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.
Notes:
+ Word meanings and origins
- 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)
- Refer means to carry again (18)
+ Acceptance/Willingness
- Avoiding the pain of presence leads to the pain of absence - avoiding pain leads to missing out on life (16)
- Short term positives are more reinforcing than long term negatives; this is why ineffective coping strategies persist - they offer short term relief but continue the problem over the long run (31)
- Is not: wanting, conditional, trying or effortful, a matter of belief, the self-deception of “yes, if…”
- “Willingness is simply answering yes to your actual present experience.” (128)
- “In any given moment the issue is the same: Will you feel what you feel when you feel it? This is a yes or no question. It can be answered in only two ways: yes or no.” (128)
- “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)
- “Willingness means shifting your agenda from the content of your pain to the content of your life.” (129)
+ Defusion
- The past is verbally remembered and the future is verbally imagined or “languaged” with images (23)
- We can jump off the mind train by breaking the rules of verbal conditioning (32)
- “Defusion is like taking off your glasses and holding them out, several inches away from your face; then you can see how they make the world appear to be yellow, instead of seeing only the yellow world” (71)
- Language is arbitrary: “Your mind can justify any relation” (69)
- “If you are fighting to be ‘right,’ even if it doesn’t help move you forward, assume the White Queen has decreed that you are ‘right.’ Now ask yourself, ‘So what? What can I actually do to create a more valued life from here?’” (84)
- “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)
- “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)
+ Observing self
- 3 levels of self: 1. Conceptualized self, 2. Self as ongoing process of self-awareness, 3. Observing self
+ Values
- “Neither rebelliousness nor compliance are, at their core, forms of independence.” (158)
- “Ask yourself this question when you think you’ve failed: What is buying that thought in the service of? What value does it comport with? Being right? Never failing? Never being vulnerable? Is that what you want your life to be about? If not, take responsibility even for your mind chattering on about what a failure you are. Feel the pain. Learn from it. Then move on.” (162)
+ Committed Action
- “None of [these techniques] will work simply by reading about them, any more than reading about physical exercise will build your muscles.” (119)
Potent Quotables:
When people step into something they want to get out of, be it a briar patch or a mud puddle, 99.9 percent of the time the effective action to take is to walk, run, step, hop, or jump out of trouble. This is not so with quicksand. (3)
Trying to get rid of your pain only amplifies it, entangles you further in it, and transforms it into something traumatic. Meanwhile, living your life is pushed to the side. (7)
The key problem is not that you have problems, it is that you’ve put the choices that are here to be made on hold. Vitality and engagement in your life does not require you to eliminate your pain first. It requires quite the opposite: opening up to the joy (and pain!) that comes from having your life be about what you really, really want it to be about. So, here’s a question to ask the person you see in the mirror. What do you want your life to be about? Really? (163)
“If I do not care, I will not be hurt” is how human minds keep values at arm’s length. Unfortunately, this move hurts even more than caring; it’s not the biting, alive, occasional hurt of caring and sometimes losing, but the dull, deadening, constant hurt of not living your life in a way that is true to yourself. (177)
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)
Life is a choice. The choice here is not about whether or not to have pain. It is whether or not to live a valued, meaningful life. (198)