Act matrix download pdf

People interact with the diagram and experience having thoughts, feelings, and urges that they would rather not have while choosing to take action toward who or what is important. You, the reader, will discover that while using the matrix to influence others, you have only one agenda: increasing psychological flexibility and valued living. The matrix is a result of over ten thousand hours of work beginning in By I had read pretty much every book and article about ACT, participated in well over one thousand sessions of ACT, and engaged in hundreds of in-depth conversations.

I love to create simple diagrams, and I worked the diagrams all the while. Noticing the differences is where the lines cross. Word spread, and people began to use the matrix in a variety of contexts and settings, first in hospitals and mental health clinics, and then in schools. Then the matrix found its way into boardrooms and meeting rooms. All of this travel with no formal publication to its name…until now. As a matter of fact, if you want to use the matrix, memorize the warm-up and show it to others.

Learn to introduce people to the psychological flexibility point of view by having them notice the difference between sensory experiencing and mental experiencing; and then notice the difference between how it feels to move toward important stuff and how it feels to move away from unwanted mental experiencing, such as fear.

You might also notice some people giggling just a bit while noticing the differences. Whether you choose to learn how to do the matrix routine or not, after reading chapter 1, feel free to skip around the book, perusing the topics that are most important to you. You can always come back later to read other chapters and find new ways of using the matrix diagram.

Such is the nature of the psycho- logical flexibility promoted by the matrix. The basic matrix diagram. Try drawing it on a piece of paper for clients. Five-Senses Experiencing vs.

Mental Experiencing Take out a pen and notice it using your senses. See it, touch it, hear it by tapping or clicking , and smell it. Now remove the pen from your five senses and recall experiencing the pen, this time using your mind.

You might have moved toward a loved one or some sports event. Next, recall moving away from some unwanted thought or feeling inside you. The most common one is fear. We all move away from the feeling of fear. Recall how you moved away to avoid the fear. Well done! All of us move within the matrix all of the time. Think of it as stretching exercises to promote psychological flexibility. First notice the differences a few times per day, then a dozen times per day, and finally many times per day.

Further, we need to know the actions that can help us move toward who or what is important. In acceptance and commitment therapy lingo, this is called values and committed action.

In matrix work, bodily sensations are often regarded as mental or inner experiencing because they occur inside the skin. Above all, we need to be aware of the actions we take too often to move away from unwanted inner experiencing.

While many away moves, such as getting out of the way of a bus, are highly functional, others are not. We all do things to move away from unwanted feelings when the better move would be to take the feelings with us as we move toward who or what is important. The problem is that we swim in a sea of words, and those words take us into our mental experiencing.

Sometimes we get stuck there and forget to smell the roses. Getting Unstuck Getting unstuck from mental experiencing is the purpose of the matrix diagram and noticing the two differences. The primary reason for noticing the two differences is that noticing requires no language, and language is the stuff of mental experiencing.

Instead, we notice the difference between mental and sensory experiencing and learn to have a choice. Learning to have that choice is the essence of psychological flexibility. Essentially, we all tell stories. Those stories may be about what we had for breakfast, where we went on vacation last year, or what we plan to do this weekend. Each is a story that can be sorted into the matrix.

Part of each story includes the five senses: what was seen, heard, felt, smelled, and tasted. If you go to a restaurant, there will be elements of each of the five senses in the story of the trip to the restaurant. Each story also has mental aspects: thoughts, emotions, and urges. The story will also include actions taken both toward and away. As people tell a story—any story—they can be invited to sort the elements of the story into the matrix.

We have people do the sorting so they can practice noticing the dif- ferences. In other words, to do the sorting, the person steps back and notices the differences between elements of the story, sort of like dia- gramming the story. Every act of sorting requires noticing the differences.

Yes, And? Sometimes people get hooked into telling their story and forget to do the sorting. For example, someone might be excitedly telling you about an emotionally charged event that happened last week.

When someone strikes out, the energy is redirected. The energy that the person was just about to spend on being stuck in the story is now being used to sort the story, get free of some of the bonds of the story, and move toward psychological flexibility.

Noticing Hooks To move the verbal aikido practice into life, the matrix practitioner often uses a simple homework assignment that involves noticing hooks. Hooks are those moments we all have when we quickly get emotionally charged.

Maybe a car cuts you off, maybe someone says something unkind, maybe you see a beautiful person. There are all kinds of emotional hooks that we each have every day, and each provides an opportunity to practice a touch of verbal aikido. The hook gets noticed, and then the next action is noticed. Inherent in noticing the hook and noticing what is done next is noticing the effect of the hook. Did the person expend much energy? Did the person fight against the hook or carry it along?

What came next, a toward move or an away move? Notice the difference between sensory and mental experiencing. Notice the difference between how it feels to move toward and away. When teaching others, invite them to sort stuck stories into the matrix.

