Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Quotes

“Each new human life retraces this ancient story. Young children are the very essence of human innocence. They run, play, and feel—and, as in Genesis, when they are naked they are not ashamed. Children provide a model for the assumption of healthy normality, and their innocence and vitality are part of why the assumption seems so obviously true. But that vision begins to fade as children acquire language and become more and more like the creatures adults see reflected every day in their mirrors. Adults unavoidably drag their children from the Garden with each word, conversation, or story they relate to them. We teach children to talk, think, compare, plan, and analyze. And as we do, their innocence falls away like petals from a flower, to be replaced by the thorns and stiff branches of fear, self-criticism, and pretense. We cannot prevent this gradual transformation, nor can we fully soften it. Our children must enter into the terrifying world of verbal knowledge. They must become like us.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“In humans, self-elimination can fulfill a variety of purposes, but its stated purposes are usually drawn from the everyday lexicon of emotion, memory and thought. For example, when suicide notes are examined, they tend to be messages emphasizing the immense burdens of living and conceptualizing a future state of existence (or nonexistence) in which those burdens will be lifted (Joiner et al., 2002). Although suicide notes frequently express love for others and a sense of shame for the act, they also commonly express that life is just too painful to bear (Foster, 2003). The emotions and most common states of mind generally associated with suicide include guilt, anxiety, loneliness, and sadness (Baumeister, 1990).”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“The Example of Suicide There is no more dramatic example of the degree to which suffering is part of the human condition than suicide. Death by deliberate choice is obviously the least desirable outcome one can imagine in life; yet, a surprisingly sizable proportion of the human family at one time or another seriously considers killing themselves, and a shockingly large number of them actually attempt to do so. Suicide is the conscious, deliberate, and purposeful taking of one’s own life. Two facts are starkly evident about suicide: (1) it is ubiquitous in human societies, and (2) it is arguably absent among all other living organisms. Existing theories of suicide are hard-pressed to logically account for both of these facts. Suicide is reported in every human society, both now and in the past. Approximately 11.5 per 100,000 persons in the United States actually commit suicide every year (Xu, Kochanek, Murphy, & Tejada-Vera, 2010), accounting for nearly 35,000 deaths in 2007.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“It is not possible to eliminate suffering by eliminating pain. Human existence contains inevitable challenges. People we love will be injured, and people close to us will die—indeed, we are aware from an early age that in time we all will die. We will also be sick. Functions will diminish. Friends and lovers will betray us. Pain is unavoidable, and (owing to our symbolic inclinations) we readily remember this pain and can bring it into consciousness at any given moment. This progression means that human beings consciously expose themselves to inordinate amounts of pain—despite our considerable abilities to control its sources in the external environment. Even so, great pain is not in itself a sufficient cause for true human suffering. For that to occur, symbolic behavior needs to be taken a bit further.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: An Experiential Approach to Behavior Change

“All printed forms and tools in this book are readily downloadable”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“These include the Self-Compassion Scale (Neff, 2003); White Bear Suppression Inventory (Wegner & Zanakos, 1994); Cognitive-Behavioral Avoidance Scale (Ottenbreit & Dobson, 2004); Thought Control Questionnaire (Wells & Davies, 1994), Distress Tolerance Scale (Simons & Gaher, 2005), the Emotional Nonacceptance subscale of the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (Gratz & Roemer, 2004), or similar subscales on various mindfulness measures such as the Kentucky Inventory of Mindfulness Skills (Baer, Smith, & Allen, 2004) or the Five Facets of Mindfulness Questionnaire (Baer et al., 2008), among several others. The definitions of acceptance vary in all of these approaches.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“A good way to assess for self-as-context is to examine the flexibility of perspective taking via the interview itself.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“The “I/here/nowness” of consciousness itself is an aspect of self that transcends any particular content of awareness—it is the context of verbal knowing itself.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“Another aspect of self is contact with the ongoing stream of private experience, or “self-as-process.” This contact has to do with the ability to observe and describe experiences in the present moment. Statements such as “I am feeling angry right now” reveal that the client is both aware of the content of ongoing awareness and aware of the distinct process of observing that content. This aspect of self-relatedness is a crucial part of “contact with the present moment.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“There are controlled ACT studies on work stress, pain, smoking, anxiety, depression, diabetes management, substance use, stigma toward substance users in recovery, adjustment to cancer, epilepsy, coping with psychosis, borderline personality disorder, trichotillomania, obsessive–compulsive disorder, marijuana dependence, skin picking, racial prejudice, prejudice toward people with mental health problems, whiplash-associated disorders, generalized anxiety disorder, chronic pediatric pain, weight maintenance and self-stigma, clinicians’ adoption of evidence-based pharmacotherapy, and training clinicians in psychotherapy methods other than ACT. The only sour notes so far are the use of ACT for more minor problems, where existing technology exceeded ACT outcomes on some measures (e.g., Zettle, 2003).”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“It is the breadth of problems addressed in these studies that is perhaps most startling. Such breadth is one of the main scientific requirements of a model that claims to be unified and transdiagnostic.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“In ACT, values are freely chosen, verbally constructed consequences of ongoing, dynamic, evolving patterns of activity, which establish predominant reinforcers for that activity that are intrinsic in engagement in the valued behavioral pattern itself”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“Compassion and acceptance; stigma and defusion. As described thus far, acceptance and defusion seem, superficially, to be intrapsychic issues, but self-as-context expands their nature. Because perspective taking is social, it is not possible to take a loving, open, accepting, and active perspective on yourself without doing likewise for others.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“This relationship is learned over hundreds if not thousands of examples; what is consistent across examples is not the content of the answer but rather the context, or perspective, from which the answer occurs. That is the case with all other deictic frames, such as I/you, we/they, and now/then.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“Is there something you hope will happen by telling me that thought?”).”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“The Zen master Seng-Ts’an was fond of saying “If you work on your mind with your mind, how can you avoid great confusion?”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“The resulting progress is astounding, outstripping our ability to appreciate the multifarious changes. Some 200 years ago the average human lifespan in the United States was 37 years; it now approaches 88! About 100 years ago, an American farmer could feed on average just four others; today, it is 200! Fifty years ago the Oxford English Dictionary weighed 300 pounds and took up 4 feet of shelf space; today, it fits on a 1-ounce flash drive or can be accessed via the Web from virtually anywhere!”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“The core of the ACT approach is built upon the idea that human language gives rise to both human achievement and human misery.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“The Origins of Suffering, according to the Judeo-Christian Tradition The Bible is very clear about the original source of human suffering. In the Genesis story, “God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, in our likeness’ ” (Gen. 1:26 [New International Version]), and Adam and Eve were placed in an idyllic garden. The first humans were innocent and happy: “The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame” (Gen. 2:25). They are given only one command: “You must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die” (Gen. 2:17). The serpent tells Eve that she will not die if she eats from that tree, but rather that “God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5). The serpent turns out to be correct, to a degree, because when the fruit is eaten, “The eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked” (Gen. 3:7).”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change