It’s very easy to build a relational network that might last your lifetime. But if some of your history hurts, it’s very easy to bring that to mind as well, and that too will last a lifetime. Some of the words in your head may be negative evaluations, like “Deep down I’m afraid I’m __________.” Who knows where the rest of the sentence that you just thought of came from? Maybe it came from your parents, or TV, or a book, or just the logic of language itself. But it could make all the difference in the world to you if, when you struggle with your darkest thoughts, you were able to also see the words that hurt as just words. Milk, milk, milk…
The Say the Word “Milk” as Fast as You Can exercise punctures the illusion of language for just a moment. But with practice you can develop the skills you need to free yourself whenever you become entangled in your own conditioned network of words and they are leading you in a direction that will not work for you.
You don’t need to do this all the time. Sometimes cognitive fusion is helpful. For example, when doing your taxes, there is no point in remembering that words are just words while you try to follow the complex rules involved in preparing a tax return. But when you are struggling with psychological pain, you need methods that will help you see the process of language, not just its products.
Labeling Private Experiences as What They Are
In the following exercise you will learn how to label each private experience as it arises. A good way to start this exercise is to allow your thoughts to flow for a few minutes as you did for the What Are You Thinking Right Now? exercise that was presented in chapter 5. Then pay attention to what your body is doing. Then, as your private experiences come up, watch them arise and do the next exercise.
EXERCISE: Labeling Your Thoughts
One approach that can help you catch your thoughts, feelings, memories, and bodily sensations’ as they pass by, is to label them for what they are. Call out aloud exactly what it is you are doing, rather than just thinking the thought.
For example, if you are thinking that you have things to do later today, instead of saying, “I have things to do later today,” add a label to the type of event that just took place: “I am having the thought that I have things to do later.” If you feel sad, make note of it by saying to yourself, “I am having the feeling of sadness.” When you apply your labels, they should take the following form:
I am having the thought that…(describe your thought)
I am having the feeling of…(describe your feeling)
I am having the memory of…(describe your memory)
I am feeling the bodily sensation of…(describe the nature and location of your bodily sensation)
I am noticing the tendency to…(describe your behavioral urge or predisposition)
Now you are ready to try your hand at labeling. Let your experiences flow, and label them appropriately, as they arise.
_______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ This process allows you to defuse yourself from the contents of your private experiences. For example, you may notice there is a big difference between the sentences “I am depressed” and “I am having the feeling that I am depressed.” We encourage you to do this kind of labeling in your own self-talk, that is, the way you talk to yourself, and to be rigorous about applying labels for at least a week. After that, use labeling whenever you become entangled with your own thoughts and feelings and you need to establish some distance. You might not want to talk this way to others since it sounds so strange, but if your spouse or others are game, you can do this with them too.
Watch Your Thoughts Come and Go
In chapter 5 you practiced just noticing your thoughts as they came into your head (in the Watching the Mind-Train exercise). This time, we will do this in a more open way.
EXERCISE: Floating Leaves on a Moving Stream
This will be an eyes-closed exercise. First, read the instructions and then when you are sure you understand them, close your eyes and do the exercise.
Imagine a beautiful slow-moving stream. The water flows over rocks, around trees, descends downhill, and travels through a valley. Once in a while, a big leaf drops into the stream and floats away down the river. Imagine you are sitting beside that stream on a warm, sunny day, watching the leaves float by.
Now become conscious of your thoughts. Each time a thought pops into your head, imagine that it is written on one of those leaves. If you think in words, put them on the leaf as words. If you think in images, put them on the leaf as an image. The goal is to stay beside the stream and allow the leaves on the stream to keep flowing by. Don’t try to make the stream go faster or slower; don’t try to change what shows up on the leaves in any way. If the leaves disappear, or if you mentally go somewhere else, or if you find that you are in the stream or on a leaf, just stop and notice that this happened. File that knowledge away and then once again return to the stream, watch a thought come into your mind, write it on a leaf, and let the leaf float away down stream.
Continue doing this for at least five minutes. Keep a watch or clock close by and note when you start the exercise. This will be useful in answering some of the questions below. If the instructions are clear to you now, go ahead and close your eyes and do the exercise.
How long did you go until you got caught by one of your thoughts?
