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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Ratgeber
- Sprache: Englisch
Harness ACT to live a healthier life Do you want to change your relationship with painful thoughts and feelings that are holding you back from making changes to improve your life? In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy For Dummies, you'll discover how to identify negative and unhealthy modes of thinking and apply Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) principles throughout your day-to-day life, creating a healthier, richer and more meaningful existence with yourself and others. Closely connected to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), ACT is an evidence-based, NICE-approved therapy that uses acceptance and mindfulness strategies mixed in with commitment and behaviour-changing strategies to help people increase their psychological flexibility in both their personal and professional lives. With the help of this straightforward and authoritative guide, you'll find out how to target unpleasant feelings and not act upon them--without sending yourself spiraling down the rabbit hole. The objective is not happiness; rather, it is to be present with what life brings you and to move toward valued behaviour. * Shows you how to banish unhelpful thoughts * Guides you to making room for painful feelings * Teaches you how to engage fully with your here-and-now experience * Helps you cope with anxiety, depression, stress, OCD and psychosis Whether you're looking to practice self care at home or are thinking about seeing an ACT therapist, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy For Dummies makes it easier to live a healthier and more productive life in spite of--and alongside--unpleasantness.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Acceptance and Commitment Therapy For Dummies®
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ISBN 978-1-119-10628-9 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-119- 10629-6 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-119- 10630-2 (ebk)
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy For Dummies®
Visit www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/acceptanceandcommitmenttherapy to view this book's cheat sheet.
Table of Contents
Cover
Foreword
Introduction
About This Book
Foolish Assumptions
Icons Used in This Book
Beyond the Book
Where to Go from Here
Part I: Getting Started with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
Chapter 1: Introducing ACT
Doing What Matters
Increasing Your Psychological Flexibility
Living a Life that’s True to Your Values
Accepting Life
Defusing from Your Thoughts
Recognising that ACT Is an Experiential Learning Process
Chapter 2: Understanding that a Little Unhappiness Is Normal
Linking Language and Human Suffering
Evaluating Yourself
Chapter 3: Developing Psychological Flexibility
Accepting Negative Thoughts and Feelings
Introducing the Six Core Processes of ACT
Chapter 4: Living a Life with Meaning
Letting Your Values Organise Your Life
Living Your Life with Dignity
Chapter 5: Moving Forward with Committed Action
Being Willing Is the Key to Achieving Your Goals
Setting Value-Based SMART Goals
Chapter 6: Overcoming Barriers to Living a Meaningful Life
Overcoming Psychological Barriers to Change
Replacing FEAR with DARE
Using Failure as Feedback
Chapter 7: Being Present through Mindfulness
Defining Mindfulness
Putting Mindfulness into Practice
Measuring Your Mindfulness
Being Kind to Yourself
Working on Self-Compassion
Chapter 8: Understanding Your ‘Selves’
Using Self as Context to Defuse from Your Thoughts
Seeing Your Self as Concept
Recognising Your Self as Awareness
Knowing Your Self as Context
Part II: ACT Principles and Perspectives
Chapter 9: Counting the Cost of Avoiding Yourself
Avoiding the Bad Stuff Is the Bad Stuff
Seeing Experiential Avoidance as Short-Term Gain for Long-Term Pain
Resisting Pain Leads to Suffering
Removing Your Pain … for a Price
Chapter 10: Linking the Human Mind and Consciousness
Understanding the Human Mind
Recognising that Your Mind Is more than Your Brain
Considering What Your Mind Is For
Holding a Negative Mental Bias
Understanding Consciousness
Chapter 11: Tracing the Origins of ACT and Relational Frame Theory
Explaining the Initial Breakthrough
Introducing Relational Frame Theory
Moving from RFT to ACT
Part III: ACT for Everyday Life
Chapter 12: Overcoming Work-Related Stress
Defining Work-Related Stress
Training Your Way through Stress at Work
Responding to Work-Related Stress in a Psychologically Flexible Way
Establishing a Better Work–Life Balance
Chapter 13: Looking at Love and Relationships through an ACT Lens
Ruminating on What Love Is
Breaking down Barriers
Plugging the Drain
Listening Actively, Responding Openly
Defusing Unhelpful Thoughts
Being Mindful in Your Relationships
Creating the Relationship You Want
Disagreeing Rather Than Fighting
Facing a Positive Future Together
Chapter 14: Dealing with Problem Anger
Defining Anger
Considering the Cost of Anger
Dividing Anger into Five Elements
Defusing Angry Thoughts
Fighting the Anger Monster
Tackling Your Anger with Acceptance, Compassion and Mindfulness
Letting Go of Your Anger
Setting Yourself Some Helpful Goals
Chapter 15: Helping You Live with Chronic Pain
