Don’t Quit on Me Transcript
 Dr. Steven Hayes Interview 

Nick

Welcome to don't quit the podcast series where we consider alternative ways to manage the inevitability of stress and pain.

Through speaking with a wide range of people who share their stories, strategies, and perspectives, we aim to inspire hope, confidence and belief in the fact that things can get better no matter where you are.

So who am I? My name is Nick and I have a lived experience with depression, panic, anxiety and chronic pain along with migraines. I've been around mental health challenges for most of my life. I've also produced a CD, an written a Book which looked at my own recovery through these conditions and thoroughly researched the strategies that I used, in order to fully understand why I got better, and how sustainable my recovery would be. I spoke to roughly 30 people in various fields such as nutrition, meditation, movement, exercise, science, and reflective journaling, and basically presented this information as an affirmation that what I had done had some substance. 

So I've been very interested in understanding how each of us can relate to the challenges of life so that we can minimise any unnecessary suffering.  That's basically the crux of why don't quit on me podcast exists. I hope you enjoy the show and if you want to reach out for any reason you can hit me up on Twitter at Nick PYJ, that's PYJ.

Where does any Story start and finish that is often the trick with our linear approach to life, we like to have a sequence, a pattern of, if this then that. Well the thing is, if I look to the other end of the spectrum to where the story almost ended, it hasn't. It continues with each word that I speak. And as you listen to these words, your life continues too. In which direction is completely up to you? Just know that the Story is never over. You have control and you are the author.

Steven Hayes is a foundation professor of psychology at the University of Nevada and is the author of 46 books and nearly 650 scientific articles. He's especially well known for his work on acceptance and commitment therapy or act. His book Get out of Your Mind an into your life was for a time the bestselling self-help book in the United States. An expert on the importance of acceptance, mindfulness, and values, he is ranked among the most cited psychologists in the world.

Doctor Stephen Hayes has faced down panic in a professional setting, on a continuous basis and he continues to meet it, and has overcome it and developed a framework beyond to help others do the same.

Steven

So if you want to be the whole human being that can be there for others, be kind to that part of you that was traumatised. Be kind to that part of you that suffered and invite that part of you in not to dominate, not to dictate, but to come along as a vital moment of your life. There's as much life in those moments of pain as there are in those moments of joy.

Nick

And now here is the interview with Doctor Stephen Hayes.

It's important to mention too, that the interview that you're about to hear took place about two or three days after the capital riots in the states, just to set the tone for the interview. I hope you enjoy.

For anyone who's listening who hasn't heard of act therapy or you're working with it, would you mind just giving a thumbnail sketch of how you came to develop, act from personal dealings with panic?

Steven

Well, you know ACT is a collection of acceptance and mindfulness processes and commitment to behaviour change processes, that produce what’s called psychological flexibility, which is basically being more cognitively and emotionally open. flexible, more in the present moment, consciously and more able to focus on what's important and organise our lives around that.

And I came to this over a period of years, as we developed the model, but it started inside my own struggles, especially around issues of anxiety, where I developed a panic disorder. I probably could have said that I was kind of an anxious person. I probably couldn't have said why my initial panic attack was in the middle of a psychology faculty meeting, where, as I say, on my TEDx talk, which you can Google and find. I was watching full professors fight in a way that only wild animals and full professors are capable of. And that kind of almost insane and conflicted, and almost felt like violence was going to happen space was just overwhelming. And I was not able to speak. I asked, raised my hand, they turned to me and no sound would come out of my mouth because my heart was beating so fast and I was overwhelmed in the moment.

And I did all the logical, reasonable, sensible things that people do. When you have an initial panic, attack, all of which are toxic. You start trying to control it, avoid it, watch for it, make sure you catch it before it gets too severe. Don't humiliate yourself or embarrass yourself, but what that does is it turns anxiety into your own enemy and it gives you anxiety, anxiety at the thought of anxiety. Anxiety becomes something to be anxious about. And that's a self-amplifying loop. It's very much like taking the microphone I'm talking into right now, and if I were to take the shroud around it and spin it towards the speaker, that's just a couple feet away. You wouldn't hear me talking. You probably have heard that. Sounds like it sounds like a shriek.

