When you take responsibility – the ability to respond – you can stop blaming others and finally become the creative, innovative person you have always been.
If the first requirement of an adult is that he should take to himself responsibility for his failures, for his life, and for his doing, within the context of the actual conditions of the world in which he dwells, then it is simply an elementary psychological fact that no one will ever develop to this state who is continually thinking of what a great thing he would have been had only the conditions of his life been different: his parents less indifferent to his needs, society less oppressive, or the universe otherwise arranged. The first requirement of any society is that its adult membership should realize and represent the fact that it is they who constitute its life and being. And the first function of the rites of puberty, accordingly, must be to establish in the individual a system of sentiments that will be appropriate to the society in which he is to live, and on which that society itself must depend for its existence.
In the modern Western world, moreover, there is an additional complication; for we ask of the adult something still more than that he should accept without personal criticism and judgment the habits and inherited customs of his local social group. We ask and we are expecting, rather, that he should develop what Sigmund Freud has called his “reality function”: that faculty of the independently observant, freely thinking individual who can evaluate without preconceptions the possibilities of his environment and of himself within it, criticizing and creating, not simply reproducing inherited patterns of thought and action, but becoming himself an innovating center, an active, creative center of the life process.
Joseph Campbell. Myths to Live By (The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell).
In [one example, a] person realized over time that having or not having a job was his response-ability#, even though his father had hit him and then abandoned the family. This man explained that deep inside he had struggled with whether or not he was to blame for hanging in there for so long and not standing up to his father. He had put all this adult responsibility on the child he was then. Staying stuck in this cycle of blame was interfering with his ability to be effective now. The discussion on focusing on response-ability instead of blame allowed him to feel more empowered to take control of his life. It became an issue of letting go of being right so that he could build a stable life for his family, something he valued.
Who would you be now if you could let go of the struggle with judgment, blame, being right (or wrong), and all the other passengers on your bus? What if you begin to have compassion and acceptance for yourself? For many trauma survivors, the first step in this direction is to begin to identify a sense of self—the you who has always been present.
Victoria M. Follette and Jacqueline Pistorello. Finding life beyond trauma: using acceptance and commitment therapy to heal from post-traumatic stress and trauma-related problems.
# The root of the word responsibility is actually “response-ability” or the ability to respond (Hayes, Strosahl, and Wilson 1999). This ability is something that can empower people to take control over their lives.
* In a series of posts I call mythology Monday, I look at quotes from the work of mythologist Joseph Campbell and consider them alongside extracts from books and papers on acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) and related publications.
Evolution has taught us to solve problems by fight or flight. It’s natural then that we apply the same tactics to our psychological problems, but it’s a strategy that doesn’t always work.
I listened intently and heard a sound. It was Tina. Or not really Tina. The gleaming eyes of the wolf stared back at me from the darkest corner of the storeroom. God help me, I didn’t know what to do. If we’d been in the village, I would have jumped on the horse, ridden straight to Kazem Khan’s and cried, “Come quick! The wolf is back!”
But we weren’t in the village and Kazem Khan wasn’t here.
So I took a step backwards, as I had seen Kazem Khan do, and called softly to my sister, “Go and get the Holy Book!” She snatched the book off the mantel and handed it to me.
I knelt by the storeroom door, turned to the wild beast, kissed the cover, closed my eyes, opened the book to a page and began to chant.
As I recited the sura, I quietly took one step forward, then another. Reciting all the while, I held out my hand to her and saw the light go out in the wolf’s eyes. I went on until I felt Tina’s hand seek mine in the darkness. “Come, Tina, come!” I whispered. “Let’s go eat.” She struggled to her feet and then walked into the living room.
I look out my window and I see the wolf running through the Dutch polder.
Let it run, let it go, let the wolf lose its way on this new ground, so it will never be able to find its way back to Tina.’
Kader Abdollah. My Father’s Notebook. Translated from Dutch by Susan Massotty.
‘Probably the single biggest evolutionary advantage of human language was the ability to anticipate and solve problems. This has enabled us not only to change the face of the planet, but to travel outside it. The essence of problem-solving is this:
Problem = something we don’t want.
Solution = figure out how to get rid of it, or avoid it.