Defining Chronic Pain
Recognising that Avoiding Pain Isn’t the Answer
Considering the ACT Alternative
Part IV: Mental Health Issues from an ACT Perspective
Chapter 16: Addressing Anxiety with ACT
Defining Anxiety
Linking Anxiety and Avoidance
Tackling Anxiety with a Three-Stage Approach
Advancing from Avoidance to Action
Chapter 17: Beating Depression with Acceptance and Committed Action
Keeping Thoughts and Feelings in Their Place
Doing What Matters, No Matter What
Considering What Depression Has Cost You
Giving Up What Doesn’t Work
Putting the Horse before the Cart
Chapter 18: Dealing with Addiction
Seeing Addiction through an ACT Lens
Accepting Yourself
Setting Value-Based Goals
Moving on from Addiction and Living a Valued Life
Chapter 19: Recovering from Psychosis
Understanding Psychosis
Applying an Acceptance-Based Intervention
Part V: The Part of Tens
Chapter 20: Ten Brief Exercises to Help You Live More Mindfully
Slowing Down and Connecting
Greeting the Day
Celebrating Your Wandering Mind
Appreciating Your Food
Getting to Know Your Hands
Savouring a Cup of Tea
Finding Your Balance
Hearing the World
Feeling Gravity
Listening to Music
Chapter 21: Ten Tips for Value-Based Living
Dedicate Time to Defining Your Values
Consider a Time When You Were Very Happy
Focus on a Period When You Were Really Sad
Prioritise Your Values
Identify Characteristics You Value
Act on Your Values
Make Your Goals Public
Be Willing
Defuse from Your Thoughts
Remember Some Key Tenets of ACT
Chapter 22: Ten Ways to Overcome Fusion and Experiential Avoidance
Sounding Out Your Thoughts
Taking Your Mind for a Walk
Giving Reasons for Your Behaviour
Sitting on a Description
Thinking and Observing
Getting Closer to Your Past
Using Argyle Socks to Recognise Why Feelings Aren’t Causes
Making Your Emotions Physical
Controlling Thoughts about Jam Doughnuts
Being Still
Appendix: Further Sources
Books
Courses and Training
Websites
About the Authors
Cheat Sheet
Advertisement Page
Connect with Dummies
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Foreword
Successful businesses across the world apply this simple principle: focus more on the few things that do a lot, rather than the many things that do a little.
This is such a book.
If you look at the table of contents for this book you will see that after a handful or two of short chapters it bangs through a pretty incredible list of important topics: love, anxiety, depression, anger, pain, addiction, work and even psychosis. And every one of those later chapters shows how psychological flexibility applies.
Is that even possible?
It turns out that it is. ACT is about the few core things in psychology that make an important difference in lots and lots of different areas. Last time I counted there were over 125 controlled studies (and hundreds more of lesser kinds) showing that the small set of skills that ACT targets makes a difference virtually everywhere that human minds go.
This is an ACT For Dummies book, but you could also call it an ACT for When You Are Too Smart for You Own Good book. Minds do not know when to stop! They are figuring it all out even when what they need to do is just be quiet and let people learn new ways of being and doing. There is a conflict between how your analytical mind works and how learning by direct experience works. Our analytical minds are great for doing taxes – but they are awful at getting over past hurts. Your minds are great in the role of a tool and lousy when put in the role of being the boss or dictator. What ACT does is to teach you how to put your mind on a leash – so you can use it when you want rather than it using you when it wants.
This book will help. There is nothing dumb about that!
Steven C Hayes, PhD
Foundation Professor of Psychology, University of Nevada
Co-developer of ACT
Introduction
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (said as one word, ‘ACT’) is an evidence-based psychological intervention that uses acceptance and mindfulness techniques alongside behaviour change strategies to help you live life according to what really matters to you. Based on recent breakthroughs in understanding how language works, ACT offers a genuinely original perspective on the human condition and the challenge everyone faces in living a life with meaning and purpose.
ACT is all about doing the things that really matter to you and not letting your mind get in the way. Often, without you realising it, your mind — what goes on in your head — can push you around and interfere with your daily life. You’re so connected with your thoughts that you don’t always notice what they do and, importantly, what they stop you doing. But your mind is really just a tool and, like all tools, is good at solving certain problems and pretty hopeless at addressing others. ACT shows you how to use your mind for what it’s good at and then to set it aside when your thoughts are less helpful.
To help you get on with the life you want to be living, ACT uses a range of exercises to enable you to become more open, aware and active:
Openness
involves stepping forward into life and accepting all that comes with it.
Awareness
means increasing your connection with the world around you rather than living in your head.
Being
active
is about doing the things that truly matter to you.
