A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters

by Steven C. Hayes

In working on developing attentional flexibility, it’s helpful to keep in mind that the future is a matter of pure imagination, while our recollection of the past is largely distorted and wildly incomplete. What we call “memories” are constantly being reconstructed—in the present. When old friends or siblings reminisce about old times, it’s not long before they realize that their memories diverge somewhat. One person will remember details this way and another will remember them that way; trips that are separate in the memory of one will be blended together in the memory of another. Inside our own minds, we are usually convinced we are right . . . but of course that cannot be true for everyone. Someone is obviously distorting and revising history. It turns out that “someone” is all of us. It happens in part because we have an investment in the consistency of the story our memories tell. (Recall the coherence effect from Chapter Five, one of the three Cs of cognitive inflexibility.) So when we look to the past, we are not really looking into the past anyway! We are reconstructing it. We can’t entirely turn off the process of mental fabrication, but we can learn not to become immersed in it, or to buy into our fabrications. We can become more aware of our minds slipping into this mode and choose to look at our recollections of the past and conjectures about the future with a present-focused consciousness. Thoughts are only thoughts. What we do with them is up to us.