Posted by pseudoname on May 31, 2006, at 11:17:08
In reply to Re: What I think of ACT » pseudoname, posted by honeybee on May 31, 2006, at 9:27:37
> So, do I get to call you PN, then?
:-)
> You can call me HB or BH or anything you'd like. Sometimes one finger strikes the keyboard just a bit faster than the other because it has important things to do.
Ha ha. I thought maybe BH was your real initials.
What a nice post. It sounds like (a - e) you have a pretty good idea of what you want out of therapy. I think that's a huge advantage. And they seem like very reasonable, attainable goals.
> How were you exposed to it? Through the cr*ppy acolyte of Hayes?
I stumbled on ACT on the web a few years ago, Googling for "depression and behaviorism". I got the Hayes acolyte because she'd been trained in ACT. At the time I saw her I'd read all the books and 90% of the published articles on ACT. She knew that, yet she started by v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y reciting that shovel-in-the-hole story. She was just following a script as far as ACT went; I didn't need that.
> I was having a lot of trouble finding anyone on my health plan who practiced something other than psychodynamic (I live in NYC
Oh, funny. (I went the psychodynamic route for a few years.)
> I imagine that my own struggles have something to do with pushing him that direction.
It sounds like you get along together, at the very least. Actually, it sounds like you care about each other quite a bit.
> have dipped into "Acceptance and Behavior Therapy" that Hayes and several of his colleagues wrote for therapists (sometimes, workbooks strike me as a bit puerile).
Yeah. The other Yahoo ACT forum – for professionals – was open to public reading before Jan '06. I downloaded a thousand posts from it before it went behind a membership curtain. Hayes & Wilson & others posted on it every day. Those posts gave me a lot to think about.
Including Hayes's… er… "grandiosity" as Time magazine called it.
He has EXPLODED at mild critical questions there and later affirmed the explosions. He has said he could see the "fear" in the eyes of skeptical seminar attendees. He has said he has no time for therapists who don't want to adopt ACT as a LIFESTYLE and an organizing principle for their lives and to save the world. The ACT people seem to believe that Hayes invented the idea of helping people or saving the world and that no one outside ACT is interested in that.
Hayes said ACT was urgently needed to solve the Middle East peace problem; when the Time correspondent said that idea was a little "grandiose", Hayes's people mocked the reporter. But, you know: how is Hayes's peace initiative working so far? Exactly. Hence the grandiosity.
Hayes repeatedly SAYS he will respond to any "serious" criticism, but no one has, to my knowledge, ever replied to Burgos's (in my view) devastating 2003 critique of "Relational Frame Theory". The ACT people have to perform some fast switches in order to make a lot of RFT and ACT theory hang together so "seemlessly". I think a lot of their philosophical bases are pretty naive!
None of which means that ACT strategies aren't helpful. They could still change the world.
> Hayes does seem to have provoked a cultlike adulation from his converts.
The "C-word" as they call it is a very sore spot among the ACT core. But now that I subscribe or read 3 professional therapist listservs of various orientations, I'm finding that us/them thinking and parochialism are universal in the industry. Even in the "Common Factors" group that's dedicated to NOT being parochial: their attitude is "We few who are not parochial are so much better than all those parochial guys who think they're better than others."
So I guess the ACT group's lack of perspective about itself is not specific to ACT.
> Thus far, the benefit to me has been simply that I'm not trying so hard.
Yeah. I think that's been huge for me, too.
> Do you post there?
I don't post at the Yahoo group, though I don't rule it out. Trouble is, I want to be free to assert and defend SKEPTICAL questions, and that's not really allowed there. Plus, some of those converts are SO tiresome! (I speak as one who knows how to be tiresome.)
> Any other babblers out there who've started exploring ACT? I'd love to hear what people think.
Pedrito, who started this thread, has been assiduously using ACT since last year, and reports that it has helped him a lot.
> p.s. What med did the trick for you? I love hearing success stories.
They're too rare on Babble. I take the mild synthetic opioid buprenorphine (Subutex). It has been gradually changing my life.
Yet I'm still stuck in my house today. :(
Nice chatting with you. Sorry to go on so long!
poster:pseudoname
thread:492810
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/books/20051228/msgs/650983.html