| Summary: | The aim of this comparative study between Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) and Emil Gustafson is to identify possible significance of the concept of God in relations to suffering. This is achieved by comparing Gustafsons concept of God in suffering and ACTs concept of a destructive normality as a significant role in human suffering. The study identifies five themes in ACT: destructive normality, fusion, experiential avoidance, defusion and acceptance. A comparative analysis shows that christian concepts in Gustafson like the human as damaged, humility, pride, surrender and fear of temptation may have an impact of the perspective of suffering for the individual human. The study does not show that Gustafsons christian concepts include ACT as such. The psychological processes that ACT identifies and correlates with the power of human language are rather incorporated in Gustafsons language and his concepts of God. It may be concluded that the concept of God in Gustafson, in itself, have structures of symbolic language that can play a significant role in handling with the relations of psychological processes and human language that ACT identifies as a part of human suffering.
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