(tl;dr: ACT claims a false dichotomy between “fighting” and “accepting”, while completely ignoring “eliminate without fighting” as an option.)
A couple words of caution. In the first paragraph I wrote:
[...] but I don’t feel competent to write a comprehensive introduction to ACT. So I’ll focus on describing my experience and hope for the best.
I really meant it. I used some ACT terminology to describe the prerequisite insights but I didn’t describe ACT very well so even if it does in fact claim anything like that, you couldn’t have learned about it from this post.
The issue of “eliminating without fighting” seems orthogonal to the issue of “acceptance” vs “fighting”. The first one is about doing things that you believe will prevent some subjective states from arising in the future. The second is about what to do with subjective states that are already here.
even if it does in fact claim anything like that, you couldn’t have learned about it from this post.
Fair enough; it’s possible I pattern-matched a bit on what ACT advocates have said to me in the past (which was them pattern-matching me talking about eliminating emotions as being equivalent to fighting or suppressing them), and what was written in the ACT books that I’ve read.
However...
The issue of “eliminating without fighting” seems orthogonal to the issue of “acceptance” vs “fighting”.
This actually isn’t how you presented it in the post. You said:
The alternative to acceptance is emotional avoidance
Not, “an alternative”, but “the alternative”, implying a dichotomy. So even if it was too strong to say that “ACT” claimed a dichotomy (and AFAICT, it does), it certainly appears to me that your post strongly implies such a dichotomy.
The first one is about doing things that you believe will prevent some subjective states from arising in the future. The second is about what to do with subjective states that are already here.
Nope. You can work on identifying the source of a state while it’s here, and it’s often the best time to do so. Also, in the context of arguing a case for ACT, the strong implication is that the listener should select one or more of ACT’s strategies for dealing with states arising in the future, and in fact resign themselves to using only such methods in the future, because everything else “doesn’t work”.
IOW, ACT advocacy arguments look a lot like slaying a list of straw men. Sure suppression and avoidance don’t work, duh. How does ACT compare to things that don’t suck?
Without that information, it’s like saying “you know, when it comes to open wounds, you can either try to keep them clean, or you can use our band-aids and change the dressings regularly”, without ever mentioning that maybe you should go to a hospital and get some stitches.
Don’t get me wrong: ACT actually has a cool toolbox of techniques. But AFAICT its advocates always seem to talk about how the horror of open wounds compares with their bandages, and imply that you should get used to a lifetime of bandage-replacing, even if there’s a hospital right up the street.
(And some have even gone so far as to imply that the wounds being bandaged are a virtue—i.e., that we should be happy to have them, and that attempts to get rid of them—like attempts to eliminate death—are foolish and misguided.)
Could you expand on identifying the source of a state?
Endlessly. ;-) But rather than try to do that here, Gendlin’s book “Focusing” isn’t a bad place to start.
I’ve got a bad case of self-hating thoughts, and I would be very glad to get rid of them.
A lot of times, these are a simple case of inaccurate morals, and the trick to getting rid of them is to use their symmetry. Instead of judging yourself, you judge someone else in the same way for the same behavior, and then decide not to disapprove of people who do that. When you no longer see the behavior as wrong, you stop judging yourself for it as well.
This isn’t a universal fix for all self-hating thoughts, but the basic approach works on quite a lot of things.
The Work of Byron Katie (e.g. the book “Loving What Is”, or the free excerpts from her website), and Lawrence Crane’s “Love Yourself And Let The Other Person Have It Your Way” are good resources for exercises and practical tips to applying this approach. (Both are about letting go of judgments applied to others as a way of removing both self-judgment and improving one’s state of mind in general, although they go about the process quite differently.)
Again, this won’t take care of everything—if you have second-order moral objections, for example, you might not be able to drop the judgment, or there might be another cause besides a moral judgment.
(Btw, when I say “moral judgment” in all of the above, I don’t mean “considered ethical injunction” but “conditioned responses of disgust or moral reproach, often at a semi-conscious or entirely unconscious level”.)
Btw, when I say “moral judgment” in all of the above, I don’t mean “considered ethical injunction” but “conditioned responses of disgust or moral reproach, often at a semi-conscious or entirely unconscious level”.)
It’s the semi-conscious level that gets me. I have this voice in my head which keeps going “you stupid piece of shit”. Sometimes it’s “you stupid piece of shit, why don’t you just kill yourself?”, though that variant has become less common. I can tell it’s in my head, but it doesn’t feel like I’m doing it.
Doing something useful for myself is likely to trigger it. Since I’m likely to give in and give up, this means that my actual circumstances get worse. It also makes it hard to get to doing something like focusing, which can lead to more self-hatred for not being tough enough to just bull through the problem.
I don’t treat other people like that. I know the voice is vicious and stupid.
