of each chapter. Thus, the reader cannot emerge at the end of the book without having been changed by reading the book.

The ability to critique current thinking in clinical psychology is not novel, but the ability to present an alternative is much more rare. Hayes and colleages have done so and have presented it in a way that will be accessible to practitioners and researchers from many different theoretical orientations. A challenging and thought-provoking book."
~ Written on 2000-07-14