The Unwelcome Party Guest - an Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT) Metaphor
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Published 2011-01-31
In this video, we explore the "Unwelcome Party Guest" metaphor from ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy), a powerful tool for understanding and managing difficult emotions. Imagine that your mind is a party, and unwelcome guests like anxiety, fear, or sadness keep showing up uninvited. These emotions can be overwhelming, intrusive, and make it hard to enjoy the party.
By using the "Unwelcome Party Guest" metaphor, you can learn to observe and accept these emotions without judgment, and to relate to them in a new and compassionate way. This approach can help you reduce their power and influence over your life, and allow you to focus on the things that truly matter.
Through this video, you'll learn:
-The key components of the "Unwelcome Party Guest" metaphor
-How to identify and observe your own unwelcome guests
-Strategies for accepting and relating to difficult emotions in a new way
-How to use the metaphor to improve your mental health and well-being
If you're struggling with anxiety, stress, or negative emotions, this video is a must-watch. By applying the "Unwelcome Party Guest" metaphor, you can start to build a more fulfilling and meaningful life, even in the face of adversity.
Download the full 47MB version here:
tinyurl.com/unwelcomepartyguest
ABOUT CONTEXTUAL CONSULTING
Contextual Consulting was founded in 2012 by Dr Joe Oliver, a clinical psychologist, and associate professor at University College London. The business was born out of Joe’s deep passion for acceptance and commitment therapy, both in his professional practice and personal life, Joe recognised the immense potential of ACT in facilitating positive transformations and personal growth. A primary goal for him was to disseminate the principles of ACT to a wide audience, enabling more individuals to benefit from its empowering approach.
In recent years, there has been a remarkable surge in global interest and engagement with ACT across various fields and disciplines. This exponential growth reflects the increasing desire for individuals worldwide to deepen their understanding and application of ACT principles in their personal and professional lives.
We’ve grown into a team of presenters, therapists and support staff over the last decade but our goal continues to be the connection of the ACT community through training, supervision and therapy referrals.
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All Comments (21)
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Great advice for those with OCD and intrusive thoughts. People underestimate how debilitating this type of thing can be. Joke if you want but Mental illness is no laughing matter.
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What you resist persists
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I too was sent here by my Therapist in helping my Depersonalisation & Derealisation Disorder. - Many thanks for the video, Joe Also, good luck to everyone who is going through tough times. Be kind to yourself :)
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I'm seeing a psychologist to help with my anxiety and she sent me this video and I honestly really loved it 💖 I'm working on making peace with my fears and anxiety and I think this metaphor helps a lot, thank you 💜
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MS warrior here. My doc recommended this video today. Both her and you i am grateful! Thank you so much!
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My psychiatrist just showed me this, and it’s very relatable to me
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working of the mind has been beautifully captured and expressed....
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Dear Joe Oliver :), I would like to say, thank you, to you, for taking the time and energy to both upload and share this video with the youtube community. Thank you.
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Just show Bryan some of these ACT videos. It will help him to deal with himself.
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This is both amusing and clearly demonstrative of the A.C.T. Thanks.
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Nice video. We have to guard our focus, learn to live in the moments, and simply ENJOY life!
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Message is pay attention on important things in your life. If you pay too much attention on unwanted thoughts, you will miss many valuable things. Let the thoughts come and go, you just shift your focus, no need to control or suppress your negative/ intrusive thoughts.
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That Brian 'as in Brain voice' does my head in, coming in and out of my thoughts trying to turn my happy thoughts I have against me. Don't have a party in your head, live in the now. Am currently in therapy 😌
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I think locking the door invalidates the metaphor: the premise is that you can't keep Brian out. You can't lock the door on anxiety or wandering negative thoughts, because those just happen. That's what minds do. If you're poking fun at the metaphor, then ok. You win, it's not perfect. But within the paradigm of ACT, there is no locking the door, if I understand correctly.
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This video is helpful and I may use it at a training for Social Workers. Thank you.
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Well done Joe, very useful metaphor and illustration!! My word you are full of hidden talents
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liked this one!! I'm trying to get my head around ACT and this was helpful and made me smile
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Love this animation.💯👏🏿
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Interestingly this reminds me the office US episode “email surveillance “ when Jim didn’t want Michael at the party at first
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Brilliant video, Joe, I love it! Can I offer one suggestion, though? It's great that you've made captions available.... but unfortunately the auto-generated ones aren't very good quality. Voice-to-text software still has a long way to go. I recently put my very first video up on my YouTube channel, and was pleasantly surprised to find how easy it is to add captions (If you already have a written script, you can just copy and paste, but even if you have to transcribe the audio by hand, it's still really easy!). I work a lot with the Deaf community, and would love to be able to recommend this video to them... but unfortunately with the captions the way they are at the moment it would cause too much confusion. I don't know whether you've watched it with captions, yourself? The software confuses things like "can't" and "can", "he" and "we" etc... which really skew the message. You can just search for a YouTube video about "how to add captions to a YouTube video" like I did :-) Super easy :-) Only takes a few minutes :-)