One of the things that helped me get over this sort of critical self talk is the distinction between being involved in reading a book for pleasure, and reading a book as author trying to get to be a better writer.
In the first case, you are going along with the flow of the experience. It is entrancing, and your emotions change with the fictional scene.
In the second case, you’re reading for technique. What person is this written in? What level of difficulty of the language? Why did they choose this word rather than that word? What is the theme?
pjeby’s suggestion of Byron Katie’s work is a good one. She starts with the idea “Is it true?”
I found it helpful to try to figure out where in my past I heard the phrase that I’m stuck on. Often times, with patient inquiry, I can come to recall a specific experience. And, through understanding the emotional charge of that experience, which is distinct from my circumstance now, I can feel it and let it go.
Another technique that I’ve found effective is to treat it as an environmental research project. What is different about the last few minutes which brings up this thought? Have I done anything different? What do I see and hear? Who am I with? What is the story around this? Is it true? How can I change my environment to reduce this? I’ve used this questioning technique to eliminate cravings. Again, it’s not a fast technique, but with patient application, it works.
Meditation helped. Less Wrong helped. Patience helped. Changing my environment helped a lot. Having the intention to be as kind to myself as I would be to a dear friend helped a lot.
This actually isn’t how you presented it in the post.
Fair enough. I failed at precisely communicating what I think. FWIW, I don’t think that ‘acceptance’ means that you’re forbidden from working to feel better in the future.
IOW, ACT advocacy arguments look a lot like slaying a list of straw men. Sure suppression and avoidance don’t work, duh. How does ACT compare to things that don’t suck?
I didn’t see the criticism of suppression and avoidance as a diss against other theories but rather against something that people naively tend to do by default. And even if you know some other things that don’t suck, until you become an Ultimate Master of Cognitive Restructuring, acceptance can still be useful.
Also, I kind of feel like I am being strawmanned here a bit, when you fluidly move from denying a point I made to talking about those pesky ACT advocates, right up to
(And some have even gone so far as to imply that the wounds being bandaged are a virtue—i.e., that we should be happy to have them, and that attempts to get rid of them—like attempts to eliminate death—are foolish and misguided.)
which is just stupid. Unfortunately, I have an idea where that might be coming from. One of the ideas there was that your mind’s primary job isn’t to make you happy, but to protect you from danger. So when you have an unpleasant experience, one thing you can do is to thank your mind for looking out for you (shudder). I can see how someone who doesn’t know the real, non-dumbed-down story of evolutionary psychology could get silly ideas from that.
I kind of feel like I am being strawmanned here a bit,
Not my intention; I was just trying to clarify the context in which I was interpreting your post.
I didn’t see the criticism of suppression and avoidance as a diss against other theories
Yeah, I’ve had ACT advocates email to me to warn me that eliminating bad feelings is harmful and I shouldn’t promote such a thing. So that might be why I see it differently. ;-)
Point is, I wanted to reply here so that people know there’s more to life than the false dichotomy of suppress or accept. A lot of people seem to not realize that other options are available.
A couple words of caution. In the first paragraph I wrote:
I really meant it. I used some ACT terminology to describe the prerequisite insights but I didn’t describe ACT very well so even if it does in fact claim anything like that, you couldn’t have learned about it from this post.
The issue of “eliminating without fighting” seems orthogonal to the issue of “acceptance” vs “fighting”. The first one is about doing things that you believe will prevent some subjective states from arising in the future. The second is about what to do with subjective states that are already here.
Fair enough; it’s possible I pattern-matched a bit on what ACT advocates have said to me in the past (which was them pattern-matching me talking about eliminating emotions as being equivalent to fighting or suppressing them), and what was written in the ACT books that I’ve read.
However...
This actually isn’t how you presented it in the post. You said:
Not, “an alternative”, but “the alternative”, implying a dichotomy. So even if it was too strong to say that “ACT” claimed a dichotomy (and AFAICT, it does), it certainly appears to me that your post strongly implies such a dichotomy.
Nope. You can work on identifying the source of a state while it’s here, and it’s often the best time to do so. Also, in the context of arguing a case for ACT, the strong implication is that the listener should select one or more of ACT’s strategies for dealing with states arising in the future, and in fact resign themselves to using only such methods in the future, because everything else “doesn’t work”.
IOW, ACT advocacy arguments look a lot like slaying a list of straw men. Sure suppression and avoidance don’t work, duh. How does ACT compare to things that don’t suck?
Without that information, it’s like saying “you know, when it comes to open wounds, you can either try to keep them clean, or you can use our band-aids and change the dressings regularly”, without ever mentioning that maybe you should go to a hospital and get some stitches.
Don’t get me wrong: ACT actually has a cool toolbox of techniques. But AFAICT its advocates always seem to talk about how the horror of open wounds compares with their bandages, and imply that you should get used to a lifetime of bandage-replacing, even if there’s a hospital right up the street.
