“You can choose to live a vital, committed human life, even inside your pain. That doesn’t have to go away before you get to have the privilege of being human.”
It is an honor to have Dr. Steven Hayes, the father of “Acceptance and Commitment Therapy” (ACT), on the podcast this week. In this wide ranging episode, we learn about the “third wave” of cognitive behavioral therapies, and how to have greater psychological flexibility— the ability to contact the present moment more fully as a conscious human being, and to change or persist in behavior when doing so serves valued ends. We will learn the 6 core ACT processes, and how they can help you stop fighting the battles within your own head and live a more vital life. The message from today’s podcast is that you can choose to live a vital life. This episode will teach you how! Enjoy, and please join in the discussion below.
I feel like this perspective added an important piece to the picture I am constructing (internally) of emotional suffering that has been growing over the past century (I think this was acknowledged by Martin Seligman, et al). Here’s the summation:
We’re anxious because we are conditioned to think we need to suppress certain thoughts or feelings and suppressing them has us constantly returning to them to make sure they are kept down, which makes us keep noticing them. We are depressed because our efforts to suppress the thoughts/feelings are helpless (permanent, pervasive, personal), and many of them act on a positive feedback loop (they keep getting stronger), which is how people suffer from physical pain.
The high-level solution is to integrate our real-time experiences of thoughts, feelings, and external inputs in a way that allows us to have compassion for ourselves and others, while not expending significant energy to suppress a thought or feeling that we need to be able to address a little later.