Here are three examples to give you an idea of what we 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, we 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 this book 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.
This book is 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.
We ask you to allow the possibility of living a life you value to be your guide as you read these pages and work with the exercises. We aren’t asking you 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 our work on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) we’ve developed a set of processes that appear 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, we will walk you through those processes in the service of living a vital, valued, meaningful life.
If you are willing, let’s begin.
Chapter 2
Why Language Leads to Suffering
What is the human mind? Why are we different than the birds flying outside our windows? And why do we suffer so? These kinds of questions have puzzled humankind for eons. We think we have some answers, and we think those answers may inform the process you will go through while you work with this book.
THE NATURE OF HUMAN LANGUAGE
As we noted in the introduction, ACT is based on Relational Frame Theory (RFT; Hayes, Barnes-Holmes, and Roche 2001). The basic premise of RFT is that human behavior is governed largely through networks of mutual relations called relational frames. These relations form the core of human language and cognition, and allow us to learn without requiring direct experience. For example, a cat won’t touch a hot stove twice, but it needs to touch it at least once to get the hint. A human child need never touch a hot stove to be taught verbally that it can burn. In the outside world, this ability is a tool beyond compare. But in terms of our inner lives, verbal rules can restrict our lives in fundamental ways.
We set out twenty years ago to try to discover the core features of human thinking. Today, we think that we’ve isolated some of the key components. Perhaps it’s risky to say it so boldly, but we think we’ve found what is at the core of the human mind itself. Humans think relationally; nonhumans apparently do not. Exactly what this means will become evident in this chapter but, in broad terms, humans are able to arbitrarily relate objects in our environment, thoughts, feelings, behavioral predispositions, actions (basically anything) to other objects in our environment, thoughts, feelings (basically anything else) in virtually any possible way (e.g., same as, similar to, better than, opposite of, part of, cause of, and so on).
This characteristic is essential to the way the human mind functions because it is our key evolutionary asset and has permitted the human species a dominant role in the animal kingdom. The ability to think relationally allows us to consciously analyze our environment, develop tools, build fires, create art, make computers, and even do our taxes. This same ability creates suffering.
The Idea Isn’t Entirely New
Often, the words about language were once metaphors, and their etymology focuses on that relational core. One word mentioned in the last chapter, the word “symbol,” comes from an ancient Greek root, “bol,” which means “to throw.” Combined with “sym” (which means “the same”), a symbol literally means “thrown as the same.” When our minds throw words at us, those words appear to be much the same as the things to which they “refer.” The etymology of “refer” completes the picture. Do you remember we discussed the root of “fer” in chapter 1, when we explored the word “suffering”? “Fer” means “to carry” (hence the word “ferry”), and “re” means “again.” So, “to refer” to something involves carrying something again.
/> This early common sense understanding corresponds to our research findings about the nature of human thinking. When we think, we arbitrarily relate events. Symbols “carry back” objects and events because they are related to these events as being “the same.” These symbols enter into a vast relational network that our mind generates and expands on over the course of our lives. What follows is a brief list of relational frames. This is not at all comprehensive. Such a list could fill pages and isn’t important to understand the parts of RFT that are necessary for the work we are about to do.
Relational Frames
Frames of Coordination (such as “same as,” “similar,” or “like”)
Temporal and Causal frames (these include “before and after,” “if/then,” “cause of,” “parent of,” and so on)
Comparative and Evaluative frames (a whole family of relations such as “better than,” “bigger than,” “faster than,” “prettier than,” and so on)
Deictic frames (these are frames with reference to the perspective of a speaker, such as “I/you” or “here/there”)
Spatial frames (such as “near/far”)
It is this repertoire—this set of learned relations that can be applied at your whim to anything at all—that we mean when we refer to the human “mind.”
EXERCISE: Relate Anything to Anything Else
You can test the idea that you develop arbitrary relationships all the time quite easily. To do so, try the following:
Write down a concrete noun here (any type of object or animal will do): ____________
Now write another concrete noun here: _____________________
Now answer this question: How is the first noun like the second one? When you have a good answer, go on to this next question: How is the first noun better than the second one? When you have a good answer, go on to this question: How is the first one the parent of the second one? Finding an answer to this final question may not be straightforward. Stick with it. It will come.
That last question may have been the hardest, but if you do stick with it, you will always find an answer. And note that the good answers somehow seem to be “real” in the sense that the relation you see seems to be actually in or justified by the related objects (that is, they often seem to be not arbitrary at all).
This exercise demonstrates that the mind can relate anything to anything in any possible way. In technical terms it suggests that relational responding is “arbitrarily applicable.” This fact is hidden from view because the mind justifies these relations by features it abstracts from the related facts. As you can see from this silly exercise, that cannot be wholly true. It cannot be that, in fact, everything actually can be “the parent of” everything else. Yet your mind can always find a justification for that relation or any other (we will apply this insight to the “story of your life” in chapter 7).
Even Human Babies Can Do It
Even very young human babies use these relational sets quite naturally, but nonhumans arguably do not. In this area, even the so-called “language-trained” chimpanzees fail the tests a human infant would easily pass (Dugdale and Lowe 2000). For example, suppose a baby learned that a particular imaginary animal had a name, and that this animal made a sound. We might show the baby a drawing of our imaginary creature and say, “This is a gub-gub. Can you say ‘gub-gub’?” After the baby learns this, we might show the same picture to her and say, “This goes ‘wooo.’ Can you go ‘wooo’?”
