The Third Wave Psychologists

 

Steven Hayes Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT)

Developed within a coherent theoretical and philosophical framework, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a unique empirically based psychological intervention that uses acceptance and mindfulness strategies, together with commitment and behavior change strategies, to increase psychological flexibility. Psychological flexibility means contacting the present moment fully as a conscious human being, and based on what the situation affords, changing or persisting in behavior in the service of chosen values.

Based on Relational Frame Theory, ACT illuminates the ways that language entangles clients into futile attempts to wage war against their own inner lives. Through metaphor, paradox, and experiential exercises clients learn how to make healthy contact with thoughts, feelings, memories, and physical sensations that have been feared and avoided. Clients gain the skills to recontextualize and accept these private events, develop greater clarity about personal values, and commit to needed behavior change.

 

Martha Beck's column in "O" February 2006

MELANIE'S LIFE WAS SHRINKING LIKE A CHEAP BLOUSE in an overheated dryer. At 30 she'd developed a fear of flying that ended her dream of world travel. Within a year, her phobia had grown to include—or rather, exclude— driving. After the World Trade Center attacks, Melanie became terrified to enter the downtown area of any city. She quit her job as an office manager (the potential for mail-based terrorism was too big) and called me hoping I could help her devise a way of earning money from home.

"Everybody tells me my fears aren't realistic," she said. "But I think I'm the most realistic person I know. It's a dangerous world— I just want to be safe."

There was only one thing for which Melanie would leave her apartment. Once a month, she walked to a rundown neighborhood to meet her drug dealer, who sold her Xanax and OxyContin of questionable purity. I insisted that Melanie see a psychiatrist before I'd work with her, and the worried shrink called me before the impression of Melanie's posterior had faded from his visitor chair. "She's taking enough medication to kill a moose," he told me. "If she slipped in the shower and knocked herself out, withdrawal could kill her before she regained consciousness."

Ironic, n'est-ce pas? Safety-obsessed Melanie was positively devil-may-care when it came to better living through chemistry. This made no sense to me—until I realized that Melanie's objective wasn't really to avoid danger but to prevent the feeling of fear.

Melanie was using a strategy psychologist Steven Hayes, PhD, calls experiential avoidance, dodging external experiences in an effort to ward off distressing emotions. It wasn't working. It never does. In fact, to keep her tactics from destroying her, she would have to learn the antidote for experiential avoidance—and so must the rest of us, if we want our lives to grow larger and more interesting, rather than smaller and more disappointing.

Why Experiential Avoidance Seems Like a Good Idea

Most of us do this kind of emotional side step, at least occasionally. Maybe, like Melanie, you feel skittish on airplanes, so you take the train instead. In the realm of physical objects, dodging situations associated with pain is a wonderfully effective strategy; it keeps us from pawing hot stovetops, swallowing tacks, and so on. Shouldn't the same logic apply to psychological suffering? According to Hayes, it doesn't. Experiential avoidance usually increases the hurt it is meant to eliminate.

Consider Melanie, who, quite understandably, wanted to steer clear of the awful sensation of being afraid. Every time she withdrew from a scary activity, she got a short-term hit of relief. But the calm didn't last. Soon fear would invade the place to which Melanie had retreated—for example, she felt much better driving than flying for a little while, but it wasn't long before she was as petrified in cars as airplanes. Drugs calmed her at first, but soon she became terrified of losing her supply. By the time we met, her determination to bypass anything scary had trapped her in a life completely shaped by fear.

The reason this happens, according to Hayes and other devotees of relational frame theory, is that Melanie's brain works through forming connections and associations. So does yours. Your verbal mind is one big connection generator. Try this: Pick two unrelated objects that happen to be near you. Next answer this question: How are they alike? For instance, if the objects are a book and a shoe, you might say they're alike because they both helped you get a job (by being educated and dressing well). Ta-da! Your book, your shoe, and your job are linked by a new neural connection in your brain. Now you're more likely to think of all these things when you think of any given one.

This means that every time you avoid an event or activity because it's painful, you automatically connect the discomfort with whatever you do instead. Suppose I'm having a terrible hair day, and to not feel that shame, I cancel a meeting with a client. Just thinking about that client brings on a pang of shame. If I watch a movie to distract myself, I may be hit with an unpleasant twinge just hearing the name of that movie. This happens with every form of psychological suffering we try to outrun. Your true love dumps you, and to stave off grief, you avoid everything you once shared —your favorite song, the beach, mocha lattes. Now you're bereft not only of your ex but also of music, seascapes, and a fabulous beverage. Your losses are greater, as is your grief. So you go on a hike to cheer yourself up, and what do you think as you gaze at the lovely scenery? Well, duh. You wish your ex were seeing it with you, and you're sadder than ever. When we run from our feelings, they follow us. Everywhere.