That is intolerable. Listen to, well, that's the emotional shriek. I increasingly began to live inside.

If you actually were in a feedback loop like that with the microphone and speaker, you might not know how to turn down the speaker, how to disconnect the amplifier, but when we're talking about the human nervous system and about applying reasonable problem-solving strategies, they're not crazy strategies. That would work great if dirt was on the floor, paint was peeling off their wall, you know, get rid of it. But you do that with your own emotions. You do that with your memories. You do that with your own history, you do that with your own likeness and confidence, you do that with your own self-doubts and guess what you get. You got some form of that same kind of toxic feedback loop and so. It was about three years after that that I finally hit bottom, in the middle of the night, thinking I'm having a heart attack at that point.  Now probably 90% of my waking day 95%, I'm thinking about panic attacks or avoiding them or dealing with them and increasingly unable to function. Hiding it so much that even my close friends mostly didn't know about it, and my coworkers and so forth didn't know about it. But it's because I was faking and covering and eating tranquillizers and you know trying to solve it that way. In the hitting bottom moment where I think I'm dying of a heart attack and then I realise now this is just another panic attack that woke me up in the middle of the night. Somehow in there it occurred to me. Only inside the experience of “I have no way out, My life is over”, You know I'm going to lose everything. I'll never be an academic or a psychologist. Only inside that it somehow occurred to me that I didn't need a way out, I needed a way in. And I somehow caught that I was being dictated to by the voice in my head, that was telling me to do these logical, reasonable, sensible, pathological things. I think we all have that voice. It's the voice of reason, normally, but it can be the voice of insanity under certain conditions too and I made a commitment there of, you will not make me turn from my own experience, and that changed my life. That commitment that turn, and I could feel the fog lift.

 So, I became interested in how to bring that in other people’s lives. And here I am almost exactly where we 39 years later talking to you about where that journey took me.

Nick

Then that is profound. I can relate to so many parts of what you've just said, except the part where you progressed in Quantum Leap forwards. Cause developing act and sharing it globally like I've made you know what I feel is significant changes. But there are. Some very profound methodology that I've just begun to explore so you know, from my very humble position I I definitely like to applaud that cause that's, that's not a small thing.

Steven

Well, to humanize it a little bit, although that transformational spiritual moment that showed up. I mean, using tranquillisers beta blockers etc, things like that, didn't completely stop for maybe 10 years.

You know so. Yeah, I was headed in another direction, but I walked out of it in a step by step way. What was different? Well, it would be like if you were headed West and then you realised you actually wanted to head East and you spun around. You know, I would stumble at get lost, be headed the wrong direction, make mistakes. But I would cut in those moments over and all of the years since, spin around and head in the other direction. One little baby step at a time. 

And so, I never present this kind of work as something where and then you see the error of your ways and then the fog lifts and then everything is OK. No, you can have those moments, by the way, almost everybody does, almost everybody has had micro versions of this. Maybe not this transformational moment, but you know how to sort things that work from things that don't work really.  I do exercises and stuff and workshops and everybody knows it. But the organ between your ears doesn't know it's fighting you and tricking in, you know putting obstacles in front of you and you stumbling and falling.

You know, we just were recording this a couple days after the capital of the United States was taken over by hooligans at the dictates of our soon to be gone president. And watching those scenes you know I went in to like a fugue state for most of the day because it reminds me so deeply of where some of my troubles with anxiety began, which was inside my own domestic violence history as as a very young child and watching my alcoholic dad threaten violence to my mother and throw things and my mother shrieking at him and fighting with him and so, that combination of insanity and possible violence which filled the television screen live a couple days ago, just almost paralysed me. So, you know we come into these moments with history. We're not computer programs were not coming in de Novo. We are historical beings and so excuse me for living, but you know I can, after 40 years of this work on psychological flexibility, I can almost be paralysed the freaking TV. Because it's so profoundly plugs into  my own history and that's the kind of creatures of we are. Fortunately, I have a wife who understands some of these things and she came over and held my hand. She knew I couldn't talk, for hours, I could only say few words without crying.

