Values Are Not Goals
A note about terminology: ACT distinguishes values (chosen qualities or directions of living, never finished) from goals (specific, achievable endpoints). This page uses that distinction as the basis for a disability-specific reconstruction of how values work is usually taught.
THE CONFUSION: treating a value as though it were a goal — something that can be completed, achieved, or permanently lost.
THE DISTINCTION: a goal is a destination (write a book). A value is a direction (creativity) — still alive and pursuable even when a specific route to it closes.
MAY LOOK LIKE: “if I can’t do X anymore, that whole part of my life is over,” where X was actually one expression of something bigger.
ACT QUESTION: was this activity itself the value — or was it one way of living a value that might still have other forms?
REMEMBER: disability can close a route. It changes how a value gets lived far more often than it removes what a person actually cares about.
If you only have two minutes: a goal can be finished. Write a book: done, or not done. A value can’t be finished the same way — creativity isn’t something you complete, it’s a direction you keep moving in, for as long as you’re alive. When a disability closes off a specific goal or activity, it’s worth asking whether the underlying value has actually gone too, or whether it’s still there, looking for a new route.
You might recognise this: “If I can’t hike anymore, what’s the point?” “I used to be a runner. Now I don’t know who I am.” “That part of my life is just over.”
A conventional values exercise might ask: what would you do if there were no barriers? That can be useful sometimes. It can also be quietly painful or misleading, because it asks someone to imagine a body they don’t have, and measure their actual life against it.
A better starting question doesn’t require imagining anything away: what matters to you? Not what you’d do in a hypothetical unlimited body — what you actually, currently care about. Connection. Freedom. Creativity. Contribution. Adventure. Parenthood. Love. Learning. Justice. Humour. Autonomy. Care. Beauty. Courage. Belonging. Rest. Then, only once that’s named: what forms can this value take, in the body and life I actually have?
When the old route closes
Bad ACT
“You can’t hike anymore. Accept that, and choose a different value to focus on instead.”
Better ACT
“Hiking gave you adventure. Adventure may still matter, even though hiking, as it was, doesn’t work anymore. What else has felt like adventure to you?”
Accessible travel. Adaptive sport. New food. Writing. Learning something unfamiliar. Exploring somewhere local for the first time. Even emotionally risking something new in a conversation. Disability can change the route without necessarily eliminating the value.
Sometimes disability doesn’t just close a route. Sometimes it interrupts the value itself, or a specific expression of it that genuinely cannot be substituted. Someone whose value of nurturing was deeply tied to biological parenthood, and for whom illness has made pregnancy impossible, is not in the same position as someone who can no longer hike but can still travel.
Do not rush to “there are other ways to live your value of nurturing.” Maybe there are. But first: something has genuinely been lost, and it deserves to be grieved as a real loss, not immediately reframed into an opportunity. Values work must not bypass grief. Values can eventually help someone decide how they want to live alongside a grief that doesn’t fully resolve — they are not an antidote to it, and shouldn’t be reached for as one.
A client says, flatly, “if I can’t travel the way I used to, what’s the point?” Her therapist asks what travel actually gave her. “Freedom,” she says, almost immediately. “Is travel the value,” the therapist asks, “or was travel one way you lived freedom?” She sits with that. “I suppose freedom.”
The therapist doesn’t move straight to solutions. “I don’t want to use that to minimise what you’ve lost. You may have genuinely lost a way of living freedom that mattered enormously.” A pause. “But perhaps later we can become curious about whether freedom still has other forms.”
Grief comes before substitution. That’s what makes this good ACT rather than a bypass dressed up as one.
- Name the activity
What specifically has become difficult, limited, or impossible? - Ask what it gave you
Underneath the activity itself, what did it actually provide — connection, freedom, mastery, something else? - Let the loss be real first
Before looking for alternatives, is there grief here that needs its own space, uninterrupted? - Ask if the value survived
Once ready, not before: is the underlying value still there, even though its old route has closed? - Explore new forms, without pressure
What else has felt like this value before, however small or different in shape?
Where therapy can help
Separating a lost activity from the value it once carried, holding space for genuine grief about what’s changed, and exploring new, adapted expressions of a value once the person is ready to look for them — on their own timeline, not the therapist’s.
Where interpretation should stop
When a values reframe is offered before grief has had any room at all; when “there are other ways to live this value” is used to shut down a loss the person hasn’t finished naming; when a value has genuinely been interrupted with no substitute the person finds meaningful, and that reality isn’t respected.
The values/goals distinction is a well-established part of the ACT model, with values described as freely chosen, ongoing qualities of action distinct from achievable endpoints. The specific disability application here — finding new forms for an existing value, while protecting space for grief before that work begins — is a Disability in Psychotherapy clinical reconstruction rather than a formally tested protocol.
Was the thing I lost the value itself, or one route to it — and have I actually let myself grieve before asking that question?