EP 146: ACT: The Power of Psychological Flexibility | Steven Hayes PhD

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Hi, welcome to the Radical Responsibility podcast. This is your host, Fleet Maul. In this episode I have a conversation with Dr. Steven C. Hayes, who's been a hero of mine for quite some time. He's the developer of of Acceptance Commitment Therapy, the Author of over 47 books and 670 scientific articles, one of the most published authors in the field of psychology. And his model Acceptance Commitment therapy has benefited countless human beings and been used in all sectors of society, including prison work, where I'm very familiar with it. So he talks a lot about the principle of psychological flexibility and how developing greater psychological flexibility adaptability is really one kind of arc of our human evolution and our ability to really handle our lives in the most pro social and beneficial way. And he talked about really how we can observe our own behavior patterns and get really in touch with our own history to understand ourselves and and then actually develop.

A kind of reframing grounded in deep acceptance that gives us much greater psychological flexibility and adaptability that allows us to live our lives with much greater grace, intelligence and wisdom. Dr. Steven C. Hayes.

Welcome, Dr. Hayes.

I'm happy to be here, Fleet. Looking forward to the conversation.

I'm really looking forward to it as well. I've been familiar with your Acceptance Commitment Therapy for a long, long time. It's very prevalent in the corrections work I do. So it's a privilege to meet you and I'm looking forward to our conversation. So I'm going to share some of your bio for our audience and then we'll jump in.

Okay, Sounds great.

All right. Stephen C. Hayes, PhD, is a Nevada foundation professor of Psychology and the Behavioral Analysis Program at the University of Nevada and author of 47 books and nearly 670 scientific articles. His career is focused on an analysis of the nature of human language and cognition and the application of this to the understanding and alleviation of human suffering. He is the developer of the Relational Frame Theory, an account of human higher cognition and has guided its extension to Acceptance and Commitment therapy or act, a popular evidence based form of psychotherapy that uses mindfulness, acceptance and values based methods. He is co developer of process based Therapy, PBT and A New which is a new approach to evidence based therapies. More generally, 47 books and 670 papers.

I don't know, I don't know.

How you could do that.

I managed to squeeze out two books. I hear that. And I think, Steve, get a life. What are you doing?

Wow.

Talk about prolific. My goodness. This is our summit day that's focused on relationships. And your work focuses on a set of human traits described as psychological flexibility. I would like to explore the impact of psychological flexibility, or lack thereof, on our relationships. But first, could you describe just what you mean by that term, psychological flexibility?

It's evolved over almost 40 years of sort of chasing down what is the smallest set of processes, things that people do that lead to positive or negative outcomes that can explain the most things. And there's six sort of areas of psychological flexibility, but they all go together. It's like six sides of a box. And just like a box, if you take out two sides, you really don't have a box and everything's all floppy and soggy like. And so you really want to be focusing on all six because they work together. So there's sort of six aspects of the same thing. And a key thing is emotional and cognitive flexibility. Those are two sides. Learning in the case of emotions, not to run away or to cling in the case of thoughts, to be able to back up enough to be able to see them and be able to think in more flexible ways that serve your interests. In the center of the model is connecting a sense of self that's not defined by the stories that you tell or the features and attributes you have, but by your conscious interconnection with others. And to be able to bring that into awareness of what's going on inside and out in the present moment, including the presence of thoughts that are about the past and future, but without having them so pull you out of the present, you already know where you are and disappeared into rumination and worry. And then finally, in the area of active engagement, of being able to take the qualities of being and doing that you really want to manifest in your life. Not just the goals, there are goals there, but the direction of those goals. What are they really about? What are the values you have but meaning values in a special way of that kind of that quality of things that you can never fully reach or possess, but you can manifest in life's moments that are intrinsic to what you do. And then to build habits, actual things that you do with your feet and your hands and your relationships and your work and all of that that manifest those qualities. So there's six things there that have to do with affect, cognition, attention, sense of self, motivation, non overt behavior. If you want to simplify them, you can get it down to being more open, aware, and actively engaged. Or if you want to collapse it to a single concept, you could say psychological flexibility. If you want to get it to a single word, you can say being more loving. And if you want to get it to a letter, B will be really a good letter to start with. So that's the model. That's 40 years of work. And it, you know, and you'll recognize this everywhere. We're not claiming, you know, we invented this or anything. Oh, please. That kind of grabby stuff is nonsense. But science has a way of filtering out what's useful and allowing you to take what's not useful and not spend so much time on it. So it's a kind of a.

