When you are playing cards with your mind, how do the trumps work? Does ‘Rational’ or ‘Makes Sense’ always trump ‘Feelings’ or ‘Thoughts’?
Think of yourself as an expanding balloon. At the edge of the balloon is a zone of growth, where the same question keeps being asked: “Are you big enough to have this?” No matter how big you get, thereʼs always more “big” to get, and the same question keeps being asked. When an issue presents itself,…
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…
Our mind is like a GPS. These systems are very convenient and useful. But it’s still important to keep one’s eyes wide open and look out of the window from time to time. Some people have ended up driving into a river because a bridge had gone down and the system hadn’t been updated. In…
Grizzly Momma Imagine that a mother grizzly has five cubs, conveniently named Cub Number One, Cub Number Two, Cub Number Three, Cub Number Four, and Cub Number Five. At first they don’t do much. They stay in the den, where they nurse and sleep and their mother cleans them. After their eyes open, they start…
Clean Pain, Dirty Pain Nobody likes pain. It makes sense that we make every attempt to avoid it or make it go away. But why do some of us seem to have less of it than others? It may be helpful to sort our pain into two types: clean pain and dirty pain. It seems…
An Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Metaphor Do you care how many people wear argyle socks? Well, what I want you to do isreally, really develop a strong belief that college boys have to wear argyle socks. Reallyfeel it in your gut. Really get behind it (I canʼt!) Well, really try. Feel overwhelmingly strongly about this. Is…