North Star’s Brandon Gimbel talks with Tory Krone, LCSW, of Proactive Therapy about defusion techniques in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). They explore how playful distancing from thoughts—through repetition, accents, or naming the mind—helps patients stop treating every thought as truth and start noticing what actually matters.

North Star Conversations Transcript: ACT Defusion Techniques with Tory Krone, LCSW

Brandon Gimbel (00:00)

One of the aspects of ACT that I've been drawn to is defusion techniques. Could you talk about the concept of defusion and then some of your favorite techniques, please?

Tory Krone (00:04)

Yeah, defusion is an interesting one because the idea being that we can notice our thoughts without taking them so seriously. We can ask if a thought is workable. We can do lots of different playing with our thoughts is really defusion. It's noticing a thought and not responding to it. In ACT, they have all kinds of fun and some wacky techniques around this. One is that they'll have you repeat a word over and over until it basically has no anymore. If you say it 50 times in a row, it's going to lose the meaning.

Brandon Gimbel (00:38)

I've talked to some of my patients about two of my favorite, well, three of my favorite. One is singing a song of the words. And I have regaled many a patient with my version of Happy Birthday. One is accents, but the only accent I can do is a robot voice. And so I end up doing a robot voice. But my personal favorite is naming our mind. And I'm curious about your thoughts on that. I like naming our mind because it highlights that our minds are absolutely terrible at solving our own emotional problems. What are your thoughts? What are your brain's thoughts on that?

Tory Krone (01:13)

Yeah. It's interesting. So I've actually never done where you name your mind. It's usually I thank my mind. So I would say thank your mind for that thought or just let's notice whose voice that is, but we all take our minds too seriously. Our minds come up with crazy stories all the time, and we just don't have to buy into them.