Well, a Cliff Notes for.

If life were to come with a manual, what a life manual might look like. It's the Cliff Notes version.

Well, I think it's really helpful, and I really love the idea of a relational self that's connected to both our inner and outer experience and also in eliciting that subscription. It's easy to understand why mindfulness training has been one avenue that you've chosen to. That can enhance psychological flexibility.

Yeah, you could even define the kind of open and aware features altogether as a pretty good working definition of mindfulness. I'm cautious about that. You know, I'm a child of the 60s and read all those, you know, Suzuki and Watts and all that, and, you know, have had some contact with different Eastern traditions and so forth. And I know that, A, mindfulness will chase out a lot of Christians and others who don't like the M word. And B, there's a lot of conflict there. And there's also issues of cultural appropriation. And on. On it goes. So.

I prefer to stick with, you know, what comes out of sort of Western science, but the actual methods that. Are there a contemplative practice? Of course. And not just that. I mean.

Silence. Cohen. I mean, if you just dancing, chanting, repeated prayers, rosary beads. I mean, if you just go on and on through our wisdom traditions, they all have a way, especially in their mystical wing, of reining in analytic, judgmental, critical modes of mind and helping us connect with a more open witnessing, noticing, describing, and appreciating mode of mind. And I think that's for a good reason. And it goes into why we need these processes, which is that we're riding the back of a tiger. We came up with 200,000 to 2.8 million years ago. It has to be in that range called human language that you and I are doing right now. And it can actively change and even attack forms of learning, wisdom, you know, skill development that are a thousand times old. And that's a difficult thing to manage. We're just babies at it.

Well, I think it's wise to use language that's as accessible as possible. And certainly human beings have been discovering these principles forever. But it is really helpful to get it elucidated so clearly. And there is one purely western science based version of mindful Langer's model of mindfulness, mindlessness that came out of Western psychology.

I'm also reminded, I think as I'm listening to you describe psychological flexibility, I hear some parallels to another construct which is a different window or impact, but.

Adamic well being and some of Richie Davidson's research into the constituents of well being in neuroscientific terms. So it seems like psychological flexibility.

And well being and psychological well being would be very connected.

Yeah, indeed. And I know Ellen and appreciate her work and Richie too.

And I think we do need to add, in addition to these psychological dimensions, you have to add the sociocultural dimension, the relationship dimension, this, the psychological flexibility concepts are all socially embedded, but you need to actually give that a focus and the sort of biophysiological level as well in terms of health practices and brain circuits and epigenetics and genetics and all the rest, because we're life scientists if we're going to chase this scientifically. But so I'm appreciative also of, you know, being able to look at the underlying neurobiology of these processes, such as what Richie does, and you'll find a lot of resonance there.

But how to actually put this into people's lives is, is the bottom line. And I guess that's what we're up to here today.

Yeah, you're on, you're on the application side here with, as a psychotherapist.

So.

Well, let's start to look at how psychological flexibility affects our relationships, our personal, familial, intimate, social, professional relationships. And you know, we meet many, if not all of our needs, or most of our needs anyway, in relationship. Not all, but many of our needs in relationship. And the relational field is also a place where we experience a lot of pain and suffering.

So could you talk about how psychological inflexibility to begin with disrupts the relational field or undermines our relationality and connections with others?

Yeah, it's kind of a sweet, sad story. And I'm not just on the applied side because I'm a Basic cognitive researcher and the work that I've done, a relational frame theory, is trying to come up with a theory that you can actually use to try to develop language and you don't have it. And it's widely used for that with children with developmental disabilities and things like that. But also to know more specifically how to rein in the excesses of this tiger that we're riding. And the kind of the sweet sad story begins with the fact that language and cognition as we use it would only happen to social primates such as ourselves. I mean it, I believe took hold because it's an extension of human cooperation. And if you, and it's a little geeky that I'll try to make it relevant and then loop up to what you're asking. But we really do, I think, know the smoking gun of what language and cognition involves. And it's a very, very simple one. It's being able to derive a relationship between symbols and events in a two way street and then combine them into networks when you only learn them in a one way way. I mean if you, you know, learned that these were glasses, you know, if you have a 12 month old baby on the way to becoming a normal, verbally, you know, neurotypical human, if I then hide these and say where are the glasses? The baby will, you know, try to find it. 12 months old. We did the first piece sewing that.

