Customer Reviews

Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

5 star:		(34)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This is a different sort of self-help book. It's not just for depression, or panic attacks, or phobias, or how to stop eating or drinking too much, or how to improve your relationships, or how to get your finances in order, although it can help you with any of those things and many more. This book is about discovering what you care about the most, what your top priorities are in life, and about getting your life moving in those directions. It teaches you how to keep psychological obstacles, such as fears, worries, sadness, anger, negative thoughts, and bad memories, from getting in your way. Strangely, it doesn't tell you how to get rid of those obstacles. In fact, it shows how trying to get rid of them often makes them worse. Instead, it teaches how to work with them so they don't run your life, so that you can make room for them and go where you want to go. The book has many exercises that are sometimes funny, sometimes a little odd, and always illuminating and thought provoking. This is a different way of looking at life and its challenges. For people who feel that their lives aren't working and are willing to consider a new perspective, this is worth a serious look.

Psychological treatments, like most forms of therapy, have been developing and adapting for centuries. In recent years the best treatment for depression, as well as a host of other psychiatric disorders, has being centered on a combination of medication and cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). The behavior therapies largely replaced psychoanalytic theory. The transition from psychoanalysis was not smooth, and as an attempt to ridicule psychoanalytic ideas, some notorious behavior therapists used to train people with mental illness to perform simple actions and then they would watch with amusement as psychoanalytically trained colleagues concocted creative but often bizarre symbolic interpretations of behaviors that had just been created.

We may now be on the cusp another revolution in therapy that could ultimately relegate CBT to the history books, rather in the way that CBT did to psychoanalysis. This new approach has sprung directly from the Buddhist traditions, and revolves around "mindfulness and acceptance". In the Buddhist worldview, each moment is complete by itself, and the world is perfect as it is; That being so, the focus is on acceptance, validation and tolerance, instead of change, and experience rather than experiment as the way to understand the world.

For many patients it feels profoundly liberating to be able to see that thoughts are just thoughts and that they are not "you" or "reality." This realization can free an individual from the distorted reality that they often create and allow for more clarity and a greater sense of control in life.

This idea that the solution to suffering is to increase acceptance of the here and now, and to decrease the craving and attachment that inevitably keep one clinging to a past that has already changed, is quite different from behavior therapy's emphasis on developing skills for attaining one's goals.

But the notion that suffering results from things not being the way one strongly wants them to be, or insists they should be, is very compatible with cognitive-behavioral therapies. The work of Albert Ellis, who is still active in his nineties, is arguably the clearest and most consistent presentation of this point of view.

The ideas in this book are fresh, novel, interesting and controversial. Some of the suggestion will be of great help to some people. Yet two problems remain for most people, and these are motivation to change and resistance to change. Without attention to those twin demons, progress can be very difficult.

For anyone interested in personal growth and development and an easy introduction to a whole new approach to therapy, this book is highly recommended.

I'm a layperson, can't afford therapy, so I do it self-help. I've bought many self-help books, and while they have been interesting and true, they've never had any lasting worthwhile effect, except for me to look at myself and say, "Oh, I'm doing that wrong also, again!" This book is really what the other reviewers say it is. It was a total paradigm shift, which is what people need and why the myriad of other self-help books haven't helped your self! It is not an overnight fix, it is a bit heady, but take it step-by-step, do all the exercises, and it will be very worthwhile. I'm still trying to put it into practice into my everyday life, but little by little I'm seeing change, and at least now there's hope where there was hopelessness. Thanks so much to the authors for writing a book for the masses. There are many of us out there who don't have money to spend on therapy sessions that we would like to do.

I've been in and out of therapy for over thirty years,and have read at least fifteen self help books. Basicly I was told, kill the negative self talk,say positive affirmations and one therapist said, "just snap out of it."

I constantly battled with my self. I also suffer from anxiety attacks. I've work for 20 years for a very large orginazation with a few thousand employees. Once it became obvious that I was suffering from anxiety and self esteem issues, I became the subject of the rumor mill. I really don't know how I lasted on the job so long.

But this book changed everything. I've learned to seperate myself from my thoughts and feelings, accept them, and then move on to live the life that I want. I realize now that my life will never be pain free, but in spite of that pain I can live the life I want. I don't have to battle my painful thoughts any more. They don't last as long, hurt as much, or stop me from doing my thing.

This book is not for everybody, but neither is any religion or spouse. But I can bear witness that it has changed my life for the better.

Buddhism teaches that suffering is part of life and all our attempts to avoid the suffering only make it worse. ACT teaches the same thing. In that sense, Buddhism and ACT are the same. But ACT's intellectual roots are firmly within the Western scientific psychology tradition, so the author did not so much borrow from Buddhism, as arrive at the same result by a different method and then observed the similarity after the fact.

