Category: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

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Acceptance Acceptance and Commitment Therapy ACT Feel Better

Conceptualised Selves

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

WALT WHITMAN

Sometimes it can be helpful when we start to feel very trapped in a mind-state that is causing us a great deal of suffering to do a practice that pushes us (a little uncomfortably, but hopefully not too uncomfortably) at examining the very perspective from which our thoughts and feelings emanate.

These two exercises come from Steven C. Haye’s book A Liberated Mind. I have found them both interesting and helpful at times for myself and when used with clients.

PRACTICE ONE: I AM?

Take a sheet of paper and write down the following.

I am ________________.
I am ________________.
I am ________________.

Now complete the top two with one-word answers that represent positive psychological attributes of yours. Don’t put in mere descriptive attributes (e.g., I am male). Use terms that refer to your most prized personal qualities. Reserve the last for the exact opposite. There, list in a single word a personal attribute that you fear you have or think you have that is negative.

Let’s begin by reviewing the top two “positive” answers. A couple of simple questions: Is this true all the time? Everywhere? Toward everyone? Without exception?  What about the bottom one. Is it totally true, everywhere? Would someone else say the same thing if they could watch you 24/7?

Now another question: how many of these statements can you turn into a comparison with others? Try to do it with each one. If you wrote down I am smart or I am kind, see if these statements link to the idea that you are smart-ER or kind-ER (or dumb-ER and so on) than at least some other people. This isn’t just your story—it’s your story in comparison to others. No wonder we begin to feel alone inside our own “content”-focused selves.

The beginning of a solution is to notice our fusion with these statements. Beginning with the first one and continuing through all three, change the full-stop at the end of each sentence to a comma, and then write down these two words: OR NOT. For example, I am intelligent, or not.

Now read each sentence again, slowly. Watch what happens. Take your time. If you find your mind filling with negative thoughts as you do this, use your defusion skills on them, saying to yourself, “I’m having the thought that . . .” and see if that helps to loosen the grip on the thought that’s threatening to hijack your mind.

You may be able to sense something opening slightly—as if a little bit of air is coming into a room. You may feel that you somehow have more options about how you think about yourself. Don’t try to hang on to that feeling—it will come and go—and don’t get into an argument with yourself about which version is more accurate. The mental process we are cultivating here is reminding ourselves that we can refuse to buy one version of a story as compared to another. We’re opening our minds to possibilities. See if you can notice that this sense of opening happens with both the “positive” statements and the negative one.

Now take the first sentence and cross out all of what you’ve written after I am. Who would you be without that content? Pause to consider the answer. Then do the same with each of the other sentences. What would it be like just to let go of that content?

This process raises the question: Who are we without all of our stories and defenses? Who or what are we trying to protect? If we woke up one day and all sentences like this were just sentences—they all had that open sense of “_______ or not!”—would we still be our selves? If your mind replies, “Hell no!” take just a moment to notice who is noticing that mind of yours. Aren’t you noticing that mental reaction? Isn’t the you that is noticing a deeper sense of “you”?

As the final act in this little exercise, circle the two words repeated three times—I am—and consider them. What if the deeper sense of self we seek is closer to these two words alone? In crafting the story of our lives, we lose sight of this powerful alternative: just being.

There is one more step in this exercise, which helps us become more aware of when we tend to fall under the spell of our self-telling. Ego-based stories are not just distorted, they also tend to be too general. In actuality, we focus on different aspects of our self-story in different circumstances. For example, when at home with our loved ones, we may focus on our view of ourselves as being caring; while at work, we might focus on our thoughts about being inept. Becoming aware of how our self-story changes according to different situations helps us stay better connected with our transcendent self, and therefore with our ability to choose among possibilities about how we will be.

So now, we’re going to transform the “I am _______” statements by rewriting each. First, instead of I am, write I feel or I think. For example, if you wrote I am loving, replace it with I feel loving. If you wrote I am intelligent, make it I think of myself as intelligent.

Next, qualify each statement by describing the situation in which you think or feel that way, including how your own behaviour is involved, using this phrasing:

“When [the situation] and I [your behavior] then [how you think or feel].” For example, “When my wife is disagreeing with me, and I take her perspective seriously, I feel loving,” or “When I have a lot to do, and I take time for self-care, I think of myself as intelligent.” You can also write descriptions of the situations in which you do not feel loving or intelligent. For example, “When I have a lot of work to do and I ignore my twelve-year-old son, I do not feel loving.”

PRACTICE TWO: DIFFERENTIATING BETWEEN WHAT WE’RE AWARE OF AND WHO WE ARE

Take a breath or two, notice who is noticing that sensation, and then note your experience. Whatever your mind settles on—an external object, an internal sensation, a thought, a feeling, a memory, or so on—get clear on it.

Then restate the experience in three forms:

  1. “I am aware of [state the content]”
  2. “I am not [state the content]”
  3. “I contain awareness of [state the content].”

For example, “I am aware of the television. [PAUSE] I am not the television. [PAUSE] I contain awareness of the television”

Or “I am remembering a memory of being five. [PAUSE] I am not a memory. [PAUSE] My awareness contains a memory of being five.[PAUSE]”

Five or ten minutes is plenty of time for this exercise, and after the first engagement with it, you should practice it regularly for several days. Then, for ongoing practice, you can simplify the task. Just notice the experience and then state “I’m not that; my awareness contains that.”

Don’t get drawn into an argument—instead see if you can touch a deeper awareness that your attachment to any content is distinct from awareness itself.

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Acceptance and Commitment Therapy ACT Feel Better Happiness

Counting Happiness: How Much Should We Trust Our Feelings?

This excerpt from Yuval Noah Harari’s wonderful book Sapiens manages to distil a great deal of wisdom and discernment about our quixotic quest for feeling good. I think it also points to the challenges that we face as psychotherapists in working with clients’ assumptions (which are also our own!) about striving for happiness and well-being: highlighting how these assumptions have fundamental cultural and historical foundations which we rarely question, so intrinsic are they to the symbolic worlds in which we live. 

COUNTING HAPPINESS

Social scientists measure happiness by distributing subjective well-being questionnaires and correlating the results with socio-economic factors such as wealth and political freedom. Biologists use the same questionnaires, but correlate the answers people give them with biochemical and genetic factors. Their findings are shocking.

Biologists hold that our mental and emotional world is governed by biochemical mechanisms shaped by millions of years of evolution. Like all other mental states, our subjective well-being is not determined by external parameters such as salary, social relations or political rights. Rather, it is determined by a complex system of nerves, neurons, synapses and various biochemical substances such as serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin.

Nobody is ever made happy by winning the lottery, buying a house, getting a promotion or even finding true love. People are made happy by one thing and one thing only – pleasant sensations in their bodies. A person who just won the lottery or found new love and jumps from joy is not really reacting to the money or the lover. She is reacting to various hormones coursing through her bloodstream, and to the storm of electric signals flashing between different parts of her brain.

Unfortunately for all hopes of creating heaven on earth, our internal biochemical system seems to be programmed to keep happiness levels relatively constant. There’s no natural selection for happiness as such – a happy hermit’s genetic line will go extinct as the genes of a pair of anxious parents get carried on to the next generation. Happiness and misery play a role in evolution only to the extent that they encourage or discourage survival and reproduction. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that evolution has moulded us to be neither too miserable nor too happy. It enables us to enjoy a momentary rush of pleasant sensations, but these never last for ever. Sooner or later they subside and give place to unpleasant sensations.

For example, evolution provided pleasant feelings as rewards to males who spread their genes by having sex with fertile females. If sex were not accompanied by such pleasure, few males would bother. At the same time, evolution made sure that these pleasant feelings quickly subsided. If orgasms were to last for ever, the very happy males would die of hunger for lack of interest in food, and would not take the trouble to look for additional fertile females.

Some scholars compare human biochemistry to an air-conditioning system that keeps the temperature constant, come heatwave or snowstorm. Events might momentarily change the temperature, but the air-conditioning system always returns the temperature to the same set point.

Some air-conditioning systems are set at twenty-five degrees Celsius. Others are set at twenty degrees. Human happiness conditioning systems also differ from person to person. On a scale from one to ten, some people are born with a cheerful biochemical system that allows their mood to swing between levels six and ten, stabilising with time at eight. Such a person is quite happy even if she lives in an alienating big city, loses all her money in a stock-exchange crash and is diagnosed with diabetes. Other people are cursed with a gloomy biochemistry that swings between three and seven and stabilises at five. Such an unhappy person remains depressed even if she enjoys the support of a tight-knit community, wins millions in the lottery and is as healthy as an Olympic athlete. Indeed, even if our gloomy friend wins $50,000,000 in the morning, discovers the cure for both AIDS and cancer by noon, makes peace between Israelis and Palestinians that afternoon, and then in the evening reunites with her long-lost child who disappeared years ago – she would still be incapable of experiencing anything beyond level seven happiness. Her brain is simply not built for exhilaration, come what may.

Think for a moment of your family and friends. You know some people who remain relatively joyful, no matter what befalls them. And then there are those who are always disgruntled, no matter what gifts the world lays at their feet. We tend to believe that if we could just change our workplace, get married, finish writing that novel, buy a new car or repay the mortgage, we would be on top of the world. Yet when we get what we desire we don’t seem to be any happier. Buying cars and writing novels do not change our biochemistry. They can startle it for a fleeting moment, but it is soon back to its set point.

How can this be squared with other psychological and sociological findings that, for example, married people are happier on average than singles? First, these findings are correlations – the direction of causation may be the opposite of what some researchers have assumed. It is true that married people are happier than singles and divorcees, but that does not necessarily mean that marriage produces happiness. It could be that happiness causes marriage. Or more correctly, that serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin bring about and maintain a marriage. People who are born with a cheerful biochemistry are generally happy and content. Such people are more attractive spouses, and consequently they have a greater chance of getting married. They are also less likely to divorce, because it is far easier to live with a happy and content spouse than with a depressed and dissatisfied one. Consequently, it’s true that married people are happier on average than singles, but a single woman prone to gloom because of her biochemistry would not necessarily become happier if she were to hook up with a husband.

In addition, most biologists are not fanatics. They maintain that happiness is determined mainly by biochemistry, but they agree that psychological and sociological factors also have their place. Our mental air-conditioning system has some freedom of movement within predetermined borders. It is almost impossible to exceed the upper and lower emotional boundaries, but marriage and divorce can have an impact in the area between the two. Somebody born with an average of level five happiness would never dance wildly in the streets. But a good marriage should enable her to enjoy level seven from time to time, and to avoid the despondency of level three.

If we accept the biological approach to happiness, then history turns out to be of minor importance, since most historical events have had no impact on our biochemistry. History can change the external stimuli that cause serotonin to be secreted, yet it does not change the resulting serotonin levels, and hence it cannot make people happier.

Compare a medieval French peasant to a modern Parisian banker. The peasant lived in an unheated mud hut overlooking the local pigsty, while the banker goes home to a splendid penthouse with all the latest technological gadgets and a view to the Champs-Elysées. Intuitively, we would expect the banker to be much happier than the peasant. However, mud huts, penthouses and the Champs-Elysées don’t really determine our mood. Serotonin does. When the medieval peasant completed the construction of his mud hut, his brain neurons secreted serotonin, bringing it up to level X. When in 2014 the banker made the last payment on his wonderful penthouse, brain neurons secreted a similar amount of serotonin, bringing it up to a similar level X. It makes no difference to the brain that the penthouse is far more comfortable than the mud hut. The only thing that matters is that at present the level of serotonin is X. Consequently the banker would not be one iota happier than his great-great-great-grandfather, the poor medieval peasant.

This is true not only of private lives, but also of great collective events. Take, for example, the French Revolution. The revolutionaries were busy: they executed the king, gave lands to the peasants, declared the rights of man, abolished noble privileges and waged war against the whole of Europe. Yet none of that changed French biochemistry. Consequently, despite all the political, social, ideological and economic upheavals brought about by the revolution, its impact on French happiness was small. Those who won a cheerful biochemistry in the genetic lottery were just as happy before the revolution as after. Those with a gloomy biochemistry complained about Robespierre and Napoleon with the same bitterness with which they earlier complained about Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

If so, what good was the French Revolution? If people did not become any happier, then what was the point of all that chaos, fear, blood and war? Biologists would never have stormed the Bastille. People think that this political revolution or that social reform will make them happy, but their biochemistry tricks them time and again.

There is only one historical development that has real significance. Today, when we finally realise that the keys to happiness are in the hands of our biochemical system, we can stop wasting our time on politics and social reforms, putsches and ideologies, and focus instead on the only thing that can make us truly happy: manipulating our biochemistry. If we invest billions in understanding our brain chemistry and developing appropriate treatments, we can make people far happier than ever before, without any need of revolutions. Prozac, for example, does not change regimes, but by raising serotonin levels it lifts people out of their depression.

Nothing captures the biological argument better than the famous New Age slogan: ‘Happiness Begins Within.’ Money, social status, plastic surgery, beautiful houses, powerful positions – none of these will bring you happiness. Lasting happiness comes only from serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin.

In Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World, published in 1932 at the height of the Great Depression, happiness is the supreme value and psychiatric drugs replace the police and the ballot as the foundation of politics. Each day, each person takes a dose of ‘soma’, a synthetic drug which makes people happy without harming their productivity and efficiency. The World State that governs the entire globe is never threatened by wars, revolutions, strikes or demonstrations, because all people are supremely content with their current conditions, whatever they may be. Huxley’s vision of the future is far more troubling than George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Huxley’s world seems monstrous to most readers, but it is hard to explain why. Everybody is happy all the time – what could be wrong with that?

THE MEANING OF LIFE

Huxley’s disconcerting world is based on the biological assumption that happiness equals pleasure. To be happy is no more and no less than experiencing pleasant bodily sensations. Since our biochemistry limits the volume and duration of these sensations, the only way to make people experience a high level of happiness over an extended period of time is to manipulate their biochemical system.

But that definition of happiness is contested by some scholars. In a famous study, Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, asked people to recount a typical work day, going through it episode by episode and evaluating how much they enjoyed or disliked each moment. He discovered what seems to be a paradox in most people’s view of their lives. Take the work involved in raising a child. Kahneman found that when counting moments of joy and moments of drudgery, bringing up a child turns out to be a rather unpleasant affair. It consists largely of changing nappies, washing dishes and dealing with temper tantrums, which nobody likes to do. Yet most parents declare that their children are their chief source of happiness. Does it mean that people don’t really know what’s good for them?

That’s one option. Another is that the findings demonstrate that happiness is not the surplus of pleasant over unpleasant moments. Rather, happiness consists in seeing one’s life in its entirety as meaningful and worthwhile. There is an important cognitive and ethical component to happiness. Our values make all the difference to whether we see ourselves as ‘miserable slaves to a baby dictator’ or as ‘lovingly nurturing a new life’. As Nietzsche put it, if you have a why to live, you can bear almost any how. A meaningful life can be extremely satisfying even in the midst of hardship, whereas a meaningless life is a terrible ordeal no matter how comfortable it is.

Though people in all cultures and eras have felt the same type of pleasures and pains, the meaning they have ascribed to their experiences has probably varied widely. If so, the history of happiness might have been far more turbulent than biologists imagine. It’s a conclusion that does not necessarily favour modernity. Assessing life minute by minute, medieval people certainly had it rough. However, if they believed the promise of everlasting bliss in the afterlife, they may well have viewed their lives as far more meaningful and worthwhile than modern secular people, who in the long term can expect nothing but complete and meaningless oblivion. Asked ‘Are you satisfied with your life as a whole?’, people in the Middle Ages might have scored quite highly in a subjective well-being questionnaire.

So our medieval ancestors were happy because they found meaning to life in collective delusions about the afterlife? Yes. As long as nobody punctured their fantasies, why shouldn’t they? As far as we can tell, from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning. Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose. Our actions are not part of some divine cosmic plan, and if planet Earth were to blow up tomorrow morning, the universe would probably keep going about its business as usual. As far as we can tell at this point, human subjectivity would not be missed. Hence any meaning that people ascribe to their lives is just a delusion. The other-worldly meanings medieval people found in their lives were no more deluded than the modern humanist, nationalist and capitalist meanings modern people find. The scientist who says her life is meaningful because she increases the store of human knowledge, the soldier who declares that his life is meaningful because he fights to defend his homeland, and the entrepreneur who finds meaning in building a new company are no less delusional than their medieval counterparts who found meaning in reading scriptures, going on a crusade or building a new cathedral.

So perhaps happiness is synchronising one’s personal delusions of meaning with the prevailing collective delusions. As long as my personal narrative is in line with the narratives of the people around me, I can convince myself that my life is meaningful, and find happiness in that conviction.

This is quite a depressing conclusion. Does happiness really depend on self-delusion?

KNOW THYSELF

If happiness is based on feeling pleasant sensations, then in order to be happier we need to re-engineer our biochemical system. If happiness is based on feeling that life is meaningful, then in order to be happier we need to delude ourselves more effectively. Is there a third alternative?

Both the above views share the assumption that happiness is some sort of subjective feeling (of either pleasure or meaning), and that in order to judge people’s happiness, all we need to do is ask them how they feel. To many of us, that seems logical because the dominant religion of our age is liberalism. Liberalism sanctifies the subjective feelings of individuals. It views these feelings as the supreme source of authority. What is good and what is bad, what is beautiful and what is ugly, what ought to be and what ought not to be, are all determined by what each one of us feels.

Liberal politics is based on the idea that the voters know best, and there is no need for Big Brother to tell us what is good for us. Liberal economics is based on the idea that the customer is always right. Liberal art declares that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Students in liberal schools and universities are taught to think for themselves. Commercials urge us to ‘Just do it!’ Action films, stage dramas, soap operas, novels and catchy pop songs indoctrinate us constantly: ‘Be true to yourself’, ‘Listen to yourself’, ‘Follow your heart’. Jean-Jacques Rousseau stated this view most classically: ‘What I feel to be good – is good. What I feel to be bad – is bad.’

People who have been raised from infancy on a diet of such slogans are prone to believe that happiness is a subjective feeling and that each individual best knows whether she is happy or miserable. Yet this view is unique to liberalism. Most religions and ideologies throughout history stated that there are objective yardsticks for goodness and beauty, and for how things ought to be. They were suspicious of the feelings and preferences of the ordinary person. At the entrance of the temple of Apollo at Delphi, pilgrims were greeted by the inscription: ‘Know thyself!’ The implication was that the average person is ignorant of his true self, and is therefore likely to be ignorant of true happiness. Freud would probably concur.