The language trained chimps don't do it. And I'm here in Washoe county with Washoe the chimp and the late Alan Matrixy Gardner.

And that was wonderful because you could then say, you know, apple and maybe get an apple from across the ravine inside a social group that was competing and winning because it was cooperative. That's the kind of monkey we are. But here's what happens with psychological inflexibility is that our.

Problem solving that emerges from this initial cooperative repertoire. You know, if I do this, then I'll get that that's better than this begins to apply be applied to the world within, without. And in area after area after area, we begin to rip off our opportunities to connect with others and to be whole and free human beings. And their psychological inflexibility rips up relationships. We have meta analyses of studies with like 10,000 people followed over many years. And we can show psychological inflexibility harms relationships, psychological flexibility fosters them. And let's just walk through how that would happen. Let's say you've climbed inside a verbal system that says only certain motions are good and the other ones are Bad?

Well, number one, you're going to have a hard time sharing what's going on emotionally with others. You're not going to easily tell them about your fears and your anger or whatever.

You'll have a hard time opening up to the emotion of others.

When you see pain in others, you'll feel it all the way down to mirror neurons. You're going to feel it and if you're not open to it, you're going to try to shut down. Well, but then that's going to harm your ability to relate and connect to the other person. If you're around you all, if you've ever been around people who are not open to being able to.

Be with you. When you have a difficult emotion, it ruptures the relationship. I mean it isn't just that it doesn't enhance it. That can be a one and done. If you're really not there, when you know your spouse has had a death in the family or.

A cancer diagnosis.

If you go through the rest of these flexibility processes one at a time. And it started with emotion instead of sense of self being this socially interconnected sense of consciousness that started with the mama looking your eyes and you're dumping endorphins because you're the social primate and belonging so important to you and then builds out into cognitive perspective taking skills. Where from here it looks like that but from you I know it looks different. If instead you climb inside a clown suit of your storied self and you start defending it and you basically try to play this card. The reason why you need me is because I'm so special. Either I'm so specially grand.

I'll make this relationship great again. You want a baseball cap or because I'm so pathetic. Help me, help me. Let me in. I'm wounded, damaged. Either of those will drive eventually people away. And what will bring them in? Being yourself and connecting with this deeper sense of self, of other persons. And so in each of these six areas we need to learn how to be more cognitively flexible and hear the thoughts of others without immediately getting into who's right and who's wrong. Be more emotionally open. Being able to take the perspective of others. Being able to be present in the now with each other and what the situation affords, but also what's going on inside each of us. To be able to share our values and come into a values based journey that's cooperative or to be able to work together to create new things and cooperative actions. So each of those psychological flexibility pieces become social psychological pieces and that's why they are central for healthy relationships.

You know, when you spoke about maybe 200,000 or 2 million years ago, you know, we, we jumped on this riding this wild tiger.

And then you spoke about cognition and language. I initially thought you were going to say something more about maybe about our survival based conditioning or something. But as you're speaking now, I'm starting to understand it.

But as well, we might have a relatively good bandwidth of psychological flexibility, maybe you could use Siegel's term window of tolerance or something, or zone of resilience or something like that. But we get triggered out of it. And our threat systems get triggered, whether, you know, based on real threat or just perceived threat or old tapes getting triggered or whatever it is. And then suddenly we lose all our psychological flexibility. Right.

So.

I'm. Yeah, I mean, think about that impact.

Of that, that, that fear and survival based conditioning we have that's in our biology and how, how we work with that in relation to this.

Yeah, I mean that's the thing of. You have something that, these evolved processes that a thousand times older and of course that includes learning processes, you know, operating classical conditioning and so forth that goes back to The Cambrian, that's 545 million years ago. And we know that because every single organism that evolved since then has those learning processes, not sponges and jellyfish and things that evolved earlier. But it's not even just that. I mean these kind of threat systems are underlying the neurobiology evolves too. Not just our, our learning and behavior. And if you activate, let's say a threat system, I mean, you can go back to that reptilian freeze, you know, Steve Porges type.

You know, polyvagal kind of thinking and.

The, the more mammalian thing of maybe being able to, it creates safety socially where some of the threat underlying threat systems are actually connected to our face or you know, we may be able to smile our way out of it or you know, engage our mates in a cooperative action to create safety in the band and the troop and the group.

