Acceptance And Commitment Therapy Quotes

The feeling of love comes and goes on a whim; you can't control it. But the action of love is something you can do, regardless of how you are feeling.

What we need to learn to do is to look at thought, rather than from thought.

Stop trying to control how you feel, and instead take control of what you do.

The process of living is like taking a very long road trip. The destination may be important, but the journey experienced day to day and week to week is what is invaluable.

learning certain techniques as part of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) can disarm the discomfort that so often leads to harmful distractions

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

Thoughts are like lenses through which we look at our world.

The problem with problem solving is that it is a mode of mind that does not know when to stop.

Does the client experience life as merely imposed or rather as something he or she can author in a meaningful and ongoing way?

The more importance we place on avoiding unpleasant feelings in life, the more our life tends to go downhill.

Why willingness? Because I absolutely know how my pain works when I am unwilling, and I’m sick and tired of it. It’s time to change my whole agenda, not just the moves I make inside a control and avoidance agenda.

Another key process in the cycle of suffering is experiential avoidance. It is an immediate consequence of fusing with mental instructions that encourage the suppression, control, or elimination of experiences expected to be distressing.

The fact that you can act with love even when you don’t feel love is very empowering. Why? Because whereas the feelings of love are fleeting and largely out of your control, you can take the actions of love anytime and anyplace for the whole rest of your life.

Deictic framing can be successfully taught, however, and when it is, perspective-taking and theory-of-mind skills improve

Vision without action is a daydream; action without vision is a nightmare.

You cannot be a good ACT therapist if you take words to be right, correct, and true rather than asking “How effectual are they?

People whose cognitions fuse are likely to ignore direct experience and become relatively oblivious to environmental influences.

These skills involve consciously experiencing feelings as feelings, thoughts as thoughts, memories as memories, and so on.

As human beings increasingly look inward, life begins to seem more like a problem to be solved than a process to be fully experienced.

When you try not to think of something, you do that by creating this verbal rule: “Don’t think of x.” That rule contains x, so it will tend to evoke x, just as the sounds “gub-gub” can evoke a picture of an imaginary animal. Thus, when we suppress our thoughts, we not only must think of something else, we have to hold ourselves back from thinking about why we are doing that. If we check to see whether our efforts are working, we will remember what we are trying not to think and we will think it. The worrisome thought thus tends to grow. If

This book and my work are a way of adding meaning and commitment to my life. It also honors the child inside myself who was never understood or accepted by me until my journey into myself began and continues".

The problem is that we are not trained to discriminate when the mind is useful and when it is not, and we have not developed the skills to shift out of a fused problem-solving mode of mind into a descriptively engaged mode of mind.

Acceptance and commitment therapy, a variant on cognitive therapy, attempts to teach people to accept rather than change their emotions and make decisions within the context of what they value, as opposed to letting negative feelings control their behavior.

The goal is not to “fix” people but rather to empower them. What the psychological flexibility model provides is a characterization of key features that can be changed, but it does not specify how to link history to those features, nor precisely how to intervene in a step-by-step fashion.

Most people have a way to go in terms of developing intimacy and connecting skills when they get married or enter a long-term relationship. But the great thing about a committed relationship is that the relationship itself is a form of therapy. If both partners are committed, most of their differences can be worked out and even appreciated. Shame as the root feeling of humility allows each partner to appreciate and accept the other’s foibles and idiosyncrasies.

casual acceptance of—even commitment to—human deprivation, to unemployment, inflation, and disastrously reduced living standards. This is even seen as essential therapy: out of the experience of unemployment and hunger will come a new and revitalized work ethic, a working force eager for the discipline of free enterprise.

We are in this stew together. We are caught in the same traps. With a small twist of fate, I could be sitting across from you, and you could be sitting across from me—both of us in opposite roles. Your problems are a special opportunity for you to learn and for me to learn. We are not cut from different cloths, but rather from the same cloth.

Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned. —Gautama Siddhãrta

We need to pay attention with a particular attitude: one of openness, curiosity, and receptiveness.

it is the breadth, flexibility, and meaningfulness of our roles and behaviors that defines health. Good health does not mean ease.

Even though you can't control outcomes for your child, you can parent unconditionally with all your heart.

The key verbal relations in the development of perspective taking are “deictic,” which means “by demonstration.

Gedachten zijn als lenzen waardoor we naar onze wereld kijken.