Nick

Yeah, I remember, I spoke to someone I requested an interview of, but it didn't actually go ahead, and we were discussing depression many years ago when I was researching my own recovery. I talked to him about how I was feeling and how it moved through it, and he said, you know what? In many instances, depression is a solid response to what's going on. If you're not feeling that at what's happening globally, then there's a disconnect. You know, and I'm still learning, and I still tell my boys and my daughter. You know what? It's okay to cry. Don't stop that, as I spent many years, you know stiff upper lip you know, boys don't cry and all that nonsense.

Only to learn, and I said in interviews which has gone against me. You know when they say, you know, tell me about a time you dealt with stress. What did you learn? What did you do not so intelligently? You know? How do you deal with stress now? And I'll say look, if it's bad enough and it's appropriate, I'll have a good crying cause I've found not much that's much more cathartic than that.

Steven

Yeah, well and we are living in a modern world where our children are seeing things that are orders of magnitude higher in terms of frequency and intensity that are psychologically challenging, of seeing  pain, of seeing judgement and hearing judgement and comparison, and that combination of “I'm not doing as well as others, there is something wrong with me”, exposure to a lot of pain, and you know, that kind of almost invitation to shutdown close off, or to pretend and put on the clown suit of persona. It’s toxic for people to do that, but it's human for people to do that, and so we've seen our children with anxiety and depression and substance use problems, that are a full standard deviation worse now than there were 30 years ago. And you know, people say that's just self-report, no, it's suicide rates. Don't be telling me it's just self-report. You know we are asking of ourselves and our children, to enter into a modern world that exposes us to psychological challenges that are enormously high compared to baseline. 

I mean how often would a person 100 years ago see images of somebody or see the actual see people die, see people getting shot? I was watching the capital thing and then and somebody said get out of the way, get out of the way and this woman gets pulled by in a stretcher, obviously critically wounded. And yeah, that was the first person to die. I didn't see the actual gunshot, but I did this morning. It's up on the tube this morning and I knew what I was doing cause I knew where it went, but I wanted to see how did it happen. Why did she get shot? And because they were trying to break the door into the very room where the Vice President was. And the policeman looking at that, of course, you know you're not coming through this door, and this poor deluded Q Anon believing former military officer died. Your great grandpa would see that in the war. I mean, I'm old enough to remember when in the Vietnam War. You couldn't publish in the New York Times. The picture of a dead soldier.

Nick

Yes, yes. 

Steven

You showed the picture of a dead soldier in the Vietnam War. There were angry protests sent into the paper about traumatising people. You have a young child in your house.

She could turn on the television and see actual death Live on the Internet. Soon enough, she'll know how to do it. How are we gonna live in a world like that, we better create modern minds for that modern world. We have to have baby Buddhas walking around. We cannot afford to just be mindless and foolish.

Nick

No, no, and now I'm. We probably I don't know whether to liberal or but we there was a thing on Tick tock that went around late last year and I basically took the app off my daughter and just said no, I'm not happy, it's not safe. And a few weeks later there was a situation where somebody live streamed a suicide and friends of hers who are similar age saw that because it was embedded. You probably heard about it, it was embedded in stuff that looked like it was for kids. And you know, that's it. What we're facing now, I don't see that stress is going to get any less, so we have to develop a better way of relating to that. you know?

And that's why I think ACT is so profound. I mean, my own philosophies have stemmed out of initially yoga philosophy and then more as I get older, the Buddhist style of I guess, relating to things because it made a lot of sense having come out of chronic pain with eight years of migraine and fibromyalgia. I cherished myself a lot. I didn't think I did because I thought I hated myself. But you know, I was the centre of my universe and it wasn't until I started shifting my perspective to “how can I be of assistance to other people”, that I started to heal. I guess intrinsically that's what were designed today I suppose?

 Steven

Yeah, we have the capacity for wholeness, for healing. But we have the capacity for all forms of distortion and an destruction of our own deepest sense of humanity if we mishandle these challenges and the challenges are not going down there going up, but the encouragement to do wise things is barely keeping up. The spiritual weirdest traditions are weakening enormously, people don’t go to church and so forth. They just don't. And I'm not singing the song that they necessarily should. That's a faith choice, but what was inside those traditions was lots of things that were helpful. My mother, I'm Jewish by the maternal line, but my mother converted to Catholicism and then later on a more Evangelical Christianity, but and I didn't even know she was Jewish because she hid it because of traumas of anti-Semitism, even from her father used to tell her to hide the fact that she had ‘Tainted Blood’ is the way he described it.

