Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) in New York City
You tell yourself not to think about it, but it becomes all-consuming. You try to calm down, but your body ramps up. For many people dealing with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), anxiety, or depression, this cycle feels endless. The harder you try to control what is happening internally, the more intense and persistent it becomes.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) offers a different way of working with this loop. Instead of trying to eliminate difficult thoughts and feelings, ACT focuses on changing your relationship to them.The goal of ACT is to be able to live a rich and meaningful life while accepting discomfort. It means living a life that is not organized around avoiding distress.
At ParityWell, our ACT therapists in New York City use this approach as part of an integrated, individualized treatment plan. Our therapists offer in-person ACT sessions at our office in Midtown Manhattan near Columbus Circle, across from Central Park and major subway lines. It’s a quick stop from the Upper West Side, Upper East Side, Midtown, Chelsea, or even parts of Brooklyn and Queens during your commute.
We also provide online ACT therapy for clients across New York City, New York State, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.
Comprehensive Assessments From Day One
At ParityWell, every client receives a thorough clinical assessment from the start regardless of what brings them in. We screen all clients for OCD, anxiety, depression, and other mental health disorders because we believe it’s the therapist’s responsibility to identify what’s present, not the client’s responsibility to know what to ask for.
ACT is a versatile approach that works across many presentations, but its effectiveness depends on being applied to the right clinical picture. The day-one assessment helps us understand where ACT will do the most good, where it needs to be integrated with other approaches like Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), and what a full treatment plan should look like.
We always work with you and will make sure support is tailored to your goals and preferences. We believe you are the expert in your own life.
What Is ACT?
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is built on the core idea of psychological flexibility, which is based on these six core processes:
Acceptance: Learning to make room for difficult thoughts and feelings rather than fighting them. It’s not about “sucking it up;” it’s about learning how to come into contact and process pain or distress.
Defusion: Defusing yourself from a typical thought/response pattern you developed to cope with distress. Defusion has you pause and observe the pattern of thought and reaction to change it — for example, getting angry and yelling is a common thought/response pattern.
Present-moment awareness: Bringing attention to what’s actually happening right now. It’s about identifying all the little pieces of being present and what you feel in order to find a pattern, which can then be used to make changes.
Self-as-context: Recognizing that you are not your thoughts, feelings, or the stories your mind tells about you. Self-as-context can also be used to help empathize with your past self or other people.
Values clarification: Identifying what actually matters to you and what gives you direction, not what you think should matter or what you’ve been told to want.
Committed action: Taking concrete steps toward your values even in the presence of difficult thoughts and feelings.
What ACT Can Be Used to Treat
ACT has a strong and growing evidence base across a wide range of conditions. At ParityWell, we may use ACT and other modalities as part of a treatment process for:
Anxiety
ACT is particularly well-suited to anxiety because it targets the struggle against anxiety rather than the anxiety itself. Attempts to control, suppress, or eliminate anxious thoughts often backfire and make them more intense. ACT builds the psychological flexibility to have anxious thoughts without being run by them, and to move toward valued activities even when anxiety is present. It is frequently used alongside ERP for anxiety disorders and OCD.
Learn more about anxiety therapy in NYC.
Depression
ACT addresses depression by targeting behavioral withdrawal and the rigid, self-critical thinking patterns that maintain low mood while also building a genuine connection to values and meaning that depression erodes.
For clients whose depression involves a pervasive sense of meaninglessness or disconnection from what used to matter, the values clarification work in ACT is often particularly transformative.
Learn more about depression therapy in NYC.
OCD
ACT is a natural complement to ERP for OCD. ERP works by having clients deliberately confront feared situations or thoughts without performing the compulsive or avoidant response that normally follows. ACT addresses the psychological willingness to do that in the first place. OCD and anxiety are fundamentally disorders of intolerance for uncertainty, and ACT builds the flexibility to move forward in the presence of uncertainty rather than waiting until it resolves.