For example, the client who values education might be asked, “What if you received the education, but no one knew. Would that still be of importance?

The constructive alternative to fusion is defusion, and the preferred alternative to experiential avoidance is acceptance.

It is based on a pragmatic philosophy of science called functional contextualism

Hmmm. Let’s do this and see what happens. Say out loud, ‘I can’t stand up or I will have a panic attack,’ and then while doing that, slowly stand up”).

Perfectionism is inherently self-critical—an inflexible and extreme form of self-evaluation that results in feelings of failure and worthlessness, even in the face of considerable accomplishments.

ACT uses acceptance and mindfulness processes and commitment and behavioral activation processes to produce psychological flexibility. It seeks to bring human language and cognition under better contextual control so as to overcome the repertoire-narrowing effects of an excessive reliance on a problem-solving mode of mind as well as to promote a more open, centered, and engaged approach to living.

The reason mindfulness skills work so well in depression is that they help you create a space between you and your thoughts and impulses. This allows you to pick approach behaviors instead of avoidance behaviors.

Once there is a verbally stated goal, however, we can assess the degree to which analytic practices help us achieve it. This option allows successful working toward a goal to function as a useful guide for science.

Allow yourself to think that the possibility of failure is a necessary part of parenting well.... Avoiding the possibility of failure means avoiding the possibility of being an extraordinary parent-and avoiding what you want for your child.

Psychological flexibility can be defined as contacting the present moment as a conscious human being, fully and without needless defense—as it is and not as what it says it is—and persisting with or changing a behavior in the service of chosen values.

To what extent does the client live in a world of “musts” and “shoulds” and “can’ts”? To what extent does the client live in a world of well-rehearsed excuses for why things are as they are—a world in which change is either impossible or for a time other than right now?

In the ACT approach, a goal of healthy living is not so much to feel good as to feel good. It is psychologically healthy to have unpleasant thoughts and feelings as well as pleasant ones, and doing so gives us full access to the richness of our unique personal histories

About 30 percent of all adults have a major psychiatric disorder at any given point in time, about 50 percent will have such a disorder at some point in their lives, and nearly 80 percent of these will have more than one serious psychological problem (Kessler et al. 1994).

I begin to experience myself as a conscious human being at the precise point at which I begin to experience you as a conscious human being. I see from a perspective only because I also see that you see from a perspective. Consciousness is shared. Moreover, you cannot be fully conscious here and now without sensing your interconnection with others in other places and other times. Consciousness expands across times, places, and persons. In the deepest sense, consciousness itself contains the psychological quality that we are conscious—timelessly and everywhere.

The Dilemma of Human Suffering Nothing external ensures freedom from suffering. Even when we human beings possess all the things we typically use to gauge external success—great looks, loving parents, terrific children, financial security, a caring spouse—it may not be enough. Humans can be warm, well fed, dry, physically well—and still be miserable. Humans can enjoy forms of excitement and entertainment unknown in the nonhuman world and out of reach for all but a fraction of the population—high-definition TVs, sports cars, exotic trips to the Caribbean—and still be in excruciating psychological pain.

Conscious content now is known in the context of a consistent locus or point of view that can integrate that knowledge. Infantile amnesia begins to drop away. Events are held in memory in a verbal temporal order. A conscious person shows up—not as the object of reflection but as a perspective from which knowing can occur.

Suffering occurs when people so strongly believe the literal contents of their mind that they become fused with their cognitions. In this fused state, the person cannot distinguish awareness from cognitive narratives since each thought and its referents are so tightly bound together. This combination means that the person is more likely to follow blindly the instructions that are socially transmitted through language. In some circumstances, this result can be adaptive; but in other cases, people may engage repeatedly in ineffective sets of strategies because to them they appear to be “right” or “fair” despite negative real-world consequences.

The classic self-problem seen in clinical settings is fusion with the content of verbal self-knowledge—such as “I am depressed” where “depressed” has the quality of a personal identity. This aspect of self—the conceptualized self—can be “positive” or “negative” or both, but its most dominant features are that it is rigid, evaluative, and evocative.

Comparison and Evaluation. Listen for excessive comparison and evaluation in the client’s speech, as contrasted with description. The clinician can probe the strength of such patterns of fusion by asking the client to simply describe the troublesome situation and what it evokes without injecting evaluations. Clients with high levels of fusion may not be able respond at all or may quickly lapse, injecting personal evaluations into the ongoing narrative.