And so would Christian theologians. St Paul and St Augustine knew perfectly well that if you asked people about it, most of them would prefer to have sex than pray to God. Does that prove that having sex is the key to happiness? Not according to Paul and Augustine. It proves only that humankind is sinful by nature, and that people are easily seduced by Satan. From a Christian viewpoint, the vast majority of people are in more or less the same situation as heroin addicts. Imagine that a psychologist embarks on a study of happiness among drug users. He polls them and finds that they declare, every single one of them, that they are only happy when they shoot up. Would the psychologist publish a paper declaring that heroin is the key to happiness?

The idea that feelings are not to be trusted is not restricted to Christianity. At least when it comes to the value of feelings, even Darwin and Dawkins might find common ground with St Paul and St Augustine. According to the selfish gene theory, natural selection makes people, like other organisms, choose what is good for the reproduction of their genes, even if it is bad for them as individuals. Most males spend their lives toiling, worrying, competing and fighting, instead of enjoying peaceful bliss, because their DNA manipulates them for its own selfish aims. Like Satan, DNA uses fleeting pleasures to tempt people and place them in its power.

Most religions and philosophies have consequently taken a very different approach to happiness than liberalism does. The Buddhist position is particularly interesting. Buddhism has assigned the question of happiness more importance than perhaps any other human creed. For 2,500 years, Buddhists have systematically studied the essence and causes of happiness, which is why there is a growing interest among the scientific community both in their philosophy and their meditation practices.

Buddhism shares the basic insight of the biological approach to happiness, namely that happiness results from processes occurring within one’s body, and not from events in the outside world. However, starting from the same insight, Buddhism reaches very different conclusions.

According to Buddhism, most people identify happiness with pleasant feelings, while identifying suffering with unpleasant feelings. People consequently ascribe immense importance to what they feel, craving to experience more and more pleasures, while avoiding pain. Whatever we do throughout our lives, whether scratching our leg, fidgeting slightly in the chair, or fighting world wars, we are just trying to get pleasant feelings.

The problem, according to Buddhism, is that our feelings are no more than fleeting vibrations, changing every moment, like the ocean waves. If five minutes ago I felt joyful and purposeful, now these feelings are gone, and I might well feel sad and dejected. So if I want to experience pleasant feelings, I have to constantly chase them, while driving away the unpleasant feelings. Even if I succeed, I immediately have to start all over again, without ever getting any lasting reward for my troubles.

What is so important about obtaining such ephemeral prizes? Why struggle so hard to achieve something that disappears almost as soon as it arises? According to Buddhism, the root of suffering is neither the feeling of pain nor of sadness nor even of meaninglessness. Rather, the real root of suffering is this never-ending and pointless pursuit of ephemeral feelings, which causes us to be in a constant state of tension, restlessness and dissatisfaction. Due to this pursuit, the mind is never satisfied. Even when experiencing pleasure, it is not content, because it fears this feeling might soon disappear, and craves that this feeling should stay and intensify.

People are liberated from suffering not when they experience this or that fleeting pleasure, but rather when they understand the impermanent nature of all their feelings, and stop craving them. This is the aim of Buddhist meditation practices. In meditation, you are supposed to closely observe your mind and body, witness the ceaseless arising and passing of all your feelings, and realise how pointless it is to pursue them. When the pursuit stops, the mind becomes very relaxed, clear and satisfied. All kinds of feelings go on arising and passing – joy, anger, boredom, lust – but once you stop craving particular feelings, you can just accept them for what they are. You live in the present moment instead of fantasising about what might have been.

The resulting serenity is so profound that those who spend their lives in the frenzied pursuit of pleasant feelings can hardly imagine it. It is like a man standing for decades on the seashore, embracing certain ‘good’ waves and trying to prevent them from disintegrating, while simultaneously pushing back ‘bad’ waves to prevent them from getting near him. Day in, day out, the man stands on the beach, driving himself crazy with this fruitless exercise. Eventually, he sits down on the sand and just allows the waves to come and go as they please. How peaceful!

This idea is so alien to modern liberal culture that when Western New Age movements encountered Buddhist insights, they translated them into liberal terms, thereby turning them on their head. New Age cults frequently argue: ‘Happiness does not depend on external conditions. It depends only on what we feel inside. People should stop pursuing external achievements such as wealth and status, and connect instead with their inner feelings.’ Or more succinctly, ‘Happiness Begins Within.’ This is exactly what biologists argue, but more or less the opposite of what Buddha said.

Buddha agreed with modern biology and New Age movements that happiness is independent of external conditions. Yet his more important and far more profound insight was that true happiness is also independent of our inner feelings. Indeed, the more significance we give our feelings, the more we crave them, and the more we suffer. Buddha’s recommendation was to stop not only the pursuit of external achievements, but also the pursuit of inner feelings.

To sum up, subjective well-being questionnaires identify our well-being with our subjective feelings, and identify the pursuit of happiness with the pursuit of particular emotional states. In contrast, for many traditional philosophies and religions, such as Buddhism, the key to happiness is to know the truth about yourself – to understand who, or what, you really are. Most people wrongly identify themselves with their feelings, thoughts, likes and dislikes. When they feel anger, they think, ‘I am angry. This is my anger.’ They consequently spend their life avoiding some kinds of feelings and pursuing others. They never realise that they are not their feelings, and that the relentless pursuit of particular feelings just traps them in misery.

If this is so, then our entire understanding of the history of happiness might be misguided. Maybe it isn’t so important whether people’s expectations are fulfilled and whether they enjoy pleasant feelings. The main question is whether people know the truth about themselves. What evidence do we have that people today understand this truth any better than ancient foragers or medieval peasants?

Scholars began to study the history of happiness only a few years ago, and we are still formulating initial hypotheses and searching for appropriate research methods. It’s much too early to adopt rigid conclusions and end a debate that’s hardly yet begun. What is important is to get to know as many different approaches as possible and to ask the right questions.

From Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

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Acceptance and Commitment Therapy ACT Anxiety Coping strategies Feel Better Living A Valued Life Meaning Mindfulness Positive Psychology Transcendence Values Worry

Feeling Crap 3: Three Ways out Your Suffering Mind

[Before reading this post, you might like to look at Feeling Crap: A Brief Introduction to Your Suffering Mind, as well as Feeling Crap 2: The Three Layers of Your Suffering Mind.]

HOW DO WE FREE OURSELVES FROM FEELING CRAP?

That’s the million dollar question isn’t it.

The Suffering Mind wants none of this crap, this very human-suffering-crap – for no other creature on this planet suffers in the way that we do. None of them possessing the language with which to suffer: words, concepts, abstract symbols that can make thoughts and feelings and text-messages as mind-breakingly real at times as sticks and stones.

My dog Max experiences the pain of existence in exactly the same way that I do: the pain of physical and emotional injury, the pain of social abandonment and exclusion, of not getting what he wants. Max experiences “reality slaps” like this on a daily, even hourly basis (as do I). But he doesn’t suffer them in the way that you and I do. Not one bit.

Max will never write a blogpost or create a piece of technology called a laptop on which to write it. Nor will he, or any other member of his species invent something like the internet to disseminate these words to other sentient, language-producing creatures.

Us homo sapiens have immeasurably benefitted from language, but consider for a moment the price we’ve had to pay in allowing language to be the primary currency of all our mental processes. Because that’s how, for the most part, we communicate both inside ourselves as well as externally with other human beings. Think of the ways in which language produces joy and pleasure but also immeasurable suffering for each and every one of us on a daily basis, and for our human species as a whole.

ALLEVIATING SUFFERING & ENHANCING WELL-BEING

If everything your language-focused mind has been trying to do so far hasn’t really helped, or helped in only a small way, maybe it’s time to look at some other options?

If you’re frequently locked in the struggle I’ve described above with your pleasure-seeking, pain-avoiding, problem-solving mind, maybe you need a more RADICAL solution: one that still uses language (our primary currency, we can’t avoid it), but is also opens us up to other channels of processing?

What we perhaps need is a solution that targets those three crappy layers, but not necessarily in the default Jim’ll Fix It ways of this thinking/languaging lump of human meat we call “the brain”.

If the Blinkered Mind is programmed to say GO AWAY to pain, as well as becoming at times overwhelmingly FUSED with it, then one thing we can maybe start to do is introduce some Receptive Mind strategies into the mix.

In this layer, we might need some DEFUSION processes to help us when we’re “stuck” in a particularly strong reaction (mental or physical) to a painful event.

We might also start practicing MAKING SPACE FOR for difficult thoughts and feelings.

MAKING SPACE FOR practices are an alternative to allowing the mind to do what it does best and by default: pushing painful stuff away, or wrestling interminably with it in the hope that it can be solved like a maths problem. This might help us to free ourselves up to focus on more meaningful actions and activities instead.

Part of this might also involve cultivating the second layer of RADness: Aware Mind.

One aspect of Aware Mind is the development of a more FLEXI-SELF approach to life’s challenges: practising ways of seeing things from different, and hopefully more helpful angles. Also: not getting into arguments or disagreeing with what our minds tell us about the world and ourselves.

To help us do this, we might need to “drop anchor” again and again in order to bring our minds back in MINDFUL CONTACT with what’s actually going on right here and now, as opposed to the what’s happening inside our language-filled heads.

Also, let’s clarify your core values and  begin some devoted, committed action: a few small steps, towards some meaningful goals in your life.

Each of the drawings in this post took me varying amounts of time to create, from a few minutes to a number of hours, and many weeks of writing and fiddling around with words and images to put it all together. The process was at times frustrating and disheartening when things didn’t go according to plan, but in the end I got this crappy little article out of it – a crappy little article which is meaningful to me, and hopefully for you too?

I’ve deliberately used a somewhat “spiritual” word here for the third RAD layer: Devoted Mind. Not because the valued actions need to be religious or spiritual per se.

You can be devoted to your family, or to a creative pursuit, or a football team. I’m devoted to my dog Max, and to my therapy practice, also to learning poems I love, like this one, off by heart (preferably on a walk or a hike). But I don’t have any expectation that you could or should become devoted to dogs or poetry or hiking, unless these are aligned with your core values!

We need to work out what you want to be devoted to, as well as how you’re going to show (through your actions) your devotion. It does seem though that choosing something important in our lives  “to set apart by a vow” (the origins of the word “devoted”) is almost essential when it comes to living life the fullest.

You get to choose however what you want this to be and how you can turn that into something meaningful that you can then dedicate time and energy towards.

So are you ready to take back control of your super-helpful, often over-helpful, problem-solving, pain avoiding (crappy) brain and get back to living your life to the fullest?

If you are, let’s talk some more about this RAD crap and see how I can help you to get a bit closer to some of the peace and contentment you seek, that we all seek, as well as a life that is valued and meaningful to you in the long run.

**

If you’d like to arrange an initial consultation session to talk more about whatever it is you’re struggling with at the moment, we can organise that via email or telephone (07804197605). 

Also please feel free to drop me a line if you have any other questions regarding the therapy I offer. I look forward to hearing from you.

Categories
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy ACT Anxiety Coping strategies Feel Better Living A Valued Life Meaning Mindfulness Positive Psychology Transcendence Values Worry

Feeling Crap 2: The Three Layers of Your Suffering Mind

[Before reading this post, you might like to look at Feeling Crap: A Brief Introduction to Your Suffering Mind ]

DIGGING INTO THE “BAD” CRAP OF SUFFERING

Let’s dig a little bit more deeply into our very human crap.

Might it be fair to say your mind is labelling all of that crap as BAAAAAD crap at the moment? Good, let’s label it as BAD crap, because maybe that’s what it is, even though it’s also our brains and minds doing their brainy/mindy/languagey/labelling stuff (good me/bad me, good Mum/bad Mum, good day/bad day etc.).

It’s not our brain or mind’s fault. They’re designed to do this, remember? Problem-solve as much as possible through evaluation and comparison in a bid to keep us away from anything they perceive as a threat to us? And it’s not our fault for sometimes buying into the very BAD stuff they sometimes or often come up with. A rama lama lama ka dinga da dinga dong!

For the sake of simplicity though, let’s say there might be three layers to our suffering, three layers of BAD crap.

The first I’m going to call BLINKERED MIND.

When pain in any shape or form shows up in our lives, our problem-solving brains become very, very busy and focused on this pain as if the the pain itself were a terrible threat to our continued existence.

In order to work on these problems our brains quite often fuse with the painful thoughts, feelings, urges, or body sensations, to the point where the thing we’re struggling with starts taking over our lives.

It can sometimes feel or look like that moment in any good horror film where some poor soul is being jerked about like a puppet by the demon now controlling its mind and body. We too can also become controlled, smothered, overwhelmed by our own problem-solving, pain-solving minds.

Also, because pain in any shape or form is so uh painful, our suffering Blinkered Minds will often try to avoid this pain in a very intuitive way.

“GO AWAY it says to the painful thought or feeling. Also: “I’m getting away from all of this shit!” Maybe we go away with booze or drugs, ice-cream, TV (or in my case ice-cream and TV), Twitter/WhatsApp/Facebook, or working long hours.

Or maybe we physically try and escape our lives: staying in bed, or going on a holiday, or cutting off communication with someone we’re in conflict with. Again: the natural, default GO AWAY function of our brains and minds can sometimes start to run, and ruin, the whole show!

When our minds go Blinkered they often also go into Autopilot Mode.

Their focus, their “route” you might say is set, or stuck in a particular way of doing things.

Autopilot Mind equally gets stuck in the past or the future. Focusing bitterly, or regretfully, on where our lives are flying to and from.

Also: why this might be happening to us, or why this has always happened to us, returning again and again to a particular set of memories and experiences.

Sometimes our minds do this fruitfully, as when they sit down to write a short story or a memoir, but very often they do this with a great deal of suffering, and almost no benefit for our present lives.

We also often become fixated on what’s ahead: doing so so with anxiety, worry and problem-solving busy-ness.

Autopilot Mind has no time to enjoy the journey of life. Life is never a sunset or a shooting star,  always just another maths problem.

Like we might binge on a Netflix series, Autopilot Mind binges on problem-solving in an attempt to make sense of, or find a solution to our suffering. But because it’s on Autopilot, when it gets to the end of the suffering script or “route”, it just goes back to the beginning and starts all over again.

So we get stuck on certain routes or grooves of the mind, outdated coping strategies that whirr around and around like a broken record.

We can also get stuck in a certain way of being, a certain kind of identity. Why don’t you sit back for a moment and ask the Identity-Setting part of your mind to complete the following sentence stem and see what it comes up with.

[SPOILER ALERT: It’s unlikely to suggest anything especially positive. Minds aren’t designed to do that. Positivity doesn’t keep us safe from perceived threats and harm.)

Whatever “me” our suffering minds are identifying with at this moment…(again, complete the sentence stem below for yourself)…

…this “idea” of ourselves, these words, become like a small, claustrophobic single-seater aircraft which we can’t get out of until it lands.

Here’s another one for you to get your mind to work on.

Last one.

The main problem with this process is that our minds are designed to fly in certain patterns continuously, without ever landing.

Unless we help them to do so.

So that’s the second layer of BAD crap: when our minds, in the process of carrying out their primary tasks (analysing our lives as if they were maths equations) end up flying in quite rigid, inflexible patterns.

It’s often a case of 1+1=2 when dealing with our somewhat inflexible minds.

And 2, more often than not, can sometimes just equal more…pooh. More suffering.

THE FINAL LAYER OF BAD CRAP

Perhaps as a result of the first two layers of crap, but maybe also for other reasons we become DISCONNECTED from all the good stuff in our lives.

In Blinkered and Autopilot Mind we are often out of touch with those things that give our lives meaning, which is to say our core values.

What is it that really drives us? What do we want to actually DO with our one wild and precious life, other than fighting off painful mind-states?

Understandably, when we are disconnected or unclear about this, we can also become disconnected from…LIVING!

Which is to say: we stop doing all the things that are most meaningful to us whilst we fight with our minds. Instead of focusing on valued-living activities, we might also end up doing other stuff: things that we think will “make us happy” or give us some momentary pleasure (tub of Belgian Chocolate Häagen-Dazs and an endless stream of mindless sitcoms for Steve, please!), rather than feeding our souls.

Or maybe we end up doing what other people, or even the marketing forces of our culture tell us will make us happy, but often fail to do so.

So what to do about all of this BAD crap?!

Good question. You can find some answers to that in my final post on The Suffering Mind: Three Ways out of The Suffering Mind.

**

Otherwise if you’d like to arrange an initial consultation session to talk more about whatever it is you’re struggling with at the moment, we can organise that via email or telephone (07804197605). 

Also please feel free to drop me a line if you have any other questions regarding the therapy I offer. I look forward to hearing from you.

Categories
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy ACT Anxiety Coping strategies Feel Better Living A Valued Life Meaning Mindfulness Positive Psychology Transcendence Values Worry

Feeling Crap? A Brief Introduction to Your Suffering Mind

Hello, are you feeling a bit crap?

If you are, welcome, you’re in good company.

You might not feel like you’re in good company. In fact, you might feel quite alone at the moment: at odds, and kind of stranded with your suffering mind.

When we’re feeling crap, it’s very normal for our suffering, problem-solving minds to react to those crappy feelings with a lot of self-doubt and worry.

This is the kind of thing my suffering mind starts saying. How about yours?

Our suffering minds will usually start responding to the problem-solving questions they pose to themselves, giving us lots and lots of feedback.

Imagine the above “feedback” delivered in the sneery, sermonising tones of your least favourite person. I call this part of my suffering mind “Dave” after someone I went to University with. Dave really thought he was my friend but he was actually a bit of a know-it-all bully. Do you have your own Dave, or Mildred who’s absolutely certain of what you’re doing wrong with your life?

Here’s another question the suffering mind poses to itself and attempts to answer.

Let’s watch Dave answering the must-be-something-wrong-with-me question (for me). You might like to tune into your own suffering mind at this point and let your own Dave or Mildred supply you with a wrong-with-you list for yourself.

And it probably won’t stop there.

When our suffering minds get stuck into us, what they “say” can feel very real and pertinent.

Our response is often just to suck it all up: “Yes Dave, you’re right! I am all of those shitty, unlovable qualities! And look at my massive, Dumbo-sized ears!!!”

This is because, when our minds start to suffer, we become fused with their words to the point where they can start to feel really overwhelming! A bit like this.

We lose sight of the fact that these are just words being churned up by our own minds in an attempt to “helpfully” explain the reasons for why we might be feeling so crap.