But language can put you in a situation. Human language and cognition, meaning relational learning, meaning symbolic two way streets where you're actually in quite a safe situation. You're there with people who love you or who really want to be with you. And you're activating parts of your history that you've not been able to manage and maybe even mismanaged because the culture is not so good in training us how to have this logical problem solving mind and not have it possess us and almost take us over and Even say who we are. And so you can, for example, decide that intimacy reminds you of vulnerability, that links you to a trauma history. And therefore.

Precisely because you're in an intimate, connected and safe situation, you activate massive.

Threat systems and you shut down or run away or attack or do all the 101 different things we know how to do.

To inadvertently undermine what we actually want to produce. And so it's this kind of sweet, sad quality of human beings. Somebody said if you dig down to the human condition, the single most important, most dominant emotion is sadness. And I think if you really sit with yourself, you can find it. It's hard to be human. And boy, do we see it in their relationships.

Yeah. My first spiritual teacher and meditation teacher, Trump Ramsay, often talked about, you get down to that kind of base fear, anxiety level, but if you stay with that and drop underneath that, what you find is sadness. You said exactly the same thing. Primary thing is sadness. Longing sadness.

Yeah. And what's that the sadness comes from, I think, is this longing and yearning.

I've. Human needs. Needs sound so grabby that I've. I like talking about needs as yearnings, but each of these flexibility processes has a yearning underneath it. I think our sense of self has the yearning for belonging under it.

The problems that we have with affect, but they're there because we yearn to feel. You know, babies don't have to be taught that feeling is cool. They will go out and taste, lick, smell, play with, feel everything. And so much we're saying, no, don't touch that and don't put that in your mouth and so forth, if you have a little one, and so on through all of those processes of, you know, yearning for things to be coherent, yearning to be oriented, yearning for self direction and self meaning and yearning for competence. These yearnings, when they're frustrated because we're so bad at being able to really meet our own yearnings, is met with a profound sense of loss and sadness that's just underneath all of it. And I don't think that ever goes away. But it doesn't have to be a problem. That can be more like a foundation. If we can see how we got into this situation and a bit of how to not get out of it, but move forward with. With the tendencies that we have.

Yeah, My teacher called it really our fundamental connection to life, or he called it the genuine heart of sadness, tender heart and things like that. Our vulnerability. It's how we actually. It's the one thing we can really trust. And so in listening, you describe this framework with these six aspects of psychological flexibility.

It seems like this could be a framework that sort of helps us stay within that zone of resilience, that window of tolerance and in relationship to, you know, help each other keep our social, you know, use poured this term social engagement systems online that we're communicating safety. And at the same time as we do that, right, we're weaving relationship, we're signaling safety. So we're going deeper, we're getting more connected, more intimate. Then within that same landscape, there's this minefield of our traumas and our conditioning and our childhood stuff, which. Which we might not even trigger any of those landmines if we weren't getting that close or that intimate. And so there we are in relationship. When we don't have, you know, Stephen Hayes there with us, we don't have a family systems therapist with us. We don't, you know, we're just regular folks trying to navigate the relational field. So, you know, obviously if we have the support and the knowledge, that can be our spiritual path of relationship together. But without that, it seems like it's just, you know, it's a minefield.

It is.

And even if you have the concepts to orient, you still need the skills. And that is evolving process layers of the onion metaphor. It's often used, but it's also just skill building. And even if you had a Steve Hayes with you, trust me, my wife will tell you, you'd still need to work this through because, yeah, I mean, I was. I say the reason I'm so interested in psychological flexibility and inflexibility is that I was so psychologically inflexible that it almost brought my life to a halt. And so, you know.

I view myself as a work in progress. And I'm only 73. Again, I've got a few more years to learn. And I man, you know, it's not very difficult to connect places where you just feel completely inadequate to the situation because exactly what you said, as you begin to get grounded and open up, you expand. And it's like a balloon that expands, it's going to hit something that if you aren't able to include it, your balloon can only distort around it. And so when we find a way to say yes to what initially we resist, and when we find a way to bring these more flexible approaches to it and include that, then we can expand more. But you're going to find another one and you're going to do the same thing. And at that zone of growth, it's always going to Seem like this is too much and I can't do it or I don't have to, and who says I have to? And all the 101 ways we resist just being humble and having our feet on the ground and allowing life to teach us. But relationships is the single biggest and best place to find that, because all of these processes, I think, really come down to it. Language itself is social. Sense of self is social. In some ways, I mean, that means our very kind of soul is social. Emotions have a social communicative function. Our values are almost always social. You dig down to what you really want to be about. I mean, even if it's something like, I just want to do art. Yeah, but you want to show it to someone.