LOVE is not just an acronym: it is a useful way of thinking about “love” itself. If you think of love as an ongoing process of letting go, opening up, valuing, and engaging, then it is always available to you—even when the feelings of love are absent. So in this sense of the word, you really can have everlasting love. But if you think of love merely as an emotion or feeling, then it can never last for long because all feelings and emotions continually change.

In ACT, we view depression not as a problem to be solved but as an important signal that something isn’t working quite right, that your life is out of balance in some important way We want to use the information contained in your depression to help you create a new life plan that doesn’t involve suppressing how you feel or avoiding important life situations that can determine your overall quality of life. In ACT, we believe that controlling your emotions, avoiding the situations that produce them, is the problem, not the solution.

Minds are great when it comes to inventing new devices, constructing business plans, or organizing daily schedules. But, by themselves, minds are far less useful in learning to be present, learning to love, or discovering how best to carry the complexities of a personal history. Verbal knowledge is not the only kind of knowledge there is. We must learn to use our analytical and evaluative skills when doing so promotes workability and to use other forms of knowledge when they best serve our interests. In effect, the ultimate goal of ACT is to teach clients to make such distinctions in the service of promoting a more workable life.

In humans, self-elimination can fulfill a variety of purposes, but its stated purposes are usually drawn from the everyday lexicon of emotion, memory and thought. For example, when suicide notes are examined, they tend to be messages emphasizing the immense burdens of living and conceptualizing a future state of existence (or nonexistence) in which those burdens will be lifted (Joiner et al., 2002). Although suicide notes frequently express love for others and a sense of shame for the act, they also commonly express that life is just too painful to bear (Foster, 2003). The emotions and most common states of mind generally associated with suicide include guilt, anxiety, loneliness, and sadness (Baumeister, 1990).

THOUGHTS AND REALITY You’ve probably heard of Plato’s allegory of the cave. It’s a story narrated by Socrates in Plato’s Republic, a long work published in Greece almost 2,500 years ago. In the story, prisoners in a cave are chained up in such a way that they have nothing to look at but the cave’s blank wall. But a fire is burning behind them, and when other people hold objects up in front of the fire, the shadows of those objects are projected onto the wall, where the prisoners can see them. The prisoners’ contact with these shadows, and their own thoughts about the shadows, are all they know of reality. Eventually the prisoners are freed. Only then do they discover that the world is bigger, more complex, and much more nuanced than the flickering shadows they took for reality.

Suppose your partner has deep-seated fears of abandonment: afraid that you will leave her for someone “better.” Or suppose she fears becoming trapped, controlled, or “smothered.” Then when you fight, these fears will well up inside her; she may not even be aware of them because they very quickly get buried under blame or resentment. Or suppose deep inside your partner feels deeply unworthy: that he is inadequate, unlovable, not good enough. This is painful in itself, but when people feel this way inside, they often act in ways that strain the relationship. Your partner may continually seek approval, demand recognition for what he achieves or contributes, ask for reassurance that you love or admire him, or become quite jealous and possessive. If you then react with frustration, scorn, criticism, impatience, or boredom, you will reinforce his deep-seated sense of unworthiness. And this then gives rise to even more pain.

The Example of Suicide There is no more dramatic example of the degree to which suffering is part of the human condition than suicide. Death by deliberate choice is obviously the least desirable outcome one can imagine in life; yet, a surprisingly sizable proportion of the human family at one time or another seriously considers killing themselves, and a shockingly large number of them actually attempt to do so. Suicide is the conscious, deliberate, and purposeful taking of one’s own life. Two facts are starkly evident about suicide: (1) it is ubiquitous in human societies, and (2) it is arguably absent among all other living organisms. Existing theories of suicide are hard-pressed to logically account for both of these facts. Suicide is reported in every human society, both now and in the past. Approximately 11.5 per 100,000 persons in the United States actually commit suicide every year (Xu, Kochanek, Murphy, & Tejada-Vera, 2010), accounting for nearly 35,000 deaths in 2007.

