Get Out of Your Mind and into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

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Avoiding the pain of presence leads to the pain of absence - avoiding pain leads to missing out on life (16) Suppressing Your Thoughts Suppose you have a thought you don’t like. You’ll apply your verbal problem-solving strategies to it. For example, when the thought comes up, you may try to stop thinking it. There is extensive literature on what is likely to happen as a result. Harvard psychologist Dan Wegner (1994) has shown that the frequency of the thought that you try not to think may go down for a short while, but it soon appears more often than ever. The thought becomes even more central to your thinking, and it is even more likely to evoke a response. Thought suppression only makes the situation worse.”

Get Out of Your Mind and into Your Life: The New Acceptance

I’m naturally a very cerebral person, which is partly the reason why overthinking and anxiety have been problems for me. I think too much and feel too little. I have a tendency to over intellectualize my emotions, which often means I don’t actually process them effectively. ACT/Buddhism seems to be an excellent counterbalance to my temperament. To be willing and accepting means to realize that you are the sky, not the clouds. You are the ocean, not the waves. It means noticing that you are large enough to contain all of your experiences—good and bad.Steven C. Hayes' "acceptance and commitment therapy," or ACT, is the "you are not your thoughts" philosophy of cognitive behavioral therapy with a different label slapped on top of it. After five years of analysing over 50.000 studies on what helps people make a change, we finally have an answer. And it's simpler than you might think.

Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life ⋆ Download PDF Free Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life ⋆ Download PDF Free

The past is verbally remembered and the future is verbally imagined or “languaged” with images (23) Whenever you find yourself slipping and reverting to bad, old habits, reflect on these 3 questions. If you were on a bus trying to go east in a maze of dirt roads in a large valley, you might not be able to tell your direction from moment to moment. If someone took a series of snapshots, sometimes the bus might be facing north, or south, or even west, even though all the while this is a journey to the east.” Basically, our verbal skills—and, in particular, our ability to relate anything to anything else and think symbolically—make anything an entry point into pain.As much as I want to agree with the stop-thinking asceticism of cognitive behaviorism meets buddhism ("We're not saying don't feel your feelings! Feel them so deeply you don't care! Um! This makes sense to me sometimes while I'm at ACT therapy seminars!"), it just doesn't work for the more think-y among us. I like being in my mind. Being in my mind is being in my life. Finding varying ways to relate to pain -- sometimes cowering from it and sometimes snuggling up to it -- is what marks me as a human being. I find that ACT self-help book read dogmatically. And I think the mark of any bad self-help book and definitely any bad psychotherapy is a one size fits all approach -- believing so deeply as Hayes does that the tenets of this book repudiate other ways people try to help themselves. Is not: wanting, conditional, trying or effortful, a matter of belief, the self-deception of “yes, if…” None of [these techniques] will work simply by reading about them, any more than reading about physical exercise will build your muscles.” (119)