The Inflexibility Reads pathway gives clinicians a functionally grounded library for recognizing, naming, and tracking the behavioral processes that maintain psychological suffering.

When Flexibility Returns

Throughout this series, we have explored six common ways inflexibility shows up in everyday life. Not as diagnoses or as character flaws but as functional patterns that make sense in context. This is the heart of ACT.

Welcome to RIACT: Tell Us Where You Are From

If you are new here, welcome. RIACT was built as a place for clinicians who want to think carefully about their work, grounded in FC & RFT. Whatever brought you here, we would like to know a little about it.

When Helping Becomes the Contingency: Praise, Reassurance, and the Risk of Dependence

From a functional contextual perspective, though, we cannot determine what a behavior is doing simply from what it looks like. The more useful question is what our reassurance is actually doing, and perhaps more importantly, what it is doing for both people in the room.

Introducing Clinical Conversations: A New Way to Think Together

Here is how it will work. Each installment opens with a case worth discussing: the presenting concern, the contextual pressures surrounding it, the moves a clinician made or considered and the point where things got genuinely difficult.

Hey All! First up this week is an introduction to a now format on Deeply Functional where two or more ACT clinicians sit down to have a deeper, longer conversation on a variety of topics within the contextual behavioral perspective.

New Episode Format - In Conversation

This Weeks Articles

What the First Session Looks Like

A first session carries real weight. The client walks in carrying a problem, often carrying some anxiety about being in the room at all, and within a short window of time the clinician needs to build enough trust and clarity to make the visit worthwhile.

Metaphor: The Tide and the Shore

The tide and the shore metaphor offers a different invitation. The client is not asked to control the tide. The client is invited to notice she has been the shore all along.

The Original SHAPE: A Contextual Behavioral Framework for Clinical Supervision

A first session carries real weight. The client walks in carrying a problem, often carrying some anxiety about being in the room at all, and within a short window of time the clinician needs to build enough trust and clarity to make the visit worthwhile.

UPCOMING LOCAL TRAINING

For those of you who live in the Rhode Island area, Flex Lab is offered every 2nd Monday from 11am until 1pm. Primary approach is the Portland model.

For those who do not live in the area, the 3rd Monday offers this format online from 11am until 12:30pm EST.

There is also a NEW group meeting on the 4th SATURDAY of each month now. 10am until noon. This is designed for new to ACT clinicians and run by Jon Tryhubzack.

See schedule for more details.

Join Peter for a look at the “Blooming Flower” Metaphor

RIACT•Peter Binnings

Teaching Vignette: When Duty Becomes Pressure

“Michael” sought therapy because of episodes of anger that seemed to arise “out of the blue.” He described himself as s…

RIACT•RIACT Supervision Staff

When Time Is Running Out

Our perspective on time changes as we get older, but the entire culture is dramatically speeding that up. That’s what I…

RIACT•Steve Hayes

Deeply Functional - Episode 17: When Feeling Becomes the Enemy — Reading Avoidance

Listen Here

UPCOMING LOCAL TRAINING

For those of you who live in the Rhode Island area, Flex Lab is offered every 2nd Monday from 11am until 1pm. Primary approach is the Portland model.

For those who do not live in the area, the 3rd Monday offers this format online from 11am until 12:30pm EST.

See schedule for more details.

UPCOMING NATIONAL TRAININGS

Here is a heads up of upcoming trainings:

Events - Institute for Better Health

Events Archive - Institute for Better Health

Institute for Better Health

Please note Providence is now on the schedule here:

Reimagining ACT, Rhode Island, December 2026 - Institute for Better Health

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) has long been grounded in the psychological flexibility model, traditionally or…

Institute for Better Health

You can grab tickets in advance. Please let others know about this event

MyValues.app is a free online exercise designed to help people explore that question. Through a series of structured choices, the platform helps users identify and rank the values that appear most important to them.

Hi everyone,

I wanted to share MyValues.app, a free values-clarification tool I developed as part of my PhD at the University of São Paulo.

The exercise asks people to choose between pairs of 48 values and builds a complete personal ranking. More than 2,300 people have completed it so far; 97.9% of the values identified by the exercise were confirmed by users, and the median completion time is 12 minutes.

Beyond the ranking, the site includes cultural references connected to each value, cluster analysis, psychological questionnaires, and a feature that lets two people explore where their values align and differ. It is available in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, and everything is free.

I built it both for personal reflection and as a starting point for conversations in therapy, teaching, coaching, or research.

You can try it here:

https://www.myvalues.app/

I’d genuinely love feedback from this community, especially on the exercise itself, its clinical usefulness, and the English and Spanish versions. Please also feel free to share it with clients, students, or colleagues.

Warmly,

Cainã Gomes, PhD
Clinical psychologist and researcher
São Paulo, Brazil

Motivational Flexibility (Values)

FROM OUR TEAM:

MyValues.app: A Digital Tool for Clarifying What Matters

Most people have some sense of what matters to them. They may care deeply about family, creativity, compassion, freedom, responsibility, or personal growth. Yet when they are asked to name their central values, explain what those values mean, or use them to guide a difficult decision, the answer often becomes less clear.

MyValues.app is a free online exercise designed to help people explore that question. Through a series of structured choices, the platform helps users identify and rank the values that appear most important to them.

How the exercise works

Instead of presenting a long checklist and asking users to rate every value, MyValues.app places two values beside one another. Each value includes a short definition, and the user chooses which matters more.

For example, someone might be asked to choose between freedom and compassion. Neither option is presented as better or healthier. The question is simply which value feels more personally important.

As the person continues making these paired choices, the platform’s algorithm develops a ranking of their values. The final report identifies three leading values, values that appear less central, and a broader personalized ranking. The site estimates that the central exercise takes approximately fourteen minutes.

The platform also offers several additional features, including:

• Personalized reflections connected to the user’s leading values

• Cultural references drawn from films, art, public figures, and other sources

• Optional questionnaires related to personality, wellbeing, and psychological flexibility

• A values alignment feature that allows two people to compare their priorities

• A cluster analysis showing how different values may relate to one another

The exercise is available in English, Portuguese, and Spanish. Users access it through an email address or Google account.

Why forced choices can be useful

Values exercises often run into a simple problem: nearly every value sounds important when considered by itself. Most people would prefer to be compassionate, honest, creative, responsible, loving, and courageous. Rating each of these independently may produce a list in which almost everything receives a high score.

Paired choices create a different kind of reflection. They introduce tension and require a person to notice what takes priority when two meaningful qualities compete for attention.

That tension resembles real life. Our decisions rarely involve choosing between something we value and something completely meaningless. More often, they involve choosing between competing goods:

• Security or exploration

• Belonging or independence

• Achievement or balance

• Honesty or harmony

• Service to others or care for ourselves

The usefulness of the exercise may not rest entirely in whether it discovers someone’s “true” values. Its greater value may come from the moments of hesitation. When someone struggles to choose, that struggle often reveals an important conflict, history, expectation, or uncertainty worth exploring.

How this fits with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

Values clarification is central to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Within ACT, values are not simply desirable words or personal traits. They describe qualities of action that a person wants to bring into life.

A value such as compassion becomes clinically useful when it moves from an abstract label into a lived direction:

When compassion is present in your life, what do you do differently? How do you speak, listen, respond, or care for yourself?

This distinction matters because identifying a value is only the beginning. A person may select creativity as a leading value while making little room for creative activity. Someone may identify connection while repeatedly withdrawing when vulnerability appears. Another person may value strength while treating emotional openness as evidence of weakness.

The clinically important question is not merely, “What did you rank highest?”

A more functional question is, “How does this value show up in your behavior, particularly when following it becomes difficult?”

MyValues.app can provide a useful starting point for that conversation. It gives the client and clinician a shared set of words, creates a visible result, and introduces enough contrast to evoke meaningful reflection. The results can then be connected to current patterns, barriers, and small acts of committed action.

Using the results clinically

A clinician might ask a client to complete the exercise between sessions and bring the results to their next appointment. The report could then support questions such as:

• What did you notice while making the choices?

• Which result felt most accurate?

• Which result surprised or unsettled you?

• Were you choosing what genuinely matters to you, or what you believe should matter?

• Which values came from your family, culture, faith, or professional role?

• Where is one of these values already visible in your life?

• Where has avoidance pulled you away from it?

• What would one small expression of this value look like during the coming week?

The exercise may also be useful in couples work. Differences between partners do not necessarily indicate incompatibility. One person may emphasize stability while another prioritizes exploration. Conflict often develops when each person treats their own priority as the only reasonable one.

A values comparison can help partners move from “Which of us is right?” toward “What is each of us trying to protect or create?” That shift may support greater perspective taking and more flexible negotiation.

A result, not a verdict

The website describes its method as scientifically developed and reports that it emerged from doctoral research at the University of São Paulo involving more than one thousand participants. It also reports a 92.7 percent accuracy figure. The meaning of that percentage is not fully explained on the public landing page, so it should not be interpreted as proof that the platform can objectively determine a person’s deepest values.

Values are relational and contextual. A person’s choices may be influenced by current circumstances, recent losses, cultural expectations, emotional state, or the particular definitions used by the exercise. A ranking may also change as someone enters a new stage of life.

This does not make the results invalid. It means they are best understood as a structured snapshot rather than a permanent psychological profile.

The site occasionally refers to the exercise as a “test.” Clinically, I would describe it as a values clarification exercise. There are no correct answers, and a value appearing near the bottom of a ranking does not mean that the person rejects it or lacks that quality.

From clarification to action

MyValues.app is thoughtfully designed, visually engaging, and more interactive than a typical values worksheet. Its paired choice method can help people move beyond selecting every appealing word and begin noticing the priorities that actually organize their decisions.

Its greatest usefulness, however, begins after the ranking is complete.

