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

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Just as Stoicism is the philosophical precursor to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Buddhism is the philosophical precursor to ACT. Unlike Stoicism and CBT which use logic and reason to reframe negative events, ACT uses mindfulness to investigate the nature of the emotions themselves. In short, CBT is more head and ACT is more heart. The baseline condition of life is suffering. Humans are different from other animals in that we not only suffer but we suffer about our suffering. Steven C. Hayes, PhD, is Nevada Foundation Professor in the department of psychology at the University of Nevada. An author of thirty-four books and more than 470 scientific articles, he has shown in his research how language and thought leads to human suffering, and cofounded ACT, a powerful therapy method that is useful in a wide variety of areas. Hayes has been president of several scientific societies and has received several national awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapy. Life is hard. Life is also many other things. Ultimately your life is what you choose to make it. When the word machine dominates, life works one way. When the verbal evaluative side of you is but one source of input, life works differently. The choices themselves aren’t always easy, but finding the freedom to choose is a liberating experience. It’s your life. It is not the word machine’s - even though (of course) it tells you otherwise. (194) I love ACT, so it pains me to rate this less than 4 or 5 stars, but I would really hesitate to recommend it to any consumer with less than a master’s degree. The appendix includes a note to scientists explaining that the authors dumbed down many of the Relational Frame Theory (RFT) concepts for the sake of the general public, and they did, but still there is much in here that goes way beyond what an average self-help consumer will push through. I find the exercises and quotes useful to me as a practitioner but it’s hard for me to imagine more than a handful of the people I have ever worked with going through this book start to finish. I’m willing to be wrong about that.

Get Out Of Your Mind And Into Your Life by Steven C. Hayes

He runs the leading Ph.D program in Behavior Analysis, and coined the term Clinical Behavior Analysis. He is known for devising a behavior analysis of human language and cognition called Relational Frame Theory, and its clinical application to various psychological difficulties, such as anxiety.None of [these techniques] will work simply by reading about them, any more than reading about physical exercise will build your muscles.” (119)

Get Out of Your Mind | Psychology Today UK Get Out of Your Mind | Psychology Today UK

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. When exposed to the same levels of physiological arousal, experiential avoiders are more likely to feel pain than those who willingly accept their anxiety. If you are fighting to be ‘right,’ even if it doesn’t help you move forward, ask yourself, ‘Which would I rather be? Right or alive and vital?’” (84) If you find yourself entangled in a ‘logical’ but sad story about your life, and why things have to be the way they are, write down the normal story, then take all the descriptive facts and write the same exact facts into a different story” (84) I’ve noticed in my own life that as my memory and verbal skills have increased, so has my pain/suffering.ACT is not about fighting your pain; it’s about developing a willingness to embrace every experience life has to offer. It’s not about resisting your emotions; it’s about feeling them completely and yet not turning your choices over to them. ACT offers you a path out of suffering by helping you choose to live your life based on what matters to you most. If you’re struggling with anxiety, depression, or problem anger, this book can help—clinical trials suggest that ACT is very effective for a whole range of psychological problems. But this is more than a self-help book for a specific complaint—it is a revolutionary approach to living a richer and more rewarding life. Suffer means having a burden we are unwilling to carry, that we move away from carrying: “fer” comes from Latin for ‘carry,’ “suf/sub” comes from Latin for ‘from below to up and away’ (12) Is not: wanting, conditional, trying or effortful, a matter of belief, the self-deception of “yes, if…” We began crafting ways to apply defusion and self skills to coping with the fear and pain of acceptance. Learning to defuse from the voice of the Dictator helps us keep a healthy distance from the negative messages that pop uninvited into our minds, like “Who are you kidding, you can’t deal with this!” It also helps diminish the power of the unhelpful relations that have been embedded in our thought networks, which are often activated by the pain involved in acceptance. For example, the relation between smoking a cigarette and feeling better will be triggered by the discomfort of craving a smoke. Reconnecting with our authentic self helps us practice self-compassion as we open up to unpleasant aspects of our lives, not berating ourselves for making mistakes or for feeling fear about dealing with the pain. We see beyond the image of a broken, weak, or afflicted self to the powerful true self that can choose to feel pain.”