Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (Theories of Psychotherapy) by Steven C. Hayes & Jason Lillis

Author:Steven C. Hayes & Jason Lillis
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781433811548
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Published: 2012-05-14T21:00:00+00:00

Control Is the Problem

Imagine you were strapped to a chair above a shark tank with the world’s most sensitive arousal detector, and you are told that all you have to do is stay completely relaxed, completely calm, and if the detector registers any arousal in you, the seat will go out like a dunking tank at a carnival and you will be plunged into the water with the sharks. It is pretty obvious what would happen, no?

We do this to ourselves metaphorically all the time—try to threaten and force ourselves to think or feel a certain way. Deliberate attempts to control or change unwanted thoughts, feelings, memories, and sensory experiences can in fact cause more suffering in our lives and often does, particularly when we take the stance that we must have or not have a certain experience in order to engage in behavior that is vital and connected to our values. ACT refers to this as “control is the problem.” Here is an example of how these issues are raised in ACT:

Therapist: Maybe what’s going on here is that conscious, deliberate, purposeful control has been brought into a place where it doesn’t belong. What was taking benzodiazapines about?

Client: To get the anxiety to go away.

Therapist: Or else . . . ?

Client: Or else my life would continue to slip away from me. I’m not in control of the most basic aspects of my life.

Therapist: And how do you feel when you think, “I’m not in control of the most basic aspects of my life”?

Client: Anxious as hell.

Therapist: So it all notches up one more notch. In an attempt to avoid this feeling, your life got narrower, and you ended up with even more of this feeling. Do you see what I mean when I say that maybe this is a case of bringing control to a place where it doesn’t belong? Maybe life is telling you something: Try to control your feelings and thoughts and you lose control of your life.

Trying to control is built into the problem-solving functions of human cognition. Our minds evolved to categorize, predict, evaluate, and judge. It is how we solve problems verbally, and it has enabled a weak, slow species to take over the planet. The problem is that when these abilities are applied within, our own history is our own enemy, and a human life becomes a problem to be solved instead of a process to be experienced. Despite the unworkability of this approach, we are all given sociocultural messages that we can and should be able to control our thoughts and feelings. At some point in your life you may have been told to “stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about,” or “don’t think about that,” or “there’s nothing here to be afraid of now, cut it out.” The invalidating message we get early on is that it is not OK to feel what we feel. Even as children it was supposedly our job to feel something different. We never learned quite how, but we did learn to be quiet.

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