Our suffering minds forget that they’re just a blank page onto which anything (any thought, feeling, sensation, urge) can be “written” no matter how hurtful or ludicrous. Instead we all too easily buy into and sort of become those words floating around in our minds. When that happens, I would call my experience a “suffering” one. How about you?

When we are suffering, not only do we blame ourselves for being human, but also others. We might even start blaming Dave, our very own minds and brains, labelling and sometimes shaming them with analysis, diagnoses and put-downs.

We can also become very frustrated with ourselves for not-feeling-OK.

He’s right though.

A healthy human brain like Dave is perfectly compatible with a suffering mind. In fact the two might go together like [cue this song from Grease!]: a rama lama lama ka dinga da dinga dong?

Maybe this is because Dave was not –sorry Dave- designed by Apple (or Samsung).

Three hundred years of evolutionary science and a 100 years of neuroscience have pretty much confirmed that our healthy, but oftentimes suffering human brains are “designed” with 3 primary tasks.

Can you guess what those are?

Go on! Before scrolling down, guess the job description for that three pound blob of fat, and blood and white-grey matter, that sits perched on the top of your spinal cord, which we all proudly call THE HUMAN BRAIN!

You can perhaps start to see how these primary tasks carried out 24/7, automatically, in no consultation with our minds, might lead to good feelings at times, but also lots and lots of suffering. Almost as a by-product.

Say I’m at my local Morrisons, happily filling my supermarket trolly with ice-cream, and wine, and cheese, and crackers, and chocolate, and maybe some salad too. I’m looking forward to all that yummy stuff, and feeling pretty good at this pleasure seeking moment (dopamine!).

I’m also relieved to have seen and avoided my neighbour – the one I had an argument with with last week who I spotted walking down another aisle. Whew, and another dopamine hit of pleasure!

But maybe that evening I eat the whole tub of Hagen Daz as I am wont to do and drink most of the wine and feel sick and full of self-loathing.

And maybe if I hadn’t avoided that uncomfortable meeting with my neighbour in the supermarket we might have been able to get back on an even keel?

If you’d like to dig a little bit deeper into this, please take a look at my second post, Feeling Crap 2: The Three Layers of Your Suffering Mind.

Or otherwise, if you’d like to arrange an initial consultation session to talk more about whatever it is you’re struggling with at the moment, we can organise that via email or telephone (07804197605).

Also please feel free to drop me a line if you have any other questions regarding the therapy I offer. I look forward to hearing from you.

Categories
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Anxiety By Heart Defusion Depression Feel Better Living A Valued Life Patience Refuge Ritual Self-care Self-compassion Strategies and tools Suffering Worry

April Fools?

In many ways, I love being the butt of someone’s joke, I love to be duped and fooled. Love magic tricks, especially of the Derren Brown variety that always reveal something profound to us about ourselves and others. As well as entertaining us in the process of fooling us.

I love Penn & Teller’s Fool Us. I particularly love it when those two Great Foolers themselves get fooled. And I love it when I am able to make a fool of myself (of my often-times pompous notions and ideas, at least when I’m defused enough to see the pomposity and ego-driven nature of them). And if done with love, and a kind of, hey-we’re-all-bozos-on-this-bus cameraderie, I can even enjoy it when others make a fool of me.

But I also feel uncomfortable when I see people being laughed at or mocked, especially if they are unable to defend themselves. I hate to see defenceless animals and children being treated unkindly, or made fools of.  I also don’t like the more cruel spectrum of practical jokes that shock and alarm, or even really dismay people on this day where we celebrate all things foolish and fooling. Would I eradicate the day itself if I had the power to do so? Never. Because life is a series of April Fools’ days you might say, a constant series of small and large practical jokes sent to challenge us and teach us. Here are just two of my favourites:

-We grow up in a culture that tells us romantic love is the be-all and end-all in terms of living a rich, full, and meaningful life. And then when we get into a relationship, and at some level we start to feel duped by that narrative. So we fight, bitch and moan at our other halves, because we’ve all bought into those lovely, lovely lies of Pretty Woman or Sleepless in Seattle. When instead of the happy-go-lucky romcom we get Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, or Her,  or Fatal Attraction, perhaps even The Shining, don’t we feel like fools? And when we’re not in relationships, we feel outcast or alienated from this Core Romantic Narrative pumped into our minds through everything we watch and read 24/7, embedded in every song we’ve ever listened to.

April Fools y’all!

-Or what about the reality slap, that wonderful term created by Russ Harris to describe the gap between what we have and what we want: of jumping through hoop after arduous hoop (academic, interviews, various forms of social ingratiation) to get that prestigious job, or car, or amazing holiday, or nice house -whatever we think might bring us happiness- only to find ourselves miserable with the glamourous trappings we’ve worked so hard to attain.

April Fools y’all!

And by y’all, I include myself first and foremost in that dupery.

THE ULTIMATE APRIL FOOL

But the ultimate April Fool is the fool our minds make of us on a daily basis. Never out of pure malice – for how can a lump of meat, the brain, sitting between our ears bear malice towards us? Rather, as a function of their problem-solving, pleasure-seeking, pain-avoiding programming. Every time my mind tells me that the reason so-and-so didn’t respond to my text message is because a) they don’t care about me or what I’ve written to them, or b) they don’t fundamentally like me, or whatever other narrative they come up with, and I buy into that and suffer. Again: April Fools y’all!

Every time my mind singles out something I don’t like in someone else and then tells me that’s a reason to hold that whole person in contempt – April Fool!

Every time my mind says: that pleasurable thing you want (the extra glass of wine, the seventh chocolate digestive, the checking-of-Twitter or firing off an email ten minutes into a walk, or a yoga session, or some meditation) DO IT NOW – April Fool!

I don’t know about you, but my mind makes a fool of me dozens of times a day. 

What to do? Recently I’ve gone back to doing a particular kind of meditation practice, both formally (as in a sitting practice), but more so informally, which I’ve found really helpful with my foolish mind. It might surprise you, as it doesn’t involve trying to argue with your mind, saying to it “No mind, you’re wrong when you say that your [boss, brother-in-law, mother, father, colleague – choose where applicable] is NOT a [insert choicest, most damning criticism of that individual]”.

Arguing with our minds doesn’t work because the mind is the best barrister ON THIS PLANET! It has hundreds of files, videos, taped phone calls, enough to fill 256 gigabyte’s worth of memory on a standard laptop demonstrating the ways in which that person or situation has said or done something foolish, fallible, unfair, unreasonable, and just generally shitty in a bid to hurt or upset you. And maybe they have. This is not to downplay the foolish, fallible, unfair, unreasonable, and just generally shitty things we do and say to each other. I have been a veritable font of foolish, fallible, unfair, unreasonable, and generally shitty words and actions to other human beings in my misguided and suffering mind-states. And I have also been privy to other people doing some of that around me too.

But if you even attempt to argue with your mind about all of this, it will win. It will prove you wrong, and itself right over and over again. And you will then be left in whatever state your mind gets you into when it plays and replays those particularly juicy, particularly painful tidbits, as verifiably true. So that doesn’t work (at least in my experience – has it ever worked for you?) – that will just lead to more suffering, which is something we want to try and reduce, right? I do. 

Apart from defusion, when our minds start getting Practical Joker/Tormentor on us, what else can we do? A clue might lie in one of my favourite poems of all time, one I know by heart:

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.

Man! (Also: woman!) Isn’t that the reality-gap/slap encapsulated in one small stanza?! This bears repeating:

What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.

Also:

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day
to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

PRACTISING KINDNESS

My cynical/judgemental/critical brain sometimes can be a bit hard on kindness. “Hallmark card sentimentality,” it sneers. And I don’t argue with it when it says that. Yes, Dave, I say (I call that part of my brain, Dave), yes, that’s one way of looking at it, thank you.

You could say, not that I’d get Dave to agree with me on this, that a kindness practice rather than the word itself or a nice Instagram quote on kindness (the word/quote lasts a millisecond, hardly registers in the mind at all) is a “medicine” for all those inadvertently unkind parts of ourselves.

Inadvertently unkind because they are trying to be helpful in their sometimes heavy-handed suggestions, comparisons, judgements, lectures and sermons. They don’t realise that, just like our parents and teachers and political figures (at times), they only further torment or make fools of us rather than being useful or helpful. Their comparisons, judgements, lectures and sermons only make us suffer more not less.

A kindness practice, ideally done on a daily basis, in the same way we might take some vitamins or brush our teeth daily, works at the very roots of our mind’s magic tricks, the illusions and delusions it feeds us to keep us safe, but which also separate us from the world, other people, and often times our own deeply held values and beliefs. When I remember to do some of the kindness practices below, it often feels like an almost selfish pleasure, in that the gain for me is huge (over time) but also doesn’t hurt anyone else. In fact might make their challenging, suffering lives a tad lighter too.

A win-win is always great. Bingo! Or “Yahtzee” as one of my kindness gurus, Dan Savage, will sometimes exclaim when he suggests a win-win outlook for his suffering callers. Dan Savage is also a great example of how you don’t need to be all whispery and quiet, all holier-than-thou to practice kindness. His Savage Love podcast is the kindest advice show on the planet, even though Dan is often scabrously blunt and pragmatic, but his advice and wisdom and good humour is always delivered with kindness and a desire to be helpful.That’s the kind of kindness I aspire to.

So here’s a challenge for us in our bid to become kind in a way that some of your Kindness Warriors* are kind.

  1. If you’d like to do a formal practice (I’m aiming to do this once a day for the whole of April) I’d recommend this 15 minute guided meditation from Russ Harris. I think it’s structured in a way to really get us into a kinder space towards ourselves and others, without being sentimental or “spiritual” in a cloying/annoying way (although finding our mind’s response to sentimentality and spirituality annoying, would also give us another way to be kind to ourselves): https://www.dropbox.com/s/xndq9j00b8zpoqa/Kindness%20Practice.mp3?dl=0

2.  Informally, the next time you go for a walk with your whirring, chattering mind, focus your attention on random strangers passing you on the pavement, and then instead of the usual stuff our minds do (commenting, ignoring other people, feeling intimidated by their “otherness”) silently direct some of these well-wishing phrases to them in a mantra-like loop:

“May you be peaceful, healthy, content.”

“May you experience love and kindness.”

“May your life be rich, and full, and meaningful.”

It may feel a bit weird when you start doing it, but notice what happens to the mind if you push past the cynicism and boredom of your Inner-Dave.

3.  Start learning by heart the whole of, or a part of the poem Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye, or some poem that has a similar kind vibe that speaks to you. Maybe Hopkins’ “My own heart let me more have pity on”, or Pat Schneider’s “The Patience of Ordinary Things”, or Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese”. Recite these poems by heart when you feel low or anxious.

4. Think of something you’re struggling with at the moment. Close your eyes, maybe even place a hand on your head or chest, and imagine someone kind that you know, or even a pet, saying some simple but kind words to you in sympathy. Whilst writing this today I’m strugging with a stonking head cold and am feeling fairly grotty. I had my kind person, and Max, say to me: “I’m sorry you’re feeling so crap today. Go easy on yourself, give yourself a bit of cosseting, Steve.”

If you try out any of these, please do tell me how they go in our next session together.

—

*My kindness warriors, also my ideal dinner party guests, just off the top of my head: Dan Savage, The Obamas, David Mitchell, K D Lang, Stephen Fry, the Queer Eye dudes, Russell Brand,  Adam Phillips, Caroline Lucas, Steven Hayes, Stevie Wonder, Penn & Teller, Mary Oliver, Ajahn Sucitto, and many many folk from various spiritual traditions. Also, even more so, all those people you wouldn’t recognise if I named them. My clients, each and every one of them: all sensitive bods, and all incredibly kind people. My parents and other relatives, even with all their flaws, their sometimes foolish, fallible, unfair, unreasonable, and maybe even shitty and unkind ways at times. And what about that guy who stopped his car when he saw little Max, my dogchild, running in the middle of a busy road after he went AWOL in Fryent Park a few years back? Or the kind elderly lady and her husband who always stop to say a few kind words about my garden when they see me outside weeding over the weekend. The list goes on and on. As does this one]

Categories
Acceptance Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Anxiety Avoidance Control Coping strategies DBT Emotion Regulation Feel Better Living A Valued Life Strategies and tools Thought Suppression Transcendence Worry

The Stoic Fork

At the moment, I wake up to jackhammers and drills.

Not just the usual jackhammers and drills of my own thought curves and mental convolutions, supplied by that sometimes-not-so-kind, maybe even Totally Loopy Word Machine we call the mind. But also “real” noise, and lots of it, from the builders next door who are probably going to be around for the next couple of months (!!), completely refurbishing and extending 109 Ruskin Gardens.

I’d been warned, I knew it was coming, and have got the owner of 109, Mr Patel to graciously agree to keep the work relatively quiet when I’m seeing clients. But at all other times,  the gloves (or in this case, the jackhammers, drills, power-saws, etc) are off. Which is to say “on”. All the time.

Already I can feel the effect of all that banging and the drilling on my nervous system, and partly in response to this, am trying to re-engage with a mindfulness practice: mindfulness being all about working on our willingness to “be with” upsetting thoughts, memories, body sensations, and external irritants. Especially those we have limited or no control over. 

I’ve also been finding a great deal of solace in a fork. A conceptual fork. Though in sessions, I’ll occasionally rush into the kitchen to grab a real fork in order to explain the concept to someone else.

This conceptual fork, sometimes called The Stoic Fork, is designed to get us to reflect on control, as well as the relinquishing of it. If you’re anything like me, control is important to you. It helps you to feel like you have agency, and choice, and most importantly “a say” in what happens in your life.  And yes, control is important. One understanding of depression is that it proceeds from a misperception that we have no control over our lives whatsoever, that whatever we’re struggling with is so difficult and burdensome and entrenched, that we will never, ever, ever get a handle on it. Understandably that can be something of a buzzkill (to say the least).

This fork that I’m going to excitedly wave in front of your face says that we do have control, we do have agency, and the ability to make choices that are value-driven and meaningful to us. It says that we do have control over choices that will impact on how we live our lives right now in the present, as well as choices moving us forwards into the kind of lives and people we want to be in the future.

But.

We need to skilfully differentiate between what is in our power and what is not. And that very differentiation happens to be the first thing we read about in a book of collected discourses issuing from the lips and the mind of a crippled, Roman slave named Epictetus who lived 2000 years ago. I like to imagine him as a slightly more philosophical and Latin-spouting version of Tim Renkow’s lovably, cheeky character in his new sitcom Jerk (if you haven’t seen it, do!).

Here’s a little experiment for you to try out before I explain the fork.

Think of something that’s getting you down at the moment. It could be anything: a physical ailment, a relationship issue, a problem at work, a crass comment someone made recently in your presence, something unsettling you’ve seen or read, or even six dudes banging and hammering and drilling all day long right next to where you’re sitting trying to capture the evergreen wisdom of Epictetus 😉

Make a mental or actual note of this thing, this thing that’s irking you. Now imagine me whipping out my IKEA fork (see drawing below) and asking you, as Epictetus might have done to another slave as they laboured from dusk to dawn on a Roman building site: “How much control do you have over this person/thing/situation/noise that’s upsetting or worrying you?”

Be warned! This is a trick-question. If you’re anything like me, you might say this in response: “Well not much, not as much as I’d like, but….”

Or.

“Don’t lecture me on control. Control has got nothing to do with this. Or if it does, it’s because that person/thing/situation is out of control and they’re driving me craaaaaaazy.”

To which I imagine Epictetus using his walking stick to draw a line in the sand showing the following “fork”.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As you can see, on the right he’s written the kind of things we sometimes believe or think (maybe not always consciously) that we can control, especially with regard to other people: what other people think what they say, how they act around us. But equally this works with any phenomenon in the outside world, or the inside world (our thoughts, feelings, body sensations, urges, memories). I have no control over whether my stomach might decide to translate my anxieties and worries into an unpleasant, nauseous sensation, or if my head might suddenly begin to ache, or feel tired and woozy.

Epictetus believed that the only thing we have any control over are thoughts/feeling, and our actions. As you can see in the picture above, I’ve gone and crossed out THOUGHTS & FEELINGS because although he was an incredibly wise man, and although many of his thoughts and theories have formed the bedrock of our modern psychotherapy and psychology practices, we also know now, that thoughts and feelings, just like body sensations, memories, and urges cannot be controlled!

I can no longer control what thought is going to flit into my mind in the next minute than I can control what tweet Donald Trump is going to send out to his 60 million followers in the next hour. In fact, modern psychology has shown that the more we try and control our thoughts, feelings, urges, and memories, the more persistently they surface to assail us. It’s a bit like a government trying to ban a “naughty” or “insiduous” book or film (Lady Chatterley’s anyone, A Clockwork Orange?): as soon as people catch wind that now they’re not “allowed” to read that book, or watch that film, that’s the only thing you then want to do. Our minds seem to work according to similar dynamics.

If this is so, then we need to keep on reminding ourselves in some way, that the one and only thing we have any control over whatsoever, is our behaviour: our actions, our words, the things we write and say, and do. That’s it. That’s all we have. And that’s a lot!

Want to feel more in control? Control, in a healthy-ish, skillful-ish way your actions. As we know, there are lots of unhealthy ways to control our actions: starving ourselves (eating disorders) or overeating; exerting or harming our bodies so as to distract or focus our attention away from our pain; limiting our interactions with people we might enjoy being with in order to keep ourselves safe. So as with anything, a mindful approach is best when it comes to our actions. But always with the notion that, apart from what we say and do and write, we’re not in the driver’s seat of any shared inter-action (with another person or the world), and never will be.

How does one then apply this wisdom? I find it helpful to use the fork as a kind of reminder or mantra when I find myself getting irked by someone else’s behaviour. Let’s say a friend or a loved one does or says something that triggers me in some way, so that my knee-jerk response is one of the following:

  1. “I wish they hadn’t said/done that!”
  2. “Why couldn’t they have responded to me with X, rather than Y”
  3. “I bet they’re now thinking this about me!” etc. etc.

This list might stretch to infinity, as infinite are the ways in which our minds proliferate suffering on the back of a perceived threat or hurt. At this point, if I’m quick enough to catch the panicky or angry thought, I might inwardly try and shrug my shoulders, call to my mind the image of that stoic fork and go:

“Can’t control her/him/it. Let it go.”

or

“ I have no control over this person/situation/thing. Let it go.”

or

“Not my circus, not my monkeys!” (or if you prefer the original Polish version of this expression  “nie mój cyrk, nie moje małpy” [pronunciation here])

I might follow this with an attempt at a kind of rueful smile here, which can also sometimes help, particularly if it replaces the expression on my face at that moment which is likely to be a glowering or grimacing one.

