ACT psychology is a psychology of the normal. A lot of the psychologies that are out there are built on the psychology of the abnormal. We have all these syndromal boxes that we can put people in and so forth. The actual evidence on syndromes is not very good. There's no specific biological marker for any of the things that you see talked about in the media. Even things like schizophrenia - there's no specific and sensitive biological markers for these things. There may be some abnormal processes involved, but vastly more of human suffering comes from normal processes that run away from us.
Steven C. HayesACT psychology is a psychology of the normal. A lot of the psychologies that are out there are built on the psychology of the abnormal. We have all these syndromal boxes that we can put people in and so forth. The actual evidence on syndromes is not very good. There's no specific biological marker for any of the things that you see talked about in the media. Even things like schizophrenia - there's no specific and sensitive biological markers for these things. There may be some abnormal processes involved, but vastly more of human suffering comes from normal processes that run away from us.
Steven C. HayesThe definition of happiness being very emotion-oriented - the problem is that there's too many quick and dirty ways to chase that in ways that end up being unhelpful to people. If you just have another martini or even more severe substances. But commercial culture and our media is constantly encouraging us to think that if we feel good we live well. We're only too happy to sell you goods and services from the dancing oivoids and the pill you can take, or the trips or the cars or the clothes or the women that you can get with - whatever that is that will give you the quick route to that.
Steven C. HayesI want good science, and I want it to be realistically marketed. I wouldn't like only two countries on the planet that allow pharmaceutical companies to market directly to people, New Zealand and the United States. It ought to be better regulated. And when it's presented to people, it ought to be presented in a way that's realistic. For example, often people will prescribe antidepressant medications, and we'll say, you have a brain disease; you'll have to be on these medications permanently. There is no biological marker for depression. It's not true that we know that it's a brain disease.
Steven C. HayesIt's pretty clear in how things are moving in empirically supported treatments that we're going to be speaking to the culture in a different voice. It's going to have some echoes of some of the deeper clinical and spiritual and religious traditions that had wisdom in it. If we're not going to get there through religious means and things of that kind, we're going to have to find a way to put it in the culture in a different way, because we need something right now other than yet another cable shoutcast or yet another Internet Web page showing us the cellulite on the actress's rear end.
Steven C. HayesHolding anxiety as your own enemy, and that it has to go down, diminish it, go away and not happen here is a kind of self-invalidating, interiorly focused process that would get you even more entangled with these processes. Instead, what we're going to need to learn to do is to allow your history to bring into the present thoughts and feelings and memories, and to sort of hold them mindfully and self-compassionately, and then focus on what you do and bring them along for that journey.
Steven C. HayesProcesses of avoiding the world within in order to try to regulate your behavior, or becoming entangled in your thoughts interfering with your ability to take advantage of what's around you, or losing contact with your values for fear that you'll know more about the places where you hurt - those kinds of processes are just normal psychological processes. And if you take the mode of mind that works great in 95 percent of your life and apply it within, it then implodes. It starts creating barriers, and that's true at work, it's true in our culture, true in our politics.
Steven C. Hayes