adapted from The Wisdom to Know the Difference

There are certainly many paths to recovery. But you’ll only take one. What’s the best choice for you? We don’t know. And you can never really know. You only get to live life once. However you live it, you won’t know how it would have gone had you lived it differently. Time runs in one direction. Scientific studies often tell us what happened on average to the people who got this or that treatment. We’ll cite some statistics in The Wisdom to Know the Difference. But at the end of the day you won’t have something happen to you on average. Something very particular will happen to you. The best measure—and we’ll emphasize this over and over again—is how your path to recovery is working in your own life. We’ll hold onto this practical theme throughout.

The substance of The Wisdom to Know the Difference is grounded in a model of psychotherapy called acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT from here on, which should be pronounced as a word rather than separate letters.) ACT is an application of a discipline in psychology called behavior analysis. Unless you have an interest in the study of psychology, the only thing we want you to take away from this fact is that we’re concerned here with your behavior, with what you do, far more than we are with what you think or who you “are” in some abstract sense. Rather than explain too much about how ACT works as a model of psychotherapy, we’d rather keep writing to you about the issue of addiction and recovery and let the details of the approach come out in the process, in a commonsense, storytelling way rather than a deliberately professional or scholarly- seeming way. We will offer that the principles of ACT are being evaluated on an ongoing basis in research facilities all over the world, and that, from its earliest days, ACT has been applied to substance-abuse issues with good results. While what follows isn’t science, it is of science.

by guest blogger Steven Hayes, PhD, author of Get Out of Your Mind & Into Your Life

Not too long ago, perhaps a couple hundred thousand years, an obscure primate species called "human" learned a new trick. We learned to relate events arbitrarily -- we learned to have one thing stand for another. We acquired symbolic thought.

We've been bossed around ever since.

by Steven C. Hayes, PhD, author of Get Out of Your Mind & Into Your Life

The ninth Association for Contextual Behavioral Science World Conference (WC IX) was held in Parma, Italy, July 11 through 15. Organized by ACT-Italia, the Italian chapter of ACBS, it was the largest (596 registrants) and most diverse world conference ever—22 countries had nine or more registrants.

For those who attended, this conference had a tangible sense of a more matured and developed community—intellectually, socially, and practically. Many new datasets were shared, but there was a shift away from anxious questions such as, "Is ACT / RFT empirically supported?" toward more self-confident ones such as, "How can we advance this work?" or, "What are we missing?"

by guest blogger John P. Forsyth, Ph.D., co-author of Your Life on Purpose

Peace of mind is something we all seem to want, and want more of. Few of us get it, and when we do it tends to be fleeting. I think the reason has something to do with how we think of "peace of mind." It is not something we can have and hold, but it is certainly something that we can learn to cultivate and allow to grow.

How do we do that? Here are a few steps:

Quick Tip for Therapists by Robyn Walser, PhD, co-author of Learning ACT, ACT for PTSD and The Mindful Couple

Clients may become withdrawn or shut down in session when talking about difficult topics or encountering painful emotions. This may be due to fear of evaluation, thoughts about judgment, or just a simple desire to escape painful experience. These situations can be difficult for the therapist and sometimes end in awkward attempts to get the client re-engaged, including moving away from the difficult topic or pursuing the client with questions about why they have withdrawn. These actions can actually reinforce the shutting down.

Quick Tip for Therapists by Robyn Walser, PhD, co-author of Learning ACT, ACT for PTSD and The Mindful Couple

There are times in therapy when you can feel the "Yes, but..." coming right after you and your client have just explored a way to take valued action. You can almost hear the brakes being set before any attempt at change has been made. This "brake-setting" can show up in a number of forms: "I can't because..." or "I could if only..." Sometimes this is because the action needs to be re-evaluated and there truly is a practical issue at hand. At other times, however, the brake-setting is about experiential avoidance.

excerpt from Your Life on Purpose by Matthew McKay Ph.D., John P. Forsyth Ph.D., and Georg H. Eifert Ph.D.

We are living in difficult times. Many people are suffering right now. You may be one of them. People are out of work, losing their homes, struggling to get by, and wondering how they’ll make ends meet. And even if they still have a job and a home, they worry about their future and the well-being of their families, their children, and the planet. Many of these concerns are timeless and have been with us since the dawn of recorded history—and probably longer.

