There are few situations in which drinking a wineglass full of spit would be useful, so, for the most part, our distaste for the idea is harmless. Often, cognitive fusion is not a problem. If the process is allowed to spread, however, any evaluated event can become a target without awareness of what has actually taken place, and that can be very harmful indeed.
For example, any emotional reaction to an aversive event will itself usually be evaluated negatively. What we call “anxiety” tends to appear following an aversive event (e.g., the hypothetical dog you supposedly kicked in chapter 1 could be said to be “anxious” when you come home for that reason). We notice that emotional reaction, and we label both the aversive event and the emotional results as “bad.”
It is only a small step from applying a negative label to emotional responses, to targeting those same responses for direct change efforts—even if such efforts aren’t healthy or needed. Sadness, anxiety, boredom, pain, insecurity, and so forth will be avoided or escaped, even if the process of escaping them is harmful, simply because they are “bad” emotions. That’s probably one reason why the simple belief “anxiety is bad” is correlated with many forms of psychological problems, from anxiety disorders to depression (Hayes, Strosahl, et al. 2004).
Experiential Avoidance and Cognitive Fusion
Throughout the earlier chapters of this book we have discussed experiential avoidance and why it poses such a problem. You’ve read about studies that suggest experiential avoidance is harmful and have tracked your own avoidance strategies to see how well they have worked (or haven’t worked). Now it’s time to link those ideas up to what we are exploring in this chapter. Put simply, the root cause of experiential avoidance is cognitive fusion.
Suppose you have a thought that you must avoid some difficult private experience (an emotion, thought, memory, or bodily sensation) because “it is too much to bear.” Something that is “too much to bear” must not be borne or harm may be caused. Your mind, as we’ve discussed throughout this book, evolved over the millennia to help keep you from harm. If you become fused with the idea that this private experience is “too much to bear,” then the experience manifests itself as though it were “too much to bear.” That is, you identify the initial experience with this second thought so completely that they fuse themselves together. Once they are fused, you will naturally attempt to avoid this experience. That is why fusion underlies experiential avoidance. Let’s look at an example to draw this point out a bit more clearly.
Suppose you are suffering from depression. Let’s also suppose that you have tied yourself to the idea that such sad feelings “must not be borne.” What will you do when these feelings come up? It’s likely you’ll do everything in your power to avoid them. You will avoid personal interactions that may occasion you feeling sad. You will stop going places that may occasion you feeling depressed. You will even try to stop feeling the feelings and thinking the thoughts that you believe drive the depression. Even if pursuing such a path means you drive off the road you really want to be on, you will still pursue it because the feelings you are having “must not be borne.” This is what cognitive fusion leads to.
Assuming this is true, that means any road sign you encounter could lead off the road down into an embankment if it pushes your buttons sufficiently. The question is: What are those buttons?
Thinking Causes Pain
The two biggest buttons are the processes of evaluation and self-conceptualization. Thoughts, even those you use to soothe your mind, create pain in two ways: they bring painful events to mind, and they amplify the impact of pain through what cognitive fusion leads to, that is, avoidance. For example, think of a painful memory. It doesn’t matter what it is. Just allow yourself to think of a painful memory, and spend a few moments observing it.
You just engaged in the first method by which minds create pain. The fact that we are able to bring to mind past events and to predict future ones is an integral part of being able to use language for verbal problem solving. This is an evaluative process. Language cannot work without these abilities or processes. The processes cannot be changed because you would have to become nonverbal to change them. The methods people use to try to eliminate them (like abusing alcohol or drugs, engaging in compulsive activities, or dissociating) themselves create horrific amounts of second-order pain.
The second process, self-conceptualization, is as important as evaluation (perhaps even more so). You can learn to change the process by which you perceive yourself. But to work on this process you must start with the pain you’ve been avoiding.
Keeping a Pain Diary
For the next week, using the exercise below, we would like you to track your pain to try to bring into the light of day some of the thoughts that co-occur when you are struggling. This will take some time and dedication, but it will pay off. Make seven copies of the exercise worksheet so that you’ll have a new one to fill out every day. If you feel you need more space to write than what we provide here, you can set up your own worksheets in a journal or on your computer. However you do it, make sure that you carry your Daily Pain Diary with you at all times during the next week.
