Status Updates From Acceptance and Commitment T...

Starting into Values based work. All techniques ultimately serve the purpose of helping a client live their values in the now.

Mostly exercises for helping someone to experience the observing self in this evening’s reading

The last few pages have focused on how to help a client break free from their stories about themselves, not by reframing or upgrading their self concept, but by shifting their awareness to experience self as awareness and self as observer. The approach is to notice when thought about self has taken Center stage and shift from thinking to noticing.

Today’s section mainly talked about how to help a client shift their relationship with mind chatter and to help a client evaluate reasons as causes. The book goes in and out of exceptionally dense academic writing and plain English. Great thinking throughout. The book seriously needs a copy editor who understands sentence craft.

Moving from phase 1 to phase 2. Phase 1 challenges the client’s agenda to control (unsuccessfully) their inner experiences usually by avoiding triggers or suppressing thoughts and emotions. Phase 2 moves to teaching a client to be willing to experience difficult thoughts and feelings and then to break apart the hold that language (and thought) has had on the client. The writing has become densely academic again.

The author spends considerable time suggesting collaboratively challenging ineffective natural client strategies for change through a process he calls creative hopelessness (vs destructive hopelessness). Creative hopelessness helps a client free up energy from destructive coping (attempts to avoid, numb or eliminate unwanted feelings, for example), and creates space for strategies that work.

Es complejo entender RFT incluso acá, pero también da ejemplos que hacen más llevadera la lectura…

This last ten pages outlined the main approach of ACT and spent considerable time talking about how to help a client evaluate their current model for change to answer the practical question: is it working? Hayes argues that many people engage in types of problem solving with thought or emotional distress that are doomed to fail—and encourages clients to track the success of the methods they are using.

The author is making a compelling argument that the mind that does language is the mind capable of creating suffering through the same mechanisms that allow language to develop. And that the same strategies that lead a person to successfully navigate problems in the external world often produce distress when applied to the inner world. Lots of science and examples from clinical case work. Excellent, but dense.

The book is written in dense academic language. Despite having to wade through complex passive sentences filled with jargon, the logic and behind the book is refreshing.

Right now I am reading about how humans use verbal relationships to create the experience of suffering and how many of the solutions offered people become a recipe for increasing, and not decreasing the suffering they are experiencing.