Fish in the Water
An Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Metaphor
We’re the fish, and our language is the water. How would a fish know if they were wet
if they’d never been out of the water? Jumping out of the water helps you to notice the
water.
An Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Metaphor
We’re the fish, and our language is the water. How would a fish know if they were wet
if they’d never been out of the water? Jumping out of the water helps you to notice the
water.
An Acceptance and Commitment Metaphor There are things in our language that draw us into needless psychological battles, and it is good to get a sense of how this happens so that we can learn to avoid them. One of the worst tricks language plays on us is in the area of evaluations. For language to work at…
Imagine you are going on a journey. Somewhere really special, where you really want to go, somewhere you’ve wanted to go your whole life. When you get to the train station you see two trains. One is a bit odd-looking and strange, some of the seats look a bit hard and overall it looks a…
When caught in a rip current, swimmers often intuitively swim towards the shore, unwittingly swimming directly against the rip. This is the main reason rips are so dangerous, because the strong current keeps pulling the swimmer back into the ocean, so even the strongest swimmer makes little progress, risking exhaustion and drowning. Experts advise us…
When you are playing cards with your mind, how do the trumps work? Does ‘Rational’ or ‘Makes Sense’ always trump ‘Feelings’ or ‘Thoughts’?
Our minds are like school playgrounds that are surrounded by secure high fences – they keep children in, and others out. Any bullies in that playground mean that the other children canʼt escape for long. This particular bully uses verbal abuse, shouting, teasing, and threats (rather than physical violence). The children are all fenced in…
An Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Metaphor Imagine you wake up one morning and just outside your front door you find an adorable tiger kitten mewing. of course you bring the little guy inside to keep as a pet. After playing with him for a while, you notice he is still mewing, nonstop, and you realize…