Understanding the Second Core Process of ACT: Cognitive Defusion
Cognitive defusion is the second core process in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), following acceptance, and is central to cultivating psychological flexibility. While acceptance invites individuals to allow and embrace uncomfortable thoughts and emotions without avoidance, cognitive defusion empowers individuals to create psychological distance from those thoughts. Cognitive defusion is not about changing, suppressing, or eliminating thoughts, but rather changing the way we relate to them—seeing them as mental events ("just thoughts"), not as absolute truths or commands that dictate our behavior. In the context of ACT, this means recognizing that painful, distressing, or catastrophic thoughts do not have to control our emotions, choices, or actions.
Techniques of cognitive defusion are practical and varied, including labeling ("I am having the thought that..."), using imagery (e.g., watching thoughts drift by like clouds), or repeating thoughts aloud until they lose their impact. These practices help individuals to notice the presence of thoughts without becoming entangled in them, to decrease the believability and impact of distressing narratives, and to make room for value-aligned action.
The Crucial Role of Stepping Back After Accepting Catastrophic Human Behavior
After acceptance of catastrophic human behaviors such as those causing the 6th Mass Extinction and climate change, stepping back from our thoughts through cognitive defusion becomes crucial. Acceptance alone—facing reality without avoidance—is a vital first step, but without cognitive defusion, individuals remain vulnerable to becoming fused with catastrophic beliefs like "It’s too late," "It’s hopeless," or "Nothing can make a difference". When people are fused with these distressing thoughts, they experience them as incontrovertible truths, leading to overwhelming despair, inertia, and inaction.
Only by stepping back—by defusing from these dominant mental scripts—can individuals begin to see their thoughts with objectivity and curiosity, rather than certainty. This shift creates cognitive and emotional space, allowing for clearer, more creative thinking and greater openness to possibilities for action. Defusion thus counteracts despair and opens up a broader perspective, revealing that solutions may be more accessible than fused thinking allows us to perceive.
The Obscured Ease of Solutions: How Cognitive Fusion Impedes Action
When thought patterns remain fused, people fail to recognize the full range of potential responses to the climate and biodiversity crisis. Catastrophic and self-defeating narratives—though understandable given the scale of the challenges—create a mental filter that obscures practical and attainable solutions. For example, a community fused with the belief "pro-environmental action is pointless" is unlikely to attempt collective change, even when feasible steps (policy advocacy, regenerative farming, divestment from polluting industries, etc.) are available and potentially effective. This fusion is compounded when societies at large share similar narratives, reinforcing a paralyzing status quo.
Cognitive defusion is the process that allows individuals—and by extension, groups—to "step back," see these thoughts as just passing mental phenomena, and thereby reduce their power to dictate choices. By unhooking from defeatist thinking, people may perceive that while global transformation is complex, many pathways for action exist and are, in fact, attainable if people are willing to take action even in the presence of doubt or fear.
The Collective Challenge: Doing It Together
Despite the relative simplicity of many technical and behavioral solutions to climate change and biodiversity loss, the most difficult and "impossible" task is achieving widespread, simultaneous psychological change—specifically, broad social acceptance and defusion. While individual defusion can break the chain of personal inaction, the nature of the crisis demands collective, coordinated engagement. If only a handful of individuals defuse from catastrophic narratives and take action, change is limited; overcoming the crisis requires a critical mass embracing acceptance and defusion together.
The current global predicament is that most people, groups, and societies are not practicing these essential psychological skills together. Instead, there is widespread non-acceptance—manifested in denial, disavowal, or distraction—and persistent cognitive fusion with narratives of powerlessness, blame, or hopelessness. This collective resistance directly sustains the destructive behaviors causing environmental collapse and deeply impedes the emergence of coordinated, effective solutions.
The Imperative to Break the Cycle: Acceptance and Defusion for Collective Action
To break this cycle, the psychological work must extend from the individual to the collective. Societies must learn, practice, and support acceptance—allowing themselves to face environmental realities—while also cultivating defusion, so that the grief, fear, and despair arising from these realities do not freeze them into inaction. When more people recognize that thoughts such as "we are doomed" are not absolute truths but emotional responses to pain, there is greater freedom to pursue and enact feasible solutions.
The capacity to step back together—to collectively see and defuse from self-defeating thoughts—fosters the psychological flexibility required for shared values-driven action on a planetary scale. When this mental and emotional shift occurs en masse, what once appeared impossible—the united, global response necessary to halt the 6th Mass Extinction and mitigate climate change—becomes plausible, if not inevitable.
Conclusion
The second core process of ACT, cognitive defusion, is indispensable in the psychology of global crisis response. It follows acceptance and enables not just the individual but whole societies to step back from catastrophic, fused thinking that obscures potential and undermines hope. The recognition that practical solutions are already available is only accessible when people, together, are willing to look reality in the face and defuse from narratives of impossibility. While daunting, this collective psychological transformation is the real challenge—and opportunity—of our time.
