Things Might Go Terribly, Horribly Wrong: A Guide to Life Liberated from Anxiety

by Kelly G. Wilson

Instead of seeing a problem like anxiety as something you “have,” like a virus or a broken bone, ACT describes these problems in terms of your ability to function in six process areas. These process areas are kind of like the building blocks of our problems (and our successes) in living. If we examine a problem like anxiety in light of these, we can point to certain process breakdowns that might be contributing to the problem, getting between us and whatever it is that we want in life. With these in mind, we can make small adjustments to the way we do things or relate to our experiences. Taken as a whole, these changes can help us wring more richness and meaning out of our lives—without having to first control, manage, or get rid of any particular thoughts, feelings, or experiences.

ACT is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Anxiety is not something you have, it a consequence of six processes.

Contact with the present moment—the ability to bring flexible, focused attention to what’s happening in your life right here, right now Defusion—the ability to hold thoughts and stories about what’s possible lightly, without taking them literally or assuming they are invariably true Acceptance—the ability to acknowledge and affirm all aspects of your life just as they are Values—the ability to choose and articulate those aspects of your life that matter to you Committed action—the ability to choose to act in ways that further your values and to gently turn back toward those values when you find yourself going in a different direction Self-as-context—the ability to see yourself as the dynamic and evolving setting in which your life unfolds instead of as a fixed set of ideas about who you are and what you might become

ACT’s six process areas. As you practice and develop mastery in these 6 areas or ways of thinking, anxious thoughts no longer have a meaningful place in your heart and mind. In other words, “The goal is to set you free—not free of anxiety in the sense that hard thoughts and feelings cease to exist, rather, free in the sense that they no longer set limits on your life.”

the ACT process model will help you find ways to: Remain flexibly and purposefully connected to the present moment rather than be pulled into the unchangeable past or the unknowable future. Keep your thoughts about the world in perspective as just thoughts, your stories about yourself and the world in perspective as just stories. Accept with equanimity and relative good humor all aspects of your life, whether pleasant or painful, in or out of your control. Be free to choose and to articulate what you want your life to be about. Commit to doing things, both great and small, that will shape your life around your hopes, dreams, and values—and, perhaps more importantly, turn back to these same principles when you wander from them. Recognize your life as a place of great and unfolding possibilities rather than a set of confining, rigidly defined stories about who you are and what you might become.

ACT feels like it works well with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT).

By increasing your ability to function in the six process areas, you become more psychologically limber.

I like the phrase, “psychological limber.” It’s probably because I’m feeling a need currently for greater physical flexibility.

The goal is to set you free—not free of anxiety in the sense that hard thoughts and feelings cease to exist, rather, free in the sense that they no longer set limits on your life.

Novak Djokavic adopted this mentality between 2010–2013. Look what it did for him.

ACT can’t shield you from the things that might go wrong in your life. It can’t protect you from disappointment, rejection, and loss. But ACT can help you open up to the richness of experience and connect with a sense of purpose and direction that might, to this point, have been obscured by your struggle with anxiety. It can show you how to find the space you need to live your life in a way that matters to you, even while you remain, as ever, at large in the world with its inestimable potential for both pain and joy.

“Find space.”

Learning to sit with ambiguity can be a very important start at a life liberated from anxiety—and the way to do it is to resist the urge to chase answers to questions that may actually be unanswerable.

How does one become “okay” with ambiguity?

Wherever you find a human, you find a problem.

Love this quote!

We spend a lot of time trying to solve problems that are essentially unsolvable.

Insanity.

What if problem solving twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week isn’t even the best way to solve most of our problems?

How many people who experience anxiety believe they can “eliminate” these anxious thought patterns? What would it take to convince them otherwise?

one study (Chiles and Strosahl 2005) found that 20 percent of a statistically relevant sample of American adults reported a two-week period at some time in their lives during which they gave serious thought to taking their own lives, which included making a plan and identifying the means for carrying out the deed.

Suicide stat.

If suffering is ubiquitous in life, the withdrawal from and avoidance of suffering is accordingly the withdrawal from and avoidance of life.

Love this quote!

The things we most want our lives to be about are intimately connected to the ways in which we suffer the most. Consider the ways you experience anxiety in your life and see if they aren’t bound to something you care deeply about. Would you be worried about your performance on the job if being a successful and respected professional meant nothing to you?

What do you value?