There's something in there. I actually really have never found anyone who really comes into what they really, really want where anything that they really, really want doesn't have a social aspect. And 98% of the time, it's just obvious, you know, I want to love, I want to contribute, I want to help, I want to be abuse. I want to, you know, so relationships is the Mount Everest of the. Of our climbing skills. And.

You will find that you need to learn new moves to climb that mountain and.

Be ready to learn.

Let's talk about skill building both individually and in relationship, though it seems like in relationship is a true test.

In order to build greater psychological flexibility and to be able to do that in relationship. So I'm sure acceptance and commitment therapy is something you've developed as one pathway there. I'm also curious about the role of mindfulness. I know that plays a role in N ACT and many of our summit participants are mindfulness practitioners. Not all, but many are. But I'm sure most all of our summit participants have the experience of how our habitual patterns of thought and connection to conditioning and emotions can cause us a lot of difficulties or those intrusive thoughts which some kind of mind training, mindfulness training does give us the ability to work with that in some way. So I'm wondering if you could talk about the. The skill building aspect here of how we develop greater psychological flexibility, especially in relationship, because that's our topic today.

Sure.

Yeah. And, you know, the ACT approach is to focus on the processes and then to try to foster healthy variation with a noticing of what takes you forward so that it's less a matter of here's the thing to do and here's the thing to do. There's hundreds and hundreds of things that do that have come out of the act. Community, by the way, we call it act, not act. Because it sounds to me like ect and I'm old enough to have actually witnessed ECT regularly. And it's not an association I like, but. And I really care more about the process than the label. So let's use the kernels, the elements that move us forward, even psychological flexibility in the process. Names, when I rename it, call it different things. That's great. But to answer your question, let's look at. Let's pick some of the domains. Let's take something like.

Well, emotional openness. Emotional openness is going to require backing out of emotional avoidance. It's also going to require letting go of emotional clinging. You're clinging to happiness. You're doing something that's not happy if you just watch it. You know, in drug areas you call things a fix for both reasons. Either you're trying to fix what's broken and repaired, or you're fix. You're going to hold it in place. You know, you're going to hold joy in place with that injection. And yeah, it's going to feel great, but the damage that it's going to do to your life is going to be horrific and to those you love. And so.

What acceptance is going to ask you to do is not to tolerate or resign or put up with, but to say yes to the echoes of your history that are showing up in the moment and the gifts that they contain. The word acceptance, originally in Latin, also included to receive, as if to receive a gift. And in English, we still have it. When we give something really precious to somebody, we'll say here, will you accept it? We don't mean will you tolerate this? Will you resign yourself to it? Can you put up with. With my grandmother's ring or whatever it is, you know, what you mean is, will you willingly take this gift? And if you take something, let's take something like a person with a trauma history that had something to do with relationships, sexual abuse, something like that. Who in their relationship journey now is feeling these waves of anxiety. And let's say that's the way it shows up physically. If you give it an emotional term, you'd say anxiety.

What that is, the gift of that is that you do not want to put yourself in a situation where you will be abused again. And your body and your mind is saying, be careful because you know you've actually experienced and that experience can be useful to you. How it can be useful in terms of what do you want? I don't want relationships like that. Can I watch out for it. But also even what do you want? I mean, I want intimate, committed and safe loyal relationships. That's a useful thing to know. And it's a painful way to learn it. To learn how horrible it is to have to experience betrayal all the way down, even to abusive relationships. So life is asking you to do something. Can you carry that message with you? You don't want to push the message away. Well, why wouldn't you? I'll tell you why you wouldn't. Because if you can't feel the pain of your past abuse, you can't avoid future abuse. That's an empirical fact. You want to predict future abuse. Do you know that being abused predicts future abuse? No doubt. Isn't that sad? And do you know the arc of that? What produces that? Alexithymia and not being open to your own emotions.

And you can see why I can have heart for it. Of course you wouldn't want to open up to those horrifying emotions. Yeah, but that means you can't take the gift that's inside them. The gift of wisdom, the gift of experience, the gift of knowing how important that is. And if you don't even have names in alexithymia, you've avoided it so thoroughly you don't even know what you're feeling. You can't even give a name to it. That's one of the strongest predictors of future abuse. So instead, can we start with ourselves?

