A Liberated Mind Quotes

“Pain and purpose are two sides of the same thing. A person struggling with depression is very likely a person yearning to feel fully. A socially anxious person is very likely a person yearning to connect with others. You hurt where you care, and you care where you hurt.”
― Steven C. Hayes, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters

“Psychological flexibility is the ability to feel and think with openness, to attend voluntarily to your experience of the present moment, and to move your life in directions that are important to you, building habits that allow you to live life in accordance with your values and aspirations. It’s about learning not to turn away from what is painful, instead turning toward your suffering in order to live a life full of meaning and purpose.”
― Steven C. Hayes, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters

“You can say it this way: 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. How cool is that?”
― Steven C. Hayes, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters

“The central shift is from a focus on what you think and feel to how do you relate to what you think and feel. Specifically, the new emphasis is on learning to step back from what you are thinking, notice it, and open up to what you are experiencing. These steps keep us from doing the damage to ourselves that efforts to avoid or control our thoughts or feelings inflict, allowing us to focus our energies on taking the positive actions that can alleviate our suffering.”
― Steven C. Hayes, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters

“Psychological flexibility is the ability to feel and think with openness, to attend voluntarily to your experience of the present moment, and to move your life in directions that are important to you, building habits that allow you to live life in accordance with your values and aspirations.”
― Steven C. Hayes, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters

“We began crafting ways to apply defusion and self skills to coping with the fear and pain of acceptance. Learning to defuse from the voice of the Dictator helps us keep a healthy distance from the negative messages that pop uninvited into our minds, like “Who are you kidding, you can’t deal with this!” It also helps diminish the power of the unhelpful relations that have been embedded in our thought networks, which are often activated by the pain involved in acceptance. For example, the relation between smoking a cigarette and feeling better will be triggered by the discomfort of craving a smoke. Reconnecting with our authentic self helps us practice self-compassion as we open up to unpleasant aspects of our lives, not berating ourselves for making mistakes or for feeling fear about dealing with the pain. We see beyond the image of a broken, weak, or afflicted self to the powerful true self that can choose to feel pain.”
― Steven C. Hayes, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters

“The truth about mental health is that the causes of all of the mental conditions you hear about are unknown, and the idea that “hidden diseases” lurk behind human suffering is an out-and-out failure.”
― Steven C. Hayes, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters

“Metaphorically we walk in circles—watching silly TV shows, surfing the net, posting to our Facebook page—while waiting for a sense of wholeness, or peace of mind, or purpose to arrive. The rug-scratches of distraction, avoidance, and indulgence are not changing anything of importance. We need a place we can be comfortable, in the original etymological sense of that word: with (com) strength (fort, like “build a fort,” from the Latin fortis). Living with our strength in the world requires far more of us than distraction, avoidance, and indulgence. If you want to find peace of mind and purpose, you will have to let go of finding a way out and instead pivot toward finding a way in. I am acutely aware that this is easier said than done.”
― Steven C. Hayes, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters

“The single hardest burden for a human being to carry is a lack of nurturance in childhood. Physical or sexual abuse, neglect, constant criticism: in the face of such treatment, our bodies and minds brace for a tough life ahead, even down to the level of how our genes are expressed. Genetics research has revealed that our life experiences influence which of our genes will become more or less active. For example, a specific group of genes is involved in responding to stress. A lack of nurturance intensifies their activity, making us less able to handle stress and decreasing our resistance to disease. We can also experience emotional instability or emotional blunting that can be lifelong.”
― Steven C. Hayes, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters

“Most of us think of evolution only in terms of genetics, but that is a mistake. Culture, thought, behavior, and the expression of genes (the genes you have can be turned on or off) also evolve. In addition, we humans can influence our evolution by the environments we construct and the choices we make; our evolution is not just a matter of chance. We have been given the great gift of being able to adapt our thinking and behavior intentionally, and to change our circumstances deliberately, to better suit healthy, purposeful living. The six flexibility skills form such a powerful set because each allows us to meet one of the six essential criteria for evolution to occur. They provide us with the tools to intentionally evolve our lives.”
― Steven C. Hayes, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters

“Popular books promise that we can and should learn how to feel good, manage our anxiety, or get rid of our depression—but not so much information about how to learn from our own experiences. Our medications are anti-depressants, or anti-anxiety, or anti-psychotics, as if the only sensible goal is to subtract them. Our disorders are called “mood disorders” or “thought disorders” or “anxiety disorders”—once again feeding a cultural view that is often outright hostile to anything painful. We’ve got to put aside this unhelpful messaging to create some space to try truly new things.”
― Steven C. Hayes, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters

“Consumers of psychological change advice should demand broadly useful methods of change that work, and that do so through change processes that have precision, scope, and depth.”
― Steven C. Hayes, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters

“Psychological rigidity is at its core an attempt to avoid negative thoughts and feelings caused by difficult experiences, both when they occur and in our memory of them.”
― Steven C. Hayes, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters

“If we are afraid of being rejected by others, we see signs of imminent rejection everywhere. We know that buying into that fear will not liberate us, but the possibility of rejection is so fear-inducing that it seems like a violation of basic logic not to focus on it.”
― Steven C. Hayes, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters

“The fields of psychology and psychiatry have also inadvertently contributed to the problem. Ideas that are not evidence-based proliferate, such as Freud’s Oedipus complex (you are sexually attracted to your parents, which creates a hidden conflict, giving rise to anxiety), while evidence-based ones lie dormant.”
― Steven C. Hayes, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters

“the stories my analytical mind told me about myself were not me: the stories were rather the product of a set of thought processes that were in me. Those processes were tools I could use if I chose to, but I did not have to listen to them and certainly was not defined by them.”
― Steven C. Hayes, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters

“Those processes were tools I could use if I chose to, but I did not have to listen to them and certainly was not defined by them.”
― Steven C. Hayes, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters

“This interference with learning is one reason why dismantling control by the Dictator Within is so hard: it cannot just be instructed. Suppose we’re given the rule that we must not be so dominated by rules. It would not be that useful because we can become ensnared in trying to confirm to ourselves that we’re following that new rule, and voilà: we are off into our heads once again.”
― Steven C. Hayes, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters

“For too many of us, the occasional binge becomes habitual. That extra drink at the party turns into substance dependence. Procrastinating on a deadline unfolds into life dreams that are not pursued. Picking fights with the people you love becomes a method for avoiding the intimacy you so desperately crave.”
― Steven C. Hayes, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters

“I want you to think of the most empowering relationship in your life. This should be a relationship with someone who lifted you up, who somehow carried you forward. It could be with a spouse or a sibling; a lover or a friend; a teacher or a coach; a priest, rabbi, or minister; a parent or guardian—it could be anyone.”
― Steven C. Hayes, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters

“When we’ve adopted behavior because we think it helps us avoid emotional pain, whether we’re aware of that thinking or not, change is challenging.”
― Steven C. Hayes, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters