Acceptance and Mindfulness

I would like to share with you all a very challenging experience I had in the past few weeks. I was getting caught up in the webs of the big spider I call 'the mind' and suddenly I saw myself immersing in this sadness and frustration that I didn't know much of. At work and in my personal life I am usually the support my clients and close friends will turn to for advice and psychological intervention. However at this time, it was me, and me only that was sitting on the chair in front of my mind's eye. In sorrow for god knows what, I distracted myself with every second, resisting to accept my frustration and sadness. It was clear I was having one of 'those days' but like most of us it took me a little while to find the right way out of there, or may I say the 'way in'.

If you have not heard of Mindfulness yet, get used to it because this seems to be where a new wave of cognitive behavioural therapy is leaning towards. In a nutshell the idea is to:

1 - Accept your reactions and be present

2 - Choose a valued direction

3 - Take action
(Acronym ACT borrowed from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy)

What i meant to say with 'finding the way in' was basically what I tried yesterday with great success. In talks with a good friend of mine, who lives with me, I realised that only through living that frustration and sadness deeply I would be able to understand it fully. So whilst traditional CBT aims at disputing negative thinking and expanding horizons through the practice of more helpful behaviours, mindfulness is all about being present with our deepest emotions and fears. And so let's have a have look at what FEAR really means in the eyes of ACT theory:

Fusion with your thoughts

Evaluation of experience

Avoidance of your experience

Reason giving for your behavior

Similarly I found that through my work of coaching pscyhology the acronym FEAR is seen not very differently: False Evidence Appearing Real.

The point is I was fearing to sit with my struggling frustration and sadness (independent to what these were refering to). I had the belief that I had to do something about them, rather than to sit with them and listen to how they really felt within my being. So I stopped watching videos, reading books, and exploring techniques to distract my experience, and prepared myself for something really great: sitting with the frustration and sadness that was in me. i did not want to know where it came from or why I was feelng like that anymore. I stopped ruminating over the analytical and instead I stood right in the middle of it. I had a nice shower, put all the lights of my room off, and lied on my back in bed with my arms away from my body and my legs away from each other. I relaxed my whole body and became aware of how it felt to be me with all that frustration and sadness that was there as well. i did not challenge the experience at all. I let go of the disputing of my irrational beliefs or the contents of my cognitive material, and simply allowed myself to experience the emotion. A simple decision and twenty minutes of revelation. I rolled to the side, closed my eyes and slept through the night.

The result was waking up feeling much better, looking forward to continuing my day and planning to share with you this experience that has been of great value to me.

Suddenly I am here now, aware of the results of therapy that I did on my own, as part of personal development and self-discovery, and glad I feel strong enough and transparent enough to share these with you.

Valuable things I take from this experience:

1 - To let go of the pain, sit with the pain

2 - Good coping comes with good accepting

3 - Effective therapy can only be achieved when we ourselves need it too.

Reading:
Hayes, Steven C.; Spencer Smith (2005). Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. New Harbinger Publications. ISBN.
Hayes, Steven C.; Kirk D. Strosahl (2004). A Practical Guide to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Springer. ISBN.
Hayes, Steven C.; Kirk D. Strosahl, Kelly G. Wilson (2003). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy : An Experiential Approach to Behavior Change. The Guilford Press. ISBN.