Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Narrative Practice: A Practically Grounded Examination of Theories and Worldviews

Abstract

This article examines and contributes to the recent dialogue on narrative therapy and mindfulness (including embodiment, affect, and neuroscience) and the possibilities and dangers in combining them. To make this dialogue clearer, this article focuses on an epistemologically consistent approach to mindfulness, as found in acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). It focuses on a particular practice, Steven C. Hayes's “Guided Audio Meditation” that explores problem and preferred stories, and analyzes it using the concepts of both narrative therapy and ACT. With these foundations for the exchange of ideas, this article explores the core difficulty of this dialogue—the differences between mechanistic, formist, organicist, and contextualist epistemologies, the differences between deductive, anti-theoretical, inductive, and abductive approaches to theory, and the practical implications of these differences. In doing so it suggests how narrative therapy and ACT practitioners might learn from each other without sacrificing core ethical commitments.