Whenever you find yourself struggling with emotional discomfort, difficult thoughts, painful memories, uncomfortable bodily sensations, or unwelcome urges, pull out your pain journal and record that information. You’ll see that the journal page is divided into twenty-four-hour periods. It may be that you won’t fill in something for every hour. (For example, it isn’t likely that you’re going to wake up in the middle of the night to fill out your pain diary, although you certainly could do that if you are up.) Just fill it in when you actually feel yourself struggling with some psychological or physical discomfort.
If you can’t manage to get to your pain diary at the very moment you’re having a problem (for example, when you’re in a meeting), just go back and do the writing when you have the time. The main point here is that you should be diligent in completing this activity so that you’ll have a catalog of what kind of pain is troubling you and what is going on for you when you feel that pain.
It would be especially worthwhile if you focused particularly on the core struggles you identified in chapter 1 when you did the exercise called “Your Suffering Inventory.” You don’t have to focus exclusively on this, but it would be a good idea to pay particular attention to the times when your reactions associated with those problems appear.
Most of the questions in this exercise are fairly straightforward. You should be able to answer them with relative ease. First look at the sample diary to get a feel for how to fill in your diary.
An Example of a Daily Pain Diary
Suppose someone who is stuck in a dead-end job and struggles with social anxiety filled out the Daily Pain Diary. It might look something like this:
Day: Monday
EXERCISE: Your Daily Pain Diary
Day: __________________________
Looking at Your Daily Pain Diary
When you’ve kept your Daily Pain Diary for a week, you should have a better idea of the situations in which you struggle, the content of the struggle, and the thoughts that come up in association with your struggle.
Now, look back over your entries for the week and see whether there are particular thoughts, feelings, or events that tend to lead to you struggling (the items in the second column on the left). Write down any consistencies that you’ve observed on the six lines below. (Don’t worry if you haven’t observed six consistencies. One or two will do if that’s all you see.)
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; Now look at what you tend to struggle with psychologically (items in the third column). Avoid externalizing. In other words, try to concentrate on what’s happening for you internally. If external events came up for you, see if these items would fit better in the second column. As you write down consistencies, see if you can also categorize them into thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, memories, or behavioral urges, and if you can do that, add that descriptive category in parentheses after you describe your struggle. Write down any consistencies that you see on the lines below:
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Now look at the thoughts that came up in association with your psychological struggles (the items in the fourth and final column). Look at your consistent patterns. If you find that looking at your thoughts leads to more thoughts (that is, what do you think when you read your diary?), you can put these on the list as well. Write down the kinds of thoughts you tend to think on the lines below.
As you write down the consistencies, see whether you can classify them into evaluations (judgments you make about things); predictions (attempts to forecast the future); post-dictions (attempts to understand or sort through the past; this may occur if you are engaged in “what if-ing” past experiences); or self-conceptualizations (judgments made about yourself; these often come in the form of “I am” statements); and if so, add that descriptive category in parentheses after you describe the thought.
For example, “I can’t stand this anxiety” would take (evaluation); “I’m worthless” would take (evaluation and self-conceptualization). Write down any consistencies that you see on the lines below:
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Finally, write down any consistencies you see in the relationships between columns two, three, and four. Are certain feelings and thoughts more likely in certain situations? If so, write them down (for example, “It seems that when I withdraw, then I struggle with loneliness or anxiety, and then I criticize myself.”)
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It’s important that you don’t grab hold of these formulations and try to solve them (for example, thinking, “I should stop criticizing myself”). We will work on what to do with them shortly. Right now, the job is more basic: let’s see if you can look at what’s been happening. Your job right now is simply to sit with the knowledge you collect.
LOOKING AT YOUR THOUGHTS RATHER THAN FROM YOUR THOUGHTS
If you are like most people on the planet, in reviewing your list, you probably discovered that when you are in the midst of struggle, you aren’t able to look at your thoughts consistently. In that moment, you are probably looking from the thought; that is, you considered the content of your thought from the point of view of the thoughts you had already recorded. That’s what we mean when we say that we look from our thoughts.