This approach obviously works well in the material world. A wolf outside your door? Get rid of it. Throw rocks at it, or spears, or shoot it. Snow, rain, hail? Well, you can’t get rid of those things, but you can avoid them, by hiding in a cave, or building a shelter. Dry, arid ground? You can get rid of it, by irrigation and fertilisation, or you can avoid it, by moving to a better location. Problem solving strategies are therefore highly adaptive for us as humans (and indeed, teaching such skills has proven to be effective in the treatment of depression). Given this problem solving approach works well in the outside world, it’s only natural that we would tend to apply it to our interior world; the psychological world of thoughts, feelings, memories, sensations, and urges. Unfortunately, all too often when we try to avoid or get rid of unwanted private experiences, we simply create extra suffering for ourselves. For example, virtually every addiction known to mankind begins as an attempt to avoid or get rid of unwanted thoughts and feelings, such as boredom, loneliness, anxiety, depression and so on. The addictive behaviour then becomes selfsustaining, because it provides a quick and easy way to get rid of cravings or withdrawal symptoms.
Russell Harris. Embracing Your Demons: an Overview of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
The myths and folk tales of the whole world make clear that the refusal is essentially a refusal to give up what one takes to be one’s own interest. The future is regarded not in terms of an unremitting scries of deaths and births, but as though one’s present system of ideals, virtues, goals, and advantages were to be fixed and made secure. King Minos retained the divine bull, when the sacrifice would have signified submission to the will of the god of his society; for he preferred what he conceived to be his economic advantage. Thus he failed to advance into the liferole that he had assumed—and we have seen with what calamitous effect. The divinity itself became his terror; for, obviously, if one is oneself one’s god, then God himself, the will of God, the power that would destroy one’s egocentric system, becomes a monster.
One is harassed, both day and night, by the divine being that is the image of the living self within the locked labyrinth of one’s own disoriented psyche. The ways to the gates have all been lost: there is no exit. One can only cling, like Satan, furiously, to oneself and be in hell; or else break, and be annihilate at last, in God.
Joseph Campbell. The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
The Buddhist tradition describes three poisons of the mind—greed, aversion, and ignorance. We developed this task for Zen students who seem particularly afflicted by aversion, those who habitually resist anything asked of them and what comes forward in life. Their initial and unconscious response to anything asked of them is “no,” expressed either in body language or out loud. Sometimes the no is expressed as “yes, but . . . ,” and sometimes it is cloaked in reasonable language, but it is still a consistent and persistent pattern of opposition.
People who are stuck in aversion often make major life decisions based not upon moving toward a positive goal but rather upon moving away from something they perceive to be negative. They are reactive rather than proactive. “My parents didn’t pay their bills on time and our electricity got turned off. I’m going to become an accountant,” instead of “I want to become an accountant because I love numbers.”
When monks enter training at Japanese Soto Zen monasteries, they are told that the only acceptable response to anything they are asked to do in the first year of training is, “Hai! (Yes!).” This is powerful training. It cuts through layers of apparent maturity, down to the defiant two-year-old and/or teenager within.
Not expressing opposition helps us to let go of self-centered views and see that our personal opinion is actually not so important after all. It’s surprising how often our disagreement with another person is actually unimportant and only serves to increase our distress and the suffering of those around us. Saying yes can be energizing, since habitual resistance is a persistent drain on our life energy.
Final words: Cultivate an internal attitude of “yes” to life and all it brings you. It will save you lots of energy.
Pain is inevitable in life. That doesn’t mean we have to suffer from pain. By making room for it, in our bodies and in our lives, we can make the experience a little less bitter.
This notion of ageing and death is insupportable for the individual human being, in the kind of civilization we live in it develops in a sovereign and unconditional manner, it gradually occupies the whole field of consciousness , it allows nothing else to subsist. In this way, and little by little, knowledge of the world’s constraints is established. Desire itself disappears; only bitterness, jealousy and fear remain. Above all there remains bitterness; an immense and inconceivable bitterness. No civilization, no epoch has been capable of developing such a quantity of bitterness in its subjects. In that sense we are living through unprecedented times. If it was necessary to sum up the contemporary mental state in a word, that’s the one I’d undoubtedly choose: bitterness.
Michel Houellebecq. Whatever.
‘In expansion mode, rather than trying to get rid of unpleasant feelings, we open up and accommodate them. We make room for them and allow them to come and go in their own good time. It doesn’t mean we like them, want them or approve of them; we just stop investing our time and effort in fighting them. And the more space we can give those difficult feelings, the smaller their impact and influence on our lives.
There’s an ancient Indian tale that illustrates this point very well. An old Hindu master was fed up with the continual complaints and grumbles of his apprentice. So one day, he asked the young man to fetch him a cup of water and a bowl of salt. When the young man returned, the master said, ‘Now tip a handful of salt into the water.’ The apprentice did so. The master then swirled the water around in the cup until all the salt had dissolved. ‘Now taste it,’ he said to the apprentice. The apprentice took a sip and screwed up his face in disgust. ‘How does it taste?’ asked the master. ‘Horrible,’ said the apprentice. The master chuckled. ‘Yes, very unpleasant,’ he said. ‘Now follow me.’