It’s a simple practice, but I find it quite a powerful, especially when used in the midst of interacting with other human beings who are invariably going to be saying or doing things we wish we could control, but acknowledge we can’t. And even it allows us to be a little bit more flexible and kind with ourselves as well as with each other, we’re onto a winner.  

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100 Acceptance and Commitment Therapy ACT Defusion Feel Better Pain Suffering worry

PAUSING FOR PAIN (BUT NOT FOR SUFFERING)

When were feeling bad and wanting to feel better, perhaps the most important distinction we can make for ourselves is in keeping clear the difference between pain and suffering. The difference can be summarised in the following adage which you may have come across at some point:

“Pain is inevitable and unavoidable, but suffering is optional.”

A quick click around the internet tells me that this idea lies at the heart of 12-step work, is quasi-attributable to the Buddha, and even comes up for how the author Haruki Murakami deals with physical pain when he’s running marathons. But what does it really mean? And how can this distinction help us deal with (unavoidable, inevitable) pain better, whilst suffering less?

HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT NEEDLES?

Maybe an example will help. I hate needles. I’m probably not alone in this, but at times this aversion has verged on a kind of phobia. And like any phobia, it has often got in the way of me doing the things I need to do to take care of myself. Like going to the dentist for regular check-ups. In fact, I didn’t go to the dentist from 2010-2017, because…I hate needles! Following on from that rule I’ve set for myself (Thou shall hate needles!) I didn’t go to the dentist until the pain of toothache overcame my unwillingness to tolerate the pain of a needle being pushed into my gums.

Why am I so phobic to needles? As far as I can tell, there are two reasons for this: biological and historical. Another way at looking at this is NATURE (biology) and NURTURE (life experiences, especially at an impressionable age):

  1. BIOLOGICAL REASONS:  I am a Highly Sensitive Person (if you’re reading this, you probably are too!), which means I feel stuff really intensely. Physical stuff, emotional stuff, it really doesn’t matter. When I am in the dentist chair, I often have to tell them to double up on the Lidocaine because a normal dose of the local anesthetic often doesn’t numb my highly reactive nervous system enough and I’m left wincing not only when the drug is injected, but during the drilling and scraping thereafter. 
  2. PERSONAL/HISTORICAL REASONS: When I was about 8 years old, I had a rampant outbreak of warts on my legs. My mother took me to the doctor who proceeded to inject and burn off some of the bigger warts in that unfussy, sorry-mate-just-doing-my-job way that medical professionals get on with things. And it hurt! But more than just hurting, the shock of pain, and the shock of not being given enough time before, or after, or during the intervention to process what was going on, or prepare for it seemed to really affect me. This combined with the insouciant attitude of the doctor, gave my brain a strong negative rule to follow when it came to needles (Steve Hates Needles). This is called classical conditioning: where our brains make the link between one thing (needles) and another thing (feeling overwhelmed, and scared) and forms a Life Rule for us to follow: “Never ever, ever, ever let anyone poke you in the arm, leg, or any part of your body with a needle. Ever. Again.” Often these rules are unconscious (“Needles are EVIL!”), we don’t even know we’re following them, but we are. Some of our Life Rules work really well (“Saying please and thank you and being kind is NOBLE!”). But often, even good rules can cause unnecessary problems for us. Having the rule or belief that Needles are Evil isn’t going to serve me that well because needles, as with other instances of pain (emotional and physical), are inevitable and unavoidable. Unless you’re Superman.

So I know why I’m phobic (nature + nurture), and I also know that my phobic, rule-making brain was given an extra boost in 2009 when I had some root canal treatment which wasn’t much fun, and probably just reinforced the Dentists/Needles are Evil story in my head. Knowing where my stories come from though doesn’t especially help me, although it does give me interesting things to think about. And the same goes for other pain too, including emotional pain. Which is why explanations for our pain are useful and interesting, and have their place in the process of reducing suffering, but they often don’t help that much with the job of limiting the amount of suffering we experience. In fact we might even make matters worse for ourselves by creating a kind of “story” around needles, or someone’s text, or why we didn’t get that last job we interviewed for, and that story can send us into a suffering tailspin.

But hang on, didn’t me and Haruki Murakami say that Suffering, unlike Pain, can be reduced, limited, or even dissolved? How?

MORE (PAINFUL) NEEDLES, AND SOME SUFFERING

Let’s look at how suffering works. My problem with needles is, if I really think carefully about it, a Suffering Problem, rather than a pain one.

Let me explain. If I were to dig the fingernail of my right index finger into the back of my left hand, or the crook of my arm, and really push it into the skin, I would feel the kind of pain a needle might deliver to my nervous system. And if I push harder, I might feel even more pain than a needle could ever do to me. And guess what (try it for yourself if you don’t believe me): this is all perfectly fine and dandy, not really a problem at all. Of course it doesn’t feel great. It’s uncomfortable, it’s painful, but it’s just that: pain. So maybe it’s not Pain that’s stopping me from going to the dentist or getting my bloods taken, maybe it’s more an issue of SUFFERING.

What’s the difference? Pain as I’ve shown above is all about…pain. Physical pain in all its manifestations, as well psychological pain, the emotional pain of not getting our needs met from other people, or the world in some shape or form. That’s Painful too. If you turn to me after I’ve just told you something about myself that concerns me (e.g. “I’m really scared of needles”) and you say “Come on, Steve, don’t be such a snowflake”, then I’ll probably experience a good dose of psychological pain. Your reply would be painful for me because we all have core needs such as the need for love, care, and understanding. If you’ve responded to something I’ve said in a way that seems dismissive then I’m probably going to feel a good amount of pain. But no suffering. Not yet. Although it won’t take long. A couple of nanoseconds usually.

Here’s how I suffer, and perhaps this is how you suffer too. I take the pain of your dismissal, the pain of you not being sensitive to my anxiety, of not validating me and my issues with needles, and I add stuff to that. The stuff I add (often unconsciously) is Suffering. 

Non-suffering pain might look like this: “Ouch! So my worry is not something you can relate to, or perhaps show empathy towards. And that’s painful because my need for understanding and validation is not being met. So: ouuuuuch!”

This is pain, but still no suffering. Just me feeling and acknowledging how painful your comments are to me. But of course our brains are not designed to just experience pain. My brain (your brain also?) will also probably jump into an angry, hurt monologue about your dismissive comment. My defensive (me trying to defend myself because I am in such pain) outburst might sound a bit like this:

 “Well fuck you too and the horse you rode in on! Excuse me for burdening you with my anxiety! Some kind of friend/partner/therapist/parent you are! Doesn’t this prove what I’ve always thought: that it’s fine for you to get upset about stuff and for me to be there for you, but when the tables are turned you’re not able to give me an ounce of basic understanding and compassion.”

Or some version of the above. Maybe a bit less fraught and dramatic. And maybe a great deal more fraught and dramatic if my experience of Suffering has taught me anything.

This is suffering. Suffering is ANYTHING painful our storytelling brains/minds do in response to a painful trigger. Recognising this, we might also wish to forgive our brains/mind for doing this whole suffering routine. We can’t help it! Our brains/minds really thinks that having this reaction, filling our heads and hearts with all these suffering thoughts, rants, images, memories, and retributive urges, is actually going to help us process our pain. What usually happens though is that it only doubles, triples, quadruples the pain we already have. Suffering is the addition of extra (optional) pain to ourselves when we are already in (unavoidable, inevitable) pain. Now, not only am I in pain because my need for understanding, and validation hasn’t been met by you. Now I’m in pain because my brain has spun a very convincing story about how little you care for me. The pain of the Unmet Need, which is painful enough, has become Operatic in its scope for suffering. And suffer I/we do.

SUFFERING IS LANGUAGE/LANGUAGE IS SUFFERING

I suffer because my mind/brain is “designed”  to try and solve internal problems the way it solves external ones. If your front door is jamming, you look at the problem, diagnose why the door is jamming, and then come up with a solution to fix it. The only problem is that internal, existential, emotional issues, don’t respond to our brains Jim-Will-Fix- It strategies in the same way. This is because the most sophisticated technology we have for “fixing” our internal problems or pain is with something called language! All those thoughts, beliefs, internal conversations and monologues, memories, beating ourselves up, threatening to beat others up, could not occur without language. We’re very particular in this way.

Which is why we are the only animals to suffer, but not the only animals to feel pain. When my dog Max is sick because he ate some human turd in the park (true story!), he feels pain. This is the same pain I would feel if I were to eat human turd in the park and be sick afterwards. But there is no suffering accompanying his retching and puking and shitting blood. He doesn’t beat himself up for having eaten the human turd. He doesn’t go into a twisted, blaming rant about the person who decided to defecate in the park rather than walk 500 metres to a toilets at Morrisons Supermarket. He doesn’t get angry at me for not watching him carefully enough, or at the person who relieved themselves under a tree. He feels pain, but there is absolutely no suffering. And when the pain of his mistake has passed, he is as happy as Larry. Bless him.

We however. are completely different animals. We feel the pain of the needle, the pain of someone not responding to a text message in the way we would have liked, the pain of not getting the job we wanted, the pain of having the job we have (if we’re unhappy at work), the pain of getting a low mark on an essay, the pain of seeing the people we want to go out with us swiping left, as well as the thousands of other painful situations, both large and small that fill our lives. And then, on top of that, our story-telling brains ladle a massive helping of Suffering just to make things feel proper awful. Even to the point where the original pain itself is miniscule compared to the ratio of suffering we’re experiencing after the fact.

Pain is crappy, but suffering can feel intolerable. I didn’t go to the dentist for seven years because whenever I thought of the pain of that little needle, I added a big dose of suffering-inducing, language-constructed mental activity, far far worse than the two second pain created by a Lidocaine jab. Instead, my brain fed me over those seven years hundreds if not thousands of excruciatingly painful thoughts, images, memories. All created with language. Here’s just a sample:

I hate needles. I can’t deal with needles. I hate them, and I can’t deal with them.

I can’t face going to the dentist.

Why was Dr Levin so insensitive to my needs when I was 8 years old!?!

Look at the trauma he has left me with! He has incapacitated me in this regard.

Doctors are so insensitive and uncaring. Dentists too. Fuckers.

I blame my mother for not recognising how traumatised I was by the experience.

Why can’t I just get on with it and be less sensitive, like Dad?

I’m such a fucking wuss. I should just man up.

I can’t believe I still haven’t gone to the dentist for a check-up. I’m useless at this stuff.

And here is a sample of the Suffering Images that played for seven years on my Internal YouTube Channel:

Gigantic syringes, gigantic needles, gigantic needles entering my sensitive wee gums, dentist not stopping when I yelp in pain, me yelping in pain, me embarrassing myself by yelping in pain, dentist thinking I’m a wuss for yelping in pain etc.

And that’s just a small sample of my suffering loop. Times that by 1000 and you’re just about getting close to the Hell Realm of me not going to the dentist for seven years. And that’s just the suffering I’m willing to share on a public website to prove my point. That’s just the tip of my iceberg needle. Because pain isn’t the problem. I’ve already proved to myself that I can tolerate a modicum of pain by digging my fingernail into the back of my hand, or the crook of arm. It’s suffering that’s driving me/you/anyone crazy!

Which means that if only we can, when in pain, separate out the pain from the suffering, we might be better placed to experience the unavoidable, inevitable pain of being alive, but without the extra lashings of suffering. That’s the best I think we can aim for: experiencing Pain as cleanly and uncomplicatedly as we can, but dialing back on Suffering! Especially as that’s the only dial we have access to.

Remember: Pain is unavoidable, inevitable (no dial for us to twiddle). Suffering: also somewhat inevitable because of our weird story-telling brains, but much more avoidable and diminishable.

Let’s now look at how to reduce psychological and physical suffering.

 

REDUCING YOUR SUFFERING: THE P.A.U.S.E.

So how do we experience as “cleanly” as possible whatever dose of psychological or physical pain that is next coming our way without getting trapped into having a double dose of suffering alongside it? Here’s a five step process which is easy to do and remember. But it does require practice, until it becomes second nature. Which is where the acronym helps. P.A.U.S.E! P.A.U.S.E. stands for

PAIN

ACKNOWLEDGING & ALLOWING FOR PAIN

UNDERSTANDING/UNMET NEEDS

SUFFERING

ENGAGING WITH OUR PAIN

 

P.A.U.S.E. STEP ONE: P stands for PAIN!

Think of something a situation or a conversation you had with someone, or just something ongoing in your life that is causing you pain. Make a note of your pain on a piece of paper or on your phone.

Here are some examples:

PAIN: Gavin said in a text message that he doesn’t want to see me at the moment.

PAIN: My back’s really hurting at the moment.

PAIN: I haven’t done any work today, just faffed around.

PAIN: I feel like my life isn’t going anywhere.

PAIN: Yesterday I ate too many carbs and sugary things and today I’m feeling like a beached whale.

P.A.U.S.E. STEP TWO: A stands for ACKNOWLEDGING & ALLOWING!

In this step, you set the intention to allow yourself to feel some of this pain without reaching for the jar of suffering to start slathering all extra pain on top. Think for a moment how willing are you right now (out of 10) to just experience the pain as it is, without any additional thoughts, analysis, or “stories” about the pain?

Don’t feel bad if you  discover that your willingness is only about 1/10, as this will also give you an indicator of how strong the pain is, as well as how tenacious our story-telling brains are when it comes to adding lots of thoughts, images, and explanations about our pain. 

We also need to consider that when we are in a lot of pain, and especially if we are very sensitive, our default FIGHT-FLIGHT-FREEZE stress response kicks almost instantaneously, and so we might find ourselves invariably fighting the pain with lots of extra thoughts, internal monologues/rants (FIGHT-STUFF), or just trying to get away from the pain by either numbing or distracting ourselves, or telling ourselves even more stories about the individuals or world that has triggered this pain in us (FLIGHT-STUFF). Sometimes we also freeze up entirely, unable to think or do anything, caught in the pain like a rabbit in the headlamps (FREEZE-STUFF).

So let’s try and not do that, just for a few minutes.

See if you can turn up the dial on your willingness to experience the pain, even just for the five minutes it takes you to do this exercise. Being willing to experience pain without moving into lots of thoughts, analysis, or story about the pain is an incredibly hard thing to do because our brains are designed to respond to pain in the way that brains always respond (via language), but it is also a courageous and wise thing to do as it gives us a chance, even if just for a minute or two, to just take in and process our pain. Before our brains turn it into a Suffering Extravaganza.

So maybe at this point, give yourself a little pat on the back for gently taking offline (to some extent) your highly resistant, won’t shut-up-about-it, default fight-flight-freeze nervous system and storytelling brain, so that you can give all of of your compassionate and available attention to this horrible pain. This is the first step to becoming your own therapist who is there to help you process painful events in your life 24/7. It may take a couple of years of practice, but this is where it all starts.

P.A.U.S.E. STEP THREE: U stands for UNDERSTANDING/UNMET NEEDS

In step three, you offer understanding and compassion to yourself for why you are feeling this way. It’s a tricky step, because often the “why” can take our brains into a place where either we blame others or ourselves. This is why we focus on Unmet Needs in this step (another “U”), because 99.99% of the time, these unmet needs lie at the core of our pain. In fact, I’m so confident of the fact that ALL our psychological and physical pain stems from Unmet Needs that if you can find a painful event in your consciousness that isn’t connected to an Unmet Need, I’ll give you £100.

So come back to the sentence you wrote, and see if you can find the unmet need from this list of core needs:

  1. The need for CERTAINTY and COMFORT: our need to feel in control and to know what’s coming next so we can feel secure. This is also the need for basic comfort, the need to avoid pain and stress, and also to create pleasure and stimulation (physical, mental) for ourselves.
  2. The need for UNCERTAINTY and VARIETY: paradoxically we also need things to be different at times, for there to be surprises in our life (but maybe not too many, and not painful ones, even if unavoidable!)
  3. The need for SIGNIFICANCE: is my life meaningful to me, and am I meaningful to other people?
  4. The need for LOVE and CONNECTION: am I being appreciated, acknowledged, understood, valued by those people I care about. Am I being heard? Are people making space for my self-expression, hearing me out in a way that feels supportive and kind?
  5. The need for GROWTH and CONTRIBUTION: am I growing, emotionally, spiritually, intellectually? Am I able in some way to contribute to other people’s growth and well-being, or to the world in what I say or do?

Invariably your pain will be connected to an Unmet Need, and you can make a note of that underneath your pain.

PAIN: Gavin said in a text message that doesn’t want to see me at the moment.
UNMET NEED: need to be appreciated, accepted understood by others (LOVE and CONNECTION)

PAIN: My back’s really hurting at the moment
UNMET NEED: the need for certainty and physical comfort

PAIN: I haven’t done any work today, just faffed around
UNMET NEED: the need for SIGNIFICANCE and meaning, also GROWTH and CONTRIBUTION

PAIN: I feel like my life isn’t going anywhere
UNMET NEED: The need for SIGNIFICANCE, GROWTH and CONTRIBUTION

PAIN: Yesterday I ate too many carbs and sugary things and today I’m feeling like a beached whale
UNMET NEED: the need for certainty and physical comfort

If you can’t find the unmet need that is foundational to your pain, ask yourself this question: “What do I need at the moment? What would make me feel better? That is often a way of discovering your Unmet Need.”

When you have found the Unmet Need that is shining a particularly glaring spotlight on your pain, this is also a good time to see if you can find a little self-compassion for your pain-afflicted self. Maybe just calling to mind the notion that because these needs are universal (we all have them), the fact that you are in pain at the moment is invariably because this need is not being met. And that is COMPLETELY understandable and OK. IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT (no matter what your Inner Critic tells you). You might even want to say that to yourself a couple of times: “It’s not my fault for feeling this pain. It’s really not my fault.” I would also be in pain if that need was not being met for me, and so would that person who perhaps triggered your pain, if the pain stems from a relational issue, as many of our painful moments do.

Often when we are in pain, the pain can be accompanied by a strong Inner Critic who tells us that we shouldn’t be feeling this way, that it is our fault, or that there’s something wrong with us for being so uptight about whatever we’re struggling with. Pausing to focus on Unmet Needs can help us to see that our pain is not only natural and normal, but that it is wholly unavoidable and inevitable. If a need is not met, there will invariably be pain of some sort. And if you are a sensitive person, there will probably be EVEN MORE PAIN. This is just a law of our (human) universe rather than some deficiency in you, or some blameworthy lack in the person or thing that triggered your pain. IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT. Really. It isn’t. 