The Willingness Factor

In Hayes's book Get Out of Tour Mind & into Your Life, he suggests that we picture our minds as electronic gadgets with dials, like old-fashioned radios. One dial is labeled Emotional Suffering (Hayes actually calls it Discomfort). Naturally, we do everything we can to turn that dial to zero. Some people do this all their lives, without ever noticing that it never works. The hard truth is that we have no ultimate control over our own heartaches.

There's another dial on the unit, but it doesn't look very enticing. This one Hayes calls Willingness, though I think of it as Willingness to Suffer. It's safe to assume that we start life with that dial set at zero, and we rarely see any reason to change it. Increasing our availability to pain, we think, is just a recipe for anguish souffle. Well, yes...except life, as Melanie so astutely commented, is dangerous. It'll upset you every few minutes or so, sometimes mildly, sometimes apocalyptically. Since desperately twisting down the Emotional Suffering dial only makes things worse, Hayes suggests that we try something radical: Leave that dial alone—abandon all attempts to skirt unpleasant emotions—and focus completely on turning up our Willingness to Suffer.

What this means, in real-world terms, is that we stop avoiding experiences because we're afraid of the unpleasant feelings that might come with them. We don't seek suffering or take pride in it; we just stop letting it dictate any of our choices. People who've been through hell are often forced to learn this, which is why activist, cancer patient, and poet Audre Lorde wrote, "When I dare to be powerful—to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid."

Once we're willing to confront our emotional suffering, we begin making choices based on attraction instead of aversion, love instead of fear. Where we used to think about what was "safe," we now become interested in doing what seems right or fun or meaningful or ripe with possibilities. Ask yourself this: What would I do if I stopped trying to avoid emotional pain? Think of at least three answers (though 30 would be great and 300 even better). Write them here:

1.

2.

3.

Stick with this exercise until you get a glimmer of what life without avoidance would be like. To paraphrase Dr. Seuss, Oh, the places you'd go! Oh, the people you'd meet, the food you'd eat, the jokes you'd tell, the clothes you'd wear, the changes you'd spark in the world!

One thing none of us will ever be able to calculate is how much we've lost by not having these experiences—something Hayes calls the pain of absence. Being unwilling to suffer robs us of incalculable joy—and the awful punch line is that we still get all the anguish we tried to escape (and then some).

The Consequences of Willingness

What happens when we're willing to feel bad is that, sure enough, we often feel bad—but without the stress of futile avoidance. Emotional discomfort, when accepted, rises, crests, and falls in a series of waves. Each wave washes parts of us away and deposits treasures we never imagined. Out goes naivete, in comes wisdom; out goes anger, in comes discernment; out goes despair, in comes kindness. No one would call it easy, but the rhythm of emotional pain that we learn to tolerate is natural, constructive, and expansive. It's different from unwilling suffering the way the sting of disinfectant is different from the sting of decay; the pain leaves you healthier than it found you.

It took Melanie a huge leap of faith to accept this. She finally decided to turn up her Willingness to Suffer dial, simply because her Emotional Suffering levels were manifestly out of her control. She started by joining a yoga class, though the thought of it scared her witless. She found that her anxiety spiked, fluctuated, and gradually declined. Over the ensuing months, she entered therapy, traded her street-drug habit for prescribed medication, and found a new job. Melanie's worry isn't completely gone; it probably never will be. But that doesn't matter much. She is willing to accept discomfort in the pur¬suit of happiness, and that means she'll never be a slave to fear again.

To the extent that we reject anything we love solely because of what we fear, we're all like Melanie. Find a place in your life where you're practicing experiential avoidance, an absence where you wish there were something wonderful. Then commit to the process of getting it, including any inherent anxiety or sadness. Get on an airplane not because you're convinced it won't crash, but because meeting your baby niece is worth a few hours of terror. Sit on the beach with your mocha latte, humming the song you shared with your ex, and let grief wash through you until your memories are more sweet than bitter. Pursue your dreams not because you're immune to heartbreak but because your real life, your whole life, is worth getting your heart broken a few thousand times.

When fear makes your choices for you, no security measures on earth will keep the things you dread from finding you. But if you can avoid avoidance — if you can choose to embrace experiences out of passion, enthusiasm, and a readiness to feel whatever arises—then nothing, nothing in all this dangerous world, can keep you from being safe.

Psychology Today

How Analyzing Your Problems May Be Counterproductive February 13, 2010

When you're upset or depressed, should you analyze your feelings to figure out what's wrong? Or should you just forget about it and move on? New research and theories suggests if you do want to think about your problems, do so from a detached perspective, rather than reliving the experience.