Relationships will call for skills. If you don't have the skills, the relationship cost will be there. So you do need to start with yourself. You can do it in relationship but you need to keep coming back to yourself, relationship that's between two or more people.

And see if you can work on basically saying yes. Now that's difficult with things like trauma. So you're going to need to work on the other sides of the box. You're going to let go of non judgment. You need to climb out of the ego based self, including that I'm damaged forever or whatever it might be and come into this witnessing, noticing more spiritual and interconnected sense of self, socially construed sense to be able to come into that present moment so you can see what's going on and then take those values that might be in the trauma history of really wanting, trusting, loving relationships at that point. Now we have something else that happens because acceptance can be extended to compassion. If you're going to go into a relationship with another human being, they're going to have places where their buttons get pushed. If you don't have the capacity to feel what you feel. When you see them feel what they feel, it means you can't be with them in a way that supports their development. In other words, you have to harm the relationship. So.

Acceptance skills turned into compassionate connection skills where you can ask things like emotional deepening questions.

Tell me more about that feeling.

When do you feel it? Are you feeling it now? What are you pulled to do when you feel it? Would you be willing to share that with me? Where we create a safe containment in the relationship for emotional deepening, openness and exploration. Not wallowing. No. The emotions are there for a reason. But sharing, connecting, opening, growing into the kind of person and the kind of relationship that has room for these gifts of our past that show up in the present, these sense of vulnerabilities that your mind says is negative.

But your heart says are so.

And calling an emotion a name doesn't mean it's not important and that it's not useful and that it's not so. And you know, our minds will quickly say that we only want good emotions. Yeah. Have you ever been around somebody who's Mr. And Mrs. Sunshine, no matter what? You ever have friends who. Well, look on the positive side of things. I know your husband dumped you yesterday, but at least you have had a husband that does dump you. I don't even have one. I mean, you feel so disconnected by that approach. So.

I would have to walk into each of these situations with the skills. But I would say one thing. If you know what the processes are, your own attempts can teach you variation and selection. You can learn by trial and error. It's how you learned how to walk. Mama Dada didn't tell you. You didn't even. They may have been talking, but you didn't have word capacity. Symbolic. You learned that later on. You think you know how to walk. Well, wait until you actually have a stroke and start yelling at your feet to walk. They don't have ears and your feet don't care. You know that that's not how you learned. You learned by trial and error and falling down a lot. So that's a real big teacher. But the other one is there's so much now available to you in the Internet, in self help, in therapy. Yes. That once you know what you're trying to do.

You can be guided by the wisdom of others.

So I hope I don't. Have I given you even a partial answer? Yeah.

No, you absolutely haven't. I want to dig into that a little bit.

You know.

That ability to when these triggers come up and these, these painful experiences come up and to get triggered in relation to the ability to see those gifts is really pretty already pretty high level functioning.

Right.

And, and you know, there's the, what's called the pain paradox, which is, seems like just such a setup that one of our great human challenges, right, because we naturally instinctually avoid pain or push it away. But pain is the doorway into transformation and all the good stuff is on the other side of it as you were describing, connection, relationship is on the other side of being willing to be with that pain. And so that just, it is such a human challenge and to be able to make. And then I'm also curious, you know, when I mean our thoughts, we tend to believe our thoughts, but with a bit of mindfulness training and practice, we can tend to have a little looser relationship with our thoughts. But when we're in the midst of a strong emotion, it feels real, you know, I mean it is, it is reality and so, and worry that maybe we're having that or maybe in a relationship our partner or person we're in relation, some kind of relationship with is having that and they're in the midst of that strong emotion. And the narrative around that emotion seems to be referencing us in a way that's triggering all of our stuff. And like, so then our capacity to say, well could, could you are you are, you know, how are you feeling with that? And could you talk about, you know, so I mean that ability to shift into that kind of mode, it, this is tough stuff.

It, it is and it's why it's a lifelong journey. We're never finished with it. And I don't want to say in any way that, that it's easy and you're looking at a panic disordered person in recovery. That's a lot of where act came from. And you can go look at the, you know, the TEDx talk that I gave.

I watched your talk.

My bottom moment was where I literally couldn't even.

