ABSTRACT
The concept of values in ACT has the potential to be quite seductive for both practitioner and client alike. In our experience, contacting a model of psychotherapy that explicitly seeks to elicit the client’s strengths and connect with ideas that are fundamentally meaningful can be a powerful experience for both parties. It is easy for encounters within some approaches to become somewhat problem-saturated, whereas a focus on values is one of the many places that an ACT practitioner might start. The energy and enthusiasm that this can create has the potential to provoke a false dawn, whereby either client or practitioner subscribes to the notion that all that needs to be done is identify what the client cares about and promote the dogged pursuit of value-driven behaviour. This can be a trap, since it denies the core process at the heart of ACT, namely psychological flexibility. It also denies one of the core facets of a value, which is that it is something that is freely chosen. Almost in the moment that the client starts to believe that they must pursue a value, flexibility and choice begin to evaporate, and that value starts to look more like a rule. It is important to restate that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with rules, although if there is rigidity around rule-following, a psychologically flexible position is not being adopted and the consequent behavioural repertoire is less likely to be wider or more functional.