And maybe think about this stuff being verbal aikido… 6. Practice 1 to 5 again and again. References Hayes, S. Get out of your mind and into your life: The new acceptance and commitment therapy. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger.

The matrix is a tool of human liberation that rests on recent advances in the understanding of learning and cognition, which underlie acceptance and commitment training and therapy. Along the way, we hope to give you a better sense of what makes the matrix an effective tool in promoting psychological flexibility. Basic Assumptions All science stands upon basic assumptions.

For example, we can look at life and the universe as being like a machine, and a set of mathematical equations can describe that machine and how its component parts inter- act. Many of our Western notions of science are built on some variation of the view that the universe is like a machine. Put simply, humans and living organisms in general are not machines.

So instead of basing our science on a mechanistic view, we look at how a person behaves in the situation the person is in at the time. We look at the whole picture, rather than simply at how the constituent parts interact. You can do this right now. Simply observe yourself reading these words in whatever situation you find yourself.

The matrix is an application of functional contextualism Hayes, , an approach that seeks to identify what works in particular con- texts. An alternative to functional contextualism is seeking to identify the mechanisms linking separate parts of reality. Newtonian physics is an example of that. Applied to health, this gives us the standard model of disease, in which an underlying cause is seen as the root of a symptom.

Treatment is about removing the cause to remove the symptom. For instance, in diabetes, lack of insulin is seen as the cause of the symptoms, so treatment implies supplementing with insulin to achieve levels suffi- cient to remove symptoms and restore health.

Though we rarely think about them, the basic assumptions—or, as the philosopher of science Pepper referred to them, root meta- phors—that underlie our worldviews condition how we go about under- standing things and treating people.

Therefore, they are important to examine. The focus is on selection by consequences. This is different from the standard model to the point of perhaps seeming counterintuitive. The matrix helps people easily operate in and navigate this seemingly counterintuitive functional contextual mode.

In this model of health, the target for treatment is long-term quality of life, not short-term fixes. Setting Up the Point of View Work with the matrix always starts with setting up the point of view. This is the first step toward psychological flexibility. There are many ways to set up the matrix point of view, a number of which are illustrated in this book. As with everything in this model, flexibility is key. The two basic discriminations. Grab a pen and see if you can experience it through each of your five senses in turn or four; tasting is optional!

Now put the pen away, close your eyes, and see if you can experience the pen once more, this time mentally running through each of the senses. Did you notice a difference between five-senses experiencing and mental experiencing? Did you notice a difference between how the toward move and away move felt?

Toward Psychological Flexibility By setting up the point of view reflected in figure 2. From this point of view, people can more readily make distinctions that will make a difference in their life.

We call these discriminations. Making these discriminations leads to a greater ability to observe each act in context. They become more flexible. They get stuck because they focus exclusively on unwanted inner stuff. Here are some examples of people who got stuck: Jack gets so hooked by dark thoughts and feelings of despair that he barely gets out of bed.

When Amy meets new people, she feels so anxious that she seems to forget that making friends is important to her. When Bob feels angry and disappointed with his life, he stops going to his AA meetings and relapses into drinking. Getting Unstuck Consistent practice of the matrix point of view gets people noticing the discriminations that will make a difference in their lives. Think of it as stretching exercises that will gradually build flexibility—a yoga of the mind—that requires deliberate, repeated practice.

People get unstuck by practicing noticing the two basic discriminations across their varied life situations. They become more psychologically flexible, and their actions move them toward better relationships and more satisfying integration into their community. This ensures that their toward moves continue over time. In this way, the gains of treatment are consolidated over the long term. How Derived Relational Responding Gets Us Hooked As the scary heading of this section might have alerted you, our language is about to get somewhat more technical.

When their hooks show up, they bite and engage in away moves. Aversives are things that people and organisms in general move away from. For Jack and the others, these thoughts, feelings, and sensations have in certain contexts acquired controlling functions over their behavior through a process known as derived rela- tional responding. In this transformation, mental experience can acquire some of the functions of five-senses experience.

For example, a five-senses experience of a charging bear naturally makes people run away. Through derived relational responding, the mere thought of a charging bear can make people run away or engage in other actions meant to move them away from that thought and the fear it elicits. Because of derived rela- tional responding, people react to the derived functions of things rather than simply responding to the direct functions. When hooked, people have a hard time noticing the difference between five-senses and mental experience.

It gets going as children learn language, and as it does so, it not only relates five-senses experience to mental experience, but also relates all types of inner experience among themselves: thoughts, feelings, sensations, images, and memories. Worse, an action or a comforting thought that serves to move away from the initial thoughts and fears may come to evoke these thoughts and fears.

Derived relational responding can produce so many hooks that people can easily get lost. Once people learn to speak, mental experience largely dominates over five-senses experience.