(And some have even gone so far as to imply that the wounds being bandaged are a virtue—i.e., that we should be happy to have them, and that attempts to get rid of them—like attempts to eliminate death—are foolish and misguided.)
Could you expand on identifying the source of a state?
I’ve got a bad case of self-hating thoughts, and I would be very glad to get rid of them.
Endlessly. ;-) But rather than try to do that here, Gendlin’s book “Focusing” isn’t a bad place to start.
A lot of times, these are a simple case of inaccurate morals, and the trick to getting rid of them is to use their symmetry. Instead of judging yourself, you judge someone else in the same way for the same behavior, and then decide not to disapprove of people who do that. When you no longer see the behavior as wrong, you stop judging yourself for it as well.
This isn’t a universal fix for all self-hating thoughts, but the basic approach works on quite a lot of things.
The Work of Byron Katie (e.g. the book “Loving What Is”, or the free excerpts from her website), and Lawrence Crane’s “Love Yourself And Let The Other Person Have It Your Way” are good resources for exercises and practical tips to applying this approach. (Both are about letting go of judgments applied to others as a way of removing both self-judgment and improving one’s state of mind in general, although they go about the process quite differently.)
Again, this won’t take care of everything—if you have second-order moral objections, for example, you might not be able to drop the judgment, or there might be another cause besides a moral judgment.
(Btw, when I say “moral judgment” in all of the above, I don’t mean “considered ethical injunction” but “conditioned responses of disgust or moral reproach, often at a semi-conscious or entirely unconscious level”.)
It’s the semi-conscious level that gets me. I have this voice in my head which keeps going “you stupid piece of shit”. Sometimes it’s “you stupid piece of shit, why don’t you just kill yourself?”, though that variant has become less common. I can tell it’s in my head, but it doesn’t feel like I’m doing it.
Doing something useful for myself is likely to trigger it. Since I’m likely to give in and give up, this means that my actual circumstances get worse. It also makes it hard to get to doing something like focusing, which can lead to more self-hatred for not being tough enough to just bull through the problem.
I don’t treat other people like that. I know the voice is vicious and stupid.
One of the things that helped me get over this sort of critical self talk is the distinction between being involved in reading a book for pleasure, and reading a book as author trying to get to be a better writer.
In the first case, you are going along with the flow of the experience. It is entrancing, and your emotions change with the fictional scene.
In the second case, you’re reading for technique. What person is this written in? What level of difficulty of the language? Why did they choose this word rather than that word? What is the theme?
pjeby’s suggestion of Byron Katie’s work is a good one. She starts with the idea “Is it true?”
I found it helpful to try to figure out where in my past I heard the phrase that I’m stuck on. Often times, with patient inquiry, I can come to recall a specific experience. And, through understanding the emotional charge of that experience, which is distinct from my circumstance now, I can feel it and let it go.
Another technique that I’ve found effective is to treat it as an environmental research project. What is different about the last few minutes which brings up this thought? Have I done anything different? What do I see and hear? Who am I with? What is the story around this? Is it true? How can I change my environment to reduce this? I’ve used this questioning technique to eliminate cravings. Again, it’s not a fast technique, but with patient application, it works.
Meditation helped. Less Wrong helped. Patience helped. Changing my environment helped a lot. Having the intention to be as kind to myself as I would be to a dear friend helped a lot.
I hope that you may find help in this.
Who does it feel like, then? That might be a clue.
Is there any sort of person about whom you would feel that way, though?
Fair enough. I failed at precisely communicating what I think. FWIW, I don’t think that ‘acceptance’ means that you’re forbidden from working to feel better in the future.
I didn’t see the criticism of suppression and avoidance as a diss against other theories but rather against something that people naively tend to do by default. And even if you know some other things that don’t suck, until you become an Ultimate Master of Cognitive Restructuring, acceptance can still be useful.
Also, I kind of feel like I am being strawmanned here a bit, when you fluidly move from denying a point I made to talking about those pesky ACT advocates, right up to
which is just stupid. Unfortunately, I have an idea where that might be coming from. One of the ideas there was that your mind’s primary job isn’t to make you happy, but to protect you from danger. So when you have an unpleasant experience, one thing you can do is to thank your mind for looking out for you (shudder). I can see how someone who doesn’t know the real, non-dumbed-down story of evolutionary psychology could get silly ideas from that.
Not my intention; I was just trying to clarify the context in which I was interpreting your post.
Yeah, I’ve had ACT advocates email to me to warn me that eliminating bad feelings is harmful and I shouldn’t promote such a thing. So that might be why I see it differently. ;-)
Point is, I wanted to reply here so that people know there’s more to life than the false dichotomy of suppress or accept. A lot of people seem to not realize that other options are available.