This is an exciting time for ACT. Every month, new research articles and books explore how it can be applied in different settings and to a host of human problems. In fact, so many new applications are being developed that there’s insufficient space in this book to cover them all. Rather, we provide a general introduction to ACT with the aim of helping you understand the central principles, ideas and practices that underpin the model. Contrary to popular belief, doing the things that really matter to you can be quite difficult. And the reason for that, according to ACT, is human language. While language enables you to do amazing things, it also allows you to ruminate on the past and worry about the future. And when you become overly entangled in your thoughts you stop living the life you want to be living — and instead your life is dictated by your anger, fears, worries and doubts. This insight isn’t particularly new, but where ACT differs to other approaches is in how it responds to these events. Rather than tackling this negativity head on, ACT shows you new ways to relate to your thoughts, feelings and emotions so that they have less impact on your day-to-day life.
About This Book
If you want to know more about ACT and how to apply it to your own life, then this book’s for you. In broad terms, we:
Describe how the ACT model builds your psychological flexibility by helping you become more open, aware and active.
Explain the scientific processes and concepts upon which ACT is based and how these relate to your everyday life.
Provide exercises and activities to help you understand ACT and create positive change in your life.
Offer an explanation of the new theory of language, Relational Frame Theory (RFT), which underpins ACT.
Relate ACT to real-life challenges, such as weight problems and anger management, as well as more complex mental health difficulties, like anxiety and depression.
Developing new ways to relate to your own thoughts, feelings and memories (collectively, your ‘mind’) takes practice and can’t be achieved through the understanding that results from reading alone. Understanding how to relate to your thoughts differently isn’t enough; you actually need to practise the necessary skills directly to be able to do it. It’s rather like learning to swim — no amount of reading or knowledge about swimming will ever be a substitute for getting into the water and learning how to swim directly. The exercises in this book aim to help you ‘learn to swim in your mental world’. While these experiential exercises aren’t always easy to do, they’re central to ACT and we recommend that you try as many as possible.
While reading the whole book will give you the fullest picture of what ACT involves, it’s not necessary for it to be useful to you. It’s better to think of this book as a general reference guide about ACT rather than a manual that needs to be read sequentially. That said, we do recommend that you read the chapters in Part I sequentially because we wrote it that way to take you through the key features of the ACT model. Reading those chapters in the order in which they’re written, while not absolutely necessary, enables you to find out about ACT in a systematic way, without any gaps. The chapters in the rest of the book can be read in whatever order you fancy.
Of course, the downside of ensuring that each chapter has enough information in it to make sense on its own is that some repetition of ideas exists. We’ve endeavoured to keep this to a minimum but you will note some recurrence of key points. On the upside, it means you’ll have multiple opportunities to make sense of the core principles, ideas and exercises.
Throughout the book you’ll find sidebars that provide additional detail that’s interesting but not necessary to understanding the main text. You can read them if you choose.
Foolish Assumptions
We’ve assumed some things about you and why you’re reading this book:
You have little or no prior knowledge about ACT or the ideas that underpin it.
You’re a layperson who wants to know more about how ACT works and how to apply the ideas to your own life, or you’re a professional therapist who wants to broaden your knowledge.
You’re motivated to try all the exercises because you understand that to benefit from ACT you have to directly engage with it.
Finally, a comment on the technical language we use from time to time. While we try to avoid being overly technical, sometimes ‘therapy speak’ is necessary because an understanding of the subject matter isn’t fully possible without it. When you come across technical terms and explanations, we advise you to stick with them but not worry about understanding them all in one go. It’s often better to skim read the text a couple of times to get the general picture and thus not get bogged down and frustrated. Because the chapters often repeat or build on ACT concepts, you gradually come to understand the technical details.
Icons Used in This Book
For Dummies books use icons to alert you to important details in the text. We use the following:
We use this icon to signal a new term you may not have encountered before, or at least not in the way we use it.
This icon draws your attention to a key point or something that’s useful to bear in mind for the future.
This icon highlights practical advice and guidance that can help you understand how to apply an ACT principle or work through an exercise.
This icon points out practical exercises and activities.
Beyond the Book
In addition to the material in the print or e-book you’re reading right now, this product also comes with some access-anywhere goodies on the web. Check out the free Cheat Sheet at www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/acceptanceandcommitmenttherapy for helpful tips and pointers to help you understand ACT and how to apply it to your life. You can also find extra articles at www.dummies.com/extras/acceptanceandcommitmenttherapy.
Where to Go from Here
A good place to start is Chapter 1! It sets out some of the basic ideas that we expand on in more detail in subsequent chapters. After that, you can read the rest of the chapters in Part I as we recommend, or check out the contents and jump into whichever chapter you feel is relevant to you at the time.
Part I
Getting Started with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
Find more about ACT and many other topics at www.dummies.com.
In this part …
Discover the basic ACT model and how it applies to your life.
Learn more about the nature and origins of human suffering from an ACT perspective.
Explore how to use ACT techniques to engage in a fuller and more meaningful life.
Use mindfulness to enhance your wellbeing.