An example can be found in Victor Frankl’s landmark book Man’s Search for Meaning (1959). In the book, Frankl describes his experience in the Nazi death camps during World War II. He speaks at length about suffering in the camps, which is no surprise. However, the point upon which the entire book turns is Frankl’s description of the time he and a companion find a way to escape the camp. They gather some food and a few other supplies. The day before their planned escape, Frankl decides to make one last round of the patients in his makeshift hospital. He knows that his medical efforts are largely futile. The prisoners under his care are dying of malnutrition, dysentery, and untold other causes. He has little to offer them except comfort. Frankl describes one fellow he had been particularly keen on saving but who was clearly dying. On Frankl’s last round, the man looks into his eyes and says, “You, too, are getting out?” Frankl writes, “I decided to take fate into my own hands for once.” He tells his friend that he will stay in the camp and care for his patients. Upon returning to sit in the hospital ward, Frankl describes a sense of peace unlike any he has ever experienced. What Frankl experienced that day in the camp was liberation. Even though his outward circumstances were some of the cruelest fetters devised by human beings, Frankl was able to experience freedom. And what we take away from his story is that no matter what circumstances you’ve suffered, no matter what cos...

What is freedom? If Frankl can do it, maybe there’s hope.

You can think of anxiety in the moment like a fish that’s been chucked onto dry land. To flourish, a fish needs water over its gills and supporting its body. Anxiety, likewise, needs the murky past or mysterious future to feed it and keep it going. Without their respective natural environments to sustain them, both the fish and anxiety will quickly wither and expire. Realizing this is a huge step toward breaking the stranglehold anxiety can have on your life.

Anxiety needs “murky past” and “mysterious future” to survive.

Both worry and rumination are best understood as lapses in present-moment contact. When you worry, you lose contact with the present moment as you focus your attention on a conceptualized future. When you ruminate, it’s more or less the same act, except that you focus on a conceptualized past.

Great definitions for worry and rumination.

Kabat-Zinn famously defined mindfulness as “the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally, to the unfolding of experience moment by moment” (Kabat-Zinn 1994, 4).

Mindfulness

The purpose of mindfulness, at least from an ACT perspective, is to bring you more intimately into contact with the richness of your life, not to reduce anxiety.

No pink elephants.

*Still, you are blessed, compared with me! / The present only touches you: / But oh! I backward cast my eye, / On dreary prospects! And forward, though I cannot see, / I guess and fear!

Robbie Burns

There’s an old campfire story about a nervous man who’s afraid of the dark, living by himself in a rundown house. Every night he lies awake, terrified by every bump and creak he hears. Finally, in a desperate attempt to calm his nerves, he buys a pistol. At first, the weapon seems to do him some good. He still doesn’t sleep soundly much of the time, but when he’s the most scared, he reaches under his pillow, pulls out the pistol, and aims it at the door. After a while, when nothing comes bursting in upon him, he feels a little better. He slips the gun back under the pillow and eventually falls asleep. This arrangement works out for a time. But one sultry night, the man wakes up from an uneasy dream. Everything is silent—maybe too silent. The light of a full moon is streaming through the window as he looks around the room. He’s about to put his head back on the pillow when he looks to the foot of the bed, where, to his great horror, he sees two eyes shining evilly up at him. His heart races, and he doesn’t dare to breathe. Slowly, slowly he reaches for the pistol. He points the barrel of the gun right between the eyes and wraps his finger around the trigger. After a moment, he finds his voice. “Get out!” he cries. “Or I’ll shoot!” The thing at the end of the bed just stares back at him, icy and unblinking. “I mean it!” he shrieks again. He bolts upright in bed, whereupon the thing starts to lunge toward him. He fires one shot. And then he shrieks again, for he has just shot...

Long story about realizing your dreams/nightmares.

Defusion describes a state in which we regard the contents of our thoughts as just what they are: a collection of words that form in our minds. Depending on how useful they are in our lives, we may act upon them, or we may not. But we get to choose. There’s an opposite state to defusion, which, because psychologists are a creative bunch, is known as fusion. Fusion describes a state in which we take our thoughts literally, investing them with consequence and authority. Fusion comes with a sense of urgency—a sense that something must be done. When you’re fused with a thought, your opportunities for action in areas related to that thought are always diminished. Fusion with the thought that you are boring and unlikable diminishes your opportunities in the area of socializing because, well, people must have better things to do than pal around with dull boors.

Thoughts are no more than a collection of words in our minds.

Defusion isn’t the process of arguing with or disputing your thoughts at all. Rather, it’s the process of holding all of your thoughts lightly enough to be able to do what you need to do in your life.

Your thoughts aren’t you.

one of the giants of cognitive behavioral therapy, the late Albert Ellis, who was well known for railing against both “should-ing” and “musterbation.”)

That’s where those phrases came from.

Let’s get clear on something: by acceptance, we absolutely don’t mean approval, desire, or fondness. There’s a significant difference between being willing to have an experience, and wishing for it or enjoying it when it happens.

Tony Robbins is a master at this.

[Image]. Within the ACT professional community, the six process areas are graphically represented as points on a hexagon, a diagram that’s known as the hexaflex.

