Get Out of Your Mind and into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

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If you could only get past feelings of embarrassment, fear, self-criticism, and self-doubt, how would your life be different? You might take more chances and make more mistakes, but you’d also be able to live more freely and confidently than ever before.

Get Out Of Your Mind And Into Your Life by Steven C. Hayes

Life is hard. Life is also many other things. Ultimately your life is what you choose to make it. When the word machine dominates, life works one way. When the verbal evaluative side of you is but one source of input, life works differently. The choices themselves aren’t always easy, but finding the freedom to choose is a liberating experience. It’s your life. It is not the word machine’s - even though (of course) it tells you otherwise. (194) I love ACT, so it pains me to rate this less than 4 or 5 stars, but I would really hesitate to recommend it to any consumer with less than a master’s degree. The appendix includes a note to scientists explaining that the authors dumbed down many of the Relational Frame Theory (RFT) concepts for the sake of the general public, and they did, but still there is much in here that goes way beyond what an average self-help consumer will push through. I find the exercises and quotes useful to me as a practitioner but it’s hard for me to imagine more than a handful of the people I have ever worked with going through this book start to finish. I’m willing to be wrong about that. If you are fighting to be ‘right,’ even if it doesn’t help you move forward, ask yourself, ‘Which would I rather be? Right or alive and vital?’” (84) Thought: It could be that pain is not really synonymous with suffering. It could be that pain plus unwillingness to feel that pain equals suffering. Basically, our verbal skills—and, in particular, our ability to relate anything to anything else and think symbolically—make anything an entry point into pain.

How to Operate Your Inner Flashlight

Steven C. Hayes, PhD, is Nevada Foundation Professor in the department of psychology at the University of Nevada. An author of thirty-four books and more than 470 scientific articles, he has shown in his research how language and thought leads to human suffering, and cofounded ACT, a powerful therapy method that is useful in a wide variety of areas. Hayes has been president of several scientific societies and has received several national awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapy.

Get out of Your Mind and into Your Life | Request PDF Get out of Your Mind and into Your Life | Request PDF

He runs the leading Ph.D program in Behavior Analysis, and coined the term Clinical Behavior Analysis. He is known for devising a behavior analysis of human language and cognition called Relational Frame Theory, and its clinical application to various psychological difficulties, such as anxiety.Humans suffer, at least in part, because we are verbal creatures. We are often either recreating the past or living in an imagined future. Avoiding the pain of presence leads to the pain of absence - avoiding pain leads to missing out on life (16) Willingness means shifting your agenda from the content of your pain to the content of your life.” (129) None of [these techniques] will work simply by reading about them, any more than reading about physical exercise will build your muscles.” (119)

Get Out of Your Mind and into Your Life: The New Acceptance

I’ve noticed in my own life that as my memory and verbal skills have increased, so has my pain/suffering. If you commit to a particular act, use mindfulness and defusion strategies when your mind starts giving you problems with pursuing that path, and move forward, accepting what your mind offers you, you will be in a better position to live a full and meaningful life with or without unpleasant thoughts, emotions, and sensations.

According to your mind, the content of your pain is the source of your suffering because the pain is bad. Thus, you can measure suffering by the amount of the (bad) pain.” (129)

How to Get Out of Your Head | Psychology Today How to Get Out of Your Head | Psychology Today

The past is verbally remembered and the future is verbally imagined or “languaged” with images (23) If you find yourself entangled in a ‘logical’ but sad story about your life, and why things have to be the way they are, write down the normal story, then take all the descriptive facts and write the same exact facts into a different story” (84) Suffer means having a burden we are unwilling to carry, that we move away from carrying: “fer” comes from Latin for ‘carry,’ “suf/sub” comes from Latin for ‘from below to up and away’ (12) Language creates suffering in part because it leads to experiential avoidance. Of all the psychological processes known to science, experiential avoidance—avoiding unpleasant thoughts, emotions, or events—is one of the worst.

When exposed to the same levels of physiological arousal, experiential avoiders are more likely to feel pain than those who willingly accept their anxiety. Hayes' work is somewhat controversial, particularly with his coined term "Relational Frame Theory" to describe stimulus equivalent research in relation to an elaborate form of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior (also referred to as verbal operants).