This answer is related to a psychological paradox: Processing emotions is supposed to help you facilitate coping, but attempts to understand painful feelings often backfire and perpetuate or strengthen negative moods and emotions. The solution seems to be neither denial or distraction, according to research conducted by University of Michigan psychologist Ethan Kross, who says the best way to move forward emotionally is to examine one's feelings from a distance or detached perspective.

Kross, along with University of California colleague Ozelm Ayduk, conducted a series of studies that provide the first experimental evidence of the benefits of taking a detached perspective on your problems. Kross says, "reviewing our mistakes over and over, re-experiencing the same negative emotions we felt the first time, tends to keep us stuck in negativity." Their study, published in the July, 2008 issue of Personality and Social Psychology, described how they randomly assigned 141 participants to groups that required them to focus (or not to focus) on their feelings using different strategies in a guided imagery exercise that led them to recall an experience that made them feel overwhelmed by sadness or depression. In the immersed-analysis condition, participants were told to go back to the time and place of the experience and relive it as if it were happening to them over again, and try to understand the emotions they felt, along with the underlying causes. In the detached-analysis condition, the subjects were told to go back the time and place of the experience, take a few steps back and move away from the experience, and watch it unfold as though it was happening to them from a distance, and try to understand what they felt and the reasons for the feelings-- what lessons are to be learned.

The results of the experiment? Immediately after the exercise the distanced-analysis approach subjects reported lower levels of anxiety, depression and sadness compared to those subjects who used the immersed-analysis strategy. One week later the participants were questioned. Those that had used the distanced-analysis strategy continued to show lower levels of depression, anxiety and sadness. In a related study, Ayduk and Kross showed that participants who adopted a self-distanced perspective while thinking about their problems related to anger, showed reductions in blood pressure.

Kross' and Ayduk's research supports the work done by psychotherapist Dr. Steven Hayes. Traditional cognitive psychotherapy may not be the best intervention according to Dr. Steven Hayes, a renowned psychotherapist, and author of Getting Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life. Hayes has been setting the world of psychotherapy on its ear by advocating a totally different approach.

Hayes and researchers Marsha Linehan and Robert Kohlenberg at the University of Washington, and Zindel Segal at the University of Toronto, what we could call "Third Wave Psychologists" are focusing less on how to manipulate the content of our thoughts (a focus on cognitive psychotherapy) and more on how to change their context--to modify the way we see thoughts and feelings so they can't control our behavior. Whereas cognitive therapists speak of "cognitive errors" and "distorted interpretation," Hayes and his colleagues encourage mindfulness, the meditation-inspired practice of observing thoughts without getting entangled by them--imagine the thoughts being a leaf or canoe floating down the stream.

These Third Wave Psychologists would argue that trying to correct negative thoughts can paradoxically actually intensify them. As NLP trained coaches would say, telling someone to "not think about a blue tree," actually focuses their mind on a blue tree. The Third Wave Psychologists methodology is called ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy), which says that we should acknowledge that negative thoughts recur throughout our life and instead of challenging or fighting with them, we should concentrate on identifying and committing to our values in life. Hayes would argue that once we are willing to feel our negative emotions, we'll find it easier to commit ourselves to what we want in life.

This approach may come as a surprise to many, because the traditional cognitive model permeates our culture and the media as reflected in the Dr. Phil show. The essence of the conflict between traditional cognitive psychologists and psychotherapists is to engage in a process of analyzing your way out your problems, or the Third Wave approach which says, accept that you have negative beliefs, thinking and problems and focus on what you want. Third Wave psychologists acknowledge that we have pain, but rather than trying to push it away, they say trying to push it away or deny it just gives it more energy and strength.

Third Wave Psychologists focus on acceptance and commitment comes with a variety of strategies to help people including such things as writing your epitaph (what's going to be your legacy), clarifying your values and committing your behavior to them.

It's interesting that that The Third Wave Psychologists approach comes along at a time when more and more people are looking for answer outside of the traditional medical model (which psychiatry and traditional psychotherapy represent). Just look at a 2002 study in Prevention and Treatment, which found that 80% people tested who took the six most popular antidepressants of the 1990's got the same results when they took a sugar pill placebo.

The Third Wave Psychologists approaches are very consistent with much of the training and approach that many life coaches receive, inclusive of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), and many spiritual approaches to behavioral changes reflected in ancient Buddhist teachings and the more modern version exemplified by Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now and A New Earth). The focus of those approaches reinforces the concepts of acceptance of negative emotions and thoughts, and rather than giving them energy and fighting with them, focus on mindfulness, and a commitment to an alignment of values and behavior.

What's fascinating is how brain science and psychological research is supporting ancient spiritual practices. Perhaps now the East and the West, science and spirituality, are coming together.