P.A.U.S.E. STEP FOUR: S stands for SUFFERING!

Now here’s the fun part. Ish.

Sit back and watch (mindfully, jotting down on the same piece of paper) the ways in which your Storytelling Brain begins to fill your head and heart with Suffering Thoughts, Suffering Internal Monologues and Conversations; Suffering Images, Suffering Memories, even Suffering Intentions (which is to say: intentions to do something that will probably just cause us more suffering).

PAIN: Gavin said in a text message that doesn’t want to see me at the moment.
UNMET NEED: need to be appreciated, accepted understood by others (LOVE and CONNECTION)
SUFFERING: How could he be so cruel? Doesn’t he realise what this is going to do to me? (SUFFERING THOUGHT); “I can’t believe you’re doing this! After all the times I’ve been there for you! After all the kindness and care, and consideration I’ve shown towards you and your struggles, and you shut down like this when I’m now struggling (SUFFERING INTERNAL MONOLOGUE/CONVO); Him Just Getting On With His Day, Laughing, Having Fun, Not Even Sparing Me A Single Thought (SUFFERING IMAGE); the two of us connecting and getting on (SUFFERING MEMORY); “Well fuck him, I’m going email him and tell him what I think about him. Or maybe I’ll just let him stew – don’t respond, stop engaging with him” (SUFFERING INTENTION).

Here’s another one:

PAIN: My back’s really hurting at the moment
UNMET NEED: the need for CERTAINTY and COMFORT
SUFFERING: Why me? What have I done to deserve this? There are people in their eighties who are relatively free from pain – it’s so unfair (SUFFERING THOUGHT); “You want me to sit with this?!? You want me to sit like a little Buddha and just focus on the sensations in my body?!? YOU SIT WITH IT!” (SUFFERING INTERNAL MONOLOGUE/CONVO WITH THERAPIST/FRIEND/MEDITATION TEACHER); Pain Driving Me To The Point Where I Just Go Crazy and Throw Myself Off Hornsey Lane Bridge (SUFFERING IMAGE); remembering myself pain-free, without a care in the world (SUFFERING MEMORY); If I don’t have some let up from this constant pain, I’m going to throw myself off Hornsey Lane Bridge! (SUFFERING INTENTION).

Once you’ve done this for a while with a particular painful event you will notice that your suffering thoughts, images, internal conversations, and intentions have a somewhat limited repertoire. This is because the intrinsic plots of our storytelling brain are really just a series of variations on a theme. What is important in this step of the P.A.U.S.E. is to intervene in some way with the the Suffering Thought, Internal Conversation, Image, Memory, or Intention, and not just let it continue to loop itself over and over again, going deeper and deeper into the Suffering Story until you are well and truly suffering. Instead: make a simple note of what your brain is doing (“Ah, Suffering Thought…Ah, Suffering Internal Conversation…Ah Suffering Image…Ah, Suffering Memory…Ah, Suffering Intention – thank you brain.”)

And then. Stop.

Of course your brain will probably ignore you and keep on spinning its stories. So you then make another gentle note of how the invitation to suffer is being delivered in the shape of a THOUGHT, an IMAGE/VIDEO, an INTERNAL CONVERSATION or MONOLOGUE, a MEMORY, or INTENTION, and then once again, you say: ENOUGH! STOP!

You don’t need to be harsh or hard on yourself, but just willing to interrupt yourself (your brain) in the way that you are able to interrupt (if you choose) someone who is relentlessly bombarding you with THOUGHTS or IMAGES or INTERNAL CONVERSATIONS, or MEMORIES, or INTENTIONS that are making you suffer. If all of that stuff was being pumped out of your television set and you were getting no joy or pleasure from it, you would switch it off. We can’t switch off our brains, but we can interrupt whatever is being broadcast to us.

You can devise your own way of doing this, or we can talk more about it together. I quite like to use the word “stop” or “enough”. So if you were a fly on the wall, you would hear me talking to my brain like this:

“Ah, suffering Thought! Stop!…………Ah, that’s now a suffering image, enough! …….. Suffering Monologue, stop! Focus on the pain. What’s the Unmet Need? Feel that pain, just that. ………Suffering Monologue. Enough! Ah, now a Memory. Suffering. Enough.”

Sometimes, when my brain is really set on suffering, and I’m doing something which doesn’t require my full attention, so that my brain can focus entirely on the suffering story, I might need to note and say stop/enough again and again and again. The STOP is especially important when our Suffering Minds are trying to get us to carry out some Actions (revenge, rebuttal, rehash). A Suffering Mind is so skilled at finding ways to convince us that writing an angry email or text will really help us to suffer less, that often, before we know it, we end up doing the very thing that will only make us suffer more. In my experience, lashing out and blaming another human being for the ways they have triggered in me pain, only makes me suffer more. Because then I have to deal with either the anxiety of how they will respond, or the unpleasantness of their defensive words, or whatever their Suffering Brain spins the story to try and make it better for themselves.  

Of course your brain might obstinately refuse to stop suffering. And that’s fine too. Because as long as you are aware that you are having a Suffering Thought, a Suffering Image, a Suffering Internal Conversation/Monologue, Memory, or Intention, you are winning. Because you are at that moment making a distinction between Pain which is inevitable/unavoidable, and Suffering which is not. At the moment in which you ask or demand of your brain to stop making you suffer, you are shifting into a place where you are once again in control of your brain, rather than the other way around, even if it continues to pump out Suffering Thoughts, Images, Internal Conversations, Memories and Intentions. Simply doing the P.A.U.S.E again and again and again,  will eventually reduce suffering. I promise.

But you’ll also need to give some time to the final step, which is:

P.A.U.S.E. STEP FIVE: E is for ENGAGING WITH LIFE

Once we have made space for inevitable/unavoidable Pain, but also respectfully told the Suffering Word Machines that we call “our brains/minds” to stop overloading us in a mistaken belief that it can “fix” our pain, it’s time to engage with something out there in the real world that feels meaningful to us. This also sends an important message to our Suffering Minds that there is life beyond Suffering in some shape or form, nudging it to note the tangible differences between outer experience (life) and our inner-world of images, memories, thoughts, beliefs (i.e. LANGUAGE).

What might this engagement with life look like?

1) Getting On With Value-Driven Activities

All this involves is doing something that is meaningful and has value to you, whilst at the same time being willing to have your Brain/Mind playing the Suffering Channel in the background. So for example, you might go for a walk with our Suffering Mind, or write an article for our website with your Suffering Mind droning on in the background, or do some Yoga with Adriene with your Suffering Minds occasionally interrupting Adriene’s instructions for Side-Reclining Leg Lift with suffering thoughts, images, and internal monologues.

2) Getting On With Healthy(ish) Distractions

Similar to the above but perhaps involving more Netflix binges, Amazon Wish-List making, and tidying or cleaning. Loads more examples here: https://wiredforhappy.com/100-smart-ways-to-calm-your-anxious-mind/

3) Go Back, with Open Arms, To Your Pain:

Perhaps you’ve done all of these things, and still the pain of your Unmet Need is hurting you a great deal. Returning to that hurt, with self-validation and understanding (“Anyone would be feeling this pain if the core need for X wasn’t met! It’s not my fault!”) and going right back to the P of the P.A.U.S.E is a great, and sometimes necessary thing to do.

Maybe you haven’t given your heart and your head enough time to fully take in just how painful this upset is. So don’t see it as a failure if you maybe need to do the whole P.A.U.S.E. process a number of times, perhaps even with the same material. Eventually, the pain will become more manageable, and the suffering will reduce. I promise this will happen. But it does require consistency and working that P.A.U.S.E.

Looking forward to hearing how you get on with it.

Categories
Acceptance Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Check The Facts DBT Defusion Living A Valued Life Worry

AHA! THREE STEPS FOR HANDLING CHRONIC WORRY

Anxiety is such a nebulous word, but worry is tangible. Take Louis*. Louis is 28 years old and in charge of a small team of people in the NHS. One of Louis’s team, let’s call him Phil, is slacking off at work. He consistently arrives late and does as little as possible. This is complicated by the fact that Phil’s previous line manager, Geoff, was also Phil’s friend, and so would turn a blind eye to Phil slacking off. Louis, the new line manager, needs to step in and have a meeting with Phil next week, setting out what’s expected of him in his role, and also warning Phil that if he isn’t able to fulfil these duties, there might be consequences. Simples, right?

Well of course not. Not for Louis, and not for many of us dealing with whatever random events life throws our way. Which is why Louis is worried. He’s so worried that even though the meeting is a week away, Louis is intensely anxious about the situation every time he thinks about it. He knows from past experience that he’s not going to be able to enjoy his weekend much, if at all, because all that empty time will give him hundreds of opportunities to rehearse the worries, over and over again. He says this is something he’d like to work on in our session, so I introduce him to Check The Facts, a DBT, emotion-regulation process or “dialogue” to see if this might in any way help him with his worries.

Check The Facts involves focusing on cognitive biases and distortions, looking at ways in which we might be finding a problem or a threat when one isn’t necessarily there. As David Carbonell puts it in his book The Worry Trick: the problem with worry that is we experience doubt (“I don’t know what the outcome of [something] is going to be…”) as dangerous.

Think of something that is worrying you at the moment, and ask yourself this question: Is this a problem existing in the external world right now? If so, can I do something to change it? Most likely a sticky, chronic worry will get a “no” on both counts, or a “yes” to the first, and a “no” to the second.

What a lot of therapy does, not just standard CBT or DBT, is interrogate and cross examine these worries in a bid to dissolve some of the skanky jeopardy coating each thought [here’s a short tapescript of me doing this with Louis].

More often than not, after an hour of working away at a crippling worry (and this is certainly the case with Louis) client and therapist might both be a little depleted by the fact that not much has occurred in terms of weakening the vice-like grip of the Worry. This is not however how things are protrayed in CBT or DBT manuals, where all therapist dialogues with their patients end with an implicit, but often explicit, self-congratulatory “victory” over Worry, and a big hearty slap on the back for the therapist, who has clearly shone with his skills and perceptiveness, shone in a way that you might recognise if you’ve ever read a page of Greek philosophy. Which is to say, shone like Socrates. Specifically, Socrates as Columbo whose most irritating technique if you remember was to leave a room and then return, with a befuddled look on his face, scratching his head, and saying “Just one more thing…”, then following this up with a seemingly innocuous question. The guilty person, aka The Worrier, by then eager to see the last of this schmuck, would quickly answer, and later find out that the question was not so innocent after all, when Columbo returned to say “You’re under arrest.” Crime solved, another win for Law and Order.

Check The Facts is a little bit like having your own Socrates on a piece of paper. It asks you a series of questions, and as you work through the questions, their reformulating power is designed to break down your worries, or at least reduce the extent of this worried feeling until it is at a level that sinks into the background rather that stalks your head like a heartless psychopath.

But this, and standard CBT, often don’t work. And the reason they don’t work is that these therapies target the cortex area in the brain, or System 2 as Daniel Kahneman calls it in Thinking Fast and Slow, rather than System 1, the Amygdala whose role is to attach emotional significance to situations or objects and to form emotional memories, both positive and negative.

THE PROBLEM WITH THE AMYGDALA

The problem with the amgydala is that unlike the cortex, all of its work is largely unconscious, attaching anxiety (negative emotional valence) to situtations the way the liver aids digestion, or the pituitary gland regulates our hormones. And it happens so quickly. Like a hyper-vigilant set of all-seeing, all-hearing, all-sensing cameras, as soon as the amygdala picks through its lateral nucleus and thalamus on something that may indicate a certain level of danger or harm (and remember, doubt, which is to say anything ambivalent, ambiguous, unsettled, which are most things, signals to a mind predisposed to anxiety DANGER). Then, in less than a tenth of a second, much quicker than the danger signal takes to reach the more measured, “thinky” parts of the brain, the amygdala is already signalling to the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and hypothalamus to provide a surge of adrenaline, increase blood pressure and heart rate, create muscle tension, and get us ready to self-protectively fight, flee, freeze, or worry.

When we’re experiencing this very primal fight, flight, or freeze response, the amygdala is in the driver’s seat and we’re passenger. That’s why, in emergency situations, we often feel as though we’re observing ourselves responding rather than consciously controlling our response. The reason why we don’t feel in control in these moments, or in control of our anxiety is because, as Joseph LeDoux explains: the amygdala isn’t just faster—it also has the neurological capability to override other, slower (System 2) brain processes. For this reason, strategies for coping with amygdala-based anxiety are essential, even though cortex-focused approaches are more commonly offered in treatment.

Perhaps one of the reasons for focusing on cortex-focused, thinky-talky, approaches is that a) they make sense to the part of the brain that deals in making sense of things (the cortex), but also because b) working with the amygdala often involves some form of exposure therapy.

If you want the amygdala to change its response to an object (for example, a mouse) or a situation (such as a noisy crowd), the amygdala needs experience with the object or situation for new learning to occur. Experience is most effective when the person interacts directly with the object or situation, although observing another person has also been shown to affect the amygdala. You can reason with the amygdala for hours, but if you’re trying to change amygdala-based anxiety, that tactic won’t be as effective as a few minutes of direct experience will be.

Unfortunately, we all typically try to avoid such experiences, and this avoidance prevents the amygdala from forming new connections. Returning to the example of the mouse, you may even try to avoid thinking about mice, because just the thought of a mouse can cause the amygdala to react, initiating an anxiety response. The amygdala tends to preserve learned emotional reactions by avoiding any exposure to the trigger, which decreases the likelihood of changing that emotional circuitry. Being the ultimate survivalist, the amygdala is purposely cautious, and its default setting is to organize responses that decrease your exposure to triggers. But again, amygdala-based anxiety responses won’t change if the amygdala is successful in avoiding triggers.

Often the amygdala in these narratives is presented as the flibbertigibbet in contrast with the Cool, Calm and Collected 007-like Cerebral Cortex with its highly impressive Executive Functioning, a skill no other animal on this planet possesses. But as Catherine Pittman explains because the frontal lobes of the cerebral cortex are so good at helping us to anticipate the results of situations, plan our actions, as well as initiate responses, and use feedback from the world to stop or change our behaviours, “these impressive capacities also lay the groundwork for anxiety to develop”.

So what can we do?

AHA! THREE STEPS FOR HANDLING CHRONIC WORRY

Here’s your proverbial AHA! moment in dealing with worry. This is an acronym you can use to help you remember a couple of steps to take when you’re being bothered by worrisome thoughts.

  • Acknowledge and accept.
  • Humour the worrisome thoughts, as you would humour an annoying sexist, racist, homophobic Uncle who sat down next to you at a wedding.
  • Activity—resume doing value-driven activities, activities that are important to you in your “external world” (and take the worries with you if necessary).

Here’s a detailed explanation for each step of AHA!

1) ACKNOWLEDGE AND ACCEPT

What’s to acknowledge here? That you’re having a worrisome thought, once again! It might be annoying to find it back in your head. You might want to refuse to acknowledge its appearance because it seems so unreasonable that, once again, this thought is occurring to you. It offers nothing of value, and you’ve dismissed it so many times before, yet here it is again, serving no useful purpose, bothering you like a spam e-mail that shows up in your mailbox every hour. Or maybe, even though you’ve had lots of experiences with these worrisome thoughts and have never been harmed by them, you still respond with fear because you wonder, What if this is the time that something happens? and you get tricked by that thought into taking the content seriously. You wish you could be perfectly sure that the thought is false, for all time, but of course you can’t have that certainty.

So, okay—you can simply acknowledge that you’re having another occurrence of a worrisome thought. Maybe you recognized it by the “what if” introduction, or maybe you didn’t catch on until you considered the content it was offering you, but okay. You have a brain, so you have thoughts. No need to try to ignore it, or pretend it’s not there. There’s nothing wrong with ignoring it, really—but if the effort you make to ignore the thought keeps bringing it back to your attention, then trying to ignore the thought isn’t helping. Here you are, having another one of the many, many thoughts you will have today, and this one happens to be a loser.

Whom do you acknowledge it to? Usually just yourself. This is an internal process in which you briefly notice the presence of the worrisome thoughts, acknowledge them without resistance or suppression, and move on to the next thing. 

What’s to accept? The fact that you’re having a thought you don’t like! You may or may not agree with the content of the thought. You may find it reasonable or you might find it repulsive. It doesn’t really matter! You don’t get to pick and choose which thoughts you’ll have and which thoughts you won’t have—nobody does! There’s no need to try to contradict the thought, to disprove it, to make it go away, or to reassure yourself. There probably won’t be any benefit if you do.

No one expects you to control your thoughts. You’re accountable for your actions, and you’ll be judged by your actions. Not by thoughts! You can have a worrisome thought, same as you can have an angry thought, a jealous thought, a sexy thought, a wacky thought, a kind thought, an unkind thought, a shameful thought, a compassionate thought, a murderous thought, or whatever. To say that worries are a dime a dozen would be to greatly exaggerate their value.

So, okay—you can allow yourself to have whatever thoughts happen to come to mind, same as you’ll allow yourself to have whatever noises your stomach might make, same as you’ll allow yourself to have whatever reactions you might have to an unpleasant odor. If someone else hears your stomach grumble and you feel embarrassed, you can go ahead and say “excuse me” if you wish. No one can hear your thought, so there’s no occasion for apology; you don’t control your thoughts, so there’s no need for judgment. Here you are, having a thought that you wouldn’t choose to have, if you could make the choice. Which you can’t.

Recently a client, who tends to be a little perfectionistic and demanding of herself, asked me, “But what can I say to myself when I notice I’m having one of these thoughts again?” I suggested, “Oh well.” She had thought something more complicated, more powerful and cleansing would be necessary. Nope! This is not, as the saying goes, rocket science. You don’t control your thoughts, nor do your thoughts control you. When it comes to automatic thoughts like these, you’re more like the reader of a book than you are like the author, so no need to engage in a prideful struggle to control your thoughts. You don’t get to pick the thoughts you have or exclude the thoughts you think should be excluded. Oh well! When I get to design the world, there’ll be some changes made!

This first step—acknowledge and accept—is probably the most important and powerful of the three. I describe it as simply as possible, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Some people may be able to simply acknowledge and accept the unwanted thoughts and move on to the activity step without the use of any other techniques or responses. That’s great! If that works for you, just move on without spending any time on this step.