Nick

My goodness.

Steven

Yeah, as a young child, that's what she got. And but cut to the part that I knew about when I was young , I didn’t find out about my Jewish relatives until I was a teenager, but. She would take me to things like stations of the Cross, you know where you go from one to another and there are particular prayers you say and you're on your knees, repeatedly. And I'd be complaining, you know? What am I ,  8-9 years old. Something like that. And she would say. “Offer it up dear. Offer it up”. What she meant was, take the small amount of suffering that I'm asking you to do, by being on your knees for these moments and connect in consciousness to the suffering of others. Well, there were lots of things inside those Catholic traditions; Don't eat meat on Friday, you know, give up things for Lent and on it goes. Well, as a psychologist right now, I can tell you that distress tolerance is going down, not up among kids. And distress tolerance, the ability to take small amounts of unpleasant feelings and put them into a meaningful context and allow them to hold them as meaningful, gives you some tools that you can use when, for example you have a physical injury or when somebody rejects you or you have a loss of a friend or like that. And those things will come.

Yeah, but, the cultural traditions that teach those skills are weakening and the challenges that require those skills are increasing. And what we're putting out instead is if you do the right Instagram post, If you have enough likes, if your outsides really wow people, even if your insides are a mess then you're doing the successful thing as a as a child. I mean, that's nuts.

Nick

It is. It is and the mechanisms that drive it are addictive as well…

Steven

Yeah, and of course, the commercial folks who live off those addictions are using psychology alright, but they're not using it to produce flexible people who are able to focus on their values and get things done that they deeply care about, they are focusing on ‘how can we keep people hooked on the app?’ You know, yeah. And some of that's innocent, I mean. You know you look at, for example, children's television and they researched you know they were down to something like 20 seconds, the longest unbroken attentional requirement on children’s television is now something like 20 seconds.  You know, I'm 72. You know the things that we were exposed to, I would watch television. I grew up in the era of television, black and white television .Children's shows were several times that per episode for raising a topic, doing something about it, having it conclude, you know, people could say things for more than a few seconds so they could stay on a scene for more than a few seconds. Checkers.

Well, now we've changed that and we're chasing a different vision of how fast can I hook children over and over and over again to keep the playing that video game or clicking those buttons for that app where you can do in app sales or whatever. My point being that our psychological challenges are going u and our training to rise to those challenges is going down and we are reaping the wind.

Nick

Yeah, it's um, yeah, it's definitely a situation that needs addressing and quickly, can I ask a bit about the phrase we care where we hurt and we hurt. We care, but I get you to expand on that.

Steven

Well, you know the kind of sugarcoated vision of the problem-solving mind is, ‘I'll be happy when’ the difficulties go away, the pain goes away. But the problem is this is that the places where things are of importance, are the places where we have the capacity to be hurt. If you really don't care about something that's not something that's likely to hurt you if it comes or goes. If you think about the pain of loss, it is there in direct proportion to the importance of what is lost. What the mind as it tries to solve the pain of loss by undermining purpose. Classic example of that, I bet you everybody listening to me who's an adult has been rejected in some way, in a painful way in a relationship, they've been abandoned or lied to, or found wanting, or have been found uninteresting or unattractive or left behind or not included. And when that happens, what the mind says you need to do, is to wise up and close off.

Take the one where you were lied to, betrayed in an intimate relationship and then you can probably finish the rest of this sentence. Your mind will say ‘I will never be so…’ and it's going to be vulnerable innocent, open again. Yeah, but that means you're never going to be so open to intimacy again. If you're committed to not being vulnerable in relationships, vulnerable comes from the root that means woundable, and when people are close to you, they can wound you. That's part comes with closeness. So it would be like, you know, if you accidentally dropped a glass for water when you're about to have a drink, then you really are thirsty, that the solution is to give up on water. 

