Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
IN-PERSON IN BRAMPTON, VIRTUAL ACROSS ONTARIO
A grounded therapy approach that helps you face anxiety, intrusive thoughts, and self doubt with more flexibility, build skill with discomfort, and feel more steady in day to day life.
Trauma-Informed Approach
Real Life Lived Perspective
Personalized Therapist Matching
When thoughts keep pulling you back in...
A mind that never settles can make life feel harder than it needs to be. Thoughts loop, self doubt stays close, and emotions can feel intense or unpredictable, which creates a constant need to regain control through overthinking, reassurance seeking, or planning every outcome.
ACT helps reduce overwhelm, change your relationship with thoughts, and build a purposeful life that aligns with your values.
How Does ACT Help With Personal Growth?
We Meet You Where You Are
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT, helps when thoughts and emotions start to feel louder than life.
Many people respond by trying to think their way out of anxiety or by pushing feelings down and staying busy, but that often keeps the loop going.
How do therapy sessions work?
In sessions, you learn mindfulness and defusion skills, clarify values, and take small steps forward, so rumination eases and choices feel steadier.
Many clients start with weekly sessions for 4 to 8 weeks, then shift to biweekly for a few months, and move to monthly support once things feel more stable.
In the first few sessions, many clients notice less mental spiralling and more space between a thought and a reaction
If Any of This Feels Familiar:
Overthinking takes over and feels hard to shut off
Hard conversations get avoided to keep peace
Anxious thoughts feel like warnings that must be followed
Feelings get managed, analyzed, or fixed instead of felt
Short term relief habits create longer term stress
ACT can help you see things differently. This approach works for anxiety, depression, stress, and self doubt, where the mind demands control, certainty, or avoidance to feel safe.
Our therapists use a blend of modalities including ACT, which means we tailor tools and strategies to your needs, goals, and patterns, rather than using one fixed approach.
Meet Our Therapists
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Rajdeep Deol
Anxiety, Self-Esteem, Communication Challenges
Currently Accepting New Clients
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Sonya Mahil
Stress, Trauma, Anxiety, Life Transitions
Currently Accepting New Clients
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Lizzie Lake
Non-Monogamy Affirming, Trauma, Life Transitions
Currently Accepting New Clients
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Carly Dukaczewski
Trauma, PTSD, Life Transitions
Currently Accepting New Clients
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Harsimran Kaur
Anxiety, Trauma, BPD, Relationship Issues
Currently Accepting New Clients
Why Choose Here and Now Therapy?
Many clients who choose ACT feel stuck in a tug of war with their own mind.
At Here and Now Therapy, sessions focus on psychological flexibility, which means learning how to notice thoughts without obeying them and make room for emotions without getting pulled under. We use mindfulness, cognitive defusion, and values based action, while holding cultural context with care, so it supports personal growth and long term mental wellness.
Sign Up For A Complimentary 20-Minute Consultation
Questions About Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
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Steven C. Hayes and colleagues developed ACT in the 1980s within contextual behavioral science to help people respond more flexibly to difficult inner experiences, rather than trying to eliminate them.
It includes six core processes, which includes:
Acceptance: means making room for thoughts, emotions, urges, and body sensations without spending all your energy trying to control, suppress, or escape them.
Cognitive defusion: helps you step back from thoughts and see them as mental events, not facts, commands, or warnings that must be obeyed.
Present moment awareness: brings attention back to what is happening now instead of getting pulled into past regret, future fear, or mental rehearsal.
Self as context: helps you notice that you are more than any one thought, feeling, role, or story. It builds perspective, especially when anxiety, shame, or self doubt starts taking over identity.
Values: chosen directions for how you want to live, relate, and show up. They are not goals you finish, but work as a guide for your decisions.
Committed action: means taking realistic steps that line up with your values, even when fear, uncertainty, or discomfort shows up.
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Therapists at Here and Now Therapy are trained in Somatic, CBT, DBT, and IFS therapies. Each has an important role in healing your mental health. Somatic therapy helps notice body cues and regulation, CBT offers a contextual lens, DBT builds interpersonal skills and tolerance for distress, and IFS explores protective and wounded parts with more curiosity and less shame. We also offer South Asian-centered therapy that incorporates cultural context into modalities we practice.
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ACT and CBT both help with anxiety, depression, and stress, but they target thoughts differently. ACT focuses on changing your relationship with thoughts, while CBT examines and restructures thought content. In practice, there is overlap, but ACT puts more emphasis on psychological flexibility than on disputing thoughts directly.
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Psychological flexibility means staying in contact with the present moment and then choosing to persist or change behaviour in service of your values. In therapy, that looks like feeling anxiety without letting it run the day, noticing self doubt without obeying it, and making choices based on what matters rather than what feels urgent.
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Your first session with a therapist focuses on understanding what brings you in. You can share as much or as little as feels safe. We ask about current stressors, symptoms, and patterns that repeat. We also discuss goals and what support should look like. You will leave with a clear plan for next steps, plus one or two tools to start.
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Ignoring thoughts usually means pushing them away, numbing out, or acting as if they are not there. ACT does the opposite. It asks you to notice these thoughts, expand your emotions vocabulary, make space for them without letting them dictate behaviour. You are still acknowledging your thoughts, but don't let them have the authority they previously did.