A Liberated Mind: The essential guide to ACT

We fear we might pick a life course we don’t have the necessary qualities to pursue. Maybe

Becoming aware of how our self-story changes according to different situations helps us stay better connected with our transcendent self, and therefore with our ability to choose among possibilities about how we will be.

No One Is an Island

Values work will help us throw ourselves into meaningful challenges despite the stress we know they’ll cause us. Action skills help us reduce stress by crafting goals that are manageable and then getting going rather than stalling because of anxiety, which only increases our stress.

The six flexibility skills form such a powerful set because each allows us to meet one of the six essential criteria for evolution to occur. They provide us with the tools to intentionally evolve our lives.

That was the core of a powerful new psychotherapy technique called systematic desensitization, in which people with phobias imagined gradually more and more anxiety-provoking images while staying relaxed through the use of methods of muscular relaxation.

The punch line is that if the purpose of any coping strategy is to avoid feeling a challenging emotion or thinking an upsetting thought, to wipe out a painful memory or look away from a difficult sensation, the long-term outcome will almost always be poor.

The Self pivot takes the healthy energy of yearning to belong and swings it in the direction of reconnecting with our transcendent I/here/now sense of awareness, allowing that awareness alone to be at the core of what we take ourselves to be.

To help clients see how their pain relates to their values, I tell them that as they open up to pain they should flip it over and ask, “What would I have to not care about for this not to hurt?”