Hayes has been President of Division 25 of the American Psychological Association, of the American Association of Applied and Preventive Psychology, the Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy (now known as the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies), and the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science. He was the first Secretary-Treasurer of the American Psychological Society (now known as the Association for Psychological Science), which he helped form. Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) is a new, scientifically based psychotherapy that takes a fresh look at why we suffer and even what it means to be mentally healthy. What if pain were a normal, unavoidable part of the human condition, but avoiding or trying to control painful experience were the cause of suffering and long-term problems that can devastate your quality of life? The ACT process hinges on this distinction between pain and suffering. As you work through this book, you’ll learn to let go of your struggle against pain, assess your values, and then commit to acting in ways that further those values.

Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life for Teens Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life for Teens

Short term positives are more reinforcing than long term negatives; this is why ineffective coping strategies persist - they offer short term relief but continue the problem over the long run (31) Steven C. Hayes, PhD, is Nevada Foundation Professor in the department of psychology at the University of Nevada. An author of thirty-four books and more than 470 scientific articles, he has shown in his research how language and thought leads to human suffering, and cofounded ACT, a powerful therapy method that is useful in a wide variety of areas. Hayes has been president of several scientific societies and has received several national awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapy.

Hayes' work is somewhat controversial, particularly with his coined term "Relational Frame Theory" to describe stimulus equivalent research in relation to an elaborate form of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior (also referred to as verbal operants). Defusion is like taking off your glasses and holding them out, several inches away from your face; then you can see how they make the world appear to be yellow, instead of seeing only the yellow world” (71) Suffer means having a burden we are unwilling to carry, that we move away from carrying: “fer” comes from Latin for ‘carry,’ “suf/sub” comes from Latin for ‘from below to up and away’ (12) He runs the leading Ph.D program in Behavior Analysis, and coined the term Clinical Behavior Analysis. He is known for devising a behavior analysis of human language and cognition called Relational Frame Theory, and its clinical application to various psychological difficulties, such as anxiety.

Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life for Teens: A Guide to

Basically, our verbal skills—and, in particular, our ability to relate anything to anything else and think symbolically—make anything an entry point into pain. Steven C. Hayes, PhD, is University of Nevada Foundation Professor of Psychology at the University of Nevada, Reno. He is author of more than 350 scientific articles and twenty-seven books, including Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Relational Frame Theory—two books that significantly develop the concepts on which Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life is based. His research explores the nature of human language and cognition and their application to the understanding and alleviation of human suffering. In 1992, the Institute for Scientific Information reported Hayes among the highest-impact psychologists in the world during the years 1986–90 based on the citation impact of his writings. He is past-president of the Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy, the American Association of Applied and Preventive Psychology, and Division Twenty-Five of the American Psychological Association. He was the first Secretary-Treasurer of the American Psychological Society. He is the recipient of the Don F. Hake Award for Exemplary Contributions to Basic Behavioral Research and Its Applications from Division 25 of the American Psychological Association. In 1999, US Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala appointed him to a four-year term on the National Advisory Council on Drug Abuse. The baseline condition of life is suffering. Humans are different from other animals in that we not only suffer but we suffer about our suffering. The past is verbally remembered and the future is verbally imagined or “languaged” with images (23) Trying to get rid of your pain only amplifies it, entangles you further in it, and transforms it into something traumatic. Meanwhile, living your life is pushed to the side. (7)levels of self: 1. Conceptualized self, 2. Self as ongoing process of self-awareness, 3. Observing self

Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life ⋆ Download PDF Free Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life ⋆ Download PDF Free

