A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters

by Steven C. Hayes

Most behavioral psychologists, though, believed that behavior and psychological conditions were as influenced by life experience as by genetic and neurobiological factors, and that each impacted the other in a system.

experiences do significantly determine which genes are allowed to operate in your body.

some of this epigenetic “coding” that is imprinted in our biology can be inherited.

grandchildren of people who went through the Holocaust, or who were abused as children, or who nearly starved in Holland during World War II, have bodies that are more genetically vigilant for stress and trauma, because their epigenome is different.

the gene created a greater sensitivity to experiences and became especially relevant when adversity struck and social support was lacking.

The notion that has made its way into the mainstream culture that those of us who struggle with psychological well-being were just dealt a bad genetic hand is grossly inaccurate. And the idea of a “bad genetic hand” can lead to a lack of commitment to do what you can to improve your well-being.

Harmful methylation can result from trauma, but learning the flexibility skills can undo part of the damage,

if you learn to be less reactive to stress through the cultivation of flexibility pivots, the body starts turning off those reaction systems, including genetic expression switches that may have been originally thrown not by you but by your parents and grandparents.

As psychological flexibility increases, your brain quiets. You are spending less time in defensive scanning and planning, and that allows for more focus on what you want to be attending to, like work tasks or listening thoughtfully to a friend.

An enormous body of research illuminates why the ACT skills lead to helpful brain changes and changes in gene expression. We now know that if you change your mind and behavior in a healthy way, helpful changes in your body will come along for the ride,

A false idea that has dominated the study of language acquisition is that meaning is derived from a process of association, much the way Ivan Pavlov’s dogs learned to salivate at the sound of a bell

We teach them by direct association and by using what psychologists call contingencies, learning “when . . . if . . . then” sequences such as when I see this face, if I say “Mama,” then happy tickles will follow.

Children come to understand that the relations between words and their meanings go both ways, that if the word Mama refers to a particular person, then if someone points to that person and asks who she is, the word Mama is the right answer.

every word they are saying is now leading the baby to search for events and objects in the environment that are unfamiliar and to derive a two-way relation between those events or objects and these new words.

Language was not learning to associate, it was learning to relate.

We can say to a child who has learned this relational frame not only “The house is bigger than the car,” but “God is bigger than the universe” and the child will understand. The child will also be able to say, “The universe is smaller than God” and “Since I’m smaller than the universe, God is bigger than me.” They can combine frames into cognitive networks.

Two-way relations and the networks they produce are the fundamental building block of our symbolic thinking abilities.

The kinds of relations we learn quickly become more and more complex, moving beyond direct relations between words and concrete objects to abstract relations, such as that one object is opposite to another, better or...

As we learn the many relational frames, we move from being able to derive relations by observing events in the world to being able to imagine relations—to conjure them up purely in our minds.

relational thought is much more complex than associative thought because it allows us to fabricate relations in the abstract and combine them into vast networks.

with relational thinking, we can connect things that have no physical relation to one another and don’t appear together in time and place.

Lots of unwanted thoughts are similarly triggered because of such embedded relations, explaining the automaticity of so much of our thinking.

Extensive research has confirmed that learning relations is crucial to developing our cognitive powers, and also to developing our sense of self. For example, in research with language-impaired children, who have not developed a normal sense of self, we found that if we taught them how to do relational thinking, they would then develop both stronger language skills and more normal self-awareness.

Trying to unravel these dense networks of relations and reconstruct them, as CBT has tried to help people do, is like trying to rearrange a vast spiderweb. It’s futile.

Trying to get rid of thoughts would just add to the cognitive networks that surround them. Relating could be abstract: any...

You can assess for yourself what I mean. Think of any two objects. Anything. Once you have done that, how is the first one better than the second? You will find an answer very shortly. How did the second cause the first? Think hard. Again an answer! How can you only think rational thoughts if the very nature of thou...

Traditional cognitive ideas were based on an associationistic theory of thought. If that was wrong, traditional cognitive therapy was conceptually wrong, even if some of its methods were helpful.

RFT research has since shown that it’s not until a particular type of relation is learned that this sense of self, of being a separate being, emerges.

I will call them perspective-taking relations.

knowing that you are here rather than there.

As a result, when you go there, there becomes here and here becomes there!

The three most critical are I versus you, here versus there, and now versus then. Children usually learn them in that order: person, place, and time.

The perspective-taking relations of person, place, and time merge into an integrated sense of perspective: a sense of observing from “I/here/now” appears. Metaphorically, you show up behind those eyes of yours, and at the same moment, you know that your mother is behind hers. You have developed a sense of awareness of living in the world as a conscious human being, with a point of view. There is a quality of “fromness” to this kind of awareness. You not only see, and see that you see, you also see that you see from “I/here/now.” What’s more, this sense of self is based on symbolic relations; it emanates from the combination of perspective-taking relations.

“Self” as a form of consciousness or perspective becomes the strand you put the beads of experience on. Everywhere you go, there you are.

As we begin to create our story of who we are, for example, we also start to compare ourselves to others,

We have begun to fashion the conceptualized self, and this imagined self often takes on the illusion of being our “real” self.

Human infants come into life with a certain amount of “theory of mind” skills, meaning the cognitive talents that allow us to know something about what others want based on observation rather than on being told.

The psychological costs came much later as symbolic thinking became internalized and focused on problem solving.

our problem-solving skills are unparalleled in the natural kingdom—but it led us to view our own lives as problems to be solved.

We engage in needless comparisons between ourselves and others,

Research suggests that the average person lies in small ways to one out of four of the people they encounter.

we devalue relationships with others if we lie to them, and our brains are less prepared to act effectively while inside an episode of lying.

Much as we might want to stop this storytelling process and to change the story we’ve elaborated, the activity of our mental networks is largely automatic, much of it subconscious.

“extinction does not destroy the original learning, but instead generates new learning that is especially context-dependent.”

relaxation-induced panic.

The unstoppable relation making we do accounts for why if we try to get rid of a thought, we actually create a new relation in our minds between it and our effort to expunge

Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP).

our quick relational responses (or subconscious thoughts, if you will) often predict our behavior more strongly than claims we make about what we think—what RFT researchers call our extended and elaborated relational responses.

Learn it in one, Derive it in two, Put it in networks, That change what you do.

One of the most harmful ways in which our minds become trapped in our thought processes is by learning, or inferring, problem-solving rules that we convince ourselves we must follow.