Sleep through the night inside safety. And so yeah, so if you're in a situation, let's say you have an abuse history relationship and it's engaged, maybe all you can do is just push the words out. I'm feeling overwhelmed right now. That might be it. Or even just to hold up your hand with a loved one if you've developed a little signal, if they know if you've been able to share anything and maybe in those next moments, maybe all you can do is just to drop anchor, put your feet on the ground. And to be present and to breathe and to find a place where you can simply begin to open up to what's present at all. If I can get that far, if I can actually put my eyes metaphorically on the pain, where do I feel it? What does it remind me of? And when it floods all in, to come back to this slowing down and me saying yes to just one tiny pixel in this grand, overwhelming picture, the beast within, or the horror in the film that my history presents, you know, maybe just this one part of the picture I can say yes to. Maybe just that gut feeling in my stomach or that quiver on my face, or maybe that's all I can do. And that's okay. We'll start wherever you start. You know, there's no. Nobody's keeping score here, and there's not a stopwatch, and you don't get a prize at the end. So the journey begins now, and how fast the journey will be and so forth. Well, let's see. But let's at least let this journey be about something that's loving, that's caring, that's kind to yourself first, so that you have the resources to be loving and caring and kind to others. And sometimes that's doing nothing more than sitting on your hands. It's doing nothing more than. At least I'm not going to do anything destructive here. I'm not going to burn myself. I'm not going to cut myself. I'm not going to binge on a gallon of ice cream. I don't know what the thing is. Sometimes it's just sitting on your hands. And if that's a step forward for you.

You'Ve done something important.

And you can watch and your gut will tell you, not your mind, not immediately. It will tell you whether or not you just did something healthy. And here's the metric. The next time it happens, you feel just a little bit more empowered to do something healthy instead of what you know by experience itself will move you in the wrong direction. Because here's the. Here's the really sad thing, Fleet. People know.

That what they're doing that's inflexible is destructive. They know how it will turn out because they've done it over and over and over and over and over and over again. And we learn by experience. Well, why doesn't that guide us? Because we have this chattering monkey mind within that's constantly telling us, you know, this time's different and you need to do that. And, you know, when you did that in the past, things got worse. Not Better. Can I give you a little example of that? Maybe something that somebody can use. I. I've done a study, we're just finishing it now, writing it up where we asked people pick an issue that's hard for you. Psychological issue. Now show me with your body, you at your best when you're dealing with that issue. Now show me with your body, you at your worst. And everybody could show with their bodies, you know, you at your worst. Some variant of that.

Isn't this called something like the Suffering Buddha? I think that's what it was called. But what, what happens? Your head goes down, your eyes close, your arms and hands come in. You might even buckle at the waist, you might fall to the floor, you might go fetal, or your fist clench, or you get ready to fight and you get behind you. Well, what all that's saying is, remember, open, aware and actively engaged. We'll do the opposite of open will be closed. The opposite of awareness will even close our eyes and put it down. The opposite of engagement. We don't even able to walk and put our hands on things. So you already know, you already showed me. Closed, unaware and disengaged is harmful. Conversely, if you at your best, people's head comes up, their eyes open, sometimes their arm and hands go out. Sometimes they even look like one of those pictures of somebody looking at a sunset with the same issue.

So why are we so stuck stupid that we can't be guided by our own history?

Well, it's because we're turning the driving over to this problem solving tool we got between our ears, which is great for solving problems. Started with cooperation. I mean, that's the sad thing. Turned in problem solving, and then our life became a problem to be solved. If you can take that repertoire and instead you simply sit on your hands, observe, describe and appreciate. That's it. And sometimes what you're observing is horrific and all you can say is, wow, that hurts.

Sometimes you see a sunset and what do you say? Wow, that's beautiful. You don't say, God, I want a blue cloud over there, or that pink's the wrong color. And you don't say to a crying child, could you stop crying? You're bumming me out.

So can we take. You have the repertoire within. You know how to put your head up, open your eyes, and begin to experience your own experience. And if that means just sitting on your hands and that's all you can do is the tiny little picture of the pixels of the whole horror picture of your own history. Okay, let's start there and learn just how to be, be who be you, be who be you in relationship. That's what we came to do. That's the kind of creatures we are to love and connect, contribute and share.

We can be on that journey, but not if we come in wearing the clown suit of ego and with the agenda of I'll be okay when I can run away from my history.

