“People suffer. It’s not just that they have pain—suffering is much more than that. Human beings struggle with the forms of psychological pain they have: their difficult emotions and thoughts, their unpleasant memories, and their unwanted urges and sensations. They think about them, worry about them, resent them, anticipate and dread them.
At the same time, human beings demonstrate enormous courage, deep compassion, and a remarkable ability to move ahead even with the most difficult personal histories. Knowing they can be hurt, humans still love others. Knowing they will die, humans still care about the future. Facing the draw of meaninglessness, humans still embrace ideals. At times, humans are fully alive, present, and committed.
This book is about how to move from suffering to engagement with life. Rather than waiting to win the internal struggle with your own self so that your life can begin, this book is about living now and living fully—with (not in spite of) your past, with your memories, with your fears, and with your sadness.
This book is based on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT. (‘ACT’ is spoken as a single word, not as separate initials.) This is a new, scientifically based psychotherapeutic modality that is part of what is being called the ‘third wave’ in behavioral and cognitive therapy.”
~ Steven C. Hayes from Get Out of Your Mind & Into Your Life
Steven Hayes is the creator of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy or ACT for short. Nearly a decade ago (time flies when you’re having fun!), we featured two books by Russ Harris on ACT: The Happiness Trap and The Confidence Gap.
I got this book immediately after finishing my Notes on Marsha Linehan’s great memoir, Building a Life Worth Living. Marsha, as we discuss in those Notes, is the creator of something called “Dialectical Behavior Therapy” or “DBT” for short. The “dialectic” of her therapy? Simultaneously ACCEPTING your current reality *while* COMMITTING TO CHANGE.
As it turns out, that’s pretty much EXACTLY what *this* book is about as well. In fact, Marsha could have named her approach “Acceptance and Commitment Therapy” while Steven could have named his approach Dialectical Behavior Therapy. The details of their approaches are different, but the essence is nearly identical.
Both ACT and DBT were developed in the 1980s and 1990s and were part of what is known as the “third wave” in cognitive behavior therapy. We’ve featured wisdom from a couple other approaches that fall into that category as well: Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) (see Notes on Wherever You Go, There You Are) and Mark Williams’s Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) (see Notes on his book called Mindfulness).
This is a Workbook-style book. It’s FANTASTIC. (Get a copy here.)
It’s PACKED with both theoretical wisdom *and* practical exercises to help us move from Theory to Practice to Mastery. I’m excited to share some of my favorites so let’s jump straight in!
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