Now, below you will see a bulleted list you can use to remind you of things to do. You can augment this list by adding any of the exercises you’ve done during the course of working with this book to help you either to defuse from or to accept thoughts and feelings, or to contact your observer-self. List anything that’s worked for you. For example, if you suffer from agoraphobia, and you’ve decided to walk around the block for your first step, when your anxiety comes up, you might ask yourself: “If this feeling had a size, how big would it be? If this feeling had a shape, what shape would it be?”
If you want to watch your thoughts and feelings float away as leaves on a stream, then mentally do that exercise; if you want to put your thoughts and feelings into three mind-trains (without getting into the little cars yourself!), do that. If you know you might become wrapped up in your thoughts, you might try some of the defusion exercises you learned in chapter 6. Remember that you made up some things for yourself in that chapter. You could use those if your instinct is that they would help. Help do what? Not to Help Regulate Your Target. That goal only will undermine what we are doing here. The “help” we are taking about is helping you to be present, defused, and willing to stay in contact with what has been difficult or that you have avoided.
Take this list with you and glance at it while doing your actual exposure. Notice your body and its sensations. Make room for them.
Notice what is around you. Appreciate your immediate environment.
Do not avoid.
Notice your thoughts, but just let them come and go. Don’t follow them.
Notice the pull to your past and future. Then notice you are here in the present.
Don’t fight.
Notice the pull to act and to avoid. Do nothing about that pull except to notice it.
Do something new. Perhaps even be playful.
Use your reverse compass (but only if you are willing!).
Notice you are noticing all these things.
List other things you might do below: _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________
Stick to your commitment: Be present. No avoidance.
You can continue to repeat your exposure to scenario number one until you feel able to open yourself to the experience and accept what is given to you. This doesn’t mean do it until your pain goes away. This isn’t about that. Do it until you can make more room for all the thoughts, feelings, urges, bodily sensations, and memories you have. Welcome them into the home of yourself. Inhale them all.
When you have accomplished that (it can take multiple exposures), move on to scenario number two and do the same thing. If you hit a level that seems beyond you, put the list aside and come back to it after you’ve done more work in the final chapters of this book.
You can continue working with this process indefinitely, using this list and many others. At some point, it may no longer be necessary to list scenarios and then pursue them in this manner. Once you’ve had some practice with your acceptance skills, you’ll be able to integrate them into your daily life, and life itself will give you many chances to jump. It is amazing how when we begin to say yes, life seems to present us with just the right challenges: always slightly more or slightly earlier than we might have wished and yet doable—if we are willing.
Having Jumped
If you’ve made it this far, then you’ve done some really good work. You’ve taken your first steps toward willingness and taken your first leap into a different way of understanding your pain. Don’t let you mind take any success you’ve had here and turn it into something absolute. No one is timing you. There is no “finish line” to this race. For now, anyway, just moving forward is enough.
In the next chapters, we’ll take all of the defusion, mindfulness, and acceptance exercises you’ve learned up to this point and you’ll start to learn how to use them in the context of pursuing a valued, engaged, and vital life.
Chapter 11
What Are Values?
Imagine that you’ve been driving a bus called “your life.” Like any bus, as you move along, you pick up passengers. In this case, your passengers are your memories, bodily sensations, conditioned emotions, programmed thoughts, historically produced urges, and so on. You’ve picked up some passengers you like: these are like sweet little old ladies who you hope will sit up in the front, near you. You’ve picked up some you don’t like: these are like tough, frightening gang members whom you would just as soon have take another bus.
Isn’t it true that when you began this book you were focused on the passengers? They defined the nature of your struggle with your psychological pain. It’s likely that you’ve spent a good deal of time trying to make certain passengers get off the bus, change their appearance, or make themselves less visible. If you were suffering from severe anxiety, difficult urges, or painful feelings of sadness, you probably tried stopping the bus and forcing the unwanted passengers to leave.
But notice the very first thing you had to do to achieve that. You had to stop the bus: you had to put your life on hold while the struggle was being fought. And, in all likelihood, the unwelcome passengers did not leave as a result of your struggle. These passengers have a mind of their own; furthermore, time goes only in one direction, not two. A painful memory, once on the bus, is on the bus for good. Short of a lobotomy, that passenger is not leaving.
After we learn that our passengers simply won’t leave, as a last resort, we generally focus on their appearance and visibility. If we have a negative thought, we try to tidy it up a bit, by tweaking a word here or a nuance there. But we are still historical beings. When we argue with or try to change the passengers on our bus, we simply add to them. It’s a bit like meeting a gang member and forcing him put on a suit and tie to make him appear less frightening. In memory, at least, the gang member still lives on, in his original form. Even if he’s wearing an expensive suit and tie, you know he hasn’t changed much underneath.