In practice, ACT alongside ERP involves developing a different relationship with intrusive thoughts, clarifying values as the motivation for exposure work, and building acceptance of the discomfort that ERP has to generate for effective therapy.
Trauma and PTSD
ACT helps build the psychological flexibility to hold traumatic memories and feelings without being consumed by them. ACT provides the acceptance framework that supports clients through the harder work of trauma processing.
At ParityWell, we may use ACT alongside EMDR and other trauma-informed approaches rather than as a standalone treatment for trauma.
Learn more about trauma therapy in NYC.
Burnout and Work Stress
New York City produces burnout at scale. The relentless demands of high-pressure careers in finance, law, tech, medicine, and media combined with a culture that equates worth with output leave many people running on empty.
ACT is particularly well-suited to burnout because it works at the level of values and meaning, not just stress management. It helps clients identify what they’ve been sacrificing, reconnect with what actually matters, and build a sustainable relationship with work rather than just coping better with an unsustainable one.
Substance abuse and addictive behavior
ACT addresses addiction by targeting the avoidance and experiential control strategies that substance use often serves. Rather than fighting urges, ACT builds the capacity to have urges without acting on them, understand what they’re responding to, and move toward a life that makes sobriety or moderation genuinely worth having.
At ParityWell, ACT for addiction may be integrated with a harm reduction approach.
ACT and ERP: An Integrated Approach
At ParityWell, we often use Exposure Response and Prevention (ERP) and ACT together for OCD and anxiety disorders. ERP works by having clients deliberately confront feared situations or thoughts without performing the compulsive or avoidant response that normally follows. ACT addresses the willingness to do that in the first place.
For many clients, the hardest part of ERP isn’t the exposure itself; it’s the relationship with uncertainty that exposure requires. OCD and anxiety are fundamentally about intolerance for uncertainty, and no amount of exposure eliminates uncertainty entirely. ACT builds the psychological flexibility to move forward in the presence of uncertainty rather than waiting until it resolves.
In practice, ACT alongside ERP might involve defusing from intrusive thoughts so they lose their grip on how much of your life they can control.
Why New Yorkers Choose ParityWell for ACT
ACT-trained therapists: Specific training in ACT and integrated alongside ERP, EMDR, CBT, and IFS where the clinical picture calls for it
ACT and ERP integrated: For OCD and anxiety, the combination is one of the most effective approaches available
Comprehensive assessment from day one: We identify what’s present and build treatment around the full picture
Burnout and work stress: ACT applied to the specific pressures of high-demand NYC professional life
Neuroaffirming care: For autistic and ADHD adults, we integrate ACT with neuroaffirming care.
Co-occurring conditions: Anxiety, depression, trauma, OCD, addiction, etc.: we treat the full picture
In-person in our Manhattan office or online wherever you are: Serving NYC, New York State, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania
How to Get Started
Reach out: Click the button below and tell us about yourself.
Meet your therapist: We’ll connect you with a therapist trained in ACT and suited to what you’re working on. Not sure if ACT is the right approach? That’s our job to figure out: every client receives a comprehensive clinical assessment from the start.
Start with an assessment: Your first sessions focus on understanding the full picture: your history, your needs, and what you’re looking to get from therapy.
Frequently Asked Questions
-
Yes. ACT has a substantial and growing evidence base and is recognized as an empirically supported treatment for anxiety disorders, depression, OCD, chronic pain, and addiction, among other conditions. It has been studied extensively since the 1980s and is one of the most researched third-wave cognitive behavioral therapies available.
-
CBT focuses primarily on identifying and changing unhelpful thoughts and behaviors. ACT shifts the target from the content of thoughts to the relationship with them. Rather than challenging whether a thought is true, ACT builds the capacity to have thoughts without being fused with them or controlled by them.
Both approaches share a behavioral foundation and are often used together. ACT tends to be particularly useful when CBT techniques have produced some improvement but haven’t fully shifted the underlying struggle.
-
Fees for psychotherapy sessions vary based on length. Please see our fees section for more information.
-
You can email us at hello@paritywell.com or contact us here. We are accepting new patients!