They walked down to the edge of a nearby lake, and the master said, ‘Now tip a handful of salt into the lake.’ The apprentice did so. The master said, ‘Now taste the water from the lake.’ The apprentice drank from the lake, and this time he smiled. ‘Not so hard to swallow, eh?’ said the master. ‘This salt is like the inevitable pain of life. In both cases, the amount of salt is the same; but the smaller the container, the greater the bitterness. So when life gives us pain, instead of closing in around it, like this cup, we would do better to enlarge and open, like the lake.’
The commitment part of acceptance and commitment therapy can mean taking a leap into the unknown, very much like the heroes of ancient myths, and even modern day stories.
The first stage of the mythological journey—which we have designated the ‘call to adventure’—signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from the pale of his society to a zone unknown…[a] fateful region of both treasure and danger.
Joseph Campbell. The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
The job of the therapist is to create situations in which the clients engage in a leap of faith into a future that is unknown and—to the best they can tell—in the direction of their values. A leap of faith implies the willingness to have whatever happens when one makes that leap, to touch down wherever one lands.
Jason B. Luoma, Steven C. Hayes, and Robyn D. Walser. Learning ACT: An Acceptance & Commitment Therapy Skills-training Manual for Therapists.
Great storytelling isn’t just conflict between characters. It’s conflict between characters and their values. When your hero experiences character change, he challenges and changes basic beliefs, leading to new moral action. A good opponent has a set of beliefs that come under assault as well. The beliefs of the hero have no meaning, and do not get expressed in the story, unless they come into conflict with the beliefs of at least one other character, preferably the opponent.
John Truby. The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller.
In ACT, the therapist is engaging the client in a kind of contest between two main players. On one side is the client’s mind. By “mind,” we mean the set of rules and relations that the client uses to order the world. Because so many of these are culturally established, it can be clinically useful to speak of “mind” as if it is another person or something slightly external (as indeed it is in the sense of being a cultural intrusion into the individual). On the other side, there is the wisdom of the client’s direct experience. The client has directly contacted certain outcomes. The mind and experience are in fundamental conflict. The therapist’s job is to challenge the client’s reliance on verbal rules so that experiential wisdom can play a greater role. The challenge is to undermine ineffective rules and replace them with contingency-shaped behavior, accurate tracks, and augmentals linked to chosen values.
Steven C. Hayes, Kirk D. Strosahl, and Kelly G. Wilson. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: An Experiential Approach to Behavior Change
In those moments when, like Oblomov, you feel like you’re getting nowhere, try to find the will to continue. Don’t let life’s swamps keep you from following your path.
‘Twas as though some one had stolen from him, and besmirched, the store of gifts with which life and the world had dowered him; so that always he would be prevented from entering life’s field and sailing across it with the aid of intellect and of will. Yes, at the very start a secret enemy had laid a heavy hand upon him and diverted him from the road of human destiny. And now he seemed to be powerless to leave the swamps and wilds in favour of that road. All around him was a forest, and ever the recesses of his soul were growing dimmer and darker, and the path more and more tangled, while the consciousness of his condition kept awaking within him less and less frequently – to arouse only for a fleeting moment his slumbering faculties. Brain and volition alike had become paralysed, and, to all appearances, irrevocably – the events of his life had become whittled down to microscopical proportions. Yet even with them he was powerless to cope – he was powerless to pass from one of them to another. Consequently they bandied him to and fro like the waves of the ocean. Never was he able to oppose to any event elasticity of will; never was he able to conceive, as the result of any event, a reasoned-out impulse. Yet to confess this, even to himself, always cost him a bitter pang: his fruitless regrets for lost opportunities, coupled with burning reproaches of conscience, always pricked him like needles, and led him to strive to put away such reproaches and to discover a scapegoat….
Once again Oblomov sank asleep; and as he slept he dreamed of a different period, of different people, of a different place from the present. Let us follow him thither.
If a person is wholly committed to not experiencing any unpleasant or difficult thoughts, feelings, sensations, or images, then that person will be unable to commit to and maintain a course of action because every course will eventually evoke something that is unpleasant. With valuing love comes the experience of loss, with valuing community conies the possibility of rejection, with valuing creativity comes a negative evaluation of one’s abilities. Metaphorically, it, as if you were on a journey called “living well” and you ran into a swamp that stretched as far as the eye could see. Swamps are no fun. They, smelly, they, icky, they, scary, and yet swamps are part of the journey. Life asks, “Will you wade into the swamp or will you abandon your journey,” In order to choose to act on our values, willingness to experience difficult events is necessary. This action of willingness has the quality of a leap of faith. The job of the therapist is to create situations in which clients engage in a leap of faith into a future that is unknown and—to the best they can tell—in the direction of their values. A leap of faith implies the willingness to have whatever happens when one makes that leap, to touch down wherever one lands. We are looking for this quality in client commitments.