As a result, we live mostly in our heads. What they do to move away often works in the short term. For example, Amy feels relief when she moves away from a person she wanted to meet. We call these things appetitives. Appetitives are simply things that people and organisms move toward. Because people easily get stuck in the struggle to move away from aversives, the matrix sets up a context that includes appetitives.

Once they start noticing, they naturally derive things they could do to move toward these appetitives. And when they do these things, new consequences appear. Outside, through five- senses experiencing, they start noticing the differences their actions are making.

After three sessions with the matrix, Amy initiated a few conversa- tions to move toward friendship. She noticed people responding. In plain language, Amy was getting unstuck. The goal of the matrix is to help people choose to move toward appetitives. Most people enter treatment to move away from aversives primarily mental aversives.

They come in asking to get rid of their depressive feelings, shyness, pain, drinking problem, doubts about their marriage, and so on. Traditional therapy seeks to help people move away from these aver- sives. In so doing, it unwittingly reinforces getting hooked by aversives and responding to them by moving away. This is most clearly seen in people with addictive behaviors see chapter 5 , but it occurs much more broadly.

People who have been reinforced for moving away in this fashion are liable to get stuck again—either in the same place or in some other place—whenever aversives show up again. The matrix orients toward a different kind of treatment. Psychological flexibility is key to long-term change and, we believe, to improving the effectiveness of therapy and reducing the high relapse rates that stand witness to the failure of the traditional model.

Actions under appetitive control are long-term patterns of behavior that are, for the most part, reinforced by the social community. This has two benefits for the therapist.

Second, the gains of treatment are maintained in the community after clients stop attending sessions, dras- tically reducing the probability of relapse. Things get a tad more technical from here on.

She gets hooked and essentially responds as if these experiences were bears she must flee. These verbal functions promote narrow and inflexible behavior. Thankfully, like the force in Star Wars, derived relational responding also has a side that can move toward the light. It promotes the deriving of new relations and the transformation of verbal functions to bring behavior under the control of appetitive con- sequences.

Some consequences are verbal, as people notice that they act like the person they want to be. Some consequences are noticed through the five senses, as circumstances and relationships change in new ways.

As the functions of her experience are transformed, Amy may still feel anxious and choose to engage in a conversation with someone new. Jack may come to see his despairing thoughts and feel- ings as signs of the importance of engaging in activities outside his home. They can notice both aversive and appetitive verbal functions and the actions that derive from them. The matrix therefore provides a visual cue for derived relational responding under appetitive control.

Its visual format is generic and minimally verbal. It trains a functional con- textual point of view that can be applied across multiple contexts. At its simplest, training clients in the two discriminations is all it takes to get them unstuck.

Technically, they start deriving new relational responses that gradually promote behavior under the control of appeti- tive consequences. The sorting can only be done from a position removed from the content of experience. This is known as the observer position. Thus, sorting on the matrix trains the observer perspective as learned behavior. With practice, use of the matrix point of view itself comes under the control of consequences as people experience a decrease in the long-term consequences of negatively reinforced away moves, an increase in pos- itively reinforced toward moves, or both.

Practicing an observer perspec- tive through multiple sortings gradually promotes an increased ability to maintain behavior under appetitive control and to contact positive rein- forcement in the presence of more difficult aversive experiences.

This is freedom as B. Skinner defined it. They first invite clients to perform crude discriminations by helping them identify differences between high-contrast tasks—say, between not going to a party to move away from feelings of inadequacy versus accepting an invitation to move toward making new friends.

Then gradually finer discriminations will be trained, sometimes in the same behavior. For example, calling a friend could be both a move away from loneliness and a move toward friendship. In such cases clients can be asked to ascribe percentages to the toward and away aspects of the behavior.

Practitioners use successive approximations to guide clients to more effective sorting, gradually increasing the difficulty. Sorting by Successive Approximations Using learning principles, the matrix cues shaping by successive approximations through multiple exemplar training.

The principle is for practitioners to reinforce successive approximations of sorting behavior until sorting itself comes under the control of its appetitive consequences.

At first we want people to simply engage in the sorting tasks. At first Jack sorted ruminating into the upper left quadrant of the matrix. You noticed ruminating as an away move. They might sort drinking as a toward move—say toward leisure or social- izing. Once clients are engaged in sorting, matrix practitioners coach them in a systematic practice of the discriminations, always orienting to experience.

A Word of Warning Some clients may give the answers they think the practitioner wants to hear. This is known as pliance. Be on the lookout for it, as it will get people even more hooked and keep them from responding from the per- spective of their sorting.

Reinforce the behavior of sorting rather than particular responses or ways of sorting. The matrix practitioner seeks to systematically reinforce noticing behavior while avoiding punishing any kind of sorting. This move involves two steps. First, a practice of D1 is contained in the invitation to notice the hook because the client will then notice mental experience as distinct from five-senses experience.