So we try to then live out, then I'll just have superficial relationships, yeah, but that isn't what we wanted. Yeah, but they don't hurt so bad when they go away well. Well, that's true. Instead, what you get is a constant hurt. The hurt of the relationships not being lived of the yearnings not being fulfilled, the intimacy not being had, the connection not being made, constantly, deliberately, voluntarily. By following the dictates of problem-solving mind, it says that it's just too painful. So we hurt where we care and we care where we hurt, is as a way of saying, look, Pain is built into living. Suffering is that space in which you say no to the pain that comes. Some of the pain that comes is pain of loss or pain or betrayal. With enough age. I'm 72. I can tell you some of the pain is physical pain. Some of it is loss of function, so it is loss of friends. You know pain is part of life and the problem-solving mind doesn't get that. It says I don't want any and then, it does all these things that cement in this toxic form of unnecessary pain, artificially produced pain, self-amplified pain. It isn't as acute, it's chronic. And it doesn't look like it's up to you. It looks like you're actually just defending yourself or dealing with the bad hand or complaining about the unfairness of the universe such that you are the one with that injury or you're the one with that betray, or you're the one with that parent to abused you or whatever the thing might be. But all of those things just amplify the pain in a different way that doesn't allow you to move forward as a whole human being, and that invites you into this journey as a broken human being which is not true. You're one whole conscious human being. There are no parts missing from you, even though there's a physical part missing from, You can lose an arm or leg. You're still a whole human being, but. If you put yourself in to a place where you can't be aware of what is already there that you're aware of, good luck with that.

Nick

Yeah, yeah, I heard somewhere something that reflects that same ethos, which is that we can only experience joy to the level with which we are willing to experience pain. So, when we numb one, we know numb our ability to experience the emotions that we would assume would be good.

Steven

Poets write about this and artists paint about this and dancers dance about this, and novelists write novels about this, but somehow or another, the science folks in psychology have been a little slow. They have really tried to feed the common sense, but delusional idea that you get to have sugar soup for your life and it's not what's going to happen. It's not what you'd even want to have happen. Try drinking sugar soup for a few days and see what it does.

Here's the deal. In order to be able to feel, you have to be open to feelings. if the feelings are not simply up to you but are up to the history and circumstances what's happening in your life, It means in order to be closed off to feeling, and to eliminate negative ones and subtract and cover over, you have to close off and eliminate, subtracting and cover over feeling itself. I didn't actually fully realise that myself in the the ACT work, Um, I kind of knew it and I wrote about it and so forth. But you know, when we created measures of experience avoidance, the tendency to eliminate diminish, to try to subtract your own experience, I used to say it's the tendency to eliminate difficult thoughts, feelings, memories, bodily sensations. It turns out, what happens is, it starts there, but soon enough, this is really pathetic, but you have to eliminate Joy too.

You probably know that, you probably felt that, you know you feel the vulnerability like in that example of relationships that have gone awry, and eventually you come back and your back dating again, and you know you've got that little mental thing. I'm never going to be so vulnerable again, meaning, I'm never going to let somebody really get by my defenses and quite the same way that I could be fooled again. And so, but of course you yearn for that connection, and you let down your guard, and somebody gets behind the shell that you're wearing, and it feels cool and immediately start running from that, you'll create a fight. You're not answering phone. You'll start a relationship with somebody else, and maybe even let them know about it. Or if you don't let them know about it, you have like a fall back Plan B. You know these are all kind of like, let's not go into the joy of connection. Just listen to our songs, you know, help me I'm falling in love. Okay, you have to fall you can’t do it deliberately, but help me help you from what?

