Get Out of Your Mind & Into Your Life: The New Acceptance & Commitment Therapy Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B006IKNRVU | Format: EPUB
Get Out of Your Mind & Into Your Life: The New Acceptance & Commitment Therapy Description
Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life introduces Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), a new approach to psychotherapy that reevaluates our most basic assumptions about mental health, and details how ACT can help you to embrace life and everything it has to offer.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 10 hours and 23 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Tantor Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: December 5, 2011
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B006IKNRVU
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.
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.
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