The second part of the question in turn is an invitation to track the consequences of behavior including verbal behavior. With this training, clients notice that biting hooks works in the short term but not in the long term. In this way, new aversive functions accrue to getting hooked and engaging in away moves.

This allows clients to contact their values and identify actions congruent with those values. When clients practice noticing toward moves in the moment, they increase their ability to interact with values as ongoing patterns of behavior, rather than as purely verbal statements. Furthermore, the link between values and actions helps derive reinforcing functions for their toward moves.

This promotes derived relational responses under appetitive control, making it more probable that clients will derive further toward moves. For example, if John invited Jill to go out for a weekly date night, that would be a move toward being the husband he wants to be. Jill might identify being empathic and listening to John as moves toward being the wife she wants to be. The practitioner reinforces the derivation of these reinforcing functions by asking clients to link toward moves with the values they serve.

The practitioner also encourages clients to notice, through their five senses, the effect of their toward moves on their rela- tionships and their lives. Summary of the Process Through the training of noticing behavior by means of multiple exemplar training and successive approximations, client behavior gradu- ally transforms from experiential avoidance under negatively reinforced aversive control of antecedents, both verbal and direct to behavior under positively reinforced appetitive control of consequences, both verbal and direct.

This is achieved through the continual practice of noticing or discriminating in the present moment. Derived relational responding is a result of relational framing, the largely involuntary behavior of placing sensory or mental stimuli in frames of preestablished relations that condition the transformation of functions between the framed stimuli.

Types of frames include equiva- lence, coordination, opposition, hierarchy, temporal, and perspective taking Hayes et al. The matrix diagram promotes particular types of relational framing some of which are involuntary that gradu- ally help client behavior come under appetitive control. The matrix diagram dynamically cues movement from psychological inflexibility the left side of the diagram to flexibility the right side.

With repeated practice of the matrix point of view, that network of relations can become largely automatic and come to control forms of relational framing and transformation of stimulus functions that help people come under appetitive control.

By making apparent the dynamic links between aversive private experience and experientially avoidant action away moves , the matrix diagram helps transfer some of the aversive functions of these private experiences to experientially avoidant actions.

The prac- titioner can also present frames of opposition between away and toward moves by asking clients if these actions have stopped them from engag- ing in toward moves. When the answer is yes, further aversive functions can derive to the away moves. In some cases, away moves will have allowed the client to move toward something important, even if in the long run they proved ineffec- tive in moving him or her away from aversive private experience.

In such cases, new appetitive functions can derive to actions that had previously been engaged under aversive control, bringing them under appetitive control. For example, a client with OCD who went running to fight his obsessions noticed that running was also a move toward health and started to run as a move toward, rather than as compulsive response to his obsessions. The behavior remained the same, but its function changed and it came under appetitive control.

The moves described above are illustrated in figure 2. Some possible derived functions working the left side. Arrows in boxes represent the direction of derived functions. As an example of the former, the practitioner could ask what actions would constitute a move toward something important or, con- versely, ask what or who is important in engaging a particular action. In the example of the client with OCD, by deriving that running was a move toward health itself important , functions derived that served to put running under appetitive control.

Preparing their lunch boxes in the evening made time for that. In other words, verbal appetitive functions had transferred to behavior previously under verbal aversive control. By putting suffering and values the lower quadrants in a frame of coordination and creating a frame of hierarchy with values at the top, the matrix can help the appetitive functions of values transform the functions of aversive private experience, enhancing acceptance and establishing aversive private experience as a possible antecedent of com- mitted action.

Derivation had transferred new functions to her private experience of shyness. ACT manuals provide numerous examples of how to link suffering with values in effective ways. The two derivations described here are illus- trated in figure 2. Figure 2. Some possible derived functions working the right side. You are commenting using your WordPress.

You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. Skip to content I use the ACT matrix a lot in my workshops and with my coaching clients… and on myself! I have made a video explaining how I use it:. Rate this:. This book is essential for any ACT clinician looking to simplify their therapeutic approach in client sessions.

Save Not today. Format ebook. Author Kevin L. Publisher New Harbinger Publications. After the initial burst of excitement of working from home, people talk about how relentless work is, and how much they miss some of the more informal, human sides of working in teams. For many the past year has brought a kind of empathy gap, where work has become more transactional and less human, with many of the informal 2-minute conversations replaced by more formal hour-long Zoom calls.

Building on this idea, here are two tools that you can download and use with your teams; The Life Compass and The Key to Me. Below you can find a brief explanation of each, as well as free templates to use. I hope you find them useful! It is designed to help guide people through tough times, just like a compass.

Step 1: Have each person in your team complete their own Life Compass for themselves. You can download the template here.