Don't let this happen, and in fact, here's the kind of data that changed how I think about experiential avoidance. If you take this is study done by again, Todd Kashdan, where you take experientially avoidant people who are socially anxious. And I've come to believe that you know there isn't anyone who socially anxious who isn't yearning for social connection. That's a two parter. Yeah, because you care where you hurt and you hurt where you care? Why you so anxious about relationships, why aren’t you just a hermit? Because you want them? Okay so it's your yearning for social connection. But you're socially anxious. Well, what happens if you actually do like thought recording and stuff like that, people who are socially anxious and avoidant have happy, good, social things happen to them with regularity. It's just that the mind covers it over and says that never happens, but it has happened. People compliment you. People invite you to be part of things. People include you, people comment on things that you say. Tiny little things that lift you up in the moment in a socially connected way, even though you have quote, have social anxiety disorder. I hate that way of talking about it, but here's what happens if your experientially avoidant. The joy goes up from that invitation, that compliment, that whatever and now in orders of magnitude, faster as compared to others who aren't avoidant the joy goes down. Not because the invitation was withdrawn or because the compliment was shown to be false. No is because I cannot tolerate feeling good about that. That's too frightening. And so you deliberately run from joy too. And so now you’ve redefined your emotions it's not you know, Joy and sadness, It's the happy numb, I want to be part of the happy numb, well here's the problem, it’s not happy to be numb.

Nick

No no.

Steven

But that's what the mind will do to you, so it's tricky if you don't reign in, if you don't bring a wiser mode of mind to your own psychological experiences and learn how to do that gently, one step at a time, you're not going to be some freaking guru. You don't have to be. Just make a little bit of progress today, and if you slip, then a little bit of progress tomorrow, just a little bit, learn from mistakes and have a vision for where you're headed.

And that's what psychological flexibility gives you - a vision for where to head that allows you to read whether or not you're making progress, and allows you to apply what we know and work on developing skills that allow you to be in the present, emotionally and cognitively open, focused on what's important in building your life around that, and to do all that consciously. Those are six things that I just said. Learning how to be open or aware, actively engaged in living a life worth living, you do that, (and) everything moves in a positive direction. I don't mean it all comes out well. Your business may still go bad. Your wife may still leave you, your friend may die, there may be a phone call for you right now, listening to this show, it's going to give you something painful in this is not candy land.

Can we bring into our heads and hearts and hands, the skills we need to be whole and free living the whole human life, that includes pain and joy, and that is guided by our values and not by our fears, that is guided by our love and not by our pain.

Nick

Wow thank you, can I ask you, what are some? So, let's just say, I imagine there will be a lot of people globally going through states of overwhelm or chronic prolonged stress, and their loved ones who may be trying skilfully and unskilfully to support them. What are some simple things that people can do to greatly enhance outcomes of everyone?

Steven

Well, one nice thing about the psychological flexibility model is that we have now somewhere between 2 and 3000 studies, somewhere in that territory, more if we expanded it out to include mindfulness work and so forth. This is, say, several thousand studies saying that.

You can simplify this to a small set of skills that all revolve around the central theme, I usually talk about this as six different skills, like sides of a box, and if you strengthen each one and their relationship to the others, and you build a strong box, you know how well-crafted box, you know you can stand on it. You can do things with it, but if you start weakening the sides within, it collapses. If you try to stand out or use it so.

You can, in your life, work on your skills of being more emotionally open, more cognitively open, more ‘in the now’ and in a flexible fluid and voluntary way,  less attached to the story that you tell, and more attached to awareness per se and focused on your values and habits built around them. Those are the six things.

There are several hudred specific things that you can do, I could give a quick example of some of them. Some of their counter intuitive.

Nick

Yes, please.

Steven

Yeah okay, so for example.

I'll just grab a few. Some will seem a little odd. Let's take cognitive openness, where you want to hear your thoughts, but not be dominated by your thoughts.

Why? Because you're thinking analytic judgmental thoughtstream is only one source of wisdom.

Some of what you need to guide you is intuitive. Some of it is comes from just who you are as a social and biological being and so forth. You don't want to just turn your life over to that voice inside your head.

So, let's do the simplest thing. Let's catch that voice that criticizes, judges, evaluates, plans, compares cajoles - the part of you that is telling you what to do, and give it a name. So, my minds name is George, So, instead of just thinking like, oh, you know, I'm not a very good person. You could say something like, well, George says, I'm not a very good person. To yourself.

What does your mind have to say about? Well, what does George had to say? What's Georges opinion? Sometimes George will come up with some good ideas. Sometimes not. There is nothing wrong with listening, but it's a bad idea to turn your life over to an organ you don't control. And by the way, you don't control this organ. I mean, while you're asleep, it's giving you weird connections that you don’t even know what they mean.