_______________________________________________________________ If you got the stream flowing and then it stopped, or if you went somewhere else in your mind, write down what happened just before that occurred:
_______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ If you never got the mental image of the stream started, write down what you were thinking while it wasn’t starting:
_______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ You can think of the moments when the stream wouldn’t flow as moments of cognitive fusion, while the moments when the stream does flow are moments of cognitive defusion. Many times we become fused to a thought without even being aware of it. Thoughts about this exercise can be especially “sticky.” If you thought “I’m not doing this right” or “this exercise doesn’t work for me,” these too are thoughts that you may become fused to quite easily. In many cases, you may not even notice them as thoughts. Other particularly sticky thoughts are emotional thoughts, comparative ones, and temporal or causal ones.
You may want to repeat this exercise regularly to see whether you can do better over time in allowing the stream just to flow.
Objectifying Your Thoughts and Feelings
When you look at an external object, it is quite evident that there is some distance between you and the object. When feelings and thoughts are right on top of you, they are hard to see and hard to make room for. It can help to bring your painful thoughts and feelings into the room, so that you can see them more clearly and see whether it is necessary to fight with them.
EXERCISE: Describing Thoughts and Feelings
Pick out one of the painful items you noted in your Suffering Inventory in chapter 1, or your Daily Pain Diary in chapter 5. Take a minute to get into experiential contact with it. Now in your mind’s eye, put that painful item out on the floor in front of you, about four or five feet away. (Rest assured we will not lea
ve it out there. Later in the exercise we will teach you how to take the painful experience back inside yourself.) When you get it out there, answer the following questions about it:
If it had a color, what color would it be?
If it had a size, how big would it be?
If it had a shape, what shape would it be?
If it had power, how much power would it have?
If it had speed, how fast would it go?
If it had a surface texture, what would it feel like?
Now, look at this object. This is a symbolic manifestation of your pain outside of your mind. See if you can let go of any struggle you have with it. Must this thing with that shape, color, texture, and so on be something you can’t have? What, really, is in this experience that you have thought you can’t have as it is? Must this creature be your enemy? After all, this poor thing has nowhere else to go.
Now, take a few minutes and write down some of the impressions that you have about your “pain creature” below. Note particularly any thoughts or emotions that you might have about it, and see if you can make progress in letting go of your struggle with it.
_______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ If you find you have a sense of resistance, fighting, loathing, judgment, and so on about this pain creature, leave it out there (several feet away from you) but move it off to the side. Now, find your sense of resistance and when you find it, place it in front of you, next to the pain creature. When you get it out there, answer the following questions about it:
If it had a color, what color would it be?
If it had a size, how big would it be?
If it had a shape, what shape would it be?
If it had power, how much power would it have?
If it had speed, how fast would it go?
If it had a surface texture, what would it feel like?
Now, look at this second object. This is a symbolic manifestation of your resistance. See if you can let go of any struggle with it. Letting go doesn’t mean buying into the struggle. It means experiencing this symbolic object made up of this shape, color, texture, and so on. Is there anything in this experience that you have that you think you can’t bear to have? Must this resistance creature be your enemy? Can you accept it as a private experience you sometimes have? After all, this poor thing also has nowhere else to go.
If you can drop the tug-of-war rope with this second object, take a peek now at the first one. Does it look any different in size, shape, color, and so on? If so, write down what you notice:
_______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ When you are ready, take them both back inside you, one by one. Try to do this in a loving way, the way you might welcome your children into your home when they are dirty, smelly, and tired from a long day. You don’t have to like how they look or smell to welcome them back in. These poor orphans have nowhere else to go.
A Variety of Vocalizations
Defusion exercises can be playful at times. When we say things to ourselves like “I’m so stressed out I feel I’m going to explode,” or, “I’m a bad person,” it can help to defuse from these thoughts by changing the normal context in which they occur. When these playful approaches are well-timed, they can be enormously liberating. Here are some examples.
Say It Very Slowly
Try saying your troubling thoughts or feelings very slowly. Imagine what a 45 rpm record played at 33 rpm sounds like. You may find that saying one syllable per breath is about the right speed. For example, if you’re stuck on the thought, “I’m a bad person,” stretch it out and say the word “I’m” to yourself on your in-breath, “a” on your out-breath, “bad” on your next in-breath, “per” on your next out-breath, and “—son” on your last in-breath.
Say It in a Different Voice
Another thing you can do is to say your thought aloud in a different voice. For example, if your thought is “I’m so worthless, I just can’t seem to do anything right,” try to say this either in a very low voice, or a very high voice. Or you could say it in Mickey Mouse’s, or Howard Cosell’s voice. You could try choosing the voice of your least favorite politician. Any voice you can think of will work. The point is not necessarily to change how you feel about your thought so much as it is to realize that these are thoughts and what you do with them then is up to you, not just up to your word machine.
