Getting over happiness

But what's the line between sitting with pain and some kind of masochism or self-punishment?

Well, it's also not healthy to say, "To hell with your fear; leap off a tall building and see if the parachute opens up, you big sissy!" A classic example [of repressing your feelings in the interest of bearing up under pain] is the military. You want to see spousal abuse and alcoholism? Go to a military base. Because that kind of "Just do it, you big sissy" message destroys human lives. Doing things that don't feel good by denying your own feelings results in violence, substance abuse.

What I'm saying is find a middle path. My work is about a loving posture: Accept your history, feel your feelings, notice your thoughts, and carry all that forward down a path that you value that's neither indulgence nor suppression.

So if you were treating a person who had been hurt in love and didn't want to be vulnerable again --

Well, it could be that that they [make themselves invulnerable] by not getting into relationships, or by being in promiscuous or empty relationships. You can be married and still not make yourself vulnerable -- if you don't let your partner know what you most deeply care about, don't show them where you hide, what the dark places are. But your pain is where you find your values: that you really care about intimacy and connection. That's why it hurts so much.

So if you run away from past thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations you don't like -- what we call experiential avoidance -- you can't do what it is you most deeply want to do, which is to have those kinds of [intimate] relationships. So my questions are: Can you hold your fear and still step forward, even knowing that you could be hurt?

Can you explain how your approach differs radically from cognitive therapy?

Most forms of empirically supported therapy have bought into the idea that the real problem in behavioral health is the presence of private events that are negative. Specifically with regard to cognitive therapy, which for 30 years has been ascendant in the field, the idea has been that you should monitor, detect, challenge and change your negative thoughts, and when you do that, you'll live better. But in a couple of recent randomized trials, that [theory] was shown to be not true.

The radical difference here is that instead of a sequence in which you get your thoughts and feelings lined up and then live better, I'm saying to live better now, carry your thoughts and feelings with you.

Our [ACT] model -- of accepting your feelings, disentangling yourself from your mind, connecting with your values, showing up in this moment and getting your feet moving in accordance with your values -- it helps an amazingly broad array of problems, from chronic pain and epilepsy to doing well at work, anxiety, depression, substance abuse ...

I have to say, this "moving in accordance with your values" sounds sort of vague. I don't know that many of us could identify our "values" psychologically.

Well, we don't get much training in it. We get trained in "What do you want?" But "What do you want?" leads to an object or feeling, and those aren't values.

So what are they?

They are not goals; they're nothing you can have like an object. They are an adverb, qualities of action. So when I say, "What do you want your life to be about?" I've never had somebody say, "What I want to be is the driver of an SUV," or "someone who screws everything that moves." What they tell me are things like, "I want to contribute to other people" and "I want to be a loving person." By saying it, you're connecting to it. But it's hard. Because [once you acknowledge it] you know it is not bullshit, and that it's not something you can ever stop doing. If you say that your values are being a loving person, do you ever get to say, "That's done!" No. A value is like a direction, like going west. No matter how far west you go, you can still keep going west. And the instant you turn and start facing west, you're on the right path.

Say you want to have healthy sexual relationships and that's the direction you want to move in, but you've been raped. As you walk down that path you're going to hit that past trauma, like walking west and running into a swamp. You need the means to walk through that swamp and keep going west, to walk through the past pain and carry it in a gentle, loving way. Because it's OK to have that pain and still connect to another person in an intimate sexual relationship.

In a way, is what you're saying: "Life sucks. Suck it up and move on"?

Well, life is painful, yeah. The first sentence of this book is "People suffer." There is a base level of pain: for example, knowing you're going to die. So yes, life includes a big chunk of pain, and it includes a big chunk of living. But if you're not willing to have the pain, you're not going to get the living.

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