The Acceptance Field Guide
Navigating anxiety and depression in an uncertain world.
Mark Freeman
Copyright 2011 by Mark Freeman
ISBN: 978-0-9878965-0-6
Published by Taketomi Media. Smashwords Edition.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The Acceptance Field Guide was made possible by the many people who took read, edited, and commented on the manuscript online. To all of you who took the time to help make this Field Guide as effective and useful as possible, I’d like to extend my most heartfelt thanks for bringing your energy and experiences of mental health to the project. Thanks!
Cover Images Copyright Tungphoto & Turumtaev Ildar, 2012
Used under license from Shutterstock.com
Anxiety and depression are like smoke alarms going off in your brain. You don’t have an alarm problem. You have a fire problem. Quit worrying about the alarms. Find the fire.
CONTENTS
1. WHAT IS ACCEPTANCE?
Acceptance is about hugging uncertainty and then hugging it again and again. It’s about acknowledging that fears and urges are nothing more than brain indigestion. It’s recognizing that emotions are weather passing over your soul. It’s about no longer mistaking your self for your thoughts. It’s an effective, evidence-based approach to being mentally healthy. It can help you overcome anxiety and depression by showing you that it’s the need to fight them and overcome them that’s causing them. It’s about allowing values to guide your life instead of judgements. It’s about giving your fears a piggy-back ride as you race towards your goals.
There are a million different ways to explain Acceptance. I could list metaphors and similes and explanations for the rest of the day and, yet, none of them could explain Acceptance for you. To understand Acceptance, you really have to practice it and experience it. And that’s why this is a Field Guide. We’ll discuss some of the research behind Acceptance, which is clinically known as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), but we’re going to primarily focus on specific examples of Acceptance in action. The purpose of this book isn’t to propose new theories, it’s to discuss how to translate theory into action. The steps of Acceptance aren’t difficult to grasp. They’re very easy to read. But many struggle with taking those words and turning them into real-world action.
CONTROL IS THE PROBLEM.
Acceptance comes from the recognition that trying to control thoughts or trying to control or avoid uncertainty in the world around you, is what actually causes more uncertainty, more anxiety and more depression in your life. In fact, multiple studies show that attempts to control unwanted thoughts, images, or memories actually prolongs the experiencing of them [1]. Control creates a cycle of anxious reactions. Acceptance stops that cycle.
It’s very similar to something called a tesselation. Tessalations, or tesselating patterns, are infinitely repeating patterns of interlocking shapes. In a tesselating pattern, one shape creates openings for more shapes, and those shapes create openings for even more shapes. Here’s an example of a simple tesselating pattern:
Our attempts at control create a tesselating pattern of infinite uncertainty and anxiety.
The pattern starts with a single uncertainty...
...which is followed by attempts to control that uncertainty...
...but only creates more spaces for uncertainty to enter the pattern...
...which requires even more attempts to control, more opportunities for failure, and more and more anxiety as you run out of time and energy trying to control the world.
Acceptance stops the cycle at the first uncertainty. We simply accept that uncertainty for what it is and don’t try to control it. We welcome that uncertainty into our lives. There’s no reason you have to get rid of anxiety or depression before moving on with accomplishing your goals in life. You can move along with them.
Share this idea: www.markfreeman.ca/infinite-control-fail
That was a bit of an abstract example, but there are numerous examples you can see any given day. Let’s say you’ve just started a new job and you’re anxious about whether you’re really qualified to do the job. One of your new colleagues asks you if you have experience using a particular software program. That creates uncertainty: What’s your colleague going to think if you admit that you don’t know how to use the program? Are you going to get fired?
So you try to control that uncertainty by lying. You say, “Yeah, I’ve used it some before.” And that relieves the uncertainty... briefly.
The next day you’re in a meeting discussing a new project that just so happens to need somebody with some experience in that particular software program you told your colleague that you know how to use. Not only does he recommend you for the job, but says you’re an expert at it. And your boss assigns you to the project.
Now you have multiple uncertainties to deal with: How are you going to learn that software in time to be useful on the project? What if everyone finds out you were lying? What if your colleague gets upset because you make him look bad for recommending you? What if you do get fired now because you’ve created a situation now that you can fail in?
Every single day of work is going to be one long, complex lie. The pressure on you is going to be immense. The amount of anxiety and subsequent depression will be phenomenal.