Chapter 1
Introducing ACT
In This Chapter
Recognising what matters to you
Working on your psychological flexibility
Taking an active approach to your own life
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a genuinely new way of understanding the human condition. Informed by the scientific understanding of language, it offers a radically different perspective on human cognition and emotion and why human beings can struggle to be happy.
ACT is an evidence-based Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) that uses acceptance and mindfulness techniques alongside behaviour change strategies to help you live in line with what really matters to you. While the ‘T’ in ACT stands for therapy, ACT goes beyond that: it provides a framework for a deeper understanding of what it is to be human and, more specifically, how to live your life with purpose, openness, vitality and fun!
ACT has never been needed more. In spite of being materially wealthy, many people in Western societies struggle to find a sense of meaning, happiness and fulfilment in their everyday lives. Psychological distress and mental health problems result. ACT was developed (and is continuing to be developed) in response to these challenges.
This chapter explains how your linguistic ability to evaluate parts of your own experience as negative, and therefore something to be avoided, can get in the way of doing the things that matter to you. ACT shows you how to respond more flexibly to your experiences so that, rather than battling against yourself, you can live in line with what truly matters to you.
Doing What Matters
Put simply, ACT aims to help people identify their values and then to live consistently and openly with them. This is important because when you live in line with your values you’re more likely to feel that your life has meaning and direction. And conversely, when you don’t do what matters, you can feel frustrated, unfulfilled and dissatisfied, even anxious and depressed.
You may think that doing the things you feel are important would be pretty easy — unfortunately, that’s not the case. Human beings are well-practised at delaying, avoiding, stopping or simply not starting things that really matter to them. For example, even though the following things may be important to you, you may:
Not contact family or friends on a regular basis
Give up on diets
Abandon exercise programmes
Remain in the same job even though you’re fed up with it
Avoid asking people on dates
Not clean the house
Take a moment to think about your own life. When did you last avoid, delay or stop doing something that really mattered to you? You can probably think of numerous examples. It’s a curious fact that doing what matters to you isn’t always easy or straightforward. But why is this? According to ACT, experiential avoidance is the answer.
Experiential avoidance means being unwilling to experience unwanted thoughts, feelings or bodily sensations and engaging in counterproductive behaviour to avoid them (check out the nearby sidebar, ‘Experiential avoidance and rejection’, for an example).
Experiential avoidance and rejection
Recent research into the relationship between experiential avoidance and interpersonal problems found that the sample of 159 university students demonstrated a strong association between experiential avoidance and social traits such as coldness, social evasion and hostility. The researchers concluded that, in an effort to hide their anxiety, individuals behaved in cold and impersonal ways or attempted to avoid social interactions altogether. In effect, their fear of rejection encouraged them to act in ways that increased the likelihood of rejection. In terms of relationships, US President Franklin D Roosevelt appears to have been correct in his assertion that, ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself’.
Figure 1-1 shows how human beings, like all animals, generally approach things that lead to positive experiences and avoid those that lead to negative ones. Behaving in this way makes complete sense in evolutionary terms, because it means you’re more likely to avoid dangerous situations and embrace people and experiences that are good for you.
© John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Figure 1-1: Turning your back on negative experiences and seeking out the positive.
For human beings, however, the situation is more complex. Because language enables people to evaluate their thoughts and feelings as good or bad, it’s easy for people to move towards or away from their own experiences — even when doing so isn’t in their best interests. If you evaluate part of your experience as ‘bad’, you’ll be inclined to stop doing the things that led to it even if doing so also stops you doing what you really want. Consider walking up a mountain. Before you start out you may have doubts about whether you can do it and, during the hike, you’ll inevitably experience some physical discomfort as you go higher. If you’re not prepared to experience these negative thoughts and feelings, you won’t experience what it’s like to walk in the mountains.
Figure 1-2 shows this situation pictorially — unwillingness to experience negative thoughts and feelings causes you to turn around and move away from the things that matter to you. While doing so may solve the immediate problem — you reduce the impact of negative thoughts and feelings — unfortunately, it also creates another problem: you’re now no longer moving in a valued life direction. Experiential avoidance is occurring!
© John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Figure 1-2: Avoiding negative experiences can mean you miss out on the good things life has to offer.
Turning the tables on avoidance
Nic, a university lecturer and ACT researcher, has turned experiential avoidance on its head. He realised that avoidance was getting in the way of his ability to learn new skills, meet new people and connect with life. And because meeting people and learning new skills were important to him, he took a somewhat radical step. Now every time he notices any resistance to doing something, rather than letting this feeling dictate his actions, he automatically steps forward and does it. This approach doesn’t always make life easy for him, but by refusing to allow his life to be dominated by avoidance, he’s behaving in ways that are consistent with his values of openness, learning, exploration and fun. And he sleeps all the better for it!