If you were raised in the United States (or many other places), you’ve grown up in a culture in which it’s more accurate to ask “In what ways am I racist?” than to ask “Am I racist?” Our culture (if you’re American, and perhaps even if you’re not) carries the baggage of racial oppression, and it takes a very long time for deeply ingrained prejudices like this to change. Even when we personally value the practice of equality and abhor the idea of discrimination, we are likely to still carry some of the seeds of these prejudices.

Everyone’s a little bit racist.

In 1923, the New York Times asked explorer George Mallory why he was so keen on climbing Mount Everest, to which he supposedly made the famous reply, “Because it’s there.”

Classic.

Values aren’t goals. Basically, if you can achieve, earn, attain, or complete it, it’s not a value—it’s a goal.

I need to show this to Scott.

I’ll keep the kids home from school. What if they catch the flu from one of the other children? You can almost feel the edges of this life closing in with each new experience. Remember that humans like to make up categories and then put things into them. Experiences like the ones above point toward the category “anxious person.” And what do anxious people do? They stay out of elevators, avoid going to the doctor, refrain from public speaking, skip parties… Do you see how this works? How life quickly gets bound up with content about who we are and what we can become? If you’ve come to think of yourself as an anxious person, a change in perspective about who you are and what you can become would be a major step toward liberating you from anxiety.

Perspective taking.

In a way, this entire book has been a long lesson in how to adopt a self-as-context perspective. If you can learn to remain connected to what’s going on in your life right now, accepting both the sweet and the sad, holding lightly the stories about what’s possible while turning your actions toward things that matter to you, you’ll have pretty much solved the riddle of self-as-context.

Three steps to freedom.

If we want to get specific about self-as-context, though, the way to do it is through some active perspective taking. In other words, we imagine what the world might look like if we could look at it from a different vantage point. The change in perspective can involve shifting time, space, or even identity. Whatever form it takes, the act of trying to see the world through a different pair of eyes gives you a chance to practice feeling what it’s like to be open to different sets of possibilities.

Trying on some different perspectives can open you up to new ways of being in the world. If you’re struggling with anxiety, this kind of practice can help you start to imagine a world where you can live your life the way you choose, even with feelings of anxiety—regardless of whether the possibility seems impossible to you at the moment. Here’s a little game you can play that might get you started with perspective taking. Game: Letter from the Future Props: Pen and paper or your computer • Difficulty: Somewhat hard This game is played in two rounds. You’ll complete each round by writing a short letter—just the kind of friendly correspondence you might put on a postcard or in an e-mail. Your objective in each round is to explore the world from a slightly different perspective than the one you currently have, although the nature of that difference varies from the first round to the second. Preparation: If you like to write with a pen and paper, set yourself up at a table or desk with these tools at hand. If you’re a committed typist, you can sit down in front of your computer (or your IBM Selectric, if you think this whole personal computer thing is just a fad). Before you write or type anything, though, close your eyes and take a few deep breaths, settling yourself in your chair. Without trying very hard to think of anything in particular, allow something that you’ve been bothered about for a long time to come into your thoughts. Since you’ve been at this book for quite a w...

At times we feel the need to go back to plain things. To stones, earth, grass, wind. To things we have known a long time, to what we knew when what filled the hours was dirt and a few sticks, a pile of leaves or some thin, white bones from a long-dead bird. The huge rock near the creek was not too hard to lie on then and the sun on bare skin felt warm. We did not feel the press of time as we do now. The world seemed firm and real, and life was slow, and long, and good. —Carolyn Elkins, “What We Knew”

Outdoors.

Steven C. Hayes’s workbook with Spencer Smith, Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (New Harbinger, 2005), is a good all-around introduction to ACT that doesn’t necessarily focus on any one kind of mental health problem. The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Anxiety: A Guide to Breaking Free from Anxiety, Phobias, and Worry Using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (New Harbinger, 2008), by John P. Forsyth and Georg H. Eifert, comes at the problem of anxiety from a slightly different angle than Things Might Go Terribly, Horribly Wrong, but like this book, it’s aimed at problems with anxiety. In addition to a number of pen-and-paper exercises, The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook comes with an audio CD with some useful and interesting guided meditations. Finally, among the books written for general readers, Chad LeJeune’s The Worry Trap: How to Free Yourself from Worry and Anxiety Using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (New Harbinger, 2007) is focused specifically on the condition of persistent worry known as generalized anxiety disorder. Much of what you’ve just read in this book was anticipated in our book Mindfulness for Two (New Harbinger, 2008), but in that volume, we go into greater detail about the behavior science that grounds this stuff. Mindfulness for Two is pretty readable for a professional book. If you think you want to explore the foundations of ACT a little further, we think you might want to take a look....

ACT resources.