Figure 2.1. The gub-gub and its directly trained name and sound.
In this example, we have three pieces of a relational network: the picture, the name of the animal the picture represents (gub-gub), and the sound that animal makes (“wooo”). The relationships between the fictional creature, its sound, and the picture could be mapped inside a triangle (see figure 2.1). At this point in the lesson, we have only trained two relationships: the one between the picture and the name of the creature and the one between the picture and the sound the creature makes.
Figure 2.2. The relational net work expands.
Any complex organism—including human babies and chimpanzees alike—can learn this. But this is the point where humans start to differ from other animals. At age fourteen to sixteen months (perhaps even earlier; scientists are still trying to pinpoint exactly when this ability is activated), humans will reverse the direction of what they learned. When presented with an assortment of pictures of imaginary creatures and asked, “Which one is the gub-gub?” they will point to the picture they were trained to call a gub-gub and not to another imaginary creature they also learned to name. Human children do this without training. They realize not only that the picture refers to the word “gub-gub,” but that the word “gub-gub” also refers to the picture.
This seems so obvious that it may seem unimportant. But research suggests this process is at the very core not only of how humans think, but why they suffer. (We will expand on this shortly.) This ability to reverse relationships holds true for the references between the picture and the sound the creature makes as well. If you ask a child of this age, “Which one goes ‘wooo’?” the child will again point to the picture of the gub-gub and not to a drawing of another creature.
At this point, we have developed four relationships from two trained relations. Following the example above, these are as follows: the picture to the word “gub-gub,” the word “gub-gub” to the picture, the picture to the sound “wooo,” and the sound “wooo” to the picture (see figure 2.2).
Then, from around twenty-two to twenty-seven months (Lipkens, Hayes, and Hayes 1993), human children will combine all these reversible relations. When asked, “What does the gub-gub say?” the child will say “wooo.” When asked, “Who says ‘wooo’?” the response will be “gub-gub.” Note that the child not only retains the previous four relationships we’ve explored, she creates two new relationships in our triangle that she had no prior training in whatsoever. She has seen a picture that we have taught her is a gub-gub, and she has been taught that the picture this fictional creature represents makes the sound “wooo.” She has never been distinctly trained in any relationship between the word “gub-gub” and the sound “wooo.” Nonetheless, she can derive the connections between these various parts of this relational network. Now the triangle is completely filled in. Out of two trained relationships we have developed six (see figure 2.3).
Figure 2.3. Gub-gubs go “wooo”: the relational net work is completed.
Furthermore, if one of these events becomes associated either with something frightening, or pleasing, all other related events are likely to be scary or pleasant. For example, if the baby is accidentally stuck with a diaper pin while you say “wooo,” the baby might cry whenever you mention a gub-gub or the gub-gub’s picture is seen. On the other hand, if the baby is given a sweet when you first say “wooo,” the baby might expect a goodie whenever the sound of “wooo” is heard.
So far, we’ve been considering relations of sameness and, after twenty-five years of research, there is still disagreement about whether, with enough training, nonhumans may be able to develop relations of sameness that can be applied to anything (Hayes and Barnes-Holmes 2004). As humans mature, they learn other relations that show the many other kinds of relational frames mentioned earlier in the chapter, such as comparison, causality, and so forth. How humans create these relational frameworks has been the focus of a great deal of RFT research, and we now know enough to be able to teach these sets of relations to children who have not yet acquired them (Barnes-Holmes, Barnes-Holmes, and Smeets 2004). However, for our present purposes, the fact that human beings do this kind of relational thinking naturally is our main point. It fundamentally changes the world that human beings live in.
Each learned relation is like the triangle shown in figure 2.2, but the specific relation and thus the specific network is different. For example, a child who can recognize opposites and has learned that “frio” is the opposite of “hot,” and “frio” is also the opposite of “cali
ente,” will know the reverse relations without needing further training (e.g., caliente is the opposite of cold) and the combined terms (caliente and hot are the same, not opposites). If this child burned himself with “hot” water, he might begin to avoid “caliente” water and not avoid “cold” water.
This is one reason that even beautiful sunsets may not be safe for human beings in pain, as mentioned in chapter 1. If “happy” is the opposite of “sad,” then happiness can remind human beings of being sad. The two are related. This is probably part of the reason that relaxation can induce panic (Schwartz and Schwartz 1995). Dogs do not know how to do this. People do.
The Advantage of Our Abilities with Language
As best we can tell, the ability to derive relations like this is probably only about 75,000 to 100,000 years old, and in highly elaborated forms it is much younger than that. Written language marks a real transition in the ability to relate events in this way and it is only five- to ten-thousand-years old, depending on what you count as written symbols. By animal standards, humans are frail, slow-moving creatures. We do not have the strength of gorillas, the teeth of tigers, the speed of cheetahs, or the venom of snakes. Nevertheless, over the last 10,000 years we have taken over the planet. Why is that? We believe that the answer lies in these relational frames.
Now, let’s try an interesting exercise that will help to illustrate this point.
EXERCISE: A Screw, a Toothbrush, and a Lighter
Consider this simple problem. Watch carefully what your mind does with it.
Suppose you have a slotted screw in a board and you want to get it out. You can use only a normal toothbrush and a cigarette lighter to do so. What will you do? Take a moment to think about it and write down your thoughts, even if they are fragmentary:
Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life Page 4