Each new human life retraces this ancient story. Young children are the very essence of human innocence. They run, play, and feel—and, as in Genesis, when they are naked they are not ashamed. Children provide a model for the assumption of healthy normality, and their innocence and vitality are part of why the assumption seems so obviously true. But that vision begins to fade as children acquire language and become more and more like the creatures adults see reflected every day in their mirrors. Adults unavoidably drag their children from the Garden with each word, conversation, or story they relate to them. We teach children to talk, think, compare, plan, and analyze. And as we do, their innocence falls away like petals from a flower, to be replaced by the thorns and stiff branches of fear, self-criticism, and pretense. We cannot prevent this gradual transformation, nor can we fully soften it. Our children must enter into the terrifying world of verbal knowledge. They must become like us.

Ever seen a movie where the hero gets punched right in the face? A gruesome slow-mo close-up, where a spray of sweat and blood flies through the air? Notice how you wince, or flinch, or turn away even though you know it’s only a movie? Even though you know it’s make-believe, you can’t help relating to it on some level. How ironic is it that we can so easily relate to the nonexistent pain of a fictitious movie character, but we often completely forget about the very real pain of the people we love? Humans are social animals. When it comes to affairs of the heart, most of us are pretty similar. We want to be loved, respected, and cared for. We want to get along with others and generally have a good time with them. When we fight with, reject, or distance ourselves from the people we love, we don’t feel good. And when they fight with, reject, or distance themselves from us, we feel even worse. So when you fight with your partner, you both get hurt. Your partner may not reveal his pain to you; he may just get angry, or storm out of the house, or quietly switch on the TV and start drinking, but deep inside he hurts just like you. Your partner may refuse to talk to you, she may criticize you in scathing tones, or go out on the town with her friends, but deep inside, she hurts just as you are. It is so important to recognize and remember this. We tend to get so caught up in

We are cradlers of secrets. Every day patients grace us with their secrets, often never before shared. Receiving such secrets is a privilege given to very few. The secrets provide a backstage view of the human condition without social frills, role playing, bravado, or stage posturing. Sometimes the secrets scorch me and I go home and hold my wife and count my blessings. Other secrets pulsate within me and arouse my own fugitive, long-forgotten memories and impulses. Still others sadden me as I witness how an entire life can be needlessly consumed by shame and the inability to forgive oneself. Those who are cradlers of secrets are granted a clarifying lens through which to view the world—a view with less distortion, denial, and illusion, a view of the way things really are. (Consider, in this regard, the titles of books written by Allen Wheelis, an eminent psychoanalyst: The Way Things Are, The Scheme of Things, The Illusionless Man.) When I turn to others with the knowledge that we are all (therapist and patient alike) burdened with painful secrets—guilt for acts committed, shame for actions not taken, yearnings to be loved and cherished, deep vulnerabilities, insecurities, and fears—I draw closer to them. Being a cradler of secrets has, as the years have passed, made me gentler and more accepting. When I encounter individuals inflated with vanity or self-importance, or distracted by any of a myriad of consuming passions, I intuit the pain of their underlying secrets and feel not judgment but compassion and, above all, connectedness. When I was first exposed, at a Buddhist retreat, to the formal meditation of loving-kindness, I felt myself much at home. I believe that many therapists, more than is generally thought, are familiar with the realm of loving-kindness.

LEARNING TO

The idea is that your thinking affects your mood, which affects your behavior, which affects your mood, and so on.

YOUR EMOTIONS ARE NOT THE PROBLEM You are supposed to have feelings. Your emotions also evolved to help you survive. Sadness indicates a kind of loss and helps people slow down in order to heal.

Some of the prominent ones that have been particularly useful for many trauma survivors include dialectical behavior therapy for borderline personality (Linehan, 1993); systems training for emotional predictability and problem solving (STEPPS; Blum et al., 2008; Bos, Van Wel, Appelo, & Verbraak, 2010 also for borderline personality; short-term psychodynamic treatment of affect phobia (McCullough et al., 2003); and mindfulness and mentalization-based treatments such as acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT; Follette & Pistorello, 2007). In the past decade, manuals that specifically address the

VITAL Action As you take action on your social-anxiety playing field, you can use the following skills to guide you in each and every action: V Identify your values and goals. (Hint: Values guide your actions and are never “finished”; goals are things you can check off and say you’re done with.) I Remain in the present moment, first anchoring your attention to the breath and then shifting your focus to, and staying fully present with, what really matters in the situation; revisit your anchor as needed when your focus drifts from the present moment. T Take notice of your experience from your observer perspective (perhaps embodying your inner mountain or another observer image), noticing feelings, thoughts, and urges to use safety behaviors (including avoidance). AL Allow your experience to be exactly as it is, with the assistance of metaphors (flip on your willingness switch, drop the rope, welcome Uncle Leo, and so on) and defusion strategies (labeling, thank your mind, and so on). Try bringing attitudes of curiosity, openness, compassion, and acceptance to your experience.

