Helping Lost Clients Find Their Compass: Values Work in the ACT Hexaflex

When the Symptoms Lift but the Direction Doesn't

A client settles into the chair, exhales, and says something many of us recognize: "The depression has eased up, but I have no idea how I'm supposed to live from here. I don't even know what I want anymore."

This is one of the more humbling moments in clinical work. Reducing the weight of depression or anxiety is one task; helping a person live a vivid, chosen life is an entirely different one. The two don't automatically follow from each other. A client can be measurably less symptomatic and still feel rudderless.

This is precisely where the values process in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) earns its place in the room. ACT doesn't aim merely to eliminate distress; it helps clients hold their pain and keep moving toward what matters to them. But working with values is trickier than it sounds. Clients routinely confuse values with other people's expectations, with social benchmarks, or with rigid rules they feel they should obey. So how do we help someone find their own North Star inside the fog—and then take a step toward it?

This guide focuses on the values point of the ACT Hexaflex and offers concrete strategies and practical tips for helping clients redesign a life worth living.

1. Values vs. Goals: Clearing Up the Most Common Confusion First

The single most frequent error in session—made by clients, and sometimes by newer clinicians—is treating values and goals as the same thing. When a client says, "My value is landing a job at a big company" or "My value is getting married and having kids," our job is to help them redefine that from an ACT stance. A value isn't a checklist item you complete and retire. It's the direction you move in and the quality you bring to each moment of living.

The shift we're guiding is from goal-oriented thinking to a process-oriented stance toward life. During the psychoeducation phase, a side-by-side comparison is an effective way to make this concrete. The table below works well as something you build collaboratively with the client, or walk through together in session.

Table 1 — Values vs. Goals: A Clinical Comparison Through an ACT Lens

This distinction lets a client move out of the fused thought "I failed to get the job, so my life is over" and into psychological flexibility: "I didn't reach the goal of that job, but I can still live out my values of diligence and learning today."

2. Experiential Techniques for Clarifying Values

Once the conceptual groundwork is laid, clients need experiential methods to reach the values that sit deeper than reasoning. Simply asking "What are your values?" tends to trigger defenses or earn a flat "I don't know." Indirect but emotionally evocative metaphors and exercises tend to reach further.

1. The 80th-Birthday Party (or Eulogy) Exercise Invite the client to close their eyes and picture their 80th-birthday celebration. The people they love most are gathered, speaking about them. "What kind of person do they remember you as? What do you hope they say you cared about most in your life?" This question is especially good at surfacing values about relationship and the quality of one's presence—rather than social achievement.

2. The Flip Side of Pain Show the client that, paradoxically, a value is often hiding inside the very thing tormenting them. To a client distressed by family conflict, you might offer: "The fact that this hurts so much—could it be because connection with your family genuinely matters to you? If it didn't matter, it wouldn't hurt." This move supports acceptance of the pain and confirms the value at the same time.

3. Values Card Sort Give the client a deck of 60–80 cards, each printed with a value (freedom, honesty, challenge, stability, and so on), and ask them to sort the cards into very important, important, and not important. Throughout, watch closely: the flicker in their expression as they pick up a card, the hesitation, the reasons behind a choice—and ask about what you notice.

3. Committed Action: Putting Values on Their Feet

Discovering a value isn't enough. If it never translates into behavior, the ACT work is incomplete. Many clients say, "I get the value, but the anxiety stops me from acting on it." This is where committed action comes in. The clinician's role is to structure things so the client starts with very small units of behavior and builds a sense of efficacy.

1. Linking SMART Goals to Values Set concrete behavioral goals that bring a discovered value to life. The goal should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound. For the value of health, for instance: "Take a 20-minute walk every evening at 7 p.m."

2. Anticipating Barriers and Planning Responses Rehearse, in advance, how the client will respond when the internal experiences that derail committed action show up—anxiety, reluctance, the thought "I can't do this." Ask, "When you're about to head out for your walk and the thought I'm too tired shows up, what will you do?" Then practice noticing that thought for what it is (defusion) and committing to the action of putting on their shoes anyway.

3. Public Commitment Encourage the client to commit to their plan out loud—to you in session, or to a trusted person in their life. Social support is a powerful motivator for sustaining committed action.

4. Practical Takeaways: Values as Background Music

In ACT, values work isn't a one-off event. It's the background music that runs through the whole of therapy. The skilled clinician catches the fleeting cues that pass through a client's speech—the moment the eyes brighten, the point where the tone of voice shifts—and reflects the value held inside them back like a mirror. That responsiveness is the clinical insight.

Noticing those cues in real time is demanding. Across a 50-minute session, holding every verbal and nonverbal signal in mind while sustaining the therapeutic relationship is genuinely hard work, and a metaphor a client tosses off in passing—or a key word they keep returning to—can be the difference between catching the right moment to intervene and missing it. It's worth building review habits that help you recover those threads between sessions, whether through your own notes or a structured worksheet.

An Action Plan for Clinicians

1. Try this week: Use the values-vs-goals table to reframe a client's current dilemma.
2. Bring in the Bull's-Eye worksheet: Help the client see, visually, how closely their current life is aligned with their values.
3. Listen for the value cues: Track the small, easily missed signals—the bright eyes, the repeated word—and reflect them back. That mirroring is often where committed change begins.