Good ACT practitioners know their clients. They notice what resonates, what falls flat, and when a metaphor has landed somewhere useful versus somewhere puzzling. What separates skilled practitioners from newer ones isn’t usually the size of their toolkit, it’s knowing how to use what’s already in it. The metaphors we reach for most often in ACT are already rich, already field-tested, and already built around the psychological principles that matter. They just occasionally need translating.
This blog will walk you through an example that uses the popular ACT metaphor – Passengers on the bus, and tailors it to an intervention with parents.
Let’s start with a broader context
It’s important that practitioners help their clients make the distinction between things inside and outside of their influence. Understanding this helps us to clarify where attention and energy can be directed effectively. For example;
What we can influence
- Our actions
- Engaging with the present moment
- Our values
- Willingness to make space for difficult emotions
- What we practise or commit to
- How we prepare and respond
What we can’t directly influence
- Other people’s thoughts, feelings, and actions
- Past experiences
- Automatic thoughts and emotions
- Natural limitations
- Environmental or societal conditions
- The outcome of our actions
For instance, when working with parents this can be a powerful way to help them recognise they should focus their energy on values-driven parenting choices rather than getting stuck wrestling with things outside their control, like their own thoughts or their child’s behaviour. These same ideas might then begin to look like this:
Practitioners helping parents to
- Respond to their child with patience, even when stressed
- Prioritise loving actions, like listening and showing care
- Adjust behaviour to align with parenting values
- Practise mindfulness and self-compassion as a parent
Practitioners helping parents make space for
- A child’s immediate emotions or reactions
- The loud “passengers” (self-doubt, worries, past mistakes)
- Difficult moments, like tantrums, defiance, or other challenges
- Uncertainty about the child’s long-term future
The passengers on the bus metaphor adapts naturally in this context to parenting work, offering a direct way to connect into the struggles that many parents commonly bring to therapy.
Passengers on the bus – A parenting example:
Imagine you’re a parent driving a bus towards your destination; a meaningful relationship with your children, where your key values might include connection, patience, and nurturing their growth and independence.
But as you drive the bus, passengers come aboard. These passengers represent the difficult experiences that come up for you as a parent. For instance:
- One passenger might shout, “You’re not a good enough parent, you’re failing!”
- Another passenger might grumble, “Your child isn’t listening because you’re doing it wrong.”
- Others might remind you of past mistakes or bring up worries about the future, like, “What if they struggle at school?” or “What if they don’t succeed in life?”
These passengers are loud, persistent, and difficult to ignore. As a parent, it’s natural to want to stop the bus and argue with them, throw them off the bus, or wait until they quiet down before continuing. But here’s the reality: trying to fight the passengers or silence them often just slows you down and distracts you from driving.
Instead, it can help to practise self-kindness and compassion by acknowledging that these passengers are just part of the journey. It’s okay that they’re there and it doesn’t mean you’ve failed as a parent, nor does it mean you’re headed in the wrong direction. Remind yourself that parenting is inherently challenging, and every parent will have their own loud passengers on the bus. You don’t have to fight them to prove yourself or wait for them to disappear before taking meaningful action with your children.
It’s also worth remembering that self-compassion isn’t a luxury for parents; it’s a necessity. When we’re harsh and critical towards ourselves, it becomes much harder to offer warmth and patience to our children. By treating yourself with kindness, you’re not only supporting your own wellbeing, but modelling for your children what it looks like to be human, to struggle, and to keep going anyway.
Sometimes, just noticing the passengers and saying to yourself, “Ah, here’s self-doubt showing up,” or “This is fear chiming in again” can make a difference. Try to treat yourself with the same compassion you’d show to a friend or even your child if they were struggling. Many parents find it easy to offer grace to others yet hold themselves to an impossibly high standard. Part of the work here is gently challenging that double standard, and recognising that being a “good enough” parent, one who shows up with love and intention even on the hard days, is something worth acknowledging.
And when things don’t go to plan, for example, when you’ve snapped, lost patience, or said something you regret, this is where rupture and repair is important. Recognising that relationships with our children aren’t damaged by difficult moments but are strengthened when we take steps to reconnect and repair, can be a powerful reminder that you don’t have to be a perfect parent to be a good one.
In the context of the metaphor, taking a deep breath, placing your hands firmly on the wheel, and gently steering the bus back on course is an act of self-kindness. It’s you doing the best you can to continue acting in a way that reflects your values, even if it feels imperfect in the moment. And here’s the key: driving the bus doesn’t mean you have to “win” against the passengers. You don’t have to convince them you’re a good parent or silence their negative chatter completely. You simply need to keep choosing small value-driven steps and practising patience when you’re tired or listening carefully when you’re stressed. It’s about moving forward, even if it’s just inch by inch.
So, when the passengers get loud, remind yourself: “I can keep going, even with this noise. I don’t have to ‘win’ against these thoughts and feelings. I just need to steer my bus where I want it to go.”
What does this look like practically
When working with parents, you could:
- Explore their values: Ask parents to identify their key parenting values (e.g., connection, nurturing, teaching resilience) to define their “direction of travel.”
- Identify their passengers: Help them recognise the thoughts, feelings, and struggles they face (e.g., guilt, fear of making mistakes, pressure from societal expectations).
- Reinforce their role as the driver: Emphasise that their job is not to control or remove the passengers but to steer the bus in ways that align with their values, even when it’s challenging.
- Encourage self-compassion as a practice: Invite parents to reflect on how they speak to themselves during difficult parenting moments, and to consider whether they would use the same language with a close friend. Helping parents develop a kinder inner voice is itself a values-driven act; one that benefits both them and their children.
The passengers on the bus is just one example of what’s possible when we take a familiar metaphor and translate it for the person in front of us. Working with parents is some of the most meaningful and demanding clinical work there is, and when a metaphor like this one lands, it can shift something significant: the move from fighting the noise to driving through it, from waiting to be good enough to choosing to act on values right now. That shift is what ACT is for, with the same principle we have shown in this example applying across the full therapy toolkit.
Learn more about ACT metaphors
If you’d like to explore other popular ACT metaphors, our A–Z of ACT metaphors is a good place to continue. For practitioners who want to develop this skill further, Niklas Törneke’s workshop on using metaphors in psychotherapy offers a practical and grounded place to go deeper.
Learn more about ACT for parents
Chris McCurry joins us this December for ACT for parents – a workshop that introduces a unique integration of ACT into parent-focused interventions. Attendees will leave with practical strategies that help their parent and caregiver clients to effectively support their children while also nurturing their own psychological flexibility. Chris will share actionable tools to enrich your clinical practice and help to improve the dynamics within the families that you are working with.