As well as interfering with everyday life, experiential avoidance can be a major contributor to mental health problems. Avoiding daily doubts, reservations or sources of emotional discomfort is one thing, but some people who experience highly disturbing thoughts and memories go to even greater extremes in order to evade them, such as disassociation or drug and alcohol misuse. When this happens, their solution becomes their problem.
Increasing Your Psychological Flexibility
You can counteract your inclination to avoid parts of your own experience by becoming more psychologically flexible.
Psychological flexibility is your ability to be open to all your experiences — good and bad — while simultaneously doing the things that are consistent with your values. With a strong sense of psychological flexibility, negative thoughts and feelings are no longer barriers to doing the things that you want to be doing.
ACT focuses on six core processes associated with psychological flexibility. Although they’re set out as distinct processes, lots of overlap exists between them. And, while they can be applied individually, ACT is really about all six processes functioning together as one.
The six core processes are:
Values:
Deciding what you want your life to be about and the on-going actions that take your life in those directions
Committed action:
Doing those things that bring your values to life
Acceptance:
Noticing, accepting and embracing all your experiences, especially the unwanted or negative ones
Defusion:
Noticing your thoughts and thinking processes, without being inside them or trying to alter or control them
Contact with the present moment:
Being fully aware of your experiences as they’re occurring here and now
Self as context: Getting in touch with your deep sense of self — the ‘you’ who sits just behind your eyes, who observes and experiences, and yet is distinct from your own thoughts, feelings and memories
We return to these six core processes in Chapter 3 so that you can really understand how they work and link together. Here, it’s important to understand that ACT aims to enhance your psychological flexibility so that you can get on with doing what matters.
Living a Life that’s True to Your Values
In ACT, the things you really care about, deep down inside, and want your life to stand for are called your values. They’re not specific items or goals that you can hold or achieve; rather, they’re statements that reflect how you want to behave in life on an ongoing basis. For example, ‘being a loving partner’, ‘being healthy’ or ‘reducing my impact on the environment’ are values as they describe how you want to behave towards other people, yourself or the world in general. You can think of values as the directions you want your life to be going in as they guide your behaviour to reflect what’s important for you.
Even though being true to your values leads to a greater sense of purpose and contentment in life, doing so isn’t always easy. It can involve doing things that you may not actually want to do at that particular moment — for example, communicating calmly with your children when you’re very angry or making a cup of tea for your partner when you feel upset with him. Doing these things in the service of your values of being a good parent and a loving partner means that you’re being true to what you hold most dear.
Accepting Life
Many traditional therapeutic approaches focus on changing or altering unwanted or troublesome thoughts and feelings. ACT is different in that it works to change how you relate to these events rather than to change them directly. The aim is to become more open to, and accepting of, your thoughts and feelings instead of battling against them.
ACT takes this approach because research carried out over the last 20 years or so indicates that people have much less control over their thoughts and feelings than they often think they do. For example, while you can choose to think about different things, such as a red car or a polar bear, you can’t sustain these thoughts for anything other than short periods before your attention moves on to something else. And if you try your best not to think about something, then the opposite happens and you end thinking about it all the more. These findings (and what does your own experience tell you?) mean that your efforts to control, minimise or avoid your thoughts can only ever have marginal success. Chapters 7 and 11 explain in more detail how your thoughts work.
A similar situation exists with your emotions. What you feel depends on what’s happened to you, and this means that you can’t change how you feel at any one point in time without first changing your past. Of course, that’s impossible, and so attempts to manage or change your feelings in the present won’t be successful.
The aim of ACT is to help people live open and fulfilling lives, which is difficult to do if they’re spending lots of their time trying to change, control or avoid things that can’t be easily changed, controlled or avoided. For this reason, acceptance is so important. When faced with things you can’t change, your best option is usually to accept them. This challenge is nicely summed up by Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer:
Grant me the serenity to accept the thingsI cannot change,The courage to change the things I can,And the wisdom to know the difference.
Acceptance provides an alternative to experiential avoidance as a way to engage with life. In practising acceptance you create the space to do the things that really matter to you rather than waste your time and energy on trying to control the uncontrollable. This doesn’t mean that everything you do will be successful. Some things you do will work out and others won’t, but at least you’re now doing the things that are important to you rather than trying to control or avoid the things you don’t like. At the end of each day you can then rest your head on the pillow and fall asleep knowing you’ve lived according to your values.
And something else happens when you practise acceptance: life becomes less scary and less focused on the negatives. It transpires that your unpleasant thoughts and feelings aren’t as bad as you think they are. Sure, they’re not very nice, but they aren’t something you need to unduly worry about much of the time. And they certainly aren’t things to which you need to devote significant energy trying to avoid or control.
Defusing from Your Thoughts
Human language can occur in the public domain (speech and writing) and the private domain (thoughts and cognitions). While human language is an essential part of modern life and helps you with all kinds of challenges and problems, when you become too attached to its literal content it can also lead to difficulties.
