Explore and clarify clients' core values across various life domains to enhance motivation, guide therapy, and promote psychological flexibility in acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT).
Offers theory, guidance, and prompts for mental health professionals. Downloads are in Fillable PDF format where appropriate.
Includes client-friendly guidance. Downloads are in Fillable PDF format where appropriate.
Values play a crucial role in defining what is most meaningful to people, guiding their behavior and life choices. The Exploring Valued Domains exercise helps clients in pinpointing their values within specific life areas, such as family, work, and spirituality, which can help to foster greater self-awareness and psychological flexibility. Exploration of one's values is common across various therapeutic approaches, but is particularly useful within acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT).
Values-based interventions are integral to many therapeutic models, providing a foundation for therapy focused on what is meaningful to that person. Focusing on values:
Reduces focuses on symptoms and promotes a emphasis on living in a valued-driven way.
Helps manage pain by aligning actions with personal values.
Addresses concerns around meaning and purpose.
Enhances motivation by connecting therapy to clients' core values.
Provide guidance to help clients distinguish between values and domains.
Help clients explore important life domains and values.
Use open-ended questions to delve deeper into clients' values.
Encourage clients to rate importance and satisfaction in these domains.
Facilitate reflection on how values align with current life actions.
Assist clients in identifying actions aligned with prioritized values.
Values are central to many therapeutic models, acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) offer perhaps the most comprehensive and theoretically grounded approach. In ACT, values are defined as “desired global qualities of ongoing action” (Hayes et al., 2006), which function like a compass — offering direction, sustaining motivation, and helping people reconnect with what matters most, especially during challenging times.
Values are not synonymous with goals, commandments, or static ideals. Instead, they are chosen qualities of being and doing — “principles for living” that people freely choose and embody through ongoing patterns of action (Harris, 2019; Wilson & Dufrene, 2009). ACT emphasizes that values must be enacted rather than merely identified, and their power lies in their ability to coordinate action across contexts, promote meaning, and inspire committed behavior.
Therapeutically, values-based work in ACT unfolds across three phases:
ACT also warns against treating values work as a standalone or magical fix. Rather, its effectiveness depends on its integration with other core ACT processes, including acceptance, cognitive defusion, and present-moment awareness. As Hayes and colleagues (2012) state, “it is only within the context of values that action, acceptance, and defusion come together into a sensible whole.”