You could have just told the truth. You could have embraced the initial uncertainty and avoided all of that.
But how do you do that? How do you give a big hug to anxiety?
I know that can sound tough, especially when you’ve spent much of your life trying to control anxiety. But there are some steps to practicing Acceptance that help make it effective and give some structure to the practice.
THE STEPS OF ACCEPTANCE:
Step 1: Recognize that your thoughts are separate from your self.
Step 2: Accept those thoughts. Don’t try to fight, control, or correct them.
Step 3: Act according to your values.
Step 4: Repeat these steps throughout your life, accepting the world as it is instead of judging it.
These four steps can transform your professional and personal life, but they can be very counter-intuitive. They go against much of what we’ve been raised to believe, to think, and to practice for so many years. We try to control our emotions, we try to force ourselves to feel differently, we try to make thoughts go away, and we throw around statements like: “I think therefore I am”. We conflate our identities with what’s going on in our bodies. And now we’re going to go against all of that.
If at any point the things I’m talking about sound incredibly strange, just ask yourself if supposedly “normal” things have worked for you? If logical thinking was the way out of your struggles with anxiety and depression, don’t you think you’d be experiencing less anxiety and depression instead of more and more? Haven’t you thought and judged and reasoned and argued enough? Has that gotten you to where you wanted to be? Perhaps it’s time for a new approach.
This Field Guide is going to be your companion as you go out into the world and practice Acceptance and adapt it to your life. Acceptance is not something you do in a clinic or in a laboratory, it’s something you do out in the real world, where you make the decisions that impact your mental health.
In fact, it was out in the real world where I stumbled on Acceptance one day.
I WAS WALKING TO WORK ONE DAY...
...and as would often happen when I left my house, a question popped into my head: “What if I forgot to turn off the stove?”
When that question intruded into my mind that morning, I didn’t go back and check the stove. That’s because I used to suffer from OCD and I knew that going back to check was exactly the type of behavior that encourages OCD.
About a year prior to this particular morning, I’d completed a six-month course of Exposure & Response Prevention (ERP) therapy to get over a range of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and addictive behaviors. It was amazingly successful. I went from living every day drowning in anxieties and compulsive behaviors, to living every day pursuing the goals I’d always wanted to pursue.
I knew that going back to check the stove was unhealthy. I knew that acting compulsively to resolve anxiety would only lead to more anxiety [2].
The need to cope with, check on, or control uncertainty ruled my life for years. It was so bad that there were times when I stood in front of my stove to be certain it wasn’t going to turn on somehow.
I didn’t have to stand in front of the stove anymore, but some of the more intense anxieties still lingered, albeit significantly reduced. I’d also begun to realize how compulsive behaviors infiltrated every aspect of my life—in ways that weren’t considered traditional OCD symptoms. Whether at work, at school, or in my personal life, I was constantly trying to control and eliminate uncertainty, but all I did was create more anxiety.
I was no longer “mentally ill” as far as mental health professionals were concerned, but anxiety was still a constant battle in my life and I felt like I was slowly being pushed back towards the edge of a cliff I really didn’t want to fall back down again.
And that morning was no different. Even though it was a perfect summer morning, the world around me was completely obliterated by the furious debate raging in my head about whether or not I’d actually turned off the stove after making breakfast.
Whenever a question like that would muscle its way into my mind—whether it was about the stove, or about whether somebody liked me, or if I wasn’t good enough, or if somebody was going to do something bad to me, or whatever it might be at that moment—I would always try to rationally answer it and reasonably prove that everything was fine, ok, good, etc.
So I first tried to remember the image of myself turning off the stove. And I thought I could remember it. But then my brain wondered: “Is that memory from this morning or could it be from yesterday?” Which was a reasonable question—memories aren’t time-stamped. How do you even know your memories are real? So then I tried to remember putting the frying pan in the sink because, even if the stove was on, if there weren’t any dirty pans on the stove, nothing could start a grease fire. But then my brain tossed up another thought: “But what if some oil had spilled out of the frying pan onto the stove and that’s going to catch fire?”
And the debate went on. There I was, on this perfect morning, starting my day off with a depressing, anxiety-inducing meditation on all of the ways my stove could burn my house down.