Jason Luoma PhD, Steven C. Hayes PhD and Robyn D Walser PhD. Learning ACT: An Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Skills-Training Manual for Therapists.
It is only those who know neither an inner call nor an outer doctrine whose plight truly is desperate; that is to say, most of us today, in this labyrinth without and within the heart. Alas, where is the guide, that fond virgin, Ariadne, to supply the simple clue that will give us the courage to face the Minotaur, and the means to find our way to freedom when the monster has been met and slain?”
Suppose you are out skiing, and when you got off the lift, you mention to the person who rode up the lift with you that you plan to ski down to the lodge where you’re going to meet up with some friends for lunch. “No problem” this person replies, and suddenly he waves to a helicopter above, that upon his signal, swoops you up and speedily deposits you at the ski lodge. You protest vigorously, but the pilot is incredulous. He says, “What’s your beef, my friend? It was you who said the objective was to get from the summit down to the lodge!”
The helicopter pilot would have a point if getting to the lodge were the only issue. If it is, flying down the slope achieves exactly what skiing down achieves. Both have you start at the top and end up at the lodge. The helicopter even has notable advantages: you don’t get cold, or tired, or wet, for example.
There is only one problem with this. The goal of getting to the lodge was meant to structure the process of skiing. That process was the true “goal.”
You have to value “down” over “up” or you can’t do downhill skiing. Aiming at a specific goal (the lodge) allows you to “orienteer” one way to go down the hill. But the true goal is just to ski, not reaching the goal (the lodge).
In precisely the same way, the true goal of goals is to orient you toward your values so you can live a valued life, moment by moment. A successful ACT patient put it this way toward the end of therapy: “I just want to do this because that’s what I want my life to be about. It’s not really about any outcome. I want to be alive until I’m dead.” Goals can help you do exactly that. But be careful! Your mind will often claim that the true goal is the goal itself (after all, evaluating outcomes is what this organ evolved to do), and it will suggest that you should cut corners (like violate your integrity, or ignore other valued aspects of your life) to get there. That defeats the whole purpose, and if you succumb to cutting corners, accomplishing your goals will only mock you.
* In a series of posts I call mythology Monday, I look at quotes from the work of mythologist Joseph Campbell and consider them alongside extracts from books and papers on acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) and related publications.
Our thoughts can be like a chess game, a constant battle between two sides. We could also choose not to always play those pieces and be the chessboard instead.
I set out the chess board. I filled a pipe, paraded the chessmen and inspected them for French shaves and loose buttons, and played a championship tournament game between Gortchakoff and Meninkin, seventy-two moves to a draw, a prize specimen of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, a battle without armor, a war without blood, and as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency.”
The Chessboard Metaphor, a central ACT intervention, connects the client to the distinction between content and the observing self:
Imagine a chessboard that goes out infinitely in all directions. It’s covered with black pieces and white pieces. They work together in teams, as in chess—the white pieces fight against the black pieces. You can think of your thoughts and feelings and beliefs as these pieces; they sort of hang out together in teams too. For example, “bad” feelings (like anxiety, depression, resentment) hang out with “bad” thoughts and “bad” memories. Same thing with the “good” ones. So it seems that the way the game is played is that we select the side we want to win. We put the “good” pieces (like thoughts that are self-confident, feelings of being in control, etc.) on one side, and the “bad” pieces on the other. Then we get up on the back of the black horse and ride to battle, fighting to win the war against anxiety, depression, thoughts about using drugs, whatever. It’s a war game. But there’s a logical problem here, and that is that from this posture huge portions of yourself are your own enemy. In other words, if you need to be in this war, there is something wrong with you. And because it appears that you’re on the same level as these pieces, they can be as big or even bigger than you are—even though these pieces are in you. So somehow, even though it is not logical, the more you fight the bigger they get. If it is true that “if you are not willing to have it, you’ve got it,” then as you fight these pieces they become more central to your life, more habitual, more dominating, and more linked to every area of living. The logical idea is that you will knock enough of them off the board that you eventually dominate them—except that your experience tells you that the exact opposite happens. Apparently, the white pieces can’t be deliberately knocked off the board. So the battle goes on. You feel hopeless, you have a sense that you can’t win, and yet you can’t stop fighting. If you’re on the back of that black horse, fighting is the only choice you have, because the white pieces seem life threatening. Yet living in a war zone is no way to live.
thefictiontherapist.com 