Once we’ve exhausted the other possibilities, typically, we try to bargain with the passengers on our bus. We try to get the most frightening ones to slouch down in their seats way in the back, with the hope that at least we won’t have to see them so often. Perhaps we can even pretend they’ve disappeared entirely. We manufacture ways to avoid knowing the scary passengers are even on the bus. We avoid. We use controlled substances. We deny.
You may try many ways to hide your anxiety, depression, or low self-esteem from yourself, asking these thoughts and feelings to slump down in the back seat. But the cost of this last strategy is high: You barter away your freedom. To get these unwanted passengers to keep out of sight, you offer this sad bargain: If they slouch down and stay hidden, you will drive where they want to go.
For example, to get your social anxiety to move to the back of the bus, you may avoid people in situations that feel evaluative and frightening; when opportunities come up to be with others, you turn them down or you engage in socializing defensively and half-heartedly. All just to keep that frightening passenger, social anxiety, from rearing his ugly head.
Even if this final strategy works to a degree, it is at a huge cost. When you go where the passengers tell you to go, you’ve lost control of this bus called “your life.” In the title of our book, we made a type of promise to you: that it’s possible to get out of your mind and into your life. You can do that now. Without your mind being changed first.
It’s taken us a while to get to that promise. We took the long way around. We focused on creating alternatives to getting your passengers to leave, making them look different, or bargaining with them to make them less visible. Instead of avoidance, you learned acceptance. Instead of belief and disbelief, you learned defusion and mindfulness. Instead of fearful expectations for the future or sad recollections of the past, you learned to be more present in the moment that is now. Instead of taking yourself to be who your mind
says you are, you learned to notice that a transcendent “no-thing” self, a self beyond verbal categorization, is continuously present.
If you’ve been doing all of these things, you’ve learned more about how to be on the bus comfortably with your passengers—distinct from them and yet willing to carry them, with vitality and presence. You’ve learned how to keep from making secret deals with the passengers that turn control of the bus over to them. So, in this chapter and the two that follow, you are now ready to move to the final core issues.
When you get on a bus, you will notice that up in front there is usually a small sign that says where the bus is going. Passengers who get on the bus will be taken to that destination. It is not up to the moment-to-moment whims of the passengers to determine where the bus will go—it is up to the owners and drivers who set the destination and then drive there. So, now it is time to look at where you want this bus called your life to be headed. What exactly do you choose to have on that little sign? What is your path?
VALUES AS CHOSEN LIFE DIRECTIONS
First we need to state a warning. You are entering into some of the most difficult work in this entire book. Your mind is listening and watching and will want to claim everything we do together (as usual!). Values are not purely verbal events, but they are necessarily known (at least in part) verbally. This places values only a hair’s breadth away from some destructive verbal processes. Your verbal organ, i.e., your “mind,” may claim that the important work you are about to do means things that it does not mean.
For example, if you notice a feeling of heaviness in response to this work; if you begin to feel disempowered; if you start to feel insignificant; if, once again, you think or feel that you are holding on to the short end of the stick with nowhere to go, stop. These are sure signs that your mind is taking over. If you run into these kinds of feelings over the course of chapters 11, 12, and 13 take a step back and start over with this chapter using all of the strategies you have learned in the book up to this point. See if you can defuse from your mental hooks this second time around. Values are vitalizing, uplifting, and empowering. They are not another mental club to beat yourself with or another measurement to fail against.
The sign on the front of your life bus says Values. Values are chosen life directions. However, unpacking this simple definition requires an understanding of what a “direction” is and what a “choice” is.
Direction
Because values are much more than mere words, it may be helpful to return to the metaphor of your life as a bus to guide us. So, imagine that your bus is traveling through a large flat valley with many gravel roads. All around you are distant mountains, hills, trees, and rocks. In the more immediate area there are ponds, shrubs, pastures, rocks, and streams. Your bus is equipped with a compass.
You must choose a direction to follow and you say, “I think I’ll go east.” You look at the compass and turn your bus to head east. You see a road ahead; it isn’t perfectly due east, but it leads you in that direction. You move the bus forward, come to the end of the road, and are presented with a couple of alternative routes. You study the alternatives and go forward once more, more or less in an easterly direction.
So when do you actually get to east? How will you know when you have arrived at east? When is the direction called “east” finished? When have you gone as far east as you can go?
If you are not trying to get to a specific place, but are just following a direction, the answer is “never.” Directions are not something you “get” in the way that you “get” an object or “get” to a city.
In this same way, values are intentional qualities that join together a string of moments into a meaningful path. They are what moments are about, but they are never possessed as objects, because they are qualities of unfolding actions, not of particular things. Said another way, values are verbs and adverbs, not nouns or adjectives; they are something you do or a quality of something you do, not something you have. If they are something you do (or a quality of something you do), they never end. You are never finished.
