What do I mean by we?

At several places in this website, attitudes are attributed to the ACT community. By this I don't mean that every single member of the community has the attitude in question, but that the community, taken as a whole, has this attitude. In practice, this means that the attitude is well-represented in the community (especially among influential community members), such that even those who do not personally hold the attitude have to deal with it in others, and such that major community decisions commonly reflect the attitude.

By analogy, consider that for a person to be anxious about X, it is not necessary that all of their parts (in the sense of IFS) are anxious about X. The person's anxiety might take the form of an internal squabble between the parts, where some exhibit the anxiety, perhaps in different ways and some argue that the anxiety is misplaced or moot, or have more nuanced positions regarding it. Although the parts are not unanimous, the person is still said to be anxious about X by virtue of the fact that the internal squabble is happening at all, and all the more if the anxiety is reflected in their decision-making.

Here is an example of a conversation in the ACT community which reflects many of the attitudes I have attributed to us, even though not every participant in the conversation exhibits these attitudes.

How did I ascertain that we have the attitudes I claim we do?

When you are part of a community and you pay attention, you become aware of the attitudes of that community. I have been part of the ACT community for the last 6 years, including working at 3 out of the 4 major centers of the community in the USA, namely UCR, Topos, and Conexus (but not NIST).

The main limitation of my understanding, as far as I can tell, is that my in-person experience is mostly with the ACT community in the US; I have mostly interacted with our European colleagues over the internet. Perhaps there are some differences in the ACT zeitgeist on the other side of the Atlantic which I am not aware of, and I would be curious to hear about this from those with more experience with European ACT.