It’s so easy to lose sight of what matters in difficult times. In a way, it’s like living in a world filled with big, hungry lions. Evolution has prepared us to protect ourselves in such a world, and as a result we are quite good at focusing all of our attention and energies on the lions in our midst. As we go into self-preservation mode, we narrow and harden. This keeps us safe—at least when we’re actually in danger of being harmed or eaten.

But in the modern world most of us don’t have to face real lions. We do have to face our own pain and suffering and that of others. In a sense, this is the psychological equivalent of having a hungry lion or two following us wherever we go. And as those hungry lions pull for our attention and energy, our attention shifts to the suffering and away from doing what matters. In that shift, the rest of the world—full of so many other things to look at and do—washes away. We lose our bearings, and our lives become about avoiding and managing our lions—our pain and suffering.

Notice that this isn’t just about walking away. Heck, if the solution to suffering was like pulling your hand back from a hot stove, we’d say, “Do it. Just pull back and walk away.” (And if we were speaking about real lions, we’d say do the same—and do it fast!) But this isn’t the solution to human suffering. When we walk away from our suffering, we also tend to walk away from things that matter to us. So walking away has costs that can deeply diminish your life.

Maybe you feel as though your suffering has taken over your life. Or perhaps your experience is that pain and suffering have eclipsed any sense of what matters to you. The hurt has become central. You just don’t know what you care about anymore.

Or maybe you’re like millions of other people and do have a sense of what matters. Yet when you take a step forward, you find that the lions pop up out of nowhere and threaten to eat you alive. So, tired and frustrated, you retreat into the comfortable and safe. Maybe you’re looking for a way out of this cycle and back into your life.

by guest blogger Richard Blonna, Ed.D., author of Stress Less, Live More

Because our values are so important to us, stress commonly occurs when our values collide with each other.

This often happens over the holidays when family, friends, and other loved ones come together and visit. Many people value family yet struggle with family-related values conflicts that crop up over the holidays. For example, you might value small intimate dinners with just a few family members but your visiting parents want to bring the whole family together at your house. You might value sharing simple, meaningful yet inexpensive gifts but your siblings like to buy expensive, trendy gifts for you and your children. You value classical music and good conversation but your uncle wants to put the football game on and shut off the music.

To cope with holiday stress, try the following tips:

excerpt from Living Beyond Your Pain by JoAnne Dahl, Ph.D., and Tobias Lundgren, MS

There’s a kind of dividing line between where pain ends and the suffering your pain causes you begins. This same line marks the difference between the aspects of your pain experience that you have control over and the ones you don’t. ACT draws this line between the physical pain you feel and the way pain is interrupting or inhibiting your life, understanding them as two different kinds of pain. We call the first one “clean pain.” It’s a simple, immediate, physical sensation that tells us something’s wrong. An aching back, the sore wrists of carpal tunnel syndrome, tender spots, an old ankle injury that flares up regularly—these things are all clean pain.

What we call “dirty pain” is something quite different. Dirty pain is all the reactions you have to your physical pain. Dirty pain is the things your mind tells you about your physical pain. It’s the epithets that run through your head when you do something that puts you in pain. It’s the avoidance behaviors you engage to keep yourself from feeling pain. Dirty pain is your attempts to relieve yourself of pain where relief may not be possible.

excerpt from The Joy of Parenting

Take a moment to think about the relationships in your life that are most important to you – those in which you feel closest to someone else. What is it about those relationships that you most value? Take a few moments and jot down your thoughts about this in your parenting journal.

If you’re like many parents, one of the valued characteristics you listed may have been “feeling heard.” When we’re very lucky, we find ourselves in relationships in which people “get” us – they have a solid understanding of our wants, desires, and dreams. They communicate that understanding in how they behave around us – by calling our attention to things we care about or being thoughtful without being asked and without expecting anything in return. Because these things are important to you, you won’t be surprised that these same attributes are probably what your child most values and trusts about her relationship with you.

Taking time to nurture a relationship like this with your child is important. After all, you’re the “base” from which your child ventures out into the world. You ensure his safety and offer a lens through which he will views other important relationships throughout his life. You show your young child how to be in the world by the way you relate to and behave with him. And that is an enormous responsibility – as well as an exquisite gift.