When you believe that your thoughts reflect the world accurately (as it ‘really’ is), they can have a greater influence over how you behave. Allowing your thoughts (and language in general) to direct your actions is problematic for a number of reasons. For a start, your thoughts are usually negative and often wrong. And even when they’re accurate, your thoughts aren’t always useful to you in terms of living in line with your values. Consider a young woman who wants to quit smoking. She might have the thought, ‘A cigarette right now would relax me’. And such a thought may be accurate; having a cigarette may indeed allow her to relax. However, being ‘fused’ with (believing it literally) and acting on that thought would move the young woman no closer to her value of healthy living.
Defusion is the process by which you gain some distance from your thoughts, cognitions and language by reducing their believability. It involves becoming aware of your thoughts (and your thinking processes) and not being stuck inside them. ACT uses lots of different experiential techniques to help you discover how to become less attached to the literal content of your thoughts.
When you see your thoughts as just bits of private language in your head, you reduce their influence on your behaviour and this enables you to act in line with your values.
Recognising that ACT Is an Experiential Learning Process
ACT is an experiential learning process. Most chapters in this book contain exercises for you to complete and learn from. While we can describe what ACT involves (such as its six core process and psychological flexibility; check out Chapter 3), doing so won’t tell you what these processes feel like or, more importantly, what they do. For that, a direct experiential process is necessary. You can only learn how to swim (and what swimming is like) by getting in the pool — and ACT is the same.
The good news is that, while the exercises take some effort, they’re often also fun.
Think of ACT as an acronym for three basic steps:
A
ccept your thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations.
Because you can’t really avoid or control how you think and what you feel, you’re better off accepting these experiences.
C
hoose your life values.
Spending your time trying to manage or avoid the things you don’t want isn’t a positive way to exist; instead, put your energy into identifying what matters to you — your values — and defining how you want to live.
T
ake action.
Start doing the things that matter to you. Begin with small steps and gradually build bigger and bigger patterns of behaviour that are informed by your values. If you want to become fitter, for example, begin with a gentle walk or short jog. Soon you’ll be able to run farther and faster and eventually you may run a marathon!
Accepting those things in life that you can’t change is the challenge everyone faces. It isn’t easy, but it’s often your best option nonetheless. Next, you need to decide what’s important to you and how you want to live your life, so that you can focus on what matters. This can be tricky too, but the prize is everything — it’s a life filled with purpose, vitality, meaning and fun.
Chapter 2
Understanding that a Little Unhappiness Is Normal
In This Chapter
Discovering the link between language and human suffering
Seeing how trying to avoid or control negative thoughts and feelings is counterproductive
Understanding how little control you have over your thoughts and feelings
Viewing healthy normality in a new light
Every day people struggle to live meaningful and positive lives. Rather than feeling energised and upbeat, people often report feeling anxious, stressed or depressed. What’s going on? Why do people find it so hard to be happy or to do the things that matter to them? According to recent breakthroughs in psychological science, the root cause of our suffering is human language and how we respond to it.
Your language is what enables you to remember sad events from the past or worry about things that may happen in the future. These events in themselves, though unpleasant, aren’t necessarily problematic. But it’s when you try to control or avoid them that you can get into trouble and embark on a road that takes you away from doing the things that really matter to you and leads to yet more psychological suffering.
This chapter looks at how your language enables you to evaluate your own experiences as well as events in the external world. We introduce the assumption of healthy normality and how it encourages you to try to avoid or control those parts of your experience that you evaluate negatively. This chapter also begins to describe how ACT offers an alternative way forward, in which you connect with your values and what really matters to you in life rather than try to avoid or control your negative thoughts and feelings.
Linking Language and Human Suffering
Language is at the heart of humanity’s greatest achievements, from science, engineering and architecture to literature, music and art. In many ways, language is the defining feature of human beings and it sets us apart from the other animals on this planet.
Language enables you to:
Think
Remember
Dream and aspire
Plan and arrange
Co-operate and organise
But language also has a darker side, which makes it possible for you to:
Worry
Experience regret
Ruminate
Fret and feel fearful
Remember past difficulties and trauma
Some of these more negative mental processes can be useful, of course. Worrying about things can help you to understand what’s happening and then to do something about it. But sometimes your thoughts and feelings can come to dominate your experience to such an extent that they interfere with your ability to get on with your life.
Struggling with your thoughts and emotions
Even when life is good, you can still worry and feel anxious or sad. Other animals aren’t like humans in this regard. Give a dog a good meal, some exercise and a warm place to sleep and it will be quite content — every day! Of course, animals can be anxious or distressed, but only when they’re in negative or adverse circumstances. In contrast, human beings can experience negative thoughts and feel lost, scared and alone at any time. And it’s language that enables this to happen. If the events you think about are negative, you’ll experience negative feelings no matter what your immediate circumstances.
