I’d barely pulled out of the gas station into busy Friday afternoon traffic when the rental van stalled and wouldn’t restart. Cars honked their horns as I blocked a lane until finally someone helped push me to the side of the road.
Psychological flexibility represents the acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) model of health—it's the element we want to foster and grow in our clients while modelling it ourselves as mental health professionals.
Sometimes emotions are seen as a sign of weakness and irrationality, but this perception couldn't be further from the truth. They are essential to being rational (Ciarrochi, Chan, & Bajgar, 2001; Ciarrochi, Chan, & Caputi, 2000; Ciarrochi, Forgas, & Mayer, 2001). They’re a way of seeing how events in the world relate to our values, needs, and desires.
We’ve spent the last few weeks discussing the overlaps between Buddhism and psychodynamic therapy, citing the views of the Buddha and Sigmund Freud. Today we are wrapping up the series with some final comments comparing psychoanalysis and the therapeutic use of mindfulness meditation.
Western society increasingly sees human suffering as grossly abnormal and typically generated from outside sources; it is a state to be eliminated as soon as possible. We vigorously seek external remedies, such as medications, a variety of addictions, and transient external pleasures over and above insight and understanding as cures for our unhappiness. These solutions to suffering are short lived, but we return time and time again to such supposed sources of happiness, as if they could possibly provide us with a stable state of well-being.
Clients who are frequently self-critical view themselves as flawed, so they are quick to highlight what they perceive as their negative aspects and minimize their positive traits and behaviors, and their strengths. They also struggle in their relationships, feeling that they need to perform well in some way in order for others to accept and value them.
