A LIFE GUIDED BY VALUES: A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO ACCEPTANCE AND COMMITMENT THERAPY

I'd like to take a moment to discuss a therapeutic approach known as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy — widely recognized by its acronym, ACT — which belongs to what are often called Contextual Therapies, or third-wave therapies, developed within the broader tradition of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. My purpose here isn't to advocate for the approach itself, but to explore one of its conceptual tools, which I find particularly useful when thinking about how we build a meaningful life — ideally within a structured therapeutic process, though not exclusively so.

What concerns me in this post is the coherence between a given theoretical framework and its real-world usefulness for people's quality of life and mental health. Theories are maps; some represent the human landscape quite well, but none of them should be mistaken for the entire territory. In my clinical work, I follow the protocols and techniques of whichever therapeutic approach I'm using with reasonable fidelity — but this space is different. Here, I think more freely. So what I want to do is offer a brief introduction to the concept of "values" — which isn't quite the same as the world means in everyday language — and reflect on how central they can be in guiding who we are, the choices we make, and the lives we live.

ACT was developed in the 1980s by American psychologist Steven Hayes and his collaborators. The approach is organized around what it calls psychological flexibility: the capacity to be fully present in the moment and, from that place, to persist or change our behavior in the service of personally chosen values. The premise sounds straightforward, but it touches on one of the central sources of human suffering. More often than not, it isn't the anxiety, the sadness, or the fear itself that paralyzes us — it's the relentless struggle to make those experiences go away before we allow ourselves to get on with life. Rather than channeling all our energy into eliminating what's difficult, ACT proposes something both more radical and, curiously, more compassionate: learning to remain in contact with difficulty without handing it the controls.

A brief word on "acceptance," since it appears in the name of the approach and tends to be misunderstood. In ACT, acceptance doesn't mean resigning yourself to an unjust situation or giving up on changing what can be changed. It means stopping the internal war against experiences that are already happening — the anxiety that has arrived, the thought that keeps coming back, the sadness that showed up uninvited. That war, when it becomes the center of a person's life, tends to cost far more energy than the experience itself. To accept is to acknowledge that a particular emotion is present right now, without having to approve of it — and, crucially, without needing it to disappear before you can act on what matters.

And by "what matters," I mean precisely what ACT calls values: the references that guide our choices throughout life, which are not the same as the choices themselves, as we'll see in a moment. But before we go further, a necessary clarification.

If you're thinking of "values" as shorthand for an ideological or religious framework — "Christian values," "conservative values," "progressive values" — step back for a moment, because that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm referring to personal behavioral values: the ones that can differ significantly even between two people who share the same religion or vote for the same party.

It's also worth distinguishing values from life domains. Family, work, and health aren't exactly values — they're areas in which values can be expressed. At work, I might value honesty or continuous learning across every situation that calls for a decision. In relationships, I might choose to act with respect and sincerity, consistently. Values show up in the standards we apply to each of these areas, not in the areas themselves.

Values are not goals

A goal is something that can be reached and, at some point, completed: finishing a degree, losing weight, landing a new job. A value, on the other hand, is the guiding principle behind what we pursue. "Being a present father" isn't something you can accomplish in a single day and cross off a list. It's an orientation for every choice you make as a parent. Likewise, "acting with integrity" isn't exhausted by any one action — it's a self-chosen standard for evaluating your own conduct whenever it comes into question.

This distinction has an important practical consequence. Goals can go unmet and leave behind a sense of failure. Values, being behavioral guidelines rather than direct targets, are more resilient to the obstacles life places in the way of our plans. I might not get the job I wanted and still continue to act with dedication and professional responsibility. A value survives the collapse of a goal precisely because it doesn't depend on a specific outcome. It has far more to do with how we try to get there than with whether we arrive.

Declared values and lived values

Most of us have declared values — we announce to anyone who'll listen that family matters, that we value honesty, knowledge, freedom. But then there are the values we actually live by, which show up in the choices we ultimately make. The two lists don't always match.

A question that tends to produce a rather fertile silence: imagine that the people you love and respect could observe your entire life — not only the moments you'd choose to show them, but everything else too. What would you want them to see? What kind of person would you hope to have been in their eyes? It's not a question about perfection. It's a question about direction. A deeply meaningful life can be built from actions — large or small — that are consistent with what we genuinely want to call "myself."

When values become a burden

It's also possible to turn the language of values into another instrument of self-criticism. Someone identifies that they want to be a caring child or a reliable friend and, before long, converts those orientations into absolute demands: being present comes to mean never losing patience; valuing friendship means never saying no. At that point, what was meant to be a compass has become a whip. Values are not standards of purity — they're directions we can return to. A loving person can lose their temper; a committed person can fall short. What matters is what we do afterward: recognizing the drift, repairing the damage when possible, and returning to the references that continue to guide us.

Even when we have some clarity about what we value, decisions don't automatically become simple. Important values can pull in different directions. We might want both security and adventure, both autonomy and belonging, both professional dedication and genuine presence at home. Some choices are hard precisely because something meaningful sits on both sides, and no life is lived without some form of loss. Values don't supply automatic answers — they help us ask better questions, and to recognize which consequences we're most willing to accept.

Values in action — and a project that can always be revised

Values come to life when they inspire concrete behavior. ACT calls this committed action: behavior chosen in alignment with one's values, adapted to the real conditions of any given moment. It's not about waiting for perfect courage or complete certainty, but about identifying the next possible step within whatever circumstances actually exist. When the distance between the life you're living and the life you'd like to build feels overwhelming, the more useful question probably isn't "how do I become everything I've decided to be?" — it's "what's the smallest move I can make today toward what matters to me?" That move might be an apology, a boundary set, a medical appointment finally scheduled, or simply the decision not to abandon yourself again.

One of ACT's more generous ideas is that these guiding principles can be built and revised over time. What was central at twenty may not carry the same weight at fifty — and that doesn't mean you were wrong. Revising your values isn't the same as abandoning them at the first sign of difficulty; it means keeping open the honest question of whether the direction you've chosen still represents the person you want to be. The point of values may not be the maintenance of some rigid, unchanging consistency, but the possibility of reorienting yourself with flexibility — even when the circumstances require that the concrete expression of those values shift as well.

Neither personal values nor ACT promises an existence without suffering — and perhaps no honest therapeutic approach should. Values don't eliminate pain, but they can help distinguish the inevitable suffering that comes with being alive from the suffering produced by a life that keeps getting postponed. A life guided by values may not be one in which we always know exactly where we're going. It may simply be one in which, even after losing our way for a while, we can still recognize the direction we want to return to.

And from there, we choose the next possible step — not necessarily a perfect one, but one that's consistent with the person we're still trying to be, limitations and all.

Image by macrovector on Magnific, Creative Commons license.