The book begins by stepping you through the science and psychology of how the mind works, inviting you to see the inner workings for yourself through many exercises. Ultimately it leads to a simple conclusion - your anxiety, depression, or whatever ails may not be an "illness" at all, but simply normal mental processes that go awry when used to try to avoid negative thoughts and emotions.

Most therapy attempts to remove the negative thoughts and feelings. ACT differs completely by asking you to ACCEPT negative thoughts and feelings as part of being human. To do this it shows you how to separate the "real you" from the contents of your mind. The negative doesn't go away, you just become more willing and able to live it. Then the focus switch to exploring your values, what's important to you personally. These values orient you on your journey through life. Finally you COMMIT to the course of action you yourself choose in accordance with your own values, and you use the skills you've learned to avoid the pitfalls that stopped you in the past.

ACT bears one more resemblance to Buddhism. 2500 years ago, the Buddha stirred up the Hindu establishment by presenting ideas that were at once radically new and yet based in a deep understanding of Hindu mystical teachings. ACT does the same to western psychology. It is firmly grounded in a good and growing body of scientific evidence and clinical successes, yet could well turn out to be the most important advance in psychology since Freud. ACT is the first psychotherapy to develop a complete system around the idea that negative feelings are natural and normal, but it is our attempts to escape those feelings that creates pathologies. If you have tried other self-help techniques, therapy, pills and nothing has worked for you, it is definitely time to try this.

I was confused for years by positive thinking books that promote the suppression and judgment of all negative thoughts. I also didn't do well with the fake it until you make it model. After years of searching, I found relief and success when I read Optimal Thinking: How To Be Your Best Self because I learned to use the simple optimal roadmaps, especially - Accept, Understand, then Optimize - for negative thoughts and feelings.

Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life is a fine book that does not cater to the erroneous belief that positive thinking will always save you and negative thinking will always destroy you. The author asks some excellent questions such as "Am I this negative thought or is this just a thought?" etc. These questions provide personal understanding. The concept in this book is not new for me, although I did come across some excellent questions I have not pondered previously.

I certainly recommend this book in conjunction with Optimal Thinking: How To Be Your Best Self. I also recommend Learned Optimism, to understand pessimism and optimism. Read all three.

I purchased this book with no prior knowledge of either it or its methodology. What a stroke of luck. After 9 months of slow but diligent completion of the exercises contained within, my life has changed dramatically for the better. Dr. Hayes does not lie, however, when he states that the concepts are subtle and difficult to grasp, and that the work is hard. But the work does pay off. It offers not only relief from constant mental self-attack, but also an alternative way of looking out from "self" to the rest of the world. Thanks to the tools provided in this book, I am beginning to experience true knowledge of self and life as shaped by conscious direction, rather than as a string of reactive experiences lived by default due to prior conditioning.

I'm a relative newcomer to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, a clinician and a non-scientist, so I have to admit that I've struggled with the underlying theory, Relational Frame Theory. When I've tried to explain/demonstrate RFT to clients, they've struggled too.

This book had ended all that. Instead of giving myself and clients headaches, I just talk about the gub-gub, (you'll have to read the book) and how it goes wooo, and all is clear.

The exercises are accessible-lighthearted and at the same time powerful and deeply humane. I've used them with clients and for myself.

But most valuable of all is the huge sigh of relief I hear in the room when it becomes clear to clients that we are all in this soup of language together and that their experience is--dare I say it? Normal.

Joanne Steinwachs, LCSW
Private Practice,
Denver CO.

At the end of my therapy my therapist recommended this book to me as a continuation of my therapy. The book has been very halpful and in many respects more helpful then therapy. It teaches us to realise that we can choose to stand-back from our thoughts and observe them rather then buy into them. The most helpful part has been the Chapter on the 'observer self' which there is a great discussion about on page 99.

Life is precious and we are told to make every moment count. Yet many of us spend a significant portion of our lives trying to sort through the ghosts of our pasts, carefully planning to avoid future pain and disappointment, and attempting to make ourselves right, all the while missing out on our life as it unfolds. We desperately try all the tools that society hands us to achieve happiness and a fuller, more meaningful life, but these methods often produce short-lived gains or worse come at some significant personal cost. This book offers a novel approach to making every moment count. You will learn about how and why our most tried and true methods for achieving internal comfort can actually backfire and take us further away from our most valued experiences. More importantly, you will learn how to change your relationship with your internal experiences in a way that allows you to connect with your life as it unfolds.