Choose ACT

Choosing what to do and how to do it sounds pretty easy.

I can choose to type a coherent sentence or hit the “j” key repeatedly jjjjjjjjjjjjjjj. If this is so easy, why do we react “out of character” when bad stuff happens, when our least favorite coworker enters the room, or when our partner misses our point? In a word, we have been conditioned.

The basic building blocks of our life are our experiences and our actions. As we move through life, our experiences and our actions are colored by our learning history: the stuff that happened to us, the way we made sense of it, the outcome, and the way we coped and continued to live. For example, if we were bullied when we were five years old by our older cousin, we likely experienced this as any five-year-old child would, with confusion, fear, shame, and anger. We may have interpreted that we were weak and deserved it. We quickly learned to comply with what our cousin wanted from us. We may have learned to cope with our pain by ignoring our emotions and our personal and interpersonal needs. Human life is complex, so mix that experience in with all of the other stuff life gave us in the context of the capabilities we had in place at the time of each event, and you have a learning history.

With the unintended help from our brain, our body and the people we interact with, we generate a life story. Our life story functions like that extra bedroom with the “eccentric decor.” We hoard - hold on to - all of our experiences and place them into this narrative whether it actually fits or not. The good news is that with a life story, we can really make sense of the stuff that happens to us, satisfying our immediate need for certainty. We use our colored glasses to fit what happens around us into this story, making it stronger and more believable. This story becomes our best friend and worst enemy since we find a strange comfort and solace when it appears, but it locks us into a rigid approach of thinking, feeling, relating, and acting. We learn to stop asking ourselves who has the keys to our behaviors, our choices and our life, ourselves or our pattern of reacting? By controlling how we view things, we lose control of the wheel.

This may be true for us, partially true, or not true at all. More than likely, it is more true in some areas of our life than others, mostly true at home, not so much at work, mostly true with Jill, not so much with Jack. If we’re not careful, our automatic, rigid, defense patterns can leak from one life domain into the other. We develop like a crockpot cooks, slowly, steadily and often without detection, an insidious process.

If you’re choosing to invest in yourself today, you’re Choosing to ACT. ACT here stands for Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, a cognitive-behavioral approach using mindfulness and acceptance strategies. ACT targets experiential avoidance, our tendency to fix pain or protect ourselves from it by altering things as they are. In this way, we attempt to control our internal environment to cover up the “bad” part of our life experience. When sadness arrives, we get busy changing it or denying it. When anxiety arrives, we take a pill. We do that over and over and over until we continually feel hopeless about our sadness and fearful about our anxiety. In our efforts to fix common and important human experiences like sadness and anxiety, we develop long-term suffering and get stuck in how we approach these rich, complex events. Like Watergate, the break-in was an error, but the cover-up became the relentless effort to control. ACT is pragmatic, it helps us see the ways we imprison ourselves and helps us develop a way to make choices, take action, and be intentional in our lives.

A note on therapy: Counseling is not done to us, it’s an invitation to explore, work, practice and reflect. Counseling can be helpful when we realize that every day is important, the people in our lives are important, we are important, this world is important. Each of us is taking a profound journey. What do we want to do with it, and how do we want to go about it?