Looking at our sexuality through the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) Lens

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)

ACT is an action-based approach to sex therapy that gets clear on what really matters to us and moves us in that direction. It doesn’t attempt to get rid of our negative feelings (feelings can’t be deleted) but does teach us how to hold negative experiences more gently, while engaging in behaviors that actually serve our deeper goals.

I’ve explored a LOT of different therapeutic lenses over the years in effort to support my clients around sexuality. No lens has landed as profoundly and as beautifully as ACT. This work doesn’t look at our suffering as a cluster of symptoms or pathology and it’s not here to judge what we do or don’t enjoy. ACT focuses on the fuller context of who we are and the hows and whys of our suffering. With this data we can build the compassion needed for our suffering and a capacity to hold this suffering while moving forward with life.

With permission from Dr. Steven H. Hayes, I’ve translated his ACT framework for working with sexual health, turning the ACT Hexaflex into the SEXaflex!

Sexual Contextualism

Working with ACT, I help clients traverse their sexual history, pivoting towards living out their vision of sexual health and pleasure, and feeling sexually satisfied just as they are. In ACT language, I lay out ways we can observe (build awareness of) our sexual context and then hold it (build acceptance) with a theoretical lens I’m calling sexual contextualization.

But, what is this, exactly? —Glad you asked!

Sexual contextualization looks at our entire life’s history, our unique combinations of social attributes, to create a fuller context of how we see sexuality in the world, how the world may see us (or not see us) sexually, and how we see ourselves sexually. 

When we look at all of our puzzle pieces, we can get a better understanding of how and why our sexuality functions in the ways that it does.