Create a Song
Try making a song out of your difficult thoughts. You can take the lyrics of a popular song and adapt them or make up your own. Sing out in a full and powerful voice, “My mind is alive with thoughts of my sadness.” Any song that you can think of will do. Don’t do this to ridicule, satirize, or criticize your thoughts. Rather just notice as you sing the “lyrics” that these are thoughts.
Bad News Radio
Imagine your negative mind is a radio station, and then say in a station’s announcer voice, “This is bad news radio! We’re here 24/7. Remember. All bad news. All the time. That’s bad news radio! Flash. [say your name] is a bad person! She thinks she’s not as good as she needs to be! More news at 11.” Continue in that way “reporting” whatever shows up. (If something “positive” shows up you can report that too, but the announcer might be pretty disturbed. After all, “This is bad news radio! All bad news! All the time!”)
Later on, we’ll give you ideas for many similar exercises and, at the end, you’ll make up some of your own. They all have the same purpose. They are designed to help you catch the word machine in flight, rather than becoming entangled in the world seemingly structured by it.
Descriptions vs. Evaluations
Because our thoughts are so pervasive, we tend to position them as a part of the external world, forget that we’ve done that, and then feel oppressed by the external world we’ve unknowingly constructed. One good way to break this cycle is to learn to notice the difference between descriptions and evaluations.
Descriptions are verbalizations linked to the directly observable aspects or features of objects or events. These aspects or features are the primary attributes of an object or event. That is, they don’t depend on your unique history; in common sense terms, they remain aspects of the event or object regardless your interaction with them.
Examples:
This is a wooden table. (Tables are hard, solid, have four or more legs, etc. This particular table is made of wood.)
I am feeling anxiety and my heart is beating fast. (Anxiety consists of certain feelings, sensations, and urges. This instance includes a rapidly beating heart.)
My friend is yelling at me loudly. (He/she is shouting and it is loud.)
Evaluations are your reactions to events or their aspects. We can compare events and assign an evaluative label (like good or bad, like or dislike, bearable or unbearable, rude or polite, prohibitive or permissive, and so forth). Evaluations are secondary attributes. Secondary attributes revolve around our interactions with objects, events, thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations.
Examples:
This is a good table. (Good is in my interaction with the table…it is not in the table.)
This anxiety is unbearable. (Unbearable is in my interaction with anxiety, it is not in the anxiety.)
My friend is unfair for yelling at me. (Unfair is in my interaction with the yelling. It is not in the yelling.)
Much of our suffering comes from mistaking evaluations for descriptions. Very often we believe that our evaluative opinions are primary properties and thus that they are descriptions. Yet when we examine our evaluations more closely, they start to smell a little fishy.
EXERCISE: Exploring the Difference Between Descriptions
and Evaluations
In this exercise we would like you to try to make some distinctions of your own between descriptions (primary attributes) and evaluations (secondary attributes). When we are dealing with external objects, it is relatively easy to notice the difference between these two kinds of properties because if you disappeared, these secondary properties would also disappear. Primary properties would not. If there were no living creatures anywhere in the universe, what would happen to the “good” part of the good table? It would be gone. What would happen to the “wooden” part of the wooden table? It is still wooden. It becomes a little harder when discussing your internal being because that rule of thumb doesn’t work, but if we first practice a bit with external objects, we can do the same with our thoughts and feelings. So let’s start with a few tangible objects.
Now, list some attributes of a tree:
Primary Attributes: (leaves, color, etc.)
_______________________________________________________________ Secondary Attributes: (ugly, ominous, beautiful, etc.)
_______________________________________________________________ List some attributes of a recent movie you’ve seen:
Primary Attributes: (ninety minutes long, Cameron Diaz was the lead actress, etc.)
_______________________________________________________________ Secondary Attributes: (boring, exciting, too long, could’ve used more drama, Cameron Diaz is hot, etc.)
_______________________________________________________________ List some of the attributes of a close friend of yours:
Primary Attributes: (height, hair color, etc.)
_______________________________________________________________ Secondary Attributes: (smart, dumb, beautiful, ugly, good, bad, etc.)
_______________________________________________________________ Now try to distinguish the difference between the primary and secondary attributes of your emotional experience.
Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life Page 12