Posted by alexandra_k on May 14, 2005, at 6:38:25
In reply to acceptance » alexandra_k, posted by badhaircut on May 14, 2005, at 1:26:35
Disclaimer: I don't know anything about ACT other than that it has the word 'acceptance' in it and Linehan goes on about acceptance and I think I agree with her... So. I am trying to defend acceptance though don't necessarily buy ACT (I don't know if I buy it or not because I don't know anything about it) ok??
:-)
> When I said ACT "doesn't care very much if a patient has irrational thoughts," I was in fact thinking of the classic "Everyone-always-hates-me" variety.
But is it that they 'don't care' or that they don't wet themselves with excitement as a CBT therapist tends to???
> As you say, if a client accepts being upset and stops judging himself harshly for it, that is itself a change in thought.
Lifting judgement... I prefer to talk of 'lifting' judgement rather than 'stopping' judgement. I'll get to *why* in a bit..
Yeah. It is a change in thought. But even more importantly it is a change in FEELING.>But ACT doesn't care very much if a patient has self-judging thoughts, either. It allows him to go on judging himself harshly and hating himself for judging himself and so ad infinitem.
How do you mean 'allows him to'???
Do you mean the t doesn't insist on making the client stoppit??? (Which is a silly thing to insist on anyways because it isn't like the patient CAN just stoppit. I mean, if they could then they wouldn't bloody well be in therapy to start with).>ACT holds that to try "removing" any cognitions, even hostile self-judgments, is like trying to turn your own body inside out.
Attempting to stop having certain thoughts is an ironic process. Example: Do NOT think about oranges.
Did you manage to do it???
Trying just makes it worse.
That is an ironic process.
That is what happens when we try and instruct ourselves not to think about certain things:
suicide
how much we hate ourselves
how depressed we feel
oranges.
Its not about being mentally unwell
Its a fact about human cognition.
> Attempts to push a thought aside, hide it, stuff it back in, vilify it, or even forcibly disbelieve it, will both (a) hijack a lot of mental resources and (b) ironically intensify the unwelcome thought.Absolutely.
Waste of time :-)
> ACT realizes that people will have much better lives if they're NOT stewing in a corner with their thoughts of self-hatred or their irrational beliefs or whatever, but it insists that no one can control her own thoughts & feelings very much without enormous, life-destroying costs. Give up on that, it says.Yeah. Our lives would be much better if those nasty old thoughts never occurred to us in the first place. But fact is, they did. And we can't make them go away.
> This is my summary, not the authors': The less effort is made to control thoughts (bad OR good), the more freedom there is for thoughts of all kinds, including helpful, happy, creative, loving, productive ones, to occur. As you say, they come unchosen. I think in a sense the "better" thoughts are always there, it's just hard to see them when one is struggling for control over the others. If one allows them all to be there, to come & go, freely plaguing & vexing, then the brighter ones can also occur more freely & frequently than they do when one is busy pushing & pulling the darker ones all out of shape.
Oh oh oh!!!
This sounds a bit like mindfulness meditation...
You can't 'make all your thoughts go away'.
You can't make yourself stop thinking...Ah.
But you can.
The trick isn't to try and make yourself stop thinking...
The trick is to take all of your attention
Everybit of it that you can muster
And focus on how your breathing FEELS.
It isn't that your thoughts stop.
It is that all you are aware of is how your breathing feels.
Mostly I feel a kind of dual-awareness.
I'm focusing everything I can on how my breathing feels
But... out of the corner of my mind little clouds of thoughts float past.
After a while you can even watch them
In a spirit of 'I am observing my thoughts' in a 'I am not my thoughts they are merely one thing going on' kind of way.
Guess what?
They come and go.
But if they come
And you grab 'em and say 'go away little thought' over and over
You only make it hang around.
If you just observe the fact that it came...
WEll.
Then it will pass.
It might come back
a hundred times.
But each time...
It passes.
Good thoughts come too.
I used to cling to those.
But then I found that I actually learned a whole heap more by resisting the temptation to cling to them.This is all really hard to explain in a coherent way that doesn't run into paradox.
But I do think there is sense in it.
> With more thoughts of all kinds "at the ready," one can act more effectively to improve the life that's *outside* of the head.:-)
poster:alexandra_k
thread:492810
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/books/20050501/msgs/497650.html