A list of values cannot tell someone exactly what to do. It cannot remove uncertainty, settle every conflict, or make difficult emotions disappear. What it can provide is a compass: a clearer sense of the direction in which someone would like to move.

The next question is where the clinical work becomes deeply functional:

Given what matters to you, what is one action you are willing to take, even if your mind and emotions make that action difficult?

That is where a named value begins becoming a lived one.

RIACT

you might also like

Motivational Flexibility (Values)

Resource Spotlight: Finding Your Inner Compass

30 Jun 2026—Peter Binnings

Clinical

When Direction Fades

14 Jun 2026—Todd Schmenk

Voting Your Values: A Simple Practice for Meaningful Daily Action

28 Apr 2026—Peter Binnings

RIACT

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© 2026 RIACT. Published with Ghost

We must recognize that the clinician is not merely a deliverer of metaphors or mechanistic protocols; the clinician is the context. Our presence—our way of seeing, being, and shaping—functions as the environment within which new, flexible behavior becomes possible. This “invisible intervention” focuses on the act-in-context as our primary unit of analysis.

While a novice may track a clean, downward symptom trajectory, the seasoned educator knows that progress is idiographic—it is a messy, individual path where a score reduction might actually signal more effective avoidance rather than genuine flexibility. We adopt the foundational reframe that our clients are “stuck, not broken.” They are following rules that once made sense but have run out of road.

By treating history as Information, Not Instruction, we model that the past is something to live with rather than something to live by. The engine of this transformation is the WTF question:

What’s The Function?

By relentlessly asking this, we move from symptom elimination to fostering psychological flexibility. We discriminate between aversive control (behaviors driven by the escape from discomfort with high long-term costs) and appetitive control (movement toward a life worth living).

In this dance, the clinician’s somatic cues are the primary instruments, providing the “clinical crunch” necessary to move a client from verbal rule-following into direct experiential contact.

As we shift our focus from what we do to how we are being, we begin with the specific, observable markers of the clinician’s embodied modeling.

You can find more like this at The Relational Institute of Applied Contextual Therapies.

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Think about that. I find that there is rarely a session in which this underlying theme is not present, but I do not want you to take my word for it. Take a moment and think about how often this sense shows up in session. I think there is a reason this shows up in some of our oldest philosophies with the most notable being Buddhism and the focus on impermanence.

From a Functional Contextual perspective, ambiguity is not a content problem. It is a context problem. It is the moment when the verbal mind reaches for a relation, a rule, a prediction that would settle the situation, and finds none available. What happens next in that moment shapes much of what we later label anxiety, depression, avoidance, or rigidity. Understanding that single hinge point gives clinical work a precision that diagnostic language tends to obscure.

What Ambiguity Actually Is, Functionally

In ordinary speech, ambiguity refers to situations where meaning is unclear. In a functional account, ambiguity is the absence of a stable derived relation that would orient behavior. The situation does not match a known frame. The mind cannot quickly answer the questions it is built to answer: Is this safe or dangerous. Will this end well or badly. Am I okay or not okay. Does this person care about me or not.

Relational Frame Theory shows why this matters. Human language operates by deriving relations among events, often without direct training. A word, a glance, a body sensation can activate a vast network of derived meanings. That capacity is the reason we can plan, anticipate, and learn from experience that is not our own. It is also the reason we suffer in ways no other species does. When the network has nothing reliable to derive, when the relational frames do not close, the verbal system keeps reaching. It generates possibilities, comparisons, predictions, and rules at high speed, looking for something that will resolve the open situation.

That reaching is what we experience as worry, rumination, vigilance, second-guessing, and the felt sense that something needs to be figured out before life can continue. The function is the same across these forms. The mind is trying to convert ambiguity into certainty so that behavior can proceed.

Why Ambiguity Feels Intolerable

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There is a particular kind of suffering that does not yet have a billing code. It arrives not as a memory of something terrible that happened, but as a clear-eyed recognition that something terrible is actively, continuously happening, and that the systems claiming to prevent it are accelerating it.

Call it Pre-Traumatic Stress. Call it anticipatory drea…

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Why This Distinction Matters Before We Define Anything

If you have ever watched a client spiral from a single worried thought into a cascade of dread within seconds, you have watched relational framing in action.

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But somewhere along the way, the system tried to turn you into one.

Packed schedules. Documentation that swallows your evenings. Supervision that feels like surveillance. An agency that measures your worth in billable hours and quietly replaces you when you burn out. You went through years of training to develop real clinical craft — and somehow ended up…

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Clinical work rarely fails because of a lack of techniques. More often, it falters when clinicians lose orientation, when urgency, complexity, or emotional load pulls attention away from what actually supports movement and care over time.

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A new episode of Deeply Functional is live, and it opens a short mini-series on process-based work with specific clinical populations—starting with anxiety.

In this episode, I take a functional look at anxiety—not as a symptom to eliminate, but as a natural human response that often becomes costly because of what we do in its presence. Rather than asking…

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That’s intentional and it’s a sign of a bigger shift happening behind the scenes.

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This past year has been a lesson I did not ask for.

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