That tends to be the exception, though. Most people find that the thoughts are a little “stickier” than that, that they can’t move on so quickly because they find that they’re still arguing with their Crazy-Uncle-At-A-Wedding Arguments, still wishing the thought would cease and desist. Cultivating an accepting attitude toward thoughts you detest and fear is usually a long, gradual process, a task we work on all our lives rather than a specific goal we attain quickly and completely. It’s something that you practice and acquire over time, not something that you simply “do.”

It reminds me of the slogan on the box of the Othello board game. Othello is a deceptively simple game with pieces like checkers, with a black side and a white side. You win by outflanking your opponent’s pieces and flipping them over to your color. Sounds simple, but the game is actually quite complex, and the slogan is “a minute to learn, a lifetime to master.”

If you became dehydrated, perhaps because you played too much tennis on a hot, sunny day without adequate liquids, you could drink more water and solve the problem. If you were severely dehydrated, you might require intravenous fluids. That’s all it would take—resupply your fluids and the problem is fixed.

Training yourself to handle your worrisome thoughts differently is not like the problem of resupplying your water. It’s more like the process of exercising to get yourself back into shape, or of dieting and losing weight. You will need to learn, practice, and continually follow some steps in order to improve and get the results you seek.

What’s most important about dieting is acquiring, and following, the habit of eating a healthy menu each day and getting regular exercise. That’s more important than whatever you happen to weigh today, because if you continue with your good habits, your weight and physical condition will generally fall into line. In the same way, what’s most important here is acquiring a regular habit of how you respond to worrisome thoughts, not how many worrisome thoughts you have today. What’s really important is moving in the right direction. It’s much less important how fast you go, or how gracefully.

In order to figure out some good ways to respond to a worry, first clarify the kind of situation you confront now. 

  • Is there a problem that exists now in the external world around you?
  • If there is, can you do something to change it now?

If you get anything other than two “yes” answers—two “no” answers, one “no” and one “yes,” maybes, or whatever—then you don’t have a problem in your external world that you can solve right now. You have the problem of worrying. You’re being “baited” by your Crazy-Uncle-At-A-Wedding Argument.

When this happens, keep two points in mind. It might help to put these on your electronic device or a 3 by 5 card until you get in the habit of remembering.

  • What you have is the emotion of feeling nervous.
  • It’s okay to feel nervous. You probably really, really dislike the emotion, but it’s like the experience of sitting in an uncomfortably warm room, not like camping in a forest fire. It’s discomfort, not danger. You might be sitting in an uncomfortably warm room and reading about a forest fire, or watching a movie about a forest fire, but it’s still just discomfort, no matter how realistic the film is or how vivid the description.

The problem you face is not the problem described in the catastrophe clause of your worry. The problem you face is the discomfort you experience in response to the worrisome thought, and your natural inclination to take that thought seriously and resist it. When you resist the thought with your usual selection of anti-worry responses, this is when you once again experience the difficulty of The harder I try, the worse it gets.

That’s the first step, acknowledge and accept. If you find that you frequently take the bait and get caught up in arguing with your Crazy-Uncle-At-A-Wedding Arguments, then this second step will be probably be helpful.

2) HUMOUR THE WORRISOME THOUGHT

Having acknowledged the temporary presence of the thought, and accepted its presence as best you can, you might now find it helpful to respond to the worrisome thought in a playful, counterintuitive style.

So do something very different. Employ the Rule of Opposites. Here are some ways you can respond, in a playful or silly manner, to the problem of getting “hooked” by Uncle Argument’s efforts to get you embroiled.

Sing a worry song. You can make a song of your worry. Pick a catchy tune that’s easy to sing to, and create your own worrisome lyrics about the disasters that are waiting for you around every corner.

Here, for instance, is the first verse of a song Louis came up with for his worries It’s sung to the tune of “Camptown Races”:

This guy’s gonna be a pain (Doo dah, doo dah)
He’s gonna argue a lot with me (Doo dah, doo dah day)
I’m really scared that he’ll complain (Doo dah, doo dah)
Worried that I might get fired (Doo dah, doo dah day)

ALSO TRY: Worrying in your second language. Are you bilingual? Even if you just have just a GCSE or O-Level in a second language, that might be enough to enable you to do your worrying in your second language.

ALSO TRY: Worrying in a fake foreign accent. Yes, it’s silly, but why not? Silly can help you keep a good perspective on the worry. No need to give the worry content more respect than it deserves.

DO YOU WORRY ABOUT PLAYING WITH WORRIES?

These suggestions are probably very different from what you’ve been trying. They involve accepting and playing with your worrisome thoughts rather than resisting and taking them seriously.

What reactions do you have to the idea of humouring your chronic worry?

People are often nervous at first about humouring their worrisome thoughts. It seems risky to them, like they’re tempting fate. They may have certain beliefs about worry that suggest the worry needs to be treated very seriously, and carefully, as if chronic worry were itself dangerous. 

If you prefer to treat these worries more formally, you can use the Worry Journal that’s available by clicking on this link. It’s simply a questionnaire you can use while you are caught up in the worries. Take a little time to observe your worries, and answer the questions listed in the Journal. This will train you to be a better observer of your worrisome thoughts and will help you detach from arguing and resisting. If a bull simply observed with interest the antics of the bullfighter with the red cape, there wouldn’t be any gory bullfights!

The Worry Journal can be quite helpful. However, I encourage you to experiment with the more humorous, playful responses as well, because I think they will bring you greater rewards over the long run.

When are you done with this second step? Don’t keep repeatedly humouring the worry, again and again, waiting for it to go away. That’s too much like arguing with Uncle Argument! Instead, take a humouring stance with the thoughts and then move on to the third step, allowing them to follow you as you get back into the external world, if that’s what they do.

3) ACTIVITY – RESUME DOING THINGS THAT ARE IMPORTANT AND VALUABLE TO YOU (AND TAKE THE WORRIES WITH YOU IF NECESSARY) 

If you’ve ever had an eye exam, you’re probably familiar with the part where the doctor switches through pairs of lenses, asking you “Better here…or better here?” while you try to decide which lens gives you better vision.

You face a similar choice when you’re caught up in worry. The choice is this: “Better here (in your internal world of worry)…or better here (in your external world)?”

It’s generally much more helpful to get involved in the external world. It’s better to engage in activities that are usually important or fun for you, while you’re worried and uncomfortable, than it is to spend much time in your head, trying to get rid of the thoughts. The reason external involvement is a better choice is not because you will feel better right away; you might not. But it will lead to a better outcome and a better pattern for the future.

This is not the same as trying to make yourself so busy that you stop worrying. That’s just another version of “stop thinking that” and just as unhelpful in the long run.

TAKE YOUR WORRIES FOR A WALK

If you have dogs, you generally need to take those dogs for a walk, unless you have room to let them run. There will be times when you don’t feel like it—when it’s cold and snowy outside, when you’re too busy writing a book, or when you have a headache, and you just don’t feel like doing it. But if you don’t let those dogs poop and pee outdoors, pretty soon they’ll do it indoors. That won’t do much for your headache or your book! And then when you take those dogs for a walk, they don’t always do what you want. Sometimes they race ahead, trying to pull you along. Sometimes they lag behind, and you have to make them follow. Sometimes they try to eat stuff they shouldn’t, or bark at your neighbours.

Those dogs are a lot like your worrisome thoughts. Sometimes they demand attention when you really don’t feel like giving it, and sometimes they just don’t do things the way you wish they would. But life is better with the walks than without them!

You’ve probably noticed that you tend to worry less when you’re busy and more when you’re idle. Episodes of chronic worry often fade faster when you’re active. So it will be useful to return your attention and energy back to involvement with the external world around you. By this, I don’t mean to simply make yourself busy. That’s too much like trying to get rid of the thoughts. Not that there’s anything terribly wrong with that, getting rid of the thoughts, if it can be done simply and effectively. It’s just that trying directly to get rid of the thoughts usually makes them more persistent and plentiful.

So it is with worries. It might seem like there would be a better time to go to a dinner party, but life is a come-as-you-are party, and if you’re worried the night of the party, then pack up your worries and bring them with you. Would you be happier without the worries? Yes, but that choice isn’t immediately available. Would you be better off lying in bed, alone with your worries? Probably not!

Go on about your business—the worries may leave sooner that way. If they don’t, at least you’re participating in life while you wait for them to pass.

People often object to the idea of getting involved with a project of any kind, on the grounds that they will be able to do a better job when they’re not worried so much. Similarly, they often want to isolate themselves from others, out of a concern that others will notice their distress and be bothered by it.

Both are instances of how our gut instincts of how to handle worry tend to be the opposite of what would actually be helpful. Both suggest that we need, first, to get rid of the worrisome thoughts we’re experiencing, and then, afterwards, to get involved with activities outside our skin.

It’s more often the other way around. Your involvement with your external world will tend to direct your energy and attention there—and leave less of it “in your head.” Moreover, when you interact with the external world, you get more involved with realistic rules of thumb. When you’re in your head, by contrast, you can imagine anything. This is why anticipatory worry is almost always worse than anything that actually happens in real life—there are no rules in your head, anything seems possible! In the external world, the rules of reality apply.

[*All names and some significant details of the above piece have been changed in order to safeguard the anonymity of those involved.]

Categories
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Avoidance Feel Better Living A Valued Life Pain Suffering

Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

There’s a wonderful poem by Mary Oliver where she talks about pain, suffering, and our relation to it.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

The key shift in the poem begins with that line Meanwhile the world goes on. It is a move out of the teeth-gritting effort of being alive and struggling as we often do with this, into that more transcendent, open, peaceful place, a place we sense other animals inhabit more readily, as well as the rest of the unthinking, non-language-using natural world. And we want to live there, not here, where it sometimes feels like we’re walking on our knees for hundreds of miles weighed down by our being-humanness. We want instead to be there, high in the clean blue air. And sometimes we experience that feeling of being there: maybe whilst meditating, or doing yoga, or walking in the countryside, or listening to a podcast that intrigues us, or after vaping some cannabis or three glasses of wine. We know what it means to crawl, and we have all had experiences of flying. Don’t we long, like those wild geese to have wings and take flight, again and again?

It may even seem unfair that we’re slithering along on our bellies, like slugs, when others seem to be soaring. At least according to social media updates and what we see in the social realm when out and and about. Soaring!  If we’ve been struggling for some time, we’ve maybe plagued ourselves with different forms of the “why?” question: “Why can’t I just get over it?” “Why can’t I feel better?” “Why is life so hard?” “Why hasn’t therapy worked?” “Why can’t I be a normal person?” “Why can’t I be happy?” We may feel victimized somehow by questions that seem not to have any ready answers. Cornered by your own emotional pain and our struggle with it, we may feel as if your life is narrowing in around us.

If you’ve been fighting a war inside your head, what would it be like if instead of trying to win that war, you knew a way to step out of it? This doesn’t mean that the war would stop; it may continue. Rather, it means that you would no longer try to live inside a war zone, with your psychological survival seemingly dependent on the outcome of the war. What if that were possible?

The different modes of therapy that I use (ACT, DBT, Schema Therapy and IFS) invite you to examine your perspective not only on what psychological pain is and how it operates, but on the very nature of your consciousness, even your identity, that is, who you take yourself to be. No issue is too “basic” if it seems necessary to address it. And for that reason, these concepts and methods may shake you up a bit. Initially, some may be hard to swallow and may even fly in the face of what you’ve been taught are the “solutions” to your problems.

Concepts like:

  • Psychological pain is normal, it is important, and everyone has it.
  • You cannot deliberately get rid of your psychological pain, although you can take steps to avoid increasing it artificially.
  • Pain and suffering are two different states of being.
  • You don’t have to identify with your suffering.
  • Accepting your pain is a step toward ridding yourself of your suffering.
  • You can live a life you value, beginning right now, but to do that you will have to learn how to get out of your mind and into your life.

Often many people we meet in our daily lives seem to have it all. They seem happy. They look satisfied with their lives. You’ve probably had the experience of walking down the street when you’re having a particularly bad day, and you’ve looked around and thought, “Why can’t I just be happy like everyone around me? They don’t suffer from chronic panic (or depression, or a substance abuse problem). They don’t feel as if a dark cloud is always looming over their heads. They don’t suffer the way I suffer. Why can’t I be like them?”

Here’s the secret: They/I do suffer, and you/we are like them in many ways. Although I also believe, and Elaine Aron’s research into high-sensitivity has shown this, that about a quarter of us do feel things a tad more strongly than others. And that matters too. We all have pain. All human beings, if they live long enough, have felt or will feel the devastation of losing someone they love. Every single person has felt or will feel physical pain. Everybody has felt sadness, shame, anxiety, fear, and loss. We all have memories that are embarrassing, humiliating, or shameful. We all carry painful hidden secrets. We tend to put on shiny, happy faces, pretending that everything is okay, and that life is “all good.” But it isn’t and it can’t be. To be human is to feel pain in ways that are orders of magnitude more pervasive than what the other creatures on planet Earth feel.

SO WHY DO WE FIND OURSELVES IN THE POSITION WE DO?

If you kick a dog, it will yelp and run away. If you kick it regularly, any sign of your arrival eventually will produce fear and avoidance behavior in the dog by means of the process called “conditioning.” But so long as you are out of the picture and are not likely to arrive, the dog is unlikely to feel or show significant anxiety. People are quite different. As young as sixteen months or even earlier, human infants learn that if an object has a name, the name refers to the object. So what, you might say?

This capacity for language puts human beings in a special position. Simply saying a word invokes the object that is named. Try it out: “Umbrella.” What did you think of when you read that word? Alright, that one’s pretty harmless. But consider what this means if the named object was fearful: anything that reminded the person of its name would evoke fear. It would be as if all the dog needs to feel fear is not an actual kick, but the thought of being kicked.

That is exactly the situation we are in. That is exactly the situation all humans are in with language.

Here is an example: Take a moment now to think of the most shameful thing you have ever done. Take a moment to actually do this.

What did you just feel? It’s very likely that as soon as you read the sentence, you felt some sense of either fear or resistance. You may have tried to dismiss the request and quickly read on. However, if you paused and actually tried to do what we asked, you probably began to feel a sense of shame while you remembered a scene from your past and your actions in it. Yet all that happened here was that you were looking at patterns of ink on paper. Nothing else is in front of you but that. Because relations that verbal humans learn in one direction, they derive in two, they have the capacity to treat anything as a symbol for something else. The etymology of “symbol” means “to throw back as the same,” and because you are reacting to the ink on this paper symbolically, the words you just read evoked a reaction from you; perhaps they even reminded you of a shameful event from your past.

Where could you go so that this kind of relation could not take place? The dog knows how to avoid pain: avoid you and your foot. But how can a person avoid pain if anytime, anywhere, pain can be brought to mind by anything related to that pain?

The situation is actually worse than that. Not only can we not avoid pain by avoiding painful situations (the dog’s method), pleasurable situations also might evoke pain. Suppose someone very dear to you recently died, and today you see one of the most beautiful sunsets you have ever seen. What will you think?

For human beings, avoiding situational cues for psychological pain is unlikely to succeed in eliminating difficult feelings because all that is needed to bring them to mind is an arbitrary cue that evokes the right verbal relations. This example of a sunset demonstrates the process. A sunset can evoke a verbal history. It is “beautiful” and beautiful things are things you want to share with others. You cannot share this sunset with your dear friend, and there you are, feeling sad at the very moment you see something beautiful.

The problem is that the cues that evoke verbal relations can be almost anything: the ink on paper that made up the word “shame,” or a sunset that reminded you of your recent loss. In desperation, humans try to take a very logical action: they start trying to avoid pain itself.

Unfortunately, a number of the methods we have of avoiding pain are incredibly unhelpful in and of themselves. For example, not getting out of bed when we feel down, or drinking a bottle of Malbec may temporarily reduce pain, but it will come back stronger than ever and further damage will be caused. Denial and learned numbness will reduce pain, but they will soon cause far more pain than they take away.

The constant possibility of psychological pain is a challenging burden that we all need to face. It is like the elephant in the living room that no one ever mentions.

The approaches we will explore in our sessions are suggested by the word “suffering.” The primary root of suffer is the Latin ferre, which means “to bear or carry” (the English word “ferry” comes from the same root). The prefix “suf” is a version of “sub” and, in this usage, means “from below, up (hence) away.” In other words, suffering doesn’t just involve having something to carry; it also involves moving away. The word “suffer” connotes the idea that there is a burden you are unwilling or unable to carry, perhaps because it seems “too heavy,” “too unfair,” or it just seems “beyond you.” That connotation refers to more than pain alone; in fact, it provides a different way to address the problem of pain.

EXERCISE: Your Suffering Inventory

If you like, why not write down or say aloud a list of all of the issues that are currently psychologically difficult for you. This is something we’d probably talk about in our consultation session, but you can do that here too if we haven’t looked at this together.

When compiling your Suffering Inventory, do not write about purely external or situational events, independent of your reactions to them. What I’m most interested in is how you react to these situations and events. For example, “my boss” would not be a good example of a difficult issue you experience; but “getting frustrated with my boss” or “feeling put down by my boss” might be. This is because, not everyone is triggered in the way you are by the personality type of your boss. S/he may even be universally loathed, but you probably realise that not everyone gets as upset or angry about, say, your boss as you do. And this is key when working with our issues.

You may also want to make a note of any of your thoughts, feelings, memories, urges, bodily sensations, habits, or behavioural predispositions that may distress you, either alone or in combination with external events. Don’t overthink it. Just write down what plagues you and causes you pain. Be honest and thorough when creating your “suffering inventory”. It may take some time, but it will be time well worth spent.

After you’ve completed your list, go back and think about how long these issues have been a problem for you. Write that down as well.

Now I’m going to ask you to organize this list. First, go back and rank these items in terms of the impact that they have on your life. Then, in the space provided below, write down the same items, but rank them in order. The order should range from those items that cause you the most pain and difficulty in your life to those that cause you the least trouble. We will use this list as a guide throughout our sessions, referring back to this list as your touchstone for the events and issues that cause you pain.

Finally, in the area to the right of this list, draw arrows between every item on the list that is related to another item. You will know that two items are related if changes in one might alter another. For example, suppose one of your items is “self-criticism” and another is “depression.” If you think the two are related (that is, the more self-critical you are, the more likely you are to feel depressed, or vice versa), draw a two-headed arrow between self-criticism and depression. You may find that this area becomes cluttered with arrows. That’s fine. There is no right or wrong way to do this. If everything is related, it’s important to know that. If some items relate to only a few others, that is useful information too. The higher on your list the items are and the more other items they connect to, the more important they become. This may suggest a reranking of your problems and you may find that you now want to combine some items or to divide them into smaller units. If that is so, you can create your final working list below, ranked from highest to lowest in order of impact on your life.