Non-human animals don’t have this problem because they don’t have the same language ability. How human language functions is at the heart of ACT. ACT is based on a new theory of language called Relational Frame Theory (RFT). This theory provides a contextual account of language that has wide-ranging implications for psychological wellbeing and, indeed, almost all walks of human life.
Although RFT is central to ACT, an understanding of it isn’t necessary here. You don’t need to know how an engine works in order to drive a car, and neither is knowledge of RFT a requirement before engaging in ACT (if you do want to know more, check out Chapter 11, which covers RFT in detail).
Differentiating between public and private language
It is useful to be aware that language occurs in two distinct domains — public and private. Public language refers to any shared form of symbolic communication and includes:
Spoken words
Written words
Signing
Semaphore and Morse code
Poetry
Private language refers to your mental processes, or what you experience ‘inside your head’, and includes:
Thinking
Planning
Remembering
Judging
Evaluating
Criticising
Although public and private language look and feel quite different, the same core processes underpin them. Essentially, language enables you to link different stimuli together into arbitrary relations (here we use stimuli as a general term for different objects, events or processes). For instance, the word ‘dog’ is an arbitrary collection of letters (themselves arbitrary marks) and there’s nothing dog-like about them (as Figure 2-1 demonstrates). The relationship between ‘dog’ and an actual dog is merely an arbitrary social convention and this relationship forms the basis of what’s termed language.
© John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Figure 2-1: Linking different stimuli into arbitrary relationships.
Language enables you to link all sorts of things together, which can be really useful. But how you relate to language can cause problems, and it’s these problems that ACT seeks to address. The rest of this chapter looks at how you relate to language in more detail and, in particular, how your capacity to evaluate the world can cause you difficulties.
Evaluating Yourself
As a human being you’re very good at scanning the world around you and evaluating it for opportunities and dangers. This ability has clear adaptive and survival benefits and maximises your effectiveness in any given environment. It enables you to identify issues and then to quickly engage in problem-solving behaviours. In other words, when you see something you don’t like you can avoid it or change it in some way. For example, if your washing machine breaks down you may feel a little upset and think, ‘Now I’ve got to get rid of it and buy a new one’. This thought makes perfect sense if you don’t want to wash your clothes by hand.
Problems can arise, however, when you apply this same strategy to the world inside your skin. That is, when you evaluate what you think and how you feel and then treat these thoughts and feelings in the same way as external events. Noticing a negative psychological experience, for example, you may think, ‘I don’t like this feeling or that memory; I’m going to get rid of it’. Responding to your thoughts and feelings in this way is a mistake because you simply don’t have enough control over them to make doing so a successful strategy.
While you can evaluate both a broken washing machine and an unpleasant thought or feeling as being negative, you can’t respond to them in the same way. Thoughts and feelings aren’t like things in the external world, such as spiders, apples or dogs, for the important reason that they can’t be as easily controlled or avoided. You can pick up spiders, eat apples and avoid going to a park popular with dogs, but the way language works means that you haven’t got the same level of control over what you think and how you feel.
A simple fact of life is that from time to time you, like everyone else, will experience negative thoughts, feelings and physical sensations. The less willing you are to remain in contact with these events, the more likely you are to engage in counterproductive or even harmful attempts to avoid or change these experiences. ACT calls this behaviour experiential avoidance and sees it as the root of human suffering and mental health difficulties.
While it can seem a good option in the short term, experiential avoidance often just adds to your problems. For example, an anxious person may not leave the house so as to avoid uncomfortable feelings of anxiety, but as a result she can’t go out to work, do the shopping or visit relatives. Similarly, a depressed person may think he’s feeling too low to be good company and thus decline an invitation to a party. Declining enables him to avoid dealing with difficult thoughts or feelings in social situations, but he’s also missing out on seeing friends. And if seeing friends is something he values and cares about, not seeing them will add to his sense of depression.
ACT argues that, by acknowledging and accepting your difficult thoughts and feelings, rather than seeking to change or avoid them, you can create the space to begin working towards valued life goals. In turn, doing so can reduce the unpleasant feelings (though not necessarily) and, more importantly, enable you to get on with living the life you want, defined by your values.
Experiential avoidance is an important concept in ACT and we explore it further in Chapter 9.
The following sections look at some assumptions you may hold about your thoughts and feelings, and examine how much control over them you actually have.
Wondering if thought control is possible
You may assume you can control your thoughts but, in fact, you have much less influence than you think. Try the exercise below to see how true this is.
Take a moment to think about an apple. Close your eyes and picture it — its colour, shape and smell. When the image is clear, focus your attention on it for the next 60 seconds and think about nothing else.
If you managed to think about the apple for the full 60 seconds, well done! However, notice how much effort it took to do so. Focusing your attention on even a simple, neutral thought like an apple isn’t easy, and often you can’t devote that much energy to a single thought.
