First jot down your painful emotion here:
Now list the attributes of this experience, just the way you did above. Remember that primary attributes are the direct qualities of the experience, while secondary attributes are the way you judge or evaluate the experience. For example, people who have had a panic attack may list increased heart rate and light-headedness as primary attributes of the experience, and they may list “This was the worst experience of my life” as a secondary attribute of the attack.
Primary attributes:
_______________________________________________________________ Secondary Attributes:
_______________________________________________________________ Being able to distinguish between descriptions and evaluations should allow you the freedom to recognize when your mind is recording or noticing your actual experience and when it is making its own judgment calls on that experience. You can amplify this distinction by adding it to your “labeling thoughts” list from the Labeling Your Thoughts exercise earlier in this chapter. For example, you could say, “I am having the evaluation that anxiety is bad.”
A Few More Defusion Techniques
What follows is a further sampling of current cognitive defusion techniques employed by ACT therapists. As you can see, there are quite a few. In fact, this is a fairly small sampling because new ones are made up every day. When you get to understand the principles of cognitive defusion, you can generate these techniques readily.
In fact, that is just what we are getting ready to help you do. We provide the list here for two reasons. First, you may be able to apply some of these techniques to your own life and thus further your practice in cognitive defusion. The second reason is to show you that there are many, many of these techniques, and if you read through them all, that should help you create your own.
CREATING YOUR OWN COGNITIVE DEFUSION TECHNIQUES
If you’ve done the work and practiced the techniques in this chapter to the degree that you understand cognitive defusion, you should be able to create your own techniques. Being able to do this will empower you to use cognitive defusion as you wish.
Start with a thought you are struggling with. Write it down here:
_______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ Now imagine a context in which those same words would not be something you had to believe or disbelieve, but would be only something you would notice. For example, when are you more likely to read, hear, or listen to words without struggling over their content? When are you more likely to read, hear, or listen to words with amusement or when their literal truth is not a big issue? Write down some examples here (for example, when I read stories in the National Enquirer, when I listen to a comedian, etc.):
_______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ Now construct a defusion technique that links the thought you are struggling with and your answers to the last question. Describe how you might think ____________________________________ [write down the problem thought] in this way (e.g., the way the National Enquirer would handle this thought, or the way a comedian would treat this thought):
_______________________________________________________________ Now, let’s use this technique. Bring the problem to mind and give it a good try. Don’t stop until you are sure you have done it long enough to assess its impact.
Write down what happened when you did that here:
_______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ After you used the technique:
Were you better able to see the thought as a thought?
Did the believability of the thought go down?
Did the distress caused by the thought go down?
If you have two or more no answers, try it one more time. If you still have two or more no answers, this is not an effective defusion technique for you. Try again and develop something else. If you have mostly or all yes answers (especially to the first two questions), you are practicing defusion.
When to Use Defusion
Because fusion is everywhere, all the time, applied to everything, and unstoppable, we don’t notice it. Here are some cues that will show you when you are fused with your thoughts:
Your thoughts feel old, familiar, and lifeless
You submerge into your thoughts and the external world disappears for a while
Your mind feels comparative and evaluative
You are mentally somewhere else or in some other time
Your mind has a heavy “right and wrong” feel
Your mind is busy or confusing
If you are not behaving optimally and any of these cues are present, look for a fused thought, and if you can find it, use one of your defusion techniques.
The next step in the process is for you to learn how to maintain a mindful stance toward your thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations. The next two chapters of this book will teach you what mindfulness is and how to stay in contact with the present moment.
Chapter 7
If I’m Not My Thoughts, Then Who Am I?
In chapters 5 and 6 you began to learn how to distance yourself from your thoughts. In certain contexts, such as literality (taking “I am an anxious person” to be literally true, even missing that this is just a thought), reason-giving (“I am anxious because I had experiences in childhood that lead me to be anxious”), or emotional control (“I have to get rid of this anxiety before I can live”), thoughts can become entangling.
The kinds of thoughts that tend to be most entangling when they are in the wrong context are evaluations and self-conceptualizations. You will remember that evaluations and self-conceptualizations are two particularly fused ways of thinking. Evaluations are subjective judgments you make about internal or external events. They are particularly troublesome because they lead so readily to useless forms of avoidance.
Thus, achieving the goal of acceptance is not possible when cognitive fusion dominates your thinking processes. You will recall that cognitive fusion refers to the tendency to look from your thoughts rather than at your thoughts. When you engage in cognitive fusion, you take your mind’s statements as literal truths, but without even being aware of these statements as the products of an ongoing cognitive process.
CONSIDERING YOUR SELF-CONCEPTUALIZATIONS
Self-conceptualizations are statements that your mind makes about you as a person that you implicitly take as literal truths. Self-conceptualizations are troublesome for a slightly different reason. Self-conceptualizations enhance psychological rigidity.
For example, consider the following questions. Please fill in the blank lines below with whatever responses come to your mind. If you wish to give multiple responses, feel free to do so.
I am a person who
_______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ I am a person who does not
_______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ My favorite part about myself is
_______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ My least favorite part about myself is
_______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ I have been wronged because other people have
_______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ I am a person who is bad at
_______________________________________________________________ ___
____________________________________________________________ Consider one of your negative responses. Focus on it. Now, suppose a miracle could happen and, without requiring any change in your history or circumstances, this problem would simply disappear while you go about living your life. For example, suppose you wrote the words “is an agoraphobic” in response to “I’m a person who…” If that agoraphobia suddenly disappeared, without needing you to have a different history, be a different person, or have a different set of current circumstances, ask yourself this question: Who would be made wrong by that disappearance?