Evaluative

The psychologist Steven Hayes, who helped develop what is known as acceptance and commitment therapy, takes a quite Buddhist approach to meeting the full spectrum of human emotions. He encourages people to stop mentally suppressing uncomfortable feelings, which leads to psychological inflexibility--a factor that, alongside loneliness, leaves us more vulnerable to stress. In the face of overwhelming global social, political, and economic upheavals and nagging worries about health, safety, financial security, childcare, and so much more, it's both harder and more important than ever to be mentally flexible.

One reason people might prize socially constructed reinforcement over intrinsic reinforcement is sociocultural programming.

Rochelle Watts is a counsellor in Australia, Thailand, Spain and the UK. She offering Psychotherapy, Cognitive behaviour therapy, Couple Counselling, Drug & Alcohol and Trauma Counselling. I have specialised training in Supervision, Acceptance & Commitment Therapy, Dialectical Behaviour Therapy.

Indeed, when we give our full attention to another human being with openness, compassion, and curiosity, that is therapeutic in itself.

The goal is to become defused from our thoughts to help create more flexibility in our thinking. This allows us to see our thoughts as thoughts and allow them to guide us, if they are helpful, rather than to dominate us and dictate our ACTions.

Can you connect with your observer self? What are you thinking? Can you notice that you are having thoughts rather than just thinking them? This is the observer self.

Values are also different from goals—goals can be accomplished, whereas values are ongoing and provide direction for how you want to live your life.

Committed ACTion means making a commitment to move in the direction of your values despite whatever discomfort might arise as a result of doing so. People often know both what they value and what ACTions are needed, but fear or discomfort gets in the way.

For example, if one of my values is mental health, I may need to commit to getting out of my mind, which tells me a story like “this person wronged me,” and learn how to be present with my pain, grief, and loss.

you are not your thoughts.

Sadness indicates a kind of loss and helps people slow down in order to heal. Fear indicates some type of danger and helps people fight, flee, or freeze. Anger indicates that some type of boundary has been crossed (for example, someone is taking advantage of you) and helps you protect or advocate for yourself. Guilt, as unpleasant as it is, indicates that we have done something inconsistent with our values and can help us make repairs by apologizing.

When you recognize that your thoughts are not facts, just mental events, and your feelings are not problematic, but rather important information, this frees you up to experience them.

paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally.

I’ll give you a preview of and introduce you to a quick and easy defusion technique, in which you thank your mind. When you notice your mind telling you things about yourself (that you are lazy or stupid, for example), you don’t have to buy into it, you can simply notice it, say “Thank you, mind,” and move on.

There is a difference between feeling anger and expressing anger.

Anger can be expressed through yelling, screaming, or punching, but it can also be expressed through strong, appropriate, nonaggressive, and assertive communication.

How is anger experienced? What thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations are associated with anger? This is what I mean by experiencing anger. For many people, anger is experienced through strong physical sensations in the body. I might notice, for example, a wave of heat run across my body, or a strong warm sensation in my chest, clenching in my jaw, and tightness in the muscles of my face.

If you are able to excel at experiencing anger, that is, if you are able to bring nonjudgmental awareness to the thoughts and physical sensations associated with anger, you will be less reactive to it.

In ACT, we assume that the normal psychological processes of a normal human mind readily become destructive and create psychological suffering for all of us. And ACT speculates that the root of this suffering is human language itself.

Bricker’s approach involves harnessing the power of imagination to help his patients see things differently. His work shows how learning certain techniques as part of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) can disarm the discomfort that so often leads to harmful distractions.

