Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
Developed by Steven Hayes, Kirk Strosahl, and Kelly Wilson in the 1980s and 1990s, ACT aims to build psychological flexibility: staying present with what’s hard, making room for it, and still acting on what you care about. A core skill, called defusion, is stepping back to notice thinking as it happens, so a thought can be seen as a thought rather than a fact or a command. In my work, ACT sets the overall direction, and that shift from what a thought says to how you relate to it is central, especially with worry and rumination.

Internal Family Systems (IFS)
Developed by family therapist Richard Schwartz in the 1980s, IFS applies systems thinking to the inner world. It sees the mind as made up of parts. Protectors, like the worrier, the critic, or the part that numbs out, often guard more vulnerable parts carrying old pain. Beneath them is a calm, curious, compassionate Self that can lead once those protectors trust it. In my work, IFS brings compassion to the parts of you that resist change, and its systems lens fits how I see problems: not as one broken piece, but as parts interacting, each for a reason.

The Unified Protocol (UP)
Developed by David Barlow and colleagues at Boston University in the 2000s, the Unified Protocol targets the common threads behind anxiety, depression, and related struggles rather than treating each diagnosis separately. It focuses on how we react to our own emotions: avoiding them, fearing them, or acting on them in ways that backfire. It builds mindful awareness of emotions and cognitive flexibility, which means noticing the automatic interpretations that come with strong feelings and holding them more loosely, rather than simply swapping in “better” thoughts. In my work, the UP keeps emotions at the center and reinforces my focus on what drives problems rather than what they’re labeled.

Roots
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), rooted largely in Aaron Beck’s work in the 1960s, was a major part of my early training. Its insight that thoughts, feelings, and behaviors keep each other going still shapes how I map problems, and my doctoral research compares it with metacognitive approaches that focus on how we relate to thinking itself. Over time, my work has moved from mainly evaluating thoughts toward psychological flexibility, toward seeing people as whole systems in context, and toward building lives around values and meaning.

Philosophy kept leading me to the same places. The Stoics taught that we’re disturbed less by events than by our judgments about them, and that our effort belongs to what we can control: our own choices and conduct. CBT’s founders pointed to the Stoics as forerunners, and ACT’s focus on values-based action over controlling feelings echoes them closely. Buddhism describes how resisting pain adds a “second arrow” of suffering, and it offers mindful, compassionate awareness instead. That idea runs through ACT’s acceptance, the UP’s mindful approach to emotion, and IFS’s Self, which Schwartz has linked to ideas found in many contemplative traditions.

Existential thought holds that meaning isn’t handed to us. Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy adds that meaning can be found even in suffering, along with the freedom to choose our stance toward what happens. Frankl’s techniques of deliberately inviting what we fear, and of turning attention away from self-focused worry toward something meaningful, anticipate ACT’s willingness and values work and the UP’s emotion exposures. Finally, pragmatism, from William James and John Dewey, judges an idea by what it does in a person’s life rather than by abstract truth. ACT is built on that same standard of what works, and it’s why I care less about which theory is “right” than about what actually helps you.