A few months ago, I got a message from a therapist in Vancouver. She’d been following my work for years. She’d read the books on ACT, done the online courses, and built her entire practice around psychological flexibility and process-based approach. But she’d never been to a live training with me.
“I just can’t cross the border right now,” she wrote. “It doesn’t feel safe.”
I sat with that for a while.
This therapist — dedicated, trained, exactly the kind of clinician I’d want working with my family — had been cut off from a community she belonged to, not by anything she’d done, but by a shift in the weather between two countries.
The border hadn’t moved. She had.
Reading those words hurt. I felt sad. My whole life has been about building community around how to alleviate human suffering and to promote human wellbeing and here we are living in a world that increasingly divides us – even communities of helping professionals.
My mind went to an unexpected place.
There was a recent study in the journal Emotion by Gatchpazian et al. (reference below) that found that the well being of Black people who have been subjected to racial discrimination is profoundly protected by acceptance.
It’s not the kind of acceptance that the common sense meaning of the word gives you. It’s the kind of acceptance that is deep inside the mindfulness traditions, or ACT and psychological flexibility. Acceptance in that context means an active process of being open to feeling what you feel, deeply engaging with it, and learning from it.
Acceptance looked at that way is not some kind of passive resignation or tolerance – as if discrimination is somehow OK and we should accept it – nor is it perseverating on how awful it is and how bad it feels. It means my feelings are valid; they are worth my attention.
Here was the actual item: “When experiencing discrimination, I am successful at accepting my emotions”. In open ended questions people said that it meant things like “I allowed myself to feel what I needed to”.
But here is the awesome finding word for word. Yes, discrimination hurt health outcomes but “the association between being exposed to more racial discrimination and experiencing worse health outcomes was significantly (or completely) attenuated for people who relatively successfully engaged in emotional acceptance compared to those who were relatively unsuccessful in emotional acceptance.”
Wow. You get it?
This epidemic of division hurts. It hurts us all and that feeling is part of what we need to feel right now.
Moments later my sadness turned into anger – a far more active emotion. And far more difficult for me to be open to, for deep historical and family of origin reasons having seen anger-based domestic violence in my home as a young child.
This time I did allow even that feeling to show up, And I thought: if she can’t come to the training, the training should come to her. Grrr. “I’m gonna do something” (as my 8 year old self once said, after seeing more violence at home).
And, yes, I’m now doing an ACT workshop in Regina, Canada this May (Details at ibh.com.)
That same issue and energy is everywhere I look.
I’ve done ACT BootCamps for years – all across the US and even in other parts of the world. They always run Thursday through Sunday. Four days – three of them long. People travel to the site Wednesday, learn all day and into the evening Thursday, Friday and Saturday, and then finish with a normal 8 hour day on Sunday, leaving that evening or the next day.
Reasonable. Efficient. And if you’re lucky you only shut down your practice for two weekdays.
And quietly, unintentional, it profoundly excludes.
If your Sabbath falls on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday — you’ve always been out. Orthodox Jews. Seventh-day Adventists. Christians who hold Sunday sacred. For years, without meaning to, the scheduling of professional training has sent a message to people of faith: this space wasn’t designed with you in mind.
I didn’t intend that. Heck I’ve worked like crazy to do ACT training programs for chaplains and pastoral counselors. I even wrote a book about it (Niewesma, Walser, & Hayes, 2016), and the US military chaplains voted to training ACT (and motivational interviewing and problem-solving therapy).
But intention doesn’t change the effect.
This year, for the first time, ACT BootCamp® will be in New York in early May running Monday through Thursday.
None of this was hard. I’m not asking for applause. I’m shamefacedly pointing toward my own lack of sensitivity and toward the need for awareness, perspective-taking and the openness to doing something that can allow us to build sometime helpful atop the pain of division that we are now all experiencing. In that effort psychological flexibility is a profound ally.
One of the core processes in ACT is called flexible perspective-taking — the capacity to hold your own point of view lightly enough to genuinely stand in someone else’s shoes. To ask, with real curiosity: what is the world like from where they’re standing? What do they see that I can’t see from here?
It sounds simple.
It isn’t.
Our minds are very good at assuming the world is basically structured around our own experience of it.
If we can allow perspective-taking a hand old, our own emotions can begin to be a more useful useful guide.
The research on psychological flexibility shows that the capacity to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously, and to feel what you feel when you do, is a predictor of prosocial behavior, compassion, and the ability to maintain connection under pressure. Like all skills, it requires practice, however. It does not come automatically, even for people who know the theory.
I could climb atop a pedestal and say I saw a need and I responded. The truth is much less flattering. The therapist in Vancouver wrote. I suspect there are others who never did.
That sits uncomfortably with me.
It should.
The world right now is working very hard at building walls. Between countries. Between communities. Between people who used to work in the same rooms and now struggle to find the same ground.
If we are going to do something about it, it is time to take perspective. It is time to hurt, to feel sad, to get angry. Not at THEM. At our own mindlessness and casual indifference.
If you’re one of the people this matters to — I’ll see you in Regina, or in New York.
For everyone else, I’ll leave you with this: is there someone in your life, or your practice, or your community, who stopped trying to get through a door you had the power to open?
ACT BootCamp, New York — May 4–7, 2026 (Monday–Thursday). Process-Based ACT, Regina, Canada — May 29–30, 2026. Both open for registration at ibh.com.
References
Gatchpazian, A., Shallcross, A. J., Troy, A. S., Kalinowski, J., & Ford, B. Q. (in press). Resilience in the Face of Racial Discrimination: The Role of Emotional Acceptance. Emotion.
Nieuwsma, J. A., Walser, R. D. & Hayes, S. C. (2016). (Eds.) ACT for clergy and pastoral counselors: Using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to bridge psychological and spiritual care. Oakland, CA: Context Press / New Harbinger Publications.
