Acceptance

By Catharine Meyers, Associate Publisher of New Harbinger Publications

We publish books aimed to help readers overcome mental health issues. Our mission is to provide evidence-based tools that help people understand the root causes of their suffering, or psychological struggles, and heal themselves.

We do this with words.

by Tim Gordon, MSW, RSW

Psychological flexibility represents the acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) model of health—it's the element we want to foster and grow in our clients while modelling it ourselves as mental health professionals.

By Ann Haynos, PhD

Sometimes emotions are seen as a sign of weakness and irrationality, but this perception couldn't be further from the truth. They are essential to being rational (Ciarrochi, Chan, & Bajgar, 2001; Ciarrochi, Chan, & Caputi, 2000; Ciarrochi, Forgas, & Mayer, 2001). They’re a way of seeing how events in the world relate to our values, needs, and desires.

Western society increasingly sees human suffering as grossly abnormal and typically generated from outside sources; it is a state to be eliminated as soon as possible. We vigorously seek external remedies, such as medications, a variety of addictions, and transient external pleasures over and above insight and understanding as cures for our unhappiness. These solutions to suffering are short lived, but we return time and time again to such supposed sources of happiness, as if they could possibly provide us with a stable state of well-being.