Clearly, suffering is a basic fact of life for humans. Yet suffering is not just about pain — psychological — or otherwise. It’s much more than that. Humans don’t just experience pain; they agonize over their painful memories, uncomfortable emotions, difficult self-evaluations. They worry and obsess about them, they dread them, they engage in all kinds of activities to avoid them. Naturally people want the suffering in their lives to be minimized. We all value feeling better, but not merely feeling better. A good life is much more than simply a lack of suffering. People want to live well and make the very best of their time on this earth
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is about easing the problem of human suffering, and it’s also about much more than that. It’s about reaching beyond suffering to the larger purpose of people’s lives and helping them get active in really living vitally. ACT is centered on such questions as “What do you really want your life to be about?” or “If you lived in a world where you could have your life be about anything, what would it be?”