Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “acceptance”
Control your moods or live with them? A guy we’ve been working with for some time commented today that he didn’t want to focus on control of his moods. His focus is on living with them. This is an attitude that we often recommend to patients who have trouble accepting a diagnosis or a treatment option. Acceptance of the reality …
Activate your psychological immune system Our brains have built-in processes that help us make meaning of adversity, and find ways to pick up and keep going after a shock, injury, or disappointment. Psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson have been researching our abilities to “weather the storms” of life, and figure out how to make the best of bad situations. …
Perfectionism is defined as refusing to accept anything except flawlessness. At first glance, this may seem like an admirable trait that will lead to, if not perfection, at least much higher quality in everything we do. However, perfectionism doesn’t work that way, it makes sufferers fearful of attempting anything that may turn out to have flaws. Human life being what …
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) teaches users a technique called “Acceptance Self-Talk”. This is a series of exercises that trains people to substitute new thoughts for old ones and encourages them to evaluate their thoughts and accept only what seems true and helpful. Depression is often characterized by recurrent negative thoughts that drag one down and become barriers to taking …
Present Moment Awareness in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a way of learning to live outside of your head. So often we spend time and energy thinking about how we wish our situation was, or (even more often) trying to avoid thinking about how it isn’t what we wish it was. ACT encourages us to start by Accepting what …
How can we reconcile acceptance and the unacceptable in our lives? A new blog post from Rick Hanson sparked me to thinking about the relationship between acceptance and acquiescence or even complicity. So many things are wrong with the world. Is there no role for righteous anger? And yet… Acceptance in the sense that Rick means is really about not …
Perfectionism and depression are opposites that often seem to attract each other, and the combination can be a great challenge for anyone trying to “live creatively with moods.” Depression enhances our brain’s natural tendency to see problems in the world around us… it shines a spotlight on every imperfection. It is a perfectionist’s nightmare. Perfectionism Perfectionism itself is not necessarily …
Sitting with Emotions I regularly work with clients who are trying to avoid and push away feelings of sadness, anger, loneliness — so-called “negative” emotions. On the one hand, I can entirely relate with this draw and have experienced it myself. However, the more I’ve learned to sit with these emotions, and witnessed others sit with them, the more important …
I hope you have a few minutes to engage in a few exercises with me…. First, I’d like you to take 1 or 2 minutes to imagine that you are sitting on a white sand beach looking at the ocean, watching the waves roll onto the shore. Set your phone timer if that would be helpful. And….go. What did you …
One of my patients wrote to me this morning asking if she could get a medication to help with her anxiety. She has been trying to find a good therapist for quite a while and I think she might have found someone who could really help her. But this is making her feel anxious and irritable. Now she has to wrestle …
I recently attended the Anxiety and Depression Association of America conference in Philadelphia, where I offered a two-hour workshop on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and deepening experiential practices in ACT sessions (largely based on the book The Big Book of ACT Metaphors: A Practitioner’s Guide to Experiential Exercises and Metaphors in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy*). This post is Part …
We are often trapped more by what we think about how things should be, or “have to be,” than by the reality of the challenges we face. This week I have been noticing how often the phrase “I can’t stand.XX” precedes a statement that is quite obviously not true. Someone who has been living with the uncertainty of multiple sclerosis for …
I recently came across an article that described a man’s experience with bipolar disorder. I was struck by his reported shift in his relationship to the disorder from one of fighting it to one of embracing it and learning how to live with it as opposed to against it. This is such a powerful and difficult transition; one that can …
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is based on the belief that five fundamental errors are responsible for much of human distress. One of these errors is the tendency to want to avoid painful feelings at all costs. Our addiction to our cell phones can serve as a distraction from the distress of loneliness. Or drinking. Or smoking. A colleague suggested …
We are indebted to Tom Wootton for his observation that the key to living creatively with bipolar is accepting and making use of depression. Tom wrote a book about depression (The Depression Advantage) that was one of the first things he wrote about bipolar (for more, see his website, Bipolar Advantage). He noted that it was a difficult book to …