For example, say one of your values is to be a loving person. This doesn’t mean that as soon as you love someone for a few months you are done, as you can be done with building a house or done with earning a college degree. There is more loving to do—always. Love is a direction, not an object.
We will return to this metaphor as we explore values further, but to complete our definition we must also define “choice.”
Choice
Choices and reasoned judgments are not the same thing. When you make a judgment, you apply your mind and its evaluative abilities to alternatives, and depending on what you want, you pick one of those alternatives. For example, you may decide to eat fish for dinner rather than fatty hamburger (even though you like the hamburger more and it costs less), because there is a lot of evidence that fish oils are good for your heart and you want to live longer. That is a judgment. You consider several factors: the taste of the food, the cost of the food, and living longer. You look at the pros and cons along those metrics: the fish may not taste as good, but it’s okay (if it was disgusting, your decision might change); it costs a bit more but you have the money (if it cost a great deal more, you might go with the burger regardless of the health issue); you want to be healthy; and you think fish is healthier. You go with the fish.
Ninety percent of the time judgments work fine. The ability to use our logical judgments to pick between alternatives is a wonderful tool, and that ability is the reason why humans have done so well on the planet. But in some areas judgments don’t work very well, and in still others they absolutely cannot work.
One area they absolutely cannot work is the area of values. Here’s why: Judgments necessarily involve applying evaluative metrics to alternative action plans. For example, in the judgment we just described, one of the metrics was the health of your heart. As with applying a yardstick to a material object, we can try to measure fish and burgers on a “healthy heart” yardstick. This is true of any evaluative situation. Once you pick which yardstick to use, picking the best alternative is a mere intellectual judgment.
But what about the yardstick itself? How was that picked? If picking the yardstick is itself a judgment (and sometimes it is), that means there is yet another yardstick. This happens when one purpose is a means to another purpose. For example, you might use “healthy for your heart” as a measure, not because it is an end in itself but because a healthy heart makes it likelier that you will live a long and full life. But how was that yardstick picked? Was picking “living a full and healthy life” itself a judgment? It could be, but if it is, there is still some other yardstick that was applied to “living a full and healthy life” because judgment, by definition, involves applying an evaluative yardstick to two or more alternatives.
Note what is happening here. This could go on forever. In the end, judgments cannot tell you which yardstick to pick, because judgments require applying an evaluative metric. That works fine, but only after you’ve picked one.
Valuing, however, gives us a place to stop. Values are not judgments. Values are choices. Choices are selections between alternatives that may be made in the presence of reasons (if your mind gives you any, which it usually does, since minds chatter about everything), but this selection is not for those reasons in the sense that it is not explained by, justified by, or linked to them. A choice is not linked to an evaluative verbal yardstick. Said another way, choice is a defused selection among alternatives. It is different than judgment, which is a verbally guided selection among alternatives.
Have you noticed that the word “evaluation” actually contains the word “value”? That’s because evaluations are a matter of applying our values and then making judgments based on those values. If values were judgments, it would mean that we’d have to evaluate our values, but against which values would we evaluate them?
Usually, we don’t think about this much, and for a good reason: minds don’t like ch
oices. Minds know how to apply evaluative yardsticks; in fact, it is the very essence of what these relational abilities evolved to do. But minds cannot pick the ultimate directions that make all of this decision making meaningful.
With nonverbal organisms, all selections between alternatives are choices, because nonverbal organisms do not have the verbal tools to make literal judgments. Scientists studying these kinds of things in the laboratory generate and test the reasons for choices, but the animal is not guided by the “reasons” the scientists come up with in a literal sense. The animal simply chooses. In a similar fashion, if we were sitting on Mt. Olympus and knew every detail of our own lives, and how to interpret all of these influences, we might be able to reason why we made certain choices at certain points in our lives. But we are not sitting on Mt. Olympus; from the inside out we simply choose.
It is essential that human beings learn to do what all the other creatures on the planet do with ease, even though our chatterbox minds keep going on and on about everything we do. It is essential because without choice, valuing becomes impossible.
Making a Choice
In order to practice choosing, let’s start with something trivial. There are two letters below. Choose one.
Now for the tricky part. Watch what your mind does as this question is asked: “Why did you choose the one you chose?”
For most of you, your mind will now generate a “reason.” But bring all of your defusion skills into this moment. Would it be possible to notice that thought and still pick the other? Remember the exercises we did in chapter 2 when we read a verbal rule and deliberately did something else? Let’s do that again.
This time, we’ll give you lots of “reasons” to be aware of. There are two letters below. Read the sentences below and then choose one. (Not as a judgment! Just notice all of the reasons in a defused, accepting, mindful, open way and pick one or the other for no reason at all and with all of the reasons you may have).
Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life Page 23