The overwhelming majority of people report that they’re unable to keep their attention on the apple for the duration of this exercise. Instead, their minds wander onto other topics and the image of the apple subsequently disappears. So much for being able to control your thoughts!
Thought suppression increases thoughts!
The limited control you actually have over your thoughts has been well-established by researchers. Psychologists Richard McNally and Joseph Ricciardi, for example, demonstrated that suppressing negative thoughts works in the short term, but as soon as you stop actively trying to suppress these negative thoughts, they’re three times more likely to return. Everyone can suppress thoughts and memories, but as soon as you drop your guard, up they pop!
The situation is the same for both emotions and physical sensations. Attempts to suppress the feeling of pain, for example, actually tend to increase it.
The simple truth is that your thoughts (and other mental processes, such as memory) are triggered by all sorts of events and stimuli (known as situational cues) over which you have little or no control. While you can focus on a single thought for a short period of time, your attention naturally shifts quickly on to something else and there’s little you can do about it.
Trying to avoid the situational cues that influence your thoughts is unlikely to work, because too many of them exist and they can become linked to any event via arbitrary relationships. For instance, a traumatic event may come to be associated with a particular date or number. Each time that number appears in the environment, it can then provide the stimulus for remembering the original event.
Dealing with feelings from the past
What you feel in your body depends on what’s happened to you in the past. The implications of this knowledge are stark — unless you invent a time machine to change your past, you can’t change how you’re feeling right now. Unfortunately, Western culture often doesn’t reflect this perspective. A parent, for example, may say to a small child ‘cheer up’ or ‘don’t worry’ in her efforts to help the child feel better. While this approach is understandable, within these messages is the idea that the child can control how she feels, when actually that’s not possible. This doesn’t mean you’re completely powerless in the face of your emotions, however. You can control how you behave when you feel different emotions, but not the emotion itself.
As how you feel depends on your history, giving yourself new ‘happy’ histories is the key to feeling better. How do you do so? By doing the things that matter to you. ACT calls the things that matter to you, your values (Chapters 3 and 4 look at values in detail). Values reflect the things that you want your life to represent and stand for. Identifying and understanding your values is critical in ACT because they provide your sense of direction for life. As such, your values define the meaning and purpose of your life and help to organise your behaviour over the longer term.
Accepting what you can’t change
Some things in life you can’t change and to avoid adding to your suffering it’s best to just accept them. Doing so is much easier said than done, of course! This is because acceptance means opening up to unpleasant psychological experiences, such as disturbing thoughts, bad memories, difficult emotions or painful physical sensations. Accepting these experiences is difficult and nobody wants to do so; however, long term, acceptance transpires to be better than living in denial.
Unpleasant experiences such as pain, anxiety and sadness are part of life and, while they can be minimised to some extent, they can never be eradicated completely. However, these experiences, or the events that produced them, aren’t at the root of human suffering. ACT argues that human suffering occurs when you embark on the ultimately futile task of trying to avoid or get rid of your own thoughts and feelings. When you try to control the uncontrollable, you only make your situation worse and waste valuable time and energy that can be better spent getting on with doing what you really care about.
Scottish psychotherapist and psychiatrist RD Laing noted, ‘There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain’. Replacing avoidance with acceptance won’t get rid of the original pain, but at least you won’t add to it.
Accepting difficult thoughts and feelings is a challenge that everyone faces. Fortunately, ACT provides a way of understanding what’s going on in your head and, importantly, shows you how to address it.
Challenging the healthy normality assumption
A widespread assumption in Western societies is that human beings are by nature psychologically positive and happiness is typical. ACT calls this the healthy normality assumption. The healthy normality assumption is so deep and pervasive that it’s rarely noticed, let alone challenged. And yet when it’s pointed out, almost everyone knows that this assumption isn’t correct. Happiness is not people’s default emotion. Feeling uncertain, anxious or depressed is much more common. Of course, you sometimes feel happy or positive, but those periods are the exception rather than the rule. Experiencing negative thoughts and feelings is much more common.
From an ACT perspective, negative thoughts or feelings aren’t necessarily problematic. While not very nice, they can be very useful. Consider stress. Stress is often seen as a bad thing, and, indeed, it can have serious physiological and psychological consequence. However, too little stress can also lead to negative outcomes, because you need a little bit of pressure to get things done. Feeling anxious before a job interview, for example, can keep you focused on what you want to say. If you’re too relaxed, you may not concentrate fully on the task at hand.
The healthy normality assumption unfortunately encourages the belief that if you’re not feeling happy or positive, there’s something wrong with you. Psychological distress or discomfort comes to be seen as some kind of pathology or disorder, rather than part of people’s normal experience.
This idea is further reinforced by the language you use. Terms such as ‘mental illness’ or ‘mental health problems’ are commonly used to describe the difficulties people face when dealing with negative psychological experiences. By definition, negative thoughts, feelings and memories aren’t pleasant, and obviously people don’t want to have them.