Does this bulleted list summarize some of what’s been going on for you?
You’ve been struggling at times to control what you think or feel.
You’ve come to define yourself and the content of your experience in accordance with your thoughts.
You tend to take your thoughts literally, so you see life from the vantage point of your thoughts.
These thoughts you are fused with argue or advocate for more struggle.
Struggle isn’t working.
When put together, these factors create a dangerous set of circumstances that contribute to your suffering. If these five things hold true, then you are guaranteed to suffer. However, rather than trying to control what you think or feel, what if you could learn to see that you are merely having thoughts and experiencing emotions? The act of thinking is not dangerous in and of itself, rather the danger lies in the point at which you “buy into your thoughts”; that is, the point at which you take your thoughts literally, even if your experience tells you that this is a context in which cognitive fusion is not only unhelpful, it is also dangerous.
THE MIND-TRAIN
Sometimes it doesn’t hurt to take your thoughts literally. When dealing purely with external problem solving, cognitive fusion is relatively harmless. That’s not so for the internal world of the self. For that world, there are other skills to be learned: how to watch your thoughts without belief or disbelief, without entanglement, without struggle. This is the focus of the chapter 6, but you can prepare for that work with this simple exercise.
EXERCISE: Watching the Mind-Train
Imagine that you are standing at a railway bridge gazing down at three sets of train tracks. A slow mining train is on each set of tracks moving away from you. Each train is composed of a string of little cars carrying ore. Seemingly endless, all three chug slowly along underneath the bridge.
Now, as you look down, imagine that the train to the left carries only the “ore” of things you notice in the present moment. That ore is composed of sensations, perceptions, and emotions. It carries things like the sounds you hear; sweaty palms you feel; skipped heartbeats you sense; sadness you notice; and so forth. The middle train carries only your thoughts: your evaluations, your predictions, your self-conceptualizations, and so on. The train on your right carries your urges to act; your pull to avoid and look away; and your efforts to change the subject. Looking down on these three tracks can be seen as a metaphor for looking at your mind.
Now, find a comfortable chair to sit in for a while in a spot where you won’t be disturbed and you can be quiet. Begin the exercise by thinking of something you’ve been struggling with lately, then close your eyes and picture the three tracks. Your job will be to stay on the bridge, looking. If you find your mind has gone somewhere else, or if you discover that you are in one of the cars chugging down the railroad track, struggling with its content, such as your judgment that you will never amount to anything or your belief that nothing good can ever happen to you in the future, this can be a very important moment (in fact, it is a major purpose of this exercise). Notice what just hooked you. File that away, and then mentally return to the bridge over the tracks and look down once again. If you are able to stay on the bridge, your experience might look like figure 5.1. If you disappear into the content, your experience might look like figure 5.2.
Figure 5.1. The mind-train.
Figure 5.2. Getting stuck on the mind-train.
Remember, present sensations, perceptions, and emotions are in the railroad car to your left. Your thoughts are in the middle car. Coping strategies and urges to do something are in the car on the right. See if you can stay on the bridge, but if you leave it, just notice what happened and then return to the bridge. Take at least three minutes just to watch what comes up for you.
Now, in the following chart, write down some of what you noticed when you were standing on the bridge observing the three sets of railroad cars:
If you psychologically disappeared, didn�
��t get the exercise started, or rode off with something in a car, what happened just before that? What sort of content came up that took you off the bridge? (Some especially common ones are memories with strong emotions attached, thoughts about the exercise itself, and thoughts about your future.) Take a few minutes to note these things in the space below:
_______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ These are things that “hooked” you, very likely because of cognitive fusion. Your job is to learn how to stay on the bridge longer and, when you leave the bridge, to get back there more quickly. This is the task we will turn to in chapter 6.
Chapter 6
Having a Thought Versus Buying a Thought
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with thinking. Language and cognition have allowed humans to be enormously successful in an evolutionary sense, and people who are good at them generally do well in many areas, especially in their professions. Our problem-solving skills have allowed us to reshape the world we live in.
Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life Page 10