Finally, you may also want to think about all the things you’ve attempted to do to “sort out” or “get rid of” or “fix” in some way these issues you’ve been struggling with. Let’s join the D-O-T-S on those! Our most common strategies for dealing with pain are:

D- Distraction: I (Steve) often try to distract myself from painful thoughts and feelings (eg Netflix, surfing the web, downloading music or books etc)? How about you?

O – Opting out: I (Steve) often opt out (quit, avoid, or withdraw from) people, places, activities, and situations when I don’t like the thoughts and feelings they bring up for me. How about you?

T -Thinking: I (Steve) have more often than not tried to think my way out of pain? (e.g. blaming others, worrying, rehashing the past, fantasizing, positive thinking, problem-solving, planning, self-criticism, ‘What if?’, ‘If only …’, ‘Why me?’, ‘Not fair!’, analyzing, trying to make sense of it, debating with myself, denial, beating myself up, etc.) How about you?

S – Substances, Self-harm, other Strategies: I have often tried putting substances into my body (including food and prescription medication) to replace the pain. These can become quite extreme in terms of self-harming activities (overeating/undereating is also a form of self-harm), as well as suicide attempts or reckless risk-taking. These are not the only way we try and avoid our pain. There are hundreds of strategies, e.g. excessive sleeping, or being on our phones (Twitter, Instagram, Bumble etc.)? Do you do this too?

Have any of these strategies helped? Many might have helped in the short term, and quite often they’re good things to do in and of themselves (going on a meditation retreat always makes me feel great), but what about the long-term? Perhaps this is part of your frustration. It’s certainly part of my frustration. Surely there has to be something out there to sort all this suffering out?!?

You can also do this exercise for what’s going on for you right at this moment by looking at this worksheet.

If we were working together, once you had created your Suffering Inventory, we would begin looking at each problem and thinking about the ways in which our interaction with that problem (on the whole) might, despite our best intentions, may only have made matters worse (so frustrating, isn’t it?).

Here’s a flavour of the way in which we’d dissect this together: Worksheet Link.

This would then give us a clearer understanding of the particular shape that human suffering has taken in your life, and we can start to think about what to do with all this pain.

THE PROBLEM WITH PAIN

Psychological pain hurts, by definition. But it does more than that. Often pain holds you back from living the kind of life you want to live. There is no question that a person with a panic disorder would rather not experience the feeling of extreme fear, because it is so unpleasant. But that discomfort is compounded by the fact that the panic seemingly gets in the way of living itself.

If you have a panic disorder, you may have begun feeling too afraid to engage in the activities you normally would because of your fear that you might panic. It may be that you no longer go to the supermarket because you are afraid you might have a panic attack there. Perhaps you are uncomfortable in social situations, because you don’t want anyone to see you panic. You cultivate friends with whom you feel safe, but then you are dependent on their schedules and availability. You start to live your life in ways to accommodate your problem, and, as a result, your life becomes narrower and narrower, less and less flexible.

It is worth noting how much of the pain we feel is a focus of attention because it seems to interfere with other activities. One way to get at this core issue is to imagine how your life would be different if your pain went away. Imagine that someone has waved a magic wand over you, and your pain has vanished. Imagine that you wake up one morning and suddenly, for no reason at all, the chronic depression you’ve suffered from all these years (or the anxiety, or worry, or whatever your core struggles may be) is gone. The cloud has lifted and the pain is over. What would you do? This question isn’t a rhetorical one, we mean it literally: What would you do? What would you want your life to be about? How has your current psychological struggle interfered with your goals and aspirations? Let’s explore that in the exercise below.

EXERCISE: The Pain is Gone, Now What?

Take an item from your suffering inventory. It could be any item, but it might be best to start with an item high on your list and connected to other items. This is probably an issue that greatly inhibits your life. Now go ahead and fill in your problem, but don’t fill in what you would do if it were gone.

If …weren’t such a problem for me, I would….

If I didn’t have … , I would….

Now, think about what you would do if that pain were suddenly lifted. The point of this exercise is not to think about what you might like to do on a given day if your problems weren’t plaguing you. The idea isn’t to celebrate by saying, “My depression is gone, I’m going to Disneyland!” The point is to think more broadly about how your life course would change if your constant struggle with emotional pain was no longer an issue. Don’t worry if you think that you don’t have a good grip on this yet. Just go with your gut instinct. Somewhere within yourself you have some idea about the things that really matter to you. Concentrate on those.

Here are three examples to give you an idea of what I mean:

If anger weren’t such a problem for me, I would have more intimate relationships.

If I didn’t have so much stress, I would work harder at my career, and I would try to find the job I always dreamed of having.

If I wasn’t so anxious, I would travel and participate more fully in life.

Now, go back and fill in the blank lines about what you would do if your pain disappeared. Be honest with yourself and think about what you really want. Think about what has value to you. Think about what gives your life meaning.

Now, let’s do that again but this time, let’s use a different area of suffering (although it certainly wouldn’t hurt to do this exercise with all of the items on your Suffering Inventory). This time, choose an item that appears to affect a different area of your life than the first one you chose. (Although after thinking about them you may find that they are not as different as they seem to be.)

If …weren’t such a problem for me, I would….

If I didn’t have … , I would….

THE PROBLEM WITH PAIN: REVISITED

You’ve just discovered that all of your problems provide you with two sources of pain. It is not just your anxiety or depression or worry that creates pain. Your pain is also holding you back from living the life you want to lead. There are activities you would be engaged in if it weren’t for your pain and the role it has played in your life.

The problem you wrote down in the exercises above refers to the pain of presence (issues that are present that you would prefer to go away). Social anxiety might be an example of the pain of presence. The anxiety you feel on social occasions is real and present in the moment you feel it. You may wish it would go away. Nonetheless, it persists in the face of your best efforts to defeat it. This is the pain of presence.

Those activities you would engage in if matters changed, represent a different kind of pain: they are called the pain of absence. As an example, consider the same socially phobic person above. Perhaps this person truly values engaging with other people but their fear keeps them from doing so in ways that are meaningful. The connection with others that is so yearned for is not there. This is the pain of absence. You have pain on top of pain, suffering on top of suffering. Not only must you deal with the immediate pain of your thoughts, feelings, and physical ailments, you also must deal with the pain caused by the fact that your pain prevents you from living the kind of life you want to live.

Now see if this next sentence is true for you: Generally, the more you live your life trying to ward off the pain of presence, the more pain you get, particularly in the form of the pain of absence.

Remember, I asked for honesty and openness about your own experience. Even if it doesn’t seem logical that this should be so, look and see if it isn’t true. While you’ve focused more on getting rid of the pain of presence, you’ve been feeling more of the pain of absence. If that’s what’s been happening for you, it may feel as though life is closing in around you. It may feel as though you’re in some kind of trap. If you’ve been experiencing those kinds of feelings, then a therapeutic modality like ACT is about finding a way out. There’s an alternative to living as though you’ve been trapped.

LIVING A VALUED LIFE: AN ALTERNATIVE

Often, we attach ourselves to our pain, and we start to judge our lives based on how we feel and not on what we do. In a way, we become our pain. The answers you’ve filled in as your responses to the four sentences in the two exercises above contain the seeds of another kind of life: a life in which what you do is connected not to your pain, or to the avoidance of your pain, but to the kind of life you truly want to live.

The therapeutic modalities I offer are not about solving your problems in a traditional way so much as it is about changing the direction of your life, so that your life is more about what you value. Moreover, the unnecessary amplification of pain stops. When that happens, the issues you’ve been struggling with will begin to diminish. Your life will begin to open up and become more wide-ranging, more flexible, and more meaningful.

These ways of thinking about our pain ask us to allow the possibility of living a life you value to be our guide. They aren’t asking us to go out and lead a different life right this minute. There is a lot of work to do first. None of this will be easy because the traps our minds set for us will continue to be laid.

In a therapeutic mode like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) we’ll have a set of processes that do seem to empower the people who work with these processes to improve their lives and to dismantle troublesome traps and dead ends. Gradually, step by step, I can walk you through those processes in the service of living a vital, valued, meaningful life.

If you are willing, let’s talk more.

Categories
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Anxiety Control Living A Valued Life Ritual Structure Values

WHY RITUAL?

We need to talk about ritual. The anthropologist Roy Rappaport writes: “Humanity is a species that lives and can only live in terms of meanings it itself must invent.” If this is so, ritual is fertile ground for creating meaning in our lives.

For meaning, we often substitute the word philosophy, but a distinction needs to be made here a la Foucault’s discrimination between philosophy and spirituality. Philosophy, says Foucault, attempts to articulate the conditions and limits that circumscribe a subject’s access to truth. Spirituality, in contrast, consists in a set of practices through which “the subject carries out the necessary transformations on himself in order to have access to the truth.”

Embedded in the word “spirituality” is, of course, the word “ritual.” Ritual knowledge, the knowledge gained from spiritual practices, postulates that in order to know there must be a transformation of the subject. Although the S-word is not bandied around that much in psychotherapy anymore (Freud’s atheism enduring to this day_, I think the cogntive-behavioural transformations we’re seeking in our lives are sometimes better understood as spiritual ones. Ritual gives us access to these spiritual truths.

CREATURES OF HABIT

Ethology explains how animals adopt rituals in order to smooth over the conflicts inherent in our inner emotional states. Animal ceremonies evolve, so the reasoning goes, in response to having to manage emotional discord created by ambivalence inherent in the conflict created by two or more behavioral tendencies that may lead to trouble. Sexual attraction, for example, draws a pair close together, but proximity also produces fear and the desire to flee, on one hand, and hostility and aggression on the other. A balanced attitude from the extremes of flight or fight is required for successful mating, and the ritualization of appeasing gestures and displays is the route to establishing such attitudes.

Certain psychotherapeutic schools, especially those designed to work with trauma (Schema Therapy, EMDR, Internal Family Systems) are all alive to the ritual possibilities of healing. Trauma and ritual have always in some way been linked, chicken-and-egg like. So how do we create in our highly abstract and technology-infused culture the space for abreaction that might be found in Traditional cultures like the Inuit and which we as human animals might still require for our well-being.

The Inuits, as do many tribal societies, employ drumming matches and singing duels to deal with conflict situations within the tribe. Someone who believes himself wronged by insult, theft, or injury may challenge his opponent to a singing duel, which takes place publicly, in the enclosed confines of the igloo. Jokes, insults, and derision, delivered with a sarcastic and mocking tone, are staples of the match, accompanied by dramatic enactments, such as pretending to sew the opponent’s mouth shut, sticking out one’s buttocks, or breathing in the face of the opponent. The opponent, for his part, is to take in the performance with reserve and equanimity, until his turn comes to sing complaints and insults. In this way, mistakes, misdeeds, faults of character, and perceived wrongs are freely and publically aired, a process that relieves such wrongs of their potency to generate violence. Typically, the contest ends with a reconciling feast. Such duels can last for days, even years, and are conducted both within and across communities.

I think we can learn a great deal from the ways in which these tribal conflicts have been solved for millenia while trying to understanding how our inner conflicts can be managed.

WHAT IS RITUAL?

Frazer in his Golden Bough suggested three things about ritual. First, the original and primary ritual form is that of blood sacrifice. The word sacrifice literally means to do (facere) a sacred thing (sacra). Metaphorically speaking, the blood element indicates that this “sacrifice” needs to feel deeply meaningful and valuable. We sacrifice something in the short term (money, time, effort) for a long term goal.

Second, ritual represents natural process or mythic-historical events or narratives, the stories of our lives and those of our tribes.

Third, ritual is inherently an act of magic, informed by the idea that “you can produce any desired effect by merely imitating it.” I think this is true for the enactment processes of experiential psychotherapy models like Schema Therapy and Internal Family Systems where we attempt to “enact” a change by visualising or re-enacting new ways of being. It’s that old Gandhi line: Be the change you wish to see. Ritual, to use Don Handelman’s term might also be seen as “events that re-present.” Ritual in this view is like a piece of society, or the socialised psyche, which society or client-therapist cut out and offer to themselves for inspection, reflection, and possibly criticism.

What often gets in the way of this happening in sessions, is that we can struggle to step out of a more superficial “play frame” in order to enter the deeper healing frame of ritual. In the play frame messages and gestures are understood to be fictive, if not actually false: the child waving a wand is not Harry Potter, and that child knows it. Within the ritual frame, in contrast, messages are conceived and understood to be somehow true and real; another way to put this is that the ritual frame articulates that which is taken to be of ultimate, foundational, and fundamental value. The difference lies in the metamessage associated with each. The metamessage of ritual is that everything within the ritual frame is sanctified, true, real, and believed.

We see this very powerfully in the documentary The Work, my favourite doc of this year where the prison in which certain dramaturgical and body-centered rituals take place, becomes a kind of transformative “cave” of the soul, maybe like the Chauvet caves explored by Werner Herzog in his equally wonderful Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

Imagine: small numbers of our Paleolithic ancestors descending into the dangerous territory of the caves. Perhaps a charismatic individual leads them, revealing and inducting new members into the mysteries of the underworld. There, in the shadows and light cast by torches, they drum, sing, and reach out to the textured surface of the walls, with their cracks, folds, and hidden recesses. The skulls and bones of animals are handled and enshrined in niches or on rocks, which serve as our earliest altars. Images of animals are painted; earlier paintings are revered as icons of the intimate relation between human and animal worlds, and as links to the group’s ancestors. The impulse to leave the daily world of light and safety for the dangers of the caves suggest an urge to seek out a distinct place for extraordinary (ritualised) acts, a place that by virtue of its very separation from ordinary life was perhaps thought to offer knowledge and experience of the world in its totality.

DAY-TO-DAY RITUALS

Ritual can also be seen as a way of structuring our lives. Most religious communities are structured on an hourly, if not even minute-by-minute basis. We can learn a great deal from the ritualised structuring of these communities. Let’s look at a passage from the “Testamentary Admonitions”, written by the statesman and courtier Fujiwara no Morosuke over a thousand years ago:

Upon arising, first of all repeat seven times in a low voice the name of the star of the year. Take up a mirror and look at your face, to scrutinize changes in your appearance. Then look at the calendar and see whether the day is one of good or evil omen. Next use your toothbrush and then, facing West, wash your hands. Chant the name of the Buddha and invoke those gods and divinities whom we ought always to revere and worship. Next make a record of the events of the previous day. Now break your fast with rice gruel. Comb your hair once every three days, not every day. Cut your ngernails on a day of the Ox, your toenails on a day of the Tiger. If the day is auspicious, now bathe, but only once every fifth day.

We have here a template you might say for ritualized living:

  • Repeating an action (perform each morning; repeat seven times)
  • Prescribing and regularizing the details (next do this; next do that)
  • Linking and elevating the action by associating it with sacred values, narratives, or gures (chant the name of the Buddha)
  • Framing an action temporally, in terms of symbolic or historical time (in the name of the star of the year; look at the calendar)
  • Invoking powers or gurus to whom reverence, respect, honor is due (divinities whom we ought always to revere and worship)
  • Performing the action with a special attitude (look at your face; reflect)

Sometimes when we are struggling in the welter of experience, it can be useful to think of how we can ritualize our lives according to these guidelines.

One of my daily rituals is to to learn and recite poems. Taking the dog for a walk each day I recite an ee cumming’s poem which has these lines in it:

i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday

…

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

Every time I recited these lines, no matter what has been going on in my head up to this point, I notice that I am able to become more present to the world around me, especially the natural world. My ears really do wake up (even to the roar of traffic, but also bird-song), and my eyes open to the diversity of nature’s forms. Ritual brings us back into the rhythms of our bodies, our culture, and our species. Through ritual we become fully alive once again to the present moment.

 

FURTHER EXPLORATION

Aldous, G., & McLeary, J. (2017). The Work. Dogwoof.

Eliade, M., & Doniger, W. (2004). Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. (W. R. Trask, Trans.) (With a New foreword by Wendy Doniger edition). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Eliade, Mircea. Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth. New York: Harper, 1958.

Frazer, S. J. G. (2009). The Golden Bough A Study in Magic and Religion. (R. Fraser, Ed.) (Reissue edition). Oxford: OUP Oxford.
Handelman, Don, and Galina Lindquist, eds. Ritual in Its Own Right: Exploring the Dynamics of Transformation. New York: Berghahn Books, 2005.

Handelman, D. (n.d.). Framing. Theorizing Ritual, Eds., J. Kreinath, J. Snoek & M. Stausberg. Leiden: Brill. Retrieved from https://www.academia.edu/3531356/Framing

Herzog, W. (2011). Cave Of Forgotten Dreams. Revolver Entertainment.

Markman, K. D., Proulx, T., & Lindberg, M. J. (Eds.). (2013). The Psychology of Meaning (1 edition). Washington, DC: American Psychological Assoc.

Rappaport, Roy. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Categories
Acceptance Acceptance and Commitment Therapy ACT Core Needs Feel Better Guided Practice

The serenity to accept? The serenity?!?

Tiger StrawberryI have for many years been haunted by a Zen parable about a man being chased by a tiger. Here it is in full:

There was a man walking across an open field, when suddenly a tiger appeared and began to give chase. The man began to run, but the tiger was closing in. As he approached a cliff at the edge of the field, the man grabbed a vine and jumped over the cliff. Holding on as tight as he could, he looked up and saw the angry tiger prowling out of range ten feet above him. He looked down. In the gully below, there were two tigers also angry and prowling. He had to wait it out. He looked up again and saw that two mice, one white, the other black, had come out of the bushes and had begun gnawing on the vine, his lifeline. As they chewed the vine thinner and thinner, he knew that he could break at any time. Then, he saw a single wild strawberry growing just an arms length away. Holding the vine with one hand, he reached out, picked the strawberry, and put it in his mouth. It was delicious.

There are many lessons to be drawn from this parable, but the one I’d like to focus on here is that of acceptance.

ACCEPT (v) late 14c., “to take what is offered; admit and agree to (a proposal, etc.),” from Old French accepter (14c.) or directly from Latin acceptare “take or receive willingly,” frequentative of accipere “receive, get without effort,” from ad “to” (see ad-) + capere “to take,” from PIE root *kap- “to grasp.”

The challenge of acceptance, which is already implicit in the etymology of the word is not only to sanction, tolerate, accede to something we’d rather not have to take or put up with, but at the same time to “take or receive willingly”. As an act of choosing, of volition (from the Old English willan, wyllan “to wish, desire; be willing; be used to; be about to”).

