Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life

by Steven C. Hayes

  What does he probably feel immediately after finding an excuse not to go with his friends?

  Relieved or Anxious

  Will avoiding the zoo (experiential avoidance) be more or less likely the next time?

  More or Less

  • Will his phobia become stronger or weaker?

  Stronger or Weaker

  Isn’t it clear what the answers are? How could they be otherwise?

  Your own situation is analogous to this person’s experience. Every time you engage in a behavior specifically designed to avoid some negative personal pain, you start the same set of reactions outlined in the questions above. You are likely to feel an immediate sense of relief from not having to deal with the painful thought, feeling, or bodily sensation. The sense of relief you gain reinforces your desire to use the same strategy the next time you are faced with the possibility of having to cope with your pain. Yet, each time you do this, you actually give the painful content, that is, your painful thought, feeling, or bodily sensation, more power.

  The Metaphor of the Hungry Tiger

  Imagine you wake up one morning and just outside your front door you find an adorable tiger kitten mewing. Of course you bring the cuddly little guy inside to keep as a pet. After playing with him for a while, you notice he is still mewing, nonstop, and you realize he must be hungry. You feed him a bit of bloody, red ground beef knowing that’s what tigers like to eat. You do this every day, and every day your pet tiger grows a little bigger. Over the course of two years, your tiger’s daily meals change from hamburger scraps, to prime rib, to entire sides of beef. Soon your little pet no longer mews when hungry. Instead, he growls ferociously at you whenever he thinks it’s meal time. Your cute little pet has turned into an uncontrollable, savage beast that will tear you apart if he doesn’t get what he wants.

  Your struggle with your pain can be compared to this imaginary pet tiger. Every time you empower your pain by feeding it the red meat of experiential avoidance, you help your pain-tiger grow a little bit larger and a little bit stronger. Feeding it in this manner seems like the prudent thing to do. The pain-tiger growls ferociously telling you to feed it whatever it wants or it will eat you. Yet, every time you feed it, you help the pain to become stronger, more intimidating, and more controlling of your life.

  Consider the possibility, as unlikely as it may seem, that it’s not just that these avoidance strategies haven’t worked—it’s that they can’t work. Avoidance only strengthens the importance and the role of whatever you are avoiding—in other words, when you avoid dealing with your problem, it only grows.

  The Chinese Finger Trap

  The situation is something like the Chinese finger traps you might have played with as a kid (see figure 3.1). The trap is a tube of woven straw about as big as your index finger. You push both index fingers in, one at each end, and as you pull them back out, the straw catches and tightens. The harder you pull, the smaller the tube becomes, and the stronger it holds your fingers. If the trap is built strongly enough, you’d have to pull your fingers out of their sockets to get them out of the tube by pulling, once they’ve been caught. Conversely, if you push into it, your finger will still be in the tube, but at least you’ll have enough room to move around and live your life.

  Figure 3.1. The Chinese finger trap.

  Now, suppose that life itself is like a Chinese finger trap. So, it’s not a question of getting free of the tube, it’s a question of how much “wiggle room” you want to have in your life. The more you struggle, the more constricted your movements will be. If you let go of the struggle, the more freedom you have to make new choices.

  SO, WHAT ARE YOU SUPPOSED TO DO?

  First, give yourself a break. Given all of the reasons discussed earlier, it’s no surprise that you’ve been focusing on experiential avoidance strategies. You’re doing exactly what logical, reasonable people are taught to do: to take care of themselves. It’s a rigged game but you didn’t know it was rigged, and it’s certainly not your fault that it isn’t working. If you were gambling at a rigged roulette wheel, you’d be sure to lose your money. You’re in a similar situation with your pain. So now, put a check mark next to the ways that you would be willing to try to give yourself a break.

  I could face the possibility that my avoidance strategies will never work.

  I could have compassion for myself for how hard I’ve tried to deal with my pain.

  I could stop blaming myself for not being able to make my avoidance strategies work.

  Now, list any other ideas you might have for how to give yourself a break:

  _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ Responsibility and Response-ability

  Second, accept response-ability. There is a slight but important difference between accepting “responsibility” and accepting “response-ability.” Accepting “responsibility” often carries the implication of blame. Blame is what we do when we try to motivate people to change a behavior or do the right thing. But does accepting the thought “I’m at fault” really motivate anyone to change?

  EXERCISE: The Blame Game

  In the space provided below, write down some examples of blaming yourself or others for any negative events that you’ve experienced. Then, on a scale of 1 to 10, rate how well your examples worked to motivate and empower you to live your life in a more vital, fulfilling, and liberated way. (In this scale, 1 means not empowered at all and 10 means empowered to the max.)