Experts have been revered—and well paid—for years for their “It is my opinion that ... ” judgments. As James March has stated, however, such reverence may serve a purely social function. People and organizations have to make decisions, often between alternatives that are almost equally good or bad. What better way to justify such decisions than to consult an expert, and the more money he or she charges, the better. “We paid for the best possible medical advice,” can be a palliative for a fatal operation (or a losing legal defense), just as throwing the I Ching can relieve someone from regretting a bad marriage or a bad career choice. An expert who constructs a linear model is not as impressive as one who gives advice in a “burst” of intuition derived from “years of experience.” (One highly paid business expert we know constructs linear models in secret.) So we value the global judgment of experts independently of its validity. But there is also a situational reason for doubting the inferiority of global, intuitive judgment. It has to do with the biased availability of feedback. When we construct a linear model in a prediction situation, we know exactly how poorly it predicts. In contrast, our feedback about our own intuitive judgments is flawed. Not only do we selectively remember our successes, we often have no knowledge of our failures—and any knowledge we do have may serve to “explain” them (away). Who knows what happens to rejected graduate school applicants? Professors have access only to accepted ones, and if the professors are doing a good job, the accepted ones will likewise do well—reinforcing the impression of the professors’ good judgment. What happens to people misdiagnosed as “psychotic”? If they are lucky, they will disappear from the sight of the authorities diagnosing them; if not, they are likely to be placed in an environment where they may soon become psychotic. Finally, therapy patients who commit suicide were too sick to begin with—as is easily supported by an ex post perusal of their files.

Compassion and acceptance; stigma and defusion. As described thus far, acceptance and defusion seem, superficially, to be intrapsychic issues, but self-as-context expands their nature. Because perspective taking is social, it is not possible to take a loving, open, accepting, and active perspective on yourself without doing likewise for others.

In ACT, values are freely chosen, verbally constructed consequences of ongoing, dynamic, evolving patterns of activity, which establish predominant reinforcers for that activity that are intrinsic in engagement in the valued behavioral pattern itself

Another aspect of self is contact with the ongoing stream of private experience, or “self-as-process.” This contact has to do with the ability to observe and describe experiences in the present moment. Statements such as “I am feeling angry right now” reveal that the client is both aware of the content of ongoing awareness and aware of the distinct process of observing that content. This aspect of self-relatedness is a crucial part of “contact with the present moment.

The “I/here/nowness” of consciousness itself is an aspect of self that transcends any particular content of awareness—it is the context of verbal knowing itself.

This relationship is learned over hundreds if not thousands of examples; what is consistent across examples is not the content of the answer but rather the context, or perspective, from which the answer occurs. That is the case with all other deictic frames, such as I/you, we/they, and now/then.

These include the Self-Compassion Scale (Neff, 2003); White Bear Suppression Inventory (Wegner & Zanakos, 1994); Cognitive-Behavioral Avoidance Scale (Ottenbreit & Dobson, 2004); Thought Control Questionnaire (Wells & Davies, 1994), Distress Tolerance Scale (Simons & Gaher, 2005), the Emotional Nonacceptance subscale of the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (Gratz & Roemer, 2004), or similar subscales on various mindfulness measures such as the Kentucky Inventory of Mindfulness Skills (Baer, Smith, & Allen, 2004) or the Five Facets of Mindfulness Questionnaire (Baer et al., 2008), among several others. The definitions of acceptance vary in all of these approaches.

A good way to assess for self-as-context is to examine the flexibility of perspective taking via the interview itself.

So we can describe psychological flexibility as the ability to “be present, open up, and do what matters.

The core of the ACT approach is built upon the idea that human language gives rise to both human achievement and human misery.

The resulting progress is astounding, outstripping our ability to appreciate the multifarious changes. Some 200 years ago the average human lifespan in the United States was 37 years; it now approaches 88! About 100 years ago, an American farmer could feed on average just four others; today, it is 200! Fifty years ago the Oxford English Dictionary weighed 300 pounds and took up 4 feet of shelf space; today, it fits on a 1-ounce flash drive or can be accessed via the Web from virtually anywhere!

The Origins of Suffering, according to the Judeo-Christian Tradition The Bible is very clear about the original source of human suffering. In the Genesis story, “God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, in our likeness’ ” (Gen. 1:26 [New International Version]), and Adam and Eve were placed in an idyllic garden. The first humans were innocent and happy: “The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame” (Gen. 2:25). They are given only one command: “You must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die” (Gen. 2:17). The serpent tells Eve that she will not die if she eats from that tree, but rather that “God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5). The serpent turns out to be correct, to a degree, because when the fruit is eaten, “The eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked” (Gen. 3:7).