Posted by badhaircut on May 16, 2005, at 0:31:48
In reply to Re: acceptance, posted by pedrito on May 15, 2005, at 17:46:21
>> So I did, I went outside and observed myself feeling and –sorta– being a jackass.
> There what you seemed to be doing was accepting that you are in fact a jackass....
> You bought into the belief...
> But where room for doubt creeps in is when you jump from the fact that you have the thought (that you do have the thought is necessarily true) to whether the thought is an accurate representation of reality (that you actually are a jackass)
This is indeed hard to talk about without paradox.
You're right. From what I wrote it sounds as though I bought into the idea. Like I was applying Albert Ellis' snarly rhetorical question: "Whaaat's so baaaad about being a jaaackass?" (I can hear his voice saying it. And hey, Pete, it sounds like Ellis would know! LOL)
But that's not what I meant. I guess I've lived with the intense I'm-a-jerk mindset for so long that I didn't realize quite how I was applying mindful detachment.
For me, "jackass" comes as a set, cemented to a ton of loud, persistent thoughts like:
•People think I'm annoying.
•No one will sincerely like me.
•I don't know anything about wine.
•etc etc etc
And feelings of shame, humiliation, fear, and shame.I guess by " 'being' a jackass" (and what I now realize I meant by the ironic quotes and the "sorta") I was talking about the whole set. Accepting Me as the guy who has all those thoughts all the time. Wow! That is what I meant.
On any checklist of boorish behavior I would score very low. In this sense I am not a jackass. But that sense is inseparable in my mind from all those other senses that do apply to me. Senses like, "One who thinks he is a jackass." And they're not merely inseparable: they turn into each other so rapidly & sneakily that if I say any one sense is false I could end up trying to deny my own existence.
I'm not a jackass except that I think that I am, and anyone who thinks that he is one, is.
There's no way out of that.
> A feeling of conviction or certainty has become attached to the content of a thought being veridical, where really the sense of conviction or certainty should be attached to the fact that they are having the thought....
A feeling of certainty is itself a sort of mental event one can watch float by like a cloud.
Sometimes I cannot separate a feeling of certainty from the crazy thought it's attached to. But I can separate myself (my core sense of self-recognition, the mindful "observer-me") from both the crazy thought and its attached feeling of certainty. Both of which walk along with me, but neither of them is me or even part of me.
Easier to write about than to practice, of course.
> I know for a fact that my CBT/REBT "defences" are like a house of cards. Once one of these unwelcome/unhealthy thoughts comes in, the whole defence collapses.
Been there. The ACT position is that our fantastic, symbol-manipulating, complexity-untangling, question-solving, verbal faculties that serve us so amazingly well in controlling the physical world and influencing other people and predicting hurricanes are completely unsuited to controlling one's own thoughts & feelings. But misusing them this way is an early-acquired, universal, and easy mistake. A tool (language skills) so broadly effective in virtually every other application is an obvious choice to use for reducing anxiety.
And it works, to a degree. But the same persistent, complex connectivity among ideas that enables us to build bridges and find off-season bargains is a disaster when applied inside one's own head. Use a mental trick to avoid thinking about some scary thing and voila! anxiety decreases. But soon enough that trick itself becomes as scary as the thing we avoided thinking about. Now you have to use another trick to avoid thinking of the first trick. And so on. This sort of contagion does not happen in the real world: Chop a tree down with an axe, and the axe doesn't turn into a tree.
ACT says, Apply problem-solving to the exterior world; apply acceptance to the interior. Though the authors do go into more detail than "Just accept it."
> bhc - have you tried these techniques? have you had much success?
I got outside my house on Thursday! This is no small thing. ACT says start somewhere and keep broadening the circle of un-avoided experiences, moving toward the things that are most personally important to you, and only you. But I don't know what's important to me, and I'm afraid to find out, so I haven't continued broadening my experience much. This exact situation wasn't covered in the literature.
In these posts I sound like a recruiter for the local ACT house. I'm not. I've been burned by NEW! & IMPROVED! Psychology enough times to be jaded. But I'd love to get people interested enough in ACT issues to tear through the theory with me. As you two have been doing.
-bhc
poster:badhaircut
thread:492810
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/books/20050501/msgs/498369.html