ACT Book Summary: Pages 158 - 168

Summary: We are in Chapter 6, Building Acceptance by Defusing Language. Page 158 begins the section titled "Don't Buy Thoughts". The subject is the deliterization of language. The explanations, exercises and metaphors are designed to enable the client to become aware of and "assume" self as perspective and to focus that perspective on thoughts and feelings themselves as they are experienced. Comment: The ease or difficulty of this and degree of success may vary greatly from person to person, but those who find it most difficult may also reap the greatest benefits. The shift to looking at literal meaning from looking through literal meaning is subtle. "Having a thought" may be distinguished from "buying a thought" or "buying in". A common example is the shift from "I am a bad person" to "I am having the thought that I am a bad person". The idea is to expose the process of thinking often hidden behind the content of thinking. Mindfulness exercises include Zen-like meditation, Soldiers in the Parade Exercise, Leaves in the Stream Exercise, Contents on the Card Exercise, and Taking Your Mind for a Walk Exercise. The client/therapist dialogue (pgs. 159-161) illustrates a therapy situation using the Soldiers in the Parade. Note how you have to get the client to try this and then give you feedback as to what they are experiencing. The client is specifically reminded that thoughts like "This isn't working" or "I can't do this" should be placed on the soldiers' placards (along with "This therapist must be one of those nutty Gestalt guys I've heard about."). The therapist sort of anthropomorphizes the mind and speaks of it trying to "hook" the client on literal meaning. He also points out how the parade stops when the client "buys" or is "hooked" by a thought. I additionally had the thought in this section that while "Contents on Cards" and "Taking Your Mind for A Walk" may seem gamey or contrived, these might be necessary and effective with certain clients who experience very emotional fusions such as cluster B type folks(or the more politically correct "multi problem client"). Undermining Reasons as Causes A troublesome class of thoughts, reasons tend to disguise themselves as deterministic statements with a cause-effect function which they really may not have. Reasons often actually function as language community justifications. Personal history is often cited as a reason things can't change. This has always been a real pain for psychodynamic therapists (I speak from personal experience). Statements focusing on functional utility rather than literal truth are suggested as helpers, such as, "And what is this story in the service of"(Ouch! They may get angry!), "If God told you that your explanation is 100% correct, how would this help you?", etc. Another dialogue (pgs. 164-166) illustrates how reasons may be deliteralized to the clients' advantage without loosing their true function. An additional "tips" section is Disrupting Troublesome Language Practices (pgs. 166-168). A discussion of the etymology of the word "but", for example, reveals how it can be a psychologically limiting verbal behavior that may be changed to "and". "I want to go, but I am angry" could be "I want to go and I am angry" leading to behavior which may not be controlled by the language conceptualization of it. The "And/Be Out Convention" inset describes how this might be communicated to a client. I had the thought that this requires some careful listening to insert this timely intervention when it can be most useful to the client. I will only comment that this is an extremely important section, drawn from RFT research and Zen and Gestalt traditions which are nuclear to ACT. It strikes me as needing a great deal of experience and/or training to be handy with it. I suspect that psychodynamically trained therapists, such as myself, have a harder time with it because we have to unlearn and learn at the same time.