I mean, it's actively busy spinning its web. I mean, you've got racist jokes inside you. You got sexist slurs inside you. You've got trauma inside. You got pain and rejection inside of you, you know you can't turnover your life to that, you know it has a life of his own, yeah? But it's good that we are the creatures, the only ones who can think symbolically. That's great. We're doing it right now. It's wonderful. Dogs and cats can't do what we did right now. We can use those tools to create the technology that allows us to do that. Right now, it's wonderful. I'm glad we got it, but don't turn your life over to it. It would be like turning your life over to, you know, rolling the dice. This doesn't make sense so, you might think that's nutty, but just try for the next week or so.

When you catch yourself thinking, just adding that little piece of give your mind a name and say, well, what does name the name, your mind, whatever it is, Mr. Mind and Miss Mind will work if you can't come up with a proper name, have to say about this, and then use what’s useful and leave the rest. That's one of several hundred methods that are called the defusion skills.

They are helping you to back up from thought the tiniest little bit, enough to notice that thought is thought. And in that gap, choice can happen. Your selection of the direction you want to take your life can happen instead of just turning it over to a mindless automatic pilot, push pull, click, click, whatever shows up in your head based in your programming and your history.

Oh

Emotional openness

Let's click it over just to what emotional openness looks like.

Here's a quick exercise where you can get a sense of what that would be like. Look around the room and everything that you see. Find something wrong with it, and mentally kind of put yourself in a no posture. You know that's not good enough, that’s dirty, in wrong places, not made of the right material.

Don't do it to any human beings in the room where you are now, but everything else. Find something wrong. What your eyes land on. And you can always do it. The car is not right. The designs are not right, something's not right.

Now flip it, do the same thing. And with each thing you see. Say yes to it. That is perfectly as it is - I don't mean that if you saw dirt that It's now clean. I mean yes, dirty carpet. You're welcome here. I may change it later. But you know, yes, old light fixture? That's not very stylish. See if you can get yourself to a yes to what you see - just feel what happens to the space that you're in, as you simply take it in for what it is. Doesn't mean you're evaluating it differently, in the sense of, of course I could still judge it negatively, but I'm going to choose to allow that to be just like that, like the perfect example of the broken lamp. I've got a lamp in my office that is an elegantly perfect broken lamp. It doesn't work. I know it didn't work. But I can say yes to the experience of having it here. Well, you could do the same thing with your emotions, so you could do the same thing with your memories. You could do the same thing with your bodily sensations. You get the same thing with the image that shows up when you look in the mirror.

Nick

Yeah.

Steven

So who's saying yes or no to your experiences? Whose job is that? Who's responsibility? Who has the ability to respond about that? Well, you do. So, that's one of several hundred acceptance Methods.

Nick

So, if anyone listening is getting inspired to look in, or dive in to ACT as a beginner where where's a good place to start? Cause I see that you had an ACT toolkit on the website. Are there any good books or audio book suggestions?

Steven

Sure, if you're interested just in my voice, I mean the.

There is an audio course called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy that an outfit called Sounds True sells and it's available through the Internet and web. Or you can go to the Sounds True website. I'm pretty sure there's a link on my website. 
 [https://www.soundstrue.com/] 
 [https://stevenchayes.com/]

Here, if you're interested in just getting a little 7 course email sequence, a little mini course, on ACT, and you want to be on my newsletter lists. Go to stevenchayes.com , and click on yes. Please send it to me and I'll do that. I don't spam people, I just send them blogs and newsletters and stuff about once a month. And if you get tired of it, it's a onne click opt out. But if you just put in acceptance and commitment therapy or psychological flexibility, our acceptance and commitment training, which is the name that it's used when it's used with sports or organisational issues or things like that, any of those things, you'll see there's a whole lot of free things out there. From Ted talks, you can get to TEDx talks that I've done or websites or groups that are on Facebook or List serves. 

groups.io/g/actforthepublic has been going on for 10 years has about 2000 people in a constant conversation, so doesn't take any money just time. And for just a little money, there's pretty good books out there, including from me, but from many other people as well as ACT is a community and it's being developed by almost 10,000 people who are in the professional society around the world. If you ever need an ACT therapist, by the way, you can go and simply find the Act Society, which is called the Association for Contextual Behavioural Science and it'll have a find a therapist button there and you can put in where you live and you may be able to find somebody close by cause there's several thousand people listed there.

