Contradiction and uncertainty: the willingness to entertain contradictory themes of uncertainties without feeling compelled to use verbal behavior or verbal reasoning to resolve them. Two things come to mind:
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
And
"Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
The phrase "field of play" seems apt to me. When I am in ACT mode with a client, it does feel like play, even if we're working on heavy painful stuff. Field of possibility is another way I think of it.
No guarantees, no warranties-just living.
My clients and I have a bus metaphor when we talk about the impermanence of life. Years ago, when I was making another appointment with a client, he told me he planned to be there, but as John Lennon said, "Life is what happens when you're busy making plans," and that either of us could be hit by a bus. He was right and I try to remember it. It seems to me that this awareness leads right into values work. If you have no guarantee that you will survive the day, how does that affect what you're doing right now?
Tolerate paradox, ambiguity, confusion and irony. I suppose you'd have to be a fan of Monty Python, then, hey?
I still find the rescuing bit hard not to buy. Getting older helps.
I'm beginning to realize on a gut level that I have no idea what happens next. Some days that's really hard.
One woman and I were discussing the whole uncertainty thing and I got rescue-y. I suggested to her that it was like being a trapeze artist, and you just let go of one trapeze, fly through the air for a while and grab then next. She replied, "Right. Except for a few things: you've never seen a trapeze before, you're blind, all of your enemies are watching, your hair's on fire and you're naked."
Point taken.
Identification with the client: "We are not cut from different cloth, but from the same cloth."
This, to me, is perhaps the most precious thing about doing ACT.
Being trained in the psychodynamic camp, I always felt like a fraud. I knew that I wasn't necessarily stronger or more psychologically healthy, but the work seemed to need me to put on my therapist suit and pretend that I was. So the client would be wearing their client suit and I'd be wearing my therapist suit and we'd sit in the room and pretend not to notice when the suits slipped. Not as much fun as you might imagine.
Normal reassurance vs. soft reassurance. How I make this distinction is this-normal reassurance has the flavor of the tense pat on the back and the underlying desire for them to stop talking. "It will be all right," is usually for me. I can feel the tenseness in my face when I'm being normally reassuring, and I can find myself wandering, thinking about grocery shopping and whatnot. When I'm doing soft reassurance, I'm often more uncomfortable,
tending to see how close their suffering is to mine and I'm riveted. I can't hold anything else, just the awareness of how hard it is sometimes to be human. Often, I get teary, especially when I get in touch with the amazing courage it takes for some of my clients to just get out of bed in the morning.
Self-disclosure: An essential aspect of developing a human relationship.
Where I still struggle is with the workability of the self- disclosure. If I'm having a terrible day, I think the client can tell, but they're paying me to be present for them, although some of them would love to caretake me in the session, if only to avoid their stuff. It's messy, this edge, and I like precision. But I think the messiness is where the life is. Perhaps.
Therapeutic Use of Spirituality. "A view of the world that recognizes a transcendent quality to human experience, acknowledges the universal aspects of the human condition, and respects the client's values and choices. "
Stepping back from a personal struggle and examining it openly and non-defensively. Easier said than done. This is where the observer exercise comes in, for me. I've had the experience of transcendence with this exercise, and clients had described the same. When they can dip into that open hearted space and observe themselves from there, their faces and bodies soften. It's really wonderful to watch. This observer position is the most fluid position I can take in the session as well. That being said, it takes repeated effort and intention to come to this place. But when someone--myself or client--has had the experience of this observer self, they know that it's possible. There's a “there there” for them, if you will. Until the experience happens, there's no there for them to go to. At least as I see it.
Radical respect: "There is no right of wrong way to live one's life.
There are only consequences that follow from specific human behaviors."
Another quote I've stolen from a client. "So the way I look at it, there's six billion and counting humans on the planet. There's probably not one right way to be a human being, so my job is to find the way I want to be a human being and choose things that get me there."
In my experience, this defining of valued direction tends to evolve over time. Not many of the people I work with can immediately describe what matters to them. We tend to do successive approximation, and look for a non-verbal response, sort of an aha experience. Values work is the part of ACT I struggle with the most.
Clinical use of humor and irreverence: "The therapist's irreverence comes from an appreciation of the craziness and verbal entanglements that surround human living."
It seems to me that this can backfire if I'm not in radical respect. Radical respect seems to infuse all of the work with a client from the ACT perspective. RR for their values, RR for their history, RR for their choices. RR for how they show up in the room.
Is RR the same as acceptance?
It's great when the client begins using humor and irreverence with their stuff. Another steal: Client's doing a lot of reason giving, catches themselves and says, "Anyway, that's my story and I'm sticking with it." Then laughs. Very cool stuff.
