From flexibility to flow: psychological selection and the maintenance of values-based therapeutic skills

Psychological flexibility, the ability to stay present, remain open to difficult thoughts and feelings, and act on personal values, is a well-established transdiagnostic process in contextual behavioural science (CBS) and the principal target of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). Yet flexibility skills learned in session often do not last. Homework is frequently left incomplete, skills fail to transfer to the settings where they matter, and a sizeable proportion of clients return to earlier patterns once treatment ends. CBS accounts explain how a flexible repertoire becomes available across settings, but they say less about why a person keeps returning to a specific repertoire rather than another over months and years. To address that gap, this conceptual paper introduces psychological selection, referring to the process by which people tend to preferentially cultivate a subset of the activities available in their daily context, based on the flow experiences that those activities reliably afford. We treat flow as a measurable experiential signal of engagement and absorption elicited by perceived challenge/skill balance and maintained by consequences intrinsic to the activity, and we propose that it can support the sustained practice and refinement of specific flexibility skills after therapy. Whereas psychological flexibility describes the capacity for adaptive responding, psychological selection describes the cultivation of related actions over longer periods of time. We develop an integration model at individual, sociocultural, and therapeutic levels, set out its boundary conditions, including valued action persisting without flow and flow-like absorption that serves no value, and state propositions designed to test whether flow adds predictive value beyond flexibility, values, and reinforcement. Set against habit and rule-governed persistence, our account predicts action retention with growth, repertoires that become more complex as skills rise and individuals search for higher challenge, and it specifies the clinical situations in which the framework does or does not apply. The contribution is a process-level account of how therapeutic gains can be maintained by considering the associated quality of experience.