Defusion and acceptance naturally support the development of the self as an ongoing process of awareness. Having a conceptualized idea of yourself is a bad idea because it will be harder for you to accept experiences that do not align with your conceptualization. This is true even if (and perhaps especially if) your conceptualization of yourself is positive. Essentially, it is a barrier to you excepting reality as it is. If you have no conceptualization of yourself, then you’re free to accept each moment as it is and you are free to accept whatever emotions arise in you as they are and let them go. ACT is not about fighting your pain; it’s about developing a willingness to embrace every experience life has to offer. It’s not about resisting your emotions; it’s about feeling them completely and yet not turning your choices over to them. ACT offers you a path out of suffering by helping you choose to live your life based on what matters to you most. If you’re struggling with anxiety, depression, or problem anger, this book can help—clinical trials suggest that ACT is very effective for a whole range of psychological problems. But this is more than a self-help book for a specific complaint—it is a revolutionary approach to living a richer and more rewarding life. If you commit to a particular act, use mindfulness and defusion strategies when your mind starts giving you problems with pursuing that path, and move forward, accepting what your mind offers you, you will be in a better position to live a full and meaningful life with or without unpleasant thoughts, emotions, and sensations.Chronic emotional avoiders do not know what they’re feeling because not knowing is itself a powerful form of avoidance. (Damn, that’s me) To be willing and accepting means to realize that you are the sky, not the clouds. You are the ocean, not the waves. It means noticing that you are large enough to contain all of your experiences—good and bad. Problem is, these verbal skills that create misery are too useful to human functioning to ever stop operating. They are both the reason for our suffering and the reason we have been able to conquer the world. Everything has a cost. This is the quintessential workbook on acceptance and commitment therapy. Written with wit, clinical wisdom, and compassionate skepticism, it succeeds in showing us that, paradoxically, there is great therapeutic value in going out of our minds. Once released from the struggle with thought, we are free to discover that a life of meaning and value is closer at hand than thought allowed. This book will serve patients, therapists, researchers, and educators looking for an elegant exposition of the nuts and bolts of this exciting approach.”— Zindel V. Segal, Ph.D., the Morgan Firestone Chair in Psychotherapy and professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Toronto and author of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression. This is consistent with Carl Jung’s idea of the shadow, which consists of all the aspects of yourself you have disowned. It also is consistent with Eastern philosophies that teach the Self as being one with everything.

Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: The New Accept…

Just as Stoicism is the philosophical precursor to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Buddhism is the philosophical precursor to ACT. Unlike Stoicism and CBT which use logic and reason to reframe negative events, ACT uses mindfulness to investigate the nature of the emotions themselves. In short, CBT is more head and ACT is more heart. Life is hard. Life is also many other things. Ultimately your life is what you choose to make it. When the word machine dominates, life works one way. When the verbal evaluative side of you is but one source of input, life works differently. The choices themselves aren’t always easy, but finding the freedom to choose is a liberating experience. It’s your life. It is not the word machine’s - even though (of course) it tells you otherwise. (194)

The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

Humans suffer, at least in part, because we are verbal creatures. We are often either recreating the past or living in an imagined future. I love ACT, so it pains me to rate this less than 4 or 5 stars, but I would really hesitate to recommend it to any consumer with less than a master’s degree. The appendix includes a note to scientists explaining that the authors dumbed down many of the Relational Frame Theory (RFT) concepts for the sake of the general public, and they did, but still there is much in here that goes way beyond what an average self-help consumer will push through. I find the exercises and quotes useful to me as a practitioner but it’s hard for me to imagine more than a handful of the people I have ever worked with going through this book start to finish. I’m willing to be wrong about that. If you are fighting to be ‘right,’ even if it doesn’t help move you forward, assume the White Queen has decreed that you are ‘right.’ Now ask yourself, ‘So what? What can I actually do to create a more valued life from here?’” (84) I’m naturally a very cerebral person, which is partly the reason why overthinking and anxiety have been problems for me. I think too much and feel too little. I have a tendency to over intellectualize my emotions, which often means I don’t actually process them effectively. ACT/Buddhism seems to be an excellent counterbalance to my temperament. As much as I want to agree with the stop-thinking asceticism of cognitive behaviorism meets buddhism ("We're not saying don't feel your feelings! Feel them so deeply you don't care! Um! This makes sense to me sometimes while I'm at ACT therapy seminars!"), it just doesn't work for the more think-y among us. I like being in my mind. Being in my mind is being in my life. Finding varying ways to relate to pain -- sometimes cowering from it and sometimes snuggling up to it -- is what marks me as a human being. I find that ACT self-help book read dogmatically. And I think the mark of any bad self-help book and definitely any bad psychotherapy is a one size fits all approach -- believing so deeply as Hayes does that the tenets of this book repudiate other ways people try to help themselves.