26208860994_f2047036a9_kThe character in this Zen fable models different forms of acceptance. There is the choiceless acceptance of running away from a genuine danger (not to be confused with running from imaginary tigers, which is more often what we do); the choiceless choice of taking a risk, a metaphorical leap into the dark in order to reach a safer place, or hanging tenuously onto a lifeline. But then there is also the kind of choice at the end of the story which feels very ACT-like: focusing, even in the midst of stress, and strain, and genuine anxiety or terror, on a valued action. Depression and anxiety tells us that in the midst of our struggles we must either give up (freeze), or escape in some way (fight, flight). And sometimes these are helpful responses. But often we cannot make significant changes to our lives or ourselves swiftly enough to rid ourselves of all the tigers (real, or imaginary) out there. What we can do, however, is focus moment-by-moment on self-care, on pleasure, as well as those things that are meaningful to us. The strawberry represents both of these I believe.

46418566802_55ecc2d4bc_kRecently I’ve been thinking about the word “grant” in the Serenity Prayer. “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” There is in that word the recognition that a certain level of patience with ourselves is required to reach this state of allowing, assent, surrender. Or that maybe it is not fully in our control to accept. We pray, we plead, we recognise how much we cling to having things (people, the world, ourselves) how we would like them as opposed to how they frustratingly present themselves to us, and see the pain that clinging generates. And then we wait for our bodies, as much as our minds to let go. Which more often than not, they don’t, do they?

It sounds so easy when presented in poetry or in a self-help book. Like Mary Oliver does here in her poem “In Blackwater Woods”:

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it
go,
to let it go.

I sometimes ask someone who is struggling with acceptance and letting something go (and we’re all struggling with this in one form or another) to do some sentence stems with “God grant me the serenity to accept…”, focusing on all those things we’d like to accept, to “let go of” in a fluid, Mary Oliverish way, and yet our fingers continue to tightly gripping, gripping, tightly gripping.

This recent piece of writing from Gail* expresses this so well.

God, Grant Me The Serenity

To accept that my attractive (married) Romanian neighbour with the hooked nose and brown eyes that turns me fiercely on will never be mine. To accept that my plantar (right foot), anterior tibialis (left foot) and ankle bone (left) don’t always play ball like they used to. To accept that 99% of the men I have access to on Bumble, Hinge, OKCupid, Badoo, and Tinder bore the pants off me. To accept that the one man I dated for a while this year who didn’t bore me, doesn’t want to be in a relationship with me; to accept that I maybe bore him, or am too needy for him, or something.  To accept that it gets dark every afternoon at 4pm, and this will continue in earnest until Friday, the 21st of December, shortest day of the year. To accept that my notion of a romantic partner, a soulmate, a friend&lover needs to be downscaled in terms of what others are willing to offer me, at least initially. To accept that I am of value to others as a kind friend/hand-holder/carer rather than as a maker of things. To accept that I am addicted to [redacted] and can’t imagine my life without it. To accept that the planet is being destroyed by our greed and selfishness, but I don’t want to give up on my greed and selfishness. To accept that I struggle with acceptance.

Resistance and clinging are not a problem per se. “The whole notion of resistance,” writes Adam Phillips, “implies that there could be acceptance.”

But how to get to that place of acceptance without waiting for God, or some Higher Power to magically “grant” it to us on a whim?

14629078269_4c3a631513_kWhat Gail is struggling to accept, and she is not alone in this, is desire and longing: for a partner, for more light in a day, for consumer goods that don’t come with an environmental price tag. “From the urgent way lovers want each other to the seeker’s search for truth, all moving is from the mover,” writes Rumi. “Every pull draws us to the ocean.” And what does the ocean desire, other than to be, and to be fully itself, expressive of itself, inhabiting the space it needs to inhabit? This is a primal desire, and one which moves everything in existence, including us. The same universal force of attraction that gathers atoms into molecules and holds solar systems spinning in galaxies also joins sperm with eggs and makes us swipe left and right on each other on our dating apps.

While often uncomfortable, desire is not bad—it is natural. The pull of desire is part of our survival equipment. It keeps us eating, having sex, going to work, doing what we do to thrive. Desire also motivates us to read books, listen to talks and explore spiritual practices that help us realize and inhabit loving awareness. The same life energy that leads to suffering also provides the fuel for insight and interest. Desire becomes a problem only when it takes over our sense of who we are.

As human beings our desire for happiness focuses on fulfilling our needs. According to psychologist Abraham Maslow, our needs range in a hierarchy from basic biological drives to spiritual yearnings. We need security, food and sex; emotional recognition and bonding; mental engagement and creative activity; communion and self-realization. Meeting these needs of body, mind and spirit gives us satisfaction and pleasure; denying them leaves us feeling deprived, frustrated and incomplete. We seek out experiences that enable us to survive, thrive and be fulfilled.

If our desires are simple and can be temporarily satisfied, our way of responding is straightforward. When thirsty, we drink. When tired, we sleep. When lonely, we talk to a friend. Yet, as we know, it’s rarely this uncomplicated. Most of the time our wanting is not so easily satisfied. Often our desires fixate on soothing, once and for all, our anxieties. We strive to tie up all the loose ends and to avoid making mistakes, even though we know both are impossible.

15739663939_ceeb05590c_kThe Latin root of the word desire, “desidus,” means “away from a star.” One way to interpret this is that stars are the energetic source of all life and an expression of pure awareness. This aliveness and wakefulness is what we long for most deeply—we long to belong to our star, to realize our own true nature. Yet because our desires habitually narrow and fixate on what by nature passes away, we feel “away from our star,” away from the life, awareness and love that is the essence of who we are. Feeling apart from the source of our being, we identify ourselves with our wants and with the ways that we try to satisfy them.

Often our desiring selves are also our most shameful selves. For this is often the cloying, under-the-radar of consciousness feeling, when our basic needs to be loved and understood are frustrated. If, like Gail, our needs for connection are consistently ignored or misunderstood, our wanting grows stronger, and we seek even more urgently the attention we crave. We spend our lives trying to get away from our painful feelings of fear and shame, disconnecting from and numbing our body, getting lost in self-judgment and obsessive thinking. But this only serves to increase our wanting and shame. As the cycle of reactivity repeats itself over and over, our identity as a wanting self—fundamentally deprived, isolated and unworthy—deepens.

Most mainstream religions—Judeo-Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Confucian—teach that our wanting, passion and greed cause suffering. While this certainly can be true, their blanket teachings about the dangers of desire often deepen self-hatred. We are counseled to transcend, overcome or somehow manage the hungers of our physical and emotional being. Audre Lorde tells us, “We have been raised to fear . . . our deepest cravings. And the fear of our deepest cravings keeps them suspect, keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, and leads us to settle for . . . many facets of our own oppression.”

We are unable to give ourselves freely and joyfully to any activity if the wanting self is in charge. And yet, until we attend to the basic desires and fears that energize the wanting self, it will insinuate itself into our every activity and relationship.

4461591095_7211da6985_bWilla Cather tells us, “There is only one big thing—desire. And before it, when it is big, all is little.” We can honour desire as a life force, but still see how it causes suffering when it takes over our life. Our natural hunger for food can become an ungovernable craving for food—ice cream, sweets, potato chips—comfort food or food to numb our feelings. Our longing for sex and affection can become an anguished dependency on another human being to define and please us. Our need for shelter and clothing can turn into insatiable greed, compelling us to possess three houses and closets full of unworn shoes. Our fundamental longing to belong and feel loved becomes an insistent craving for substitutes.

If we have been acutely frustrated or deprived, our fixated desire becomes desperate and unquenchable. We are possessed by craving, and our entire life is hijacked by the force of this energy. We feel like a wanting self in all situations, with all people, throughout the day. If we are taken over by craving, no matter who or what is before us, all we can see is how it might satisfy our needs. This kind of thirst contracts our body and mind into a profound trance. We move through the world with a kind of tunnel vision that prevents us from enjoying what is in front of us. The colour of the autumn leaves or a passage of poetry merely amplifies the feeling that there is a gaping hole in our life. The smile of a child only reminds us that we are painfully childless. We turn away from simple pleasures because our craving compels us to seek more intense stimulation or numbing relief.

So how to bring ourselves back into a Healthy Adult or Wise Mind headspace where we can experience some of the above not just as concepts but as ways of being, ways of freeing ourselves when trapped in the craving, deprivation-driven grasp of our inner addicts? Here are a couple of things you might like to try. I’m presenting them below as a kind of guided practice. I find these are more effective when we listen and give ourselves up to the experience of these exercises, rather than just try to digest them cognitively as ideas on a page. Ideas can form the basis of prayers, poems and mantras, but in order to feel the benefits of a practice, it’s best we give our bodies to them, as much as our minds.

ACCEPTANCE OF CORE NEEDS PRACTICE:  Dropbox link to MP3 file 

ACCEPTANCE OF THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS PRACTICE: Dropbox link to MP3 file

[All names and some significant details of the above piece have been changed in order to safeguard the anonymity of those involved.]

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Categories
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Addiction Feel Better Living A Valued Life Strategies and tools

Meeting Cravings with Kindness

Because we are pleasure-seeking, pain-avoiding creatures, for most of us, there is going to be something in our lives, maybe even a series of things that we develop a somewhat addictive relationship with.

For the sake of simplicity, by addiction here, I’m not necessarily talking about that especially dramatic or tragic addiction narrative that me might associate with the word ADDICTION in capital letters, associations in our minds pointing to Hubert Selby Junior’s Requiem for a Dream, or Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting – these being the outer limits of that pain-avoiding/pleasure-seeking dynamic we all experience as human beings. What I’m primarily talking about here are our everyday addictions.

My definition of addiction, caps or small-case, would simply be: that moment in the day when the thing you want, or the the thing you want to do, feels so strong, so compelling, so fused and necessary to your well-being that you would score the following statement very, very high if asked to give it a number out of ten:

“If I don’t get [whatever it is I want at this moment] into my system, I’m not going to feel OK.”

also

“Only eating/drinking/doing [whatever it is I want at this moment] will satisfy me or make me feel better, or just alright.”

If you’re scoring six to ten on these statements for anything, pleasurable or painful, it would be fair to say (in my book) that you’re somewhat addicted to that thing. I have never felt this way about cabbage, or watching Question Time. I suspect some might be addicted to the latter, but not me! Also important here is that a feeling of remorse after doing the activity, a feeling of perhaps having let yourself down (which is to say your Core-Valued Self). Again, I never feel that way after eating cabbage or watching Question Time. But I do after watching a couple of episodes of the latest binge-fest on Netflix for example.

Here are some of the things I have an addictive relationship with (you might want to create your own list as I bet at least some of these come up for you too):

  • sugary and refined-carbohydrate foods (ice-cream, biscuits, cake, crisps and other snacks, bread, crackers)
  • rich and satisfying foods, also comfort foods: cheese, peanuts, peanut-butter, mashed potatoes, chips
  • intoxicants (booze, especially wine; weed; I’d also include sugar, tea and coffee here; music can also be an intoxicant, but I never feel bad about listening to Forever In Blue Jeans on repeat, so I guess at least I’m not addicted to Neil Diamond – whew!)
  • mental stimulants: Twitter, YouTube, WhatsApp, Bumble, downloading new books/music/films
  • Have-To or Need-To-Do urges: an overwhelming need to reply to a message to someone, or some other form of communication that feels as if it can’t wait, or to send a message or an email (the content of the message could be positive or barbed)
  • and probably a whole bunch of other behaviours that I haven’t thought about whilst writing this post

Our remorse when following through with our addictive behaviours, like all emotions can give us a really valuable clue as to what the addiction is trying to say to us. And also perhaps one way in which we might be able to start working with the addictive parts of us. Here’s one idea of how to do that.

MEETING CRAVINGS WITH KINDNESS

The next time you are assailed by an addictive thought, or urge (“If I don’t go and get a glass of wine in me as soon as I finish work today, I’m done for!”) here’s something you might like to try.

Imagine that Addicted Part of your mind is one of your more reckless, but also gregarious and fun friends who has just sent you a text saying: “Hey Steve, fancy doing […] this evening! I know you want to! 😉 PLUS you deserve it – you’ve worked hard today! Give yourself a treat mate. All work and no play makes Steve a pretty dull therapist etc.”

OK, time to ask “Pat” to just give you 15 minutes and you’ll get back to him with your response.

I call my Craving Mind Patrick, by the way, after someone I knew at University who was pretty much 24/7 on the lash. If you were wanting to go out for a piss-up, or any other intoxicating or pleasure-seeking pursuit, Pat was not only ready and willing, but deeply committed to the two of you having as much fun as possible. Yes, the evening would invariably end with him puking or shitting himself, or needing to be carried home, but when you’re young with a full of head of hair, there is a kind of romantic splendour to these sorts of shenanigans. (You might want to help yourself defuse a little from your craving mind by giving it a name too. Even if you don’t try anything I’ve written below, just recognising when your craving mind is sending you an “invitation” as Patrick/Cruella/Milly doing so, can be a really helpful and defusing start.)

OK, you’ve now got 15 minutes to reconnect with your core caring self and your core value system.

If you were a parent, this self would come to the fore if your son or daughter told you they were going out with Pat to get hammered on whatever was available, or he might score from the local drug dealer when out. Equally, you might feel sad if you saw a close friend or family member pursuing a substance or activity (food, work, drink, whatever) that you could see was only intermittently providing them with pleasure, but than anything else: a good dose of suffering.

So what are you going to do in the next 15 minutes? You’re going to listen to this guided meditation which leads you through a kind of heart-and-soul boogie, designed primarily to top-up your levels of self-care and kindness, but also to send some of the overflow out to other people: https://www.dropbox.com/s/xndq9j00b8zpoqa/Kindness%20Practice.mp3?dl=0

That’s not my voice you’ll hear, but the mellifluous tones of Russ Harris, and the practice can be found on his ActCompanion app, which is also worth a gander.

You’ll notice when doing the meditation that you use some of the following phrases when sending kindness to yourself and others:

  • May you be peaceful.
  • May you be healthy.
  • May you be content.
  • May you experience love.
  • May you experience kindness.
  • May your life be rich, full and meaningful.

I think these phrases can also be used as a kind of compass for us to decide whether we really want or need to join “Patrick” on whatever he’s dreamt up for us that day or evening. Big or small. Last night, I used the exercise below to decide whether I wanted to send a WhatsApp message to an ex-girlfriend, as well as whether I would have a glass of wine or two rather than a mocktail with my pistachio nuts whilst cooking. You can use these for anything you have an addictive relationship with.

EXERCISE: A FEW KIND WAYS OF GETTING IN TOUCH WITH YOUR CORE VALUES

Think for a moment about the thing you’re feeling compelled to do. Now really get in touch with the urge. Feel it in your body and as an almost insistent command. You will also be able to get in touch with this a kind of “craving” frequency in your mind. You might even want to put your hands into the “shape” of that craving. Altogether now, Strike a Pose!

Now work through the following six reflections:

  1. MAY YOU BE PEACEFUL: Will this thing you want to do at this very moment lead to greater peace of mind? If it will, will that peace of mind extend to how you’ll feel tomorrow when thinking back about your behaviour? If not, what is it you could do right now that would fit the above criteria and help you to feel more peaceful?
  2. MAY YOU BE HEALTHY: Bring to mind an image of yourself at your healthiest – emotionally and physically. Will the thing you’re craving to do at this moment promote and add to that healthy-you? If not, is there something else you could do right now, that would also perhaps be pleasurable, or stress-reducing, even if not as pleasurable as the thing your Craving Mind wants you to do. But instead will certainly contribute to acting, and thus feeling more healthy?
  3. MAY YOU BE CONTENT: Notice, the word is not “happy” or ROTFLMFAO. That last phrase is very “Pat”, btw. The origins of the word “content” are more to do with feeling satisfied and “contained” in some way. Like we feel when we’re doing a meditation such as the one I provided above. Would doing this activity help you to feel genuinely “content”? Would you feel content tomorrow, or later on, knowing you’d done it? If so, go for it! If not, what could you do right now that might help you to feel content in a “satisfied” and “contained” way?
  4. MAY YOU EXPERIENCE LOVE? Does your “Patrick” love you? Mine doesn’t. He’s just the part of my pleasure-seeking/pain-avoiding brain that wants to do the activity he’s been “programmed” to do by hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years of evolution: head for the yummy stuff (booze, sex, dancing, whatever), and avoid the yucky stuff (essays, reading, meditation). What would a loving friend suggest the two of you do/eat/experience? Maybe you can be that friend to yourself at this moment?
  5. MAY YOU EXPERIENCE KINDNESS: Again, is this the kindest thing you can do for yourself at this moment. Is Patrick motivated by kindness? If the word kindness doesn’t sit well with you, perhaps has some kind of religious or religiose overtones to your critical-judging mind, try a word like “helpful”? If doing the thing Patrick wants you to do is the most helpful thing you can do for yourself at this moment, go for it! If not, maybe you might want to send a text to him saying “thanks, but-no-thanks, Pat!”, and do something kind for yourself right now. 
  6. MAY YOUR LIFE BE RICH, FULL, AND MEANINGFUL: Again, you might want to spend a moment thinking about what a rich, full, and meaningful life for yourself might look like in the here and now, without changing your job, or your flat, or anything else for that matter (though change might be part of this process too). If the thing you want to do is aligned to that vision you have of yourself, go for it! If not, is there an activity you can do right here and now that will add to the richness, fullness and meaning of the next ten minutes of your life, the next hour of this finite timespan we all have allotted to us. 

You don’t have to go through all of these steps to benefit from this defusion technique. Even just getting into the habit of imagining that every craving you have (to go on Twitter or Instagram, to check your phone for a text message, to eat another biscuit, whatever) is a text from your Craving Mind, and then just very quickly ask yourself if following-through with the urge would be kind or helpful? This is a great first step. And may be the only step you need to take in order to unhook yourself from your craving thoughts and urges.

You might want to follow this by a second step of simply saying aloud, maybe two or three times, something like: “Thanks Pat, I’d really love to [and meaning it, because you really would love to do this], but I can’t today/tonight.” And then getting on with something else that is meaningful to you.

Even if we did this one out of ten times that our craving minds hooked us into their desires (not actually your desires, your value-driven desires, but our pleasure-seeking/pain-avoidant brain’s desires), we’d be 10% freer than we are at present.

And that would feel good, wouldn’t it?