  How many times did you score high in terms of feeling vital and empowered when you were blaming yourself or someone else for negative events in your life? We are betting you didn’t feel particularly empowered when playing the blame game. If you scored low consistently, it could mean blaming isn’t working for you. If blame isn’t working, clearly, you need something else.

  As an alternative, accepting response-ability means to acknowledge the possibility that you are able to respond. This ability has nothing to do with blame. For the most part, your pain isn’t anyone’s fault; pain automatically accompanies the verbal system all normal humans acquire. Even in extreme situations (like rape or incest) when another person is actually at fault for perpetrating an evil act on you in a purposeful and deliberate manner, you still have the ability to respond to the pain it causes you.

  It is as if there are two radio dials that control your suffering. One is labeled Pain. You’ve been trying very hard to turn that dial down to a lower level, but it doesn’t seem to be working. The other dial is in the back of the radio and you didn’t know it was there. Its settings control how much you struggle with pain and how much effort you expend trying to control your pain. We are guessing that you thought you needed to learn to control the Discomfort dial when you began reading this book. But what does your actual experience tell you about who sets that dial? Do you set the dial? Can you just “dial down” the level of pain you experience to a level you would prefer?

  If your answer is no, perhaps you are not response-able for that dial. But now ask yourself this: Who sets the dial in the back of the radio? Who determines what you do with pain when it shows up? Being response-able means acknowledging that there is, in fact, some response you can make—you are able to respond. Later in this book, we will explore those areas where you can always respond.

  Third, begin to consider the possibility that there is a real alternative to your struggle. Up until now, it’s likely that you’ve rarely experienced thoughts or feelings you didn’t want without trying to control them in some way. One of our goals is to show you what happens when you let go of your efforts to control your unwanted thoughts or feelings.

  This is not easy, because controlling is what the human mind is programmed to do. At this point, we ask only that you begin to really examine what your experience is telling you. To do this, for the next two weeks fill out the following form. You may want to make a ph
otocopy of this form so that you’ll have a clean copy to fill out each day, or you can date each line and enter each day’s observations on this copy. At the end of each day, rate the following three items:

  How much psychological pain you experienced this day. (If your pain is due to a specific problem, such as anxiety or depression, use that more precise label instead of the word “pain.”) When you do your rating for the day, use a scale where 1 means no pain and 100 means extreme pain.

  After you have rated your pain for the day, then rate how much effort and struggle you needed to exert to control the pain you felt this day. Use the same scale, where 1 means no effort and 100 means an extreme level of effort and struggle.

  The final step is to rate how workable the day was. That is, if every day were like today, how much overall vitality and aliveness would characterize your life? Again, use the same 1 to 100 scale.

  EXERCISE: Judging Your Own Experience: Examining What Works

  Fourth, make room for the possibility that the alternative to control is frustratingly subtle. If you found in the last exercise that you are spending a lot of energy struggling with your pain, but not getting much out of the struggle in terms of empowerment (creating a sense that your life is expanding), then this is another clue that your attempts to control your pain may not be working as well as they logically should. Yet, years of conditioning have convinced you that this is the only correct option open to you.

  Letting go of control does not require a lot of effort. But letting go of control (where control does not belong) is tricky. It is confusing. It can be frustrating. This is not something the “word machine” that is your mind is accustomed to doing.

  That’s why it’s necessary for you to go through each of the exercises in this book slowly and carefully. The alternative to useless efforts aimed at exerting control over your thoughts and feelings offered here will require diligence, honesty, skepticism, confusion, and compassion from you. It isn’t an easy path to follow. Your most important ally in taking this new path is your own pain. Only when you consider all the time and energy you’ve already spent fruitlessly trying to control your pain and avoid negative experiences, and then weighing the painful results, will you discover that the effort to do something radically different is worth it.

  MOVING ON

  Before you can move on with your life, you need to look directly at where you presently are. The exercises in the previous chapters were designed to help you begin doing just that. You need to be aware of the types of thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations that have been plaguing you. And, just as important, you need to be aware of the habitual coping strategies you’ve been using to manage those thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations.

  At this point it wouldn’t be wise to do anything differently. In fact, we suggest that you shouldn’t try to change anything yet. Just try to become more mindful of what it is you’ve been doing, and more mindful of how this has really been working.

  EXERCISE: What Are You Feeling and Thinking Now?

  We’ve found that when people start looking more carefully at their own experiences, without running away or covering up, that, occasionally, experiences that were below their threshold of awareness percolate up to their conscious mind. So, to end this chapter, in the space provided below, list any thoughts and feelings you’re having right now about the difficulties that motivated you to pick up this book. If you begin to see some issues that have been buried below the surface, take this opportunity to describe them; put them out on the table where they can be seen in the light of day.

  _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ In the chapters that follow, we will begin to explore how to take different approaches of relating to the pain with which you’ve been struggling. Don’t expect yourself to master these new skills overnight. It will take time. The measure of success is one thing and one thing only: Your own experience. We aren’t asking you to “buy a pig in a poke.” We aren’t asking you to believe in our alternative approach. We ask only that you be willing to try the new suggestions that we will put on the table, and that you allow your own direct experience to be the judge.

  Chapter 4

  Letting Go

  Before you start reading this chapter, get a watch and sit somewhere where you won’t be disturbed for a minute. When you are seated, take a deep breath and hold it as long as you can. When you’re finished, write down how long you held your breath:

  I held my breath for _________ seconds.

  We will tell you why we’ve asked you to do this later in the chapter.

  In the first two chapters we looked at your current suffering and your efforts to cope with it. We described an innate trap, a pitfall, inherent to human thought because of the way that language works, especially when thought and language are applied to private experiences. We called that trap experiential avoidance. We tried to see whether experiential avoidance is a part of the purpose of your existing coping strategies, and we examined the possibility that experiential avoidance is generally unhelpful. In chapter 3, we discussed five of the reasons why this unhelpful strategy is the normal, logical response most people have to their psychological pain.

  Throughout, we’ve hinted at an alternative to experiential avoidance. It has been variously described as willingness, acceptance, or letting go. In this chapter, we want to start discussing this alternative more thoroughly. We will explain why acceptance is so important and give you a taste of what it means to be accepting by offering you the opportunity to experience it in some very simple ways. We aren’t presenting this information now so that you can immediately apply it to the problems that have been troubling you the most. Rather, you should look at this chapter as a primer.

  This is a brief introduction that will set the stage for the road ahead. Before you can actively apply acceptance in your daily life successfully, you will need to acquire a greater understanding of the way your mind works, how your mind is affecting your behaviors, and how you can interrupt that chain of events. There will be many opportunities for you to explore these things in the chapters that follow.

  Acceptance (which we will also refer to as willingness) is a skill you may have heard about or experimented with in the past. It is certainly something that you can learn to do. Unfortunately, it is not something your mind can do, and that’s why learning more skills will be required before you can implement it in your daily life. After all, your mind is aware of what you are reading right now. And, in this area, your mind is not your ally.

  IF YOU’RE NOT WILLING TO HAVE IT, YOU WILL

  In chapter 2 we said that perhaps the rule that applies to private experience goes something like this: “If you aren’t willing to have it, you will.” We implied that this rule is important for dealing with your suffering, although we didn’t say exactly where its importance lies. So, let’s take a look at what the human mind does with such an idea.

  Suppose that the rule is true (if you aren’t willing to have it, you will). Given that you’ve already suffered a great deal, what can you logically do that would apply that rule to your suffering? Take a moment now to write down any ideas about this that come to your mind.

  _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ If you’re like most people, you began by thinking about how you might be willing to have negative private experiences, if that meant those negative experiences would begin to diminish or even disappear. For example, suppose that anxiety is your issue. You hate how anxious you are. You’ve just read a sentence that purports to be a rule to help you deal with your problem. It states, �
��If you aren’t willing to have it, you will.” What can that mean for your anxiety? What follows is the kind of speculation that the word machine we call our mind does best.

  “Hmmm. So, if I’m not willing to be anxious, I will be anxious. I suppose that means if I were more willing to be anxious, I might not be so anxious. I hate being anxious, so I guess I could give it a try. I’ll try to be more willing to feel my anxiety so I won’t be so anxious.” With that, the thought trap slams down around you, because if you are willing to be anxious only in order to become less anxious, then you are not really willing to be anxious, and you will become even more anxious!

  This is not psychobabble. Read the sentences again. Yes, they are paradoxical, but the paradox seems to be true. Those sentences demonstrate the merry-go-round ride that can result from trying to force the mind to do something it can’t do. If the only reason you’re willing to allow yourself to feel anxiety today is the hope that feeling it today will free you from the necessity of feeling it in the future, then it can’t work. Because what your “willingness” here really means is you don’t want to feel anxiety, and you’ll try to jump through all kinds of mental hoops not to feel it. That’s not the same as being willing to feel your anxiety.

  This is why we’ve said that the approaches that might help with the causes of your pain are difficult to learn; not in the sense that they are effortful, but because they are tricky. For that reason, we are putting the concept of willingness on the table here, but we will deal with quite a bit of other material before returning to this topic to try to apply it to the core areas of your struggle.

  ACCEPTANCE AND WILLINGNESS