North Star’s Brandon Gimbel talks with Tory Krone, LCSW, of Proactive Therapy about how ACT treats values not as abstract categories but as active, lived behaviors. They discuss how values provide a compass for therapy—and how defining, operationalizing, and returning to them can guide patients through distress.
North Star Conversations Transcript: Values in ACT with Tory Krone, LCSW
Brandon Gimbel (00:00)
The values based approach to me seems analogous to the Buddhist eightfold path. But the Buddhist eightfold path, like me, can be a bit heavy handed. Here are the values. Whereas ACT says: we're not going to give you the values; we're going to help you discover your values.
Tory Krone (00:16)
Absolutely. Yeah, that's right. And there are no Right values in ACT. There's a lot of ways that we can get at what's important to people. I always find it really limiting when a values assessment says something like family, school, relationships, health and leisure. And it seems like there are these buckets, whereas in ACT, values are actions. We don't look at areas of your life, but it's: "I want to be a kind person. I want to engage in acceptance. Here's how I want to show up in my relationships. Here's how I want to show up in my life." They're active words. Once we get there, I have them operationalize them. So I'll say, "what does it look like if you live by acceptance? If you integrate this value into your rank how well or how closely you're living by it right now."
Brandon Gimbel (01:04)
The values provide the map.
Tory Krone (01:05)
It is, it is absolutely. And there's a concept in ACT that I love called the life map. It's a great intervention. It gets at what are the things that matter most to you? What are the things that would bring you closer towards the person you want to be? I don't want to do values and say, "we've done values and now we're not coming back to it." It's really, this is the map. This is the compass for our work together.