If the question doesn’t make sense to you, sit with it for a few minutes. Then repeat the question and ask yourself to answer it again. Who would be shown to be incorrect?
Can you see that you are invested in your labels and stories and reasons? Even if you hate the label (e.g., you may hate the idea that you are an agoraphobic), if you apply it to yourself or your behavior in a fused way, you have made an investment in the label. If the evidence supports its use, at least you are right. Perversely, this also means that your mind gives you a secret investment in things remaining rigidly the same, even if you are suffering terribly right now.
The problem with identifying with any particular aspect of who you are is that once you become attached to that particular aspect of your identity, you set yourself up to distort the world in order to maintain this vision of yourself. This is as true of positive aspects as it is of negative ones. For example, suppose you said, “that I’m kind” in response to “My favorite part about myself is…” That’s fine, but are you always kind? Everywhere? To everyone?…Liar!
Human beings are complex. Whenever you say, “I am x,” you simply can’t be telling the whole truth. Surely there are times you aren’t x. It doesn’t matter if the x is positive or negative. If you wrote “I am a person who is anxious,” surely you can think of at least one moment when you weren’t anxious. But notice how it feels when you realize that x is not 100 percent true. For most of us, such realizations come with a sense of disquiet.
That disquiet doesn’t come just from perhaps being “wrong.” It also comes from the need to know who we are. Consider one of the negative self-conceptualizations that you wrote above once again. Focus on it. Now, using the defusion techniques you learned in chapters 5 and 6, distance yourself thoroughly from the content of this negative self-conceptualization. That is, defuse from your thought and look at it in a mindful posture. Observe it without judging it.
To do this, you can use any of the techniques that you liked provided in earlier chapters. For example, suppose you wrote the words “is depressed” in response to “I’m a person who…” and suppose you do well with stating your thoughts as thoughts, acknowledging them, and allowing them to float on by. In that case, use these methods with the thought, for example, “I’m having the thought that I’m a person who is depressed. Thanks for the input, mind!” and then allow it to float down the stream like a leaf, as you did in chapter 6.
If you can do this, follow through with some of its implications and you may become able to see where another form of rigidity and attachment emerges. Suppose you were defused from all categorical self-conceptualizations? Suppose each and every one of the self-conceptualizations above (and the myriad other varieties that can be evoked by other questions) were, to some significant degree, simply ongoing thoughts. No more and no less. If that were so, then there is something else that needs to be faced.
I (SCH) once worked with an anxious client who was defusing from self-conceptualization after self-conceptualization. Most of his self-conceptualizations were very negative, and as we went through this work, initially, the mood in the room lightened up as the client began letting go of attachment to one feared self-evaluation after another. After some time, however, as real progress began to be made, the mood changed. The client began to tear up. Finally, he asked, with a real sense of fear in his voice, “If I am not my thoughts, then who am I?” It was as if he were dying. And, in a sense, he was.
THE THREE SENSES OF SELF
According to the theory of language that underlies ACT, there are at least three senses of self that emerge from our verbal abilities: the conceptualized self, the self as an ongoing process of self-awareness, and the observing self (Barnes-Holmes, Hayes, and Dymond 2001).
The Conceptualized Self
The conceptualized self is you as the object of summary verbal categorizations and evaluations. It is the verbal “I am” self, as in: I am old; I am anxious; I am kind; I am mean; I am unlovable; I am sweet; I am beautiful; and so forth. The conceptualized self is brimming with content; this content is the story about you and your life that you’ve been selling to yourself. It contains all the thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, memories, and behavioral predispositions that you’ve bought into and integrated into a stable verbal picture of yourself. This is the self you are probably the most familiar with because it is the product of normal applications of language to you and your life.
In terms of trapping you in your suffering, the conceptualized self is the most dangerous. That’s because the conceptualized self fits into a story that provides reasons for your actions and a self that provides coherence for your experiences. It is a kind of comfortable but suffocating coherence that leads relentlessly toward “more of the same.” Have you ever noticed that if someone thinks he is unimportant, most events in his life appear to confirm that view? Or have you ever observed that if someone sees herself as a victim, somehow she keeps ending up (in her mind or in actuality) being victimized?
If you are suffering with anxiety, depression, or stress, your identification with these disorders is almost certainly part of your conceptualized self. Your emotional problems have become part of the story that you’ve been telling yourself about your life. This is not meant to suggest that the facts as you know them aren’t real. Most of your facts are probably roughly correct. But the story of your anxiety or depression doesn’t tell the whole story of your life and, furthermore, it tells more than you can possibly know.
EXERCISE: Retelling Your Own Story
In the space provided below, write the story of your suffering as you might have written it before you began working with this book. Be brief. Describe your main problems and the historical, situational, and personal reasons for their presence in your life.
_______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ Now, go back and read what you wrote and underline several facts. Facts are descriptions, not conclusions. Leave out any causal analyses. (Causal analyses can be identified by the use of words like “because.” If there are any causal analyses, do not underline them.) Now take the facts you can extrac
t from what you wrote, and write an entirely different story with an entirely different ending using all of these facts. This is not a promise, prediction, or evaluation. It’s just an exercise. See whether you can take these objective facts and integrate them into a very different story.
_______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ Now, observe how the meaning of the same facts in the two stories changes and becomes different. If this process feels difficult, or you don’t see the point yet, take the same facts and write still another story that integrates all of these same facts in a different story. Then, once again, note how the meaning of the same facts in the two stories changes and becomes different.
Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life Page 13