I could never win debates like that because if I believed my reasoning was rational and valid, I also had to believe the questions in my head were rational and valid. They all came from the same brain. Debating myself never worked. It only exacerbated the anxiety. In many ways, debating your own brain is like trying to extinguish a forest fire with a blow torch.
But something very different and wonderful happened on this particular morning as I debated about whether I’d turned off the stove: I stopped about a block from my house and asked aloud: “Why do I have to answer these questions?”
After years of ruining my health chasing every negative thought my brain threw at me, I’d finally asked a useful question.
Trying to be certain only caused more anxiety and more depression and never, ever resulted in certainty.
Every day I tried to control uncertainty and every day I failed, again, and again, and again.
But there was nothing that said I had to be certain. It was only an assumption. I had assumed I needed to answer or correct the ideas that intruded into my conscious mind. But what if I didn’t? What would happen if I quit trying to wrestle with them and respond to them? What would happen if I just let them be?
Finally, that summer morning, I asked the questions that were going to save me from continuing that cycle of failure. And so began my journey with a concept I’ve since learned is known as “Acceptance”. For me, it’s become the key to floating through anxiety and depression while sustainably maintaining great mental health.
ACCEPTANCE ISN’T A NEW IDEA
I didn’t invent Acceptance that day on the street (although I was really excited at the time by that insight).
The various components of Acceptance—recognizing the difference between your self and your thoughts, recognizing that trying to force your way out of problems is actually causing the problems, and acting according to your values—are not new ideas or ideas confined to the realm of psychology.
The concept of being successful by consistently acting according to values is well documented in the business world. It’s one of the characteristics of “great” companies best-selling author and management consultant Jim Collins highlights in his books Good to Great and Built to Last [3].
Prior to becoming an anxiety coach to help people implement change in their lives, I did something very similar for companies. I was a management strategy facilitator working with Tom Wujec, who is a frequent TED contributor and consultant to numerous Fortune 500 companies [4]. In our workshop sessions, we would help organizations articulate their values and then understand how to let those values make decisions for them. Allowing values to guide design, instead of letting anxious reactions to the marketplace make decisions, is how great companies innovate.
Even Star Trek: The Next Generation got in on the basics of Acceptance with the episode “Booby Trap”, in which the crew of the Enterprise becomes more ensnared in a trap by trying to force their way free from it. The more energy they exert, the more energy they lose. They eventually escape the trap by doing the very thing they were trying to avoid: powering down the ship [5].
The concept of giving in to a problem to break free from a problem is something you can experience with the Chinese finger trap. Steven C. Hayes, the originator of Acceptance & Commitment Therapy, often talks about this toy in his writing to describe how we can break free from anxiety. If you’ve never seen a Chinese finger trap, you can probably buy one in a dollar store or a toy store. They’re woven tubes with openings at either end. Once you stick your fingers into the openings, if you try to pull your fingers out forcefully, the trap only gets tighter and tighter, just like how trying to escape from anxiety only causes more anxiety. The way free from the trap is to stop trying to force your way out of it.
Speaking of Steven C. Hayes, we should take a moment to discuss the great research being done to expand and promote Acceptance as an effective form of therapy.
ACCEPTANCE IS AN EVIDENCE-BASED APPROACH TO BEING MENTALLY HEALTHY
So the ideas of Acceptance have been around, but it’s only very recently that researchers have developed these concepts into a successful form of therapy known as Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT), which combines mindful awareness with living by your values. It was developed into a form of therapy by Steven C. Hayes and his colleagues in the 1990s [6] and multiple studies have gone on to demonstrate its effectiveness in helping people deal with anxiety and depression [7], psychosis [8], OCD [9], PTSD [10], substance addiction [11], chronic pain [12], and the list continues to grow.
Although ACT is relatively new as a form of therapy, there are already several great books out there for clinicians and consumers. At the end of the Field Guide, I’ll link to some books by Steven C. Hayes and Russ Harris that I would recommend reading if you’re interested in learning more about the theory and practice of ACT.
Throughout the Field Guide, I’m going to refer to ACT as Acceptance. That’s because it’s generally referred to as “Acceptance” in mental health consumer communities. That might be because, for me, as for many consumers who find success through Acceptance, it’s not only a form of therapy, it’s a skill to practice every day, everywhere we go.