Nick

That's great, thank you, thank you and one, I’ve got, I suppose it's the last question. There's lots more in my head, but I'm certainly mindful of your time, and this is not anything that was potentially related to what I was going to talk about, but one thought that occurred to me is, have you found any instances where early childhood trauma, once properly dealt with, can actually enhance psychological flexibility?

Steven

Oh, I think all of our early experiences and traumas absolutely enhance psychological flexibility in multiple ways, for one thing. I'm going back to my mother, you know, offered it dear offer it up. Your painful experiences, your painful memories. The things that have happened. Have softened you there like bread dough being kneaded and they connect you in consciousness to the pain of others. If you knew nothing of pain, who would you be?

I sometimes say this to clients when they're struggling with anxiety, let's say and think that the only way out is to find the magic delete button that would eliminate anxiety from their emotional and psychological life. And if the person is lucky enough to have children or to expect to have children or something this works very, very well and I'll say okay. Here's the deal. I'll give you an anxiety free life. I've got magic in my drawer here that will do that. But I just want to warn you a little bit about what's gonna happen. If your children ever come to you and say that they are afraid, that they are worried or feeling anxious, you will have nothing to give them, you won’t know what they're talking about, you won’t even know what the words mean. So, you tell me you want me to reach into that drawer.

Nick

No no, definitely not.

Steven

I've never had anybody say yes. Not one person. So that's the way the mind works. We want the wisdom that comes from being whole human beings that includes pain, and in fact. The joy that comes from feeling, feeling good things yes, but negative things, so called negative. There's not an emotion you can name that you don't pay money to produce. You riding roller coasters, you watch horror shows or movies, you read tearjerker novels, you like situation comedies that are  full of embarrassment. I mean, you just go down the list.

Nick

I think specifically about drama, you know, that's something I'm often saying, hey, how bout we don't bring drama to drama? However, if I'm looking for something for amusement, I search for drama as a category so there's a disconnect for, or maybe not.

Steven

Yeah, exactly so. Given that, given that we don't want to not know about this, and given that we want to be able to feel, and given that that it is in fact part of what connects us to others - a good definition of intimacy would be: shared values and vulnerabilities. If you know nothing about pain and vulnerability, you're going to have a really hard time having relationships that matter, because you're not going to be able to be there, like my wife sitting next to me on the couch a couple days ago, holding my hand while I had almost nothing to say while watching the capital of the United States be torn asunder by an insane mob. She knew what I was feeling. She knew that that went back even to the domestic violence from my home and hiding underneath my bed, and she knew that that was part of my panics or struggles in heaven. She knew as part of my work and she knew that in that moment there was not much else that I can say or do, other than just hold her hand and watch in horror and sadness.

The screen showed me in real time what was happening in my country’s capital. She would not have known to do that, if she wasn't a person who knew something about sadness, who knew something about anxiety? You know, she wouldn't have been able to be there with me in that way. No way not possible. A Robot or an automaton or a machine would not know just to say nothing and sit and hold my hand for a few moments.

So, if you want to be the whole human being that this can be there for others. Be kind to that part of you that was traumatised. Be kind to that part of you that suffered and invite that part of you in, npot to dominate, not to dictate, but to come along as a vital moment of your life. There's as much life in those moments of pain as they are in those moments of joy. The life Clock doesn't stop ticking. You know, good and bad goes one direction or the other. Invite them all in because those moments are your life moments, own them. And now put your eyes on the horizon where you want take the whole shooting match, the whole of you, all of your experiences come with you.

You're not broken - And you don't need to get rid of things before you can start. Nobody knows how to do that. Your life will mock you waiting for your life to start -  Stop waiting for your life start, it already started hear the tick of the Clock, that's the indication, and all of you can come along. That's the loving stance to take with yourself, and when you do that to others, that's the loving stance you can give to others.

Nick

Doctor Stephen Hayes. Thank you so much for your time today and for everything you said. It's been huge.

Steven

Thank you for the opportunity and thank you for the conversation and the connection.

Nick

I'm very grateful.

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