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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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

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.

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.

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

Gedachten zijn als lenzen waardoor we naar onze wereld kijken.

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

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

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

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”).

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

The six core processes of ACT are 1) defusion, 2) acceptance, 3) present moment, 4) observer self, 5) values, and 6) committed ACTion.

the part of you that observes the mind, as opposed to the part of you that gets lost in the mind, or

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.

move toward discomfort in the service of living out your

the goal of ACT, psychological flexibility.

Defusion is the ability to take a step back and observe your thinking rather than get lost or tangled up in it.

Acceptance is about allowing your experience to happen rather than avoiding or resisting it, even if it is difficult.

Making contact with the present moment is being present with whatever is actually a part of your present-moment experience, whether it is your external environment (i.e., your surroundings) or your internal environment (i.e., your thoughts, feelings, or physical sensations).

ACT, the focus is less about changing your thoughts and feelings and more about learning how to relate to your thoughts and feelings so they are no longer getting in the way of pursuing

Not only are you not your thoughts, but your thoughts are not even necessarily reflective of reality.

rather than focusing on symptoms and symptom reduction, it focuses on changing how you cope with your experience.

ACT there is an acceptance of pain as a part of the human experience while simultaneously focusing on living a meaningful life consistent with your values.

the things that are important to you.

ACT is less focused on changing your thoughts and more focused on using acceptance and mindfulness strategies to increase flexibility in your thinking. Using ACT, you would recognize that thoughts are just stories or narratives you have developed and not the absolute truth.

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. You don’t need to be afraid of difficult thoughts or emotions—they’re just elements of your awareness and a normal part of being human.

They are not driving the bus. You are driving the bus and you get to decide where you’re going. The passengers

Mindfulness is about learning how to be present and welcoming of whatever your experience is.

Practicing nonjudgment doesn’t mean that you won’t have reactions to things. (You are a human being; you are going to have reactions.) It simply means holding your judgments lightly or observing them as though from a distance.

our own suffering that we can easily forget our partner is in the same boat. 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.

Learning to accept and move through healthy conflict is an essential component of keeping passion alive long-term in partnerships. Couples who honor individuality and autonomy often experience more fulfilling intimate connections because they more easily save space for fascination, independent growth, and robust personal adventures.

For those who are suffering from chronic pain, there is a direct link between the level of pain and negative thinking.

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

like understanding the weather: no matter how much insight you have into its origins and how it operates, you can’t control it; you can only control the way that you respond to it.

The fact is there will always be significant differences between you and your partner in some or all the areas mentioned here and also in many others. That’s why relationships aren’t easy. They require communication, negotiation, compromise, and a lot of acceptance of differences; they also require you to stand up for yourself, to be honest about your desires and your feelings, and—in some situations, where something vitally important to your health and well-being is at stake—to absolutely refuse to compromise.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.