Well, I love that expression sit on our hands as a strategy when all else fails or even to use frequently. Again, one of my first meditation teachers use this expression and analogy, hold your seat, which he actually drew from an equation discipline called dressage, where you keep your butt in the saddle. You don't post up and down by holding your seat. Literally sit on your hands, you are holding your seat. Right. And it's really the same thing. Just be able to stop and be and be and be with and maybe it's, maybe that's all you can do in the moment.

I love the dressage reference and you know, my sister in law's was almost just a few steps below Olympic level dressage. She's old now, she doesn't. And her final last horse died recently. But you know, if you know that, yeah, ride the horse. Ride the horse of your own history. There's going to be some jumps. Keep your butt in the seat, you won't fall off.

And let's, let's see if we can be with your history and stand these challenges of leaping over that, you know that three barrier, dressage barrier or whatever. If you're into horses, you can build the entire psychological flexibility model into a dressage metaphor.

Yeah, absolutely. There's a lot there. Well, I'd like to reference one of your books that's really had great successes so people can find out, learn more of this model in your work. Get out of your mind and into your life. You could probably title that get out of your mind and into your relationships as well, right?

Absolutely.

Yeah. So could you say just a little bit about kind of what that book that's one of your books that's kind of meant more for the public.

Right.

In a sense of and accessible to people.

Yeah, I've written a few that are for specific areas, but they're two general ones. Or the book that's over my shoulder or A liberated mind, more recent one, which walks through the whole science story, personal story, and is both a think book and a little bit of a self help book. But get out your mind in your life was my five minutes of fame when it was written up in time. It Outsold Harry Potter for one glorious week that still does well and now 16 years later and we've actually done randomized trials of it. We know that you can do about 60% but if you really do the book well of what you'd get in a course of ACT therapy, amazing enough and I can tell you how to do it if you do get the book and read it. But it's not the only one. The happiness Trap. Russ Harris is probably a better writer than I am is another general purpose one. And there's other ones out there. Do be careful. There's two or three hundred self help books out of ACT and now we have pirates who are out there on Amazon selling false things that are put together, skimmed from the Internet. And they all have four star, you know, five star reviews and they say sometimes anti app things. So make sure you're getting the real deal by just doing a little bit of research about who is this person. You know, they actually make up Personas and then these shots or what's happening out there. But you know, might I suggest with get out of your mind is skim it in one day, just flip pages, look at it, put it away. If over the next three days you don't hear a little whisper saying well there's that book, then maybe you don't need to read it. But if you get that whisper, go back and read it slowly, carefully and do all the exercises. If you hit a point where you can't do one and skip it, come back later and avail yourself of some of the things that are out there that are self help groups, that are free. There's one in groups IO called act for the Public that's been around for now 13 years and has about 3,000 people in it. And it's very sweet. I've met some of these people personally, but I've watched them evolve over all those years. I've read every single post of the many, many thousands of posts often contributed. But get some help that way. If you bind up in the book and that alone randomized trials show will be useful.

With effect sizes that are very, you know, on the continuum with what you can get even from therapy. If you want an ACT therapist, if you go to contextual psych science.org contextualscience.org that's the association and right on the front it will say find an ACT therapist. There's about 9,000 members of that society around the world and there's 2047 chapters and 28 languages. And almost certainly with those therapists there's somebody I went and looked 4,000 of them will do teletherapy. So you can absolutely avail yourself of therapists around the world who are ACT trained. And I think you'll recognize in the ACT work that it links to so many other traditions that if it's not act, let it be something else. But do keep your eye on your own psychological flexibility and treat it as something that's worth working on. You would work on your physical strength and flexibility naturally. You don't wait till you're sick before your exercise. Do the same thing with your psychological strength and flexibility and.

ACT and all of the various things that being talked about in this event are relevant to it.

And I think it's a great practice for, for couples who want to work on their relationship to take a book like that and work through it together.

Can, can be very helpful.

Give a good framework.

There are now three or four books on ACT for couples and there's some good randomized trials there that looks like it's helpful. And there's sister technologies, the integrated model that the late Neil Jacobson and Andy Christensen came up with, for example, that includes some acceptance elements. But also, I mean I like.

Gottman's work and other work that's out there. You can take the psychological flexibility message and easily put it into the kind of couples work, trauma informed couples work, et cetera, very, very directly. And there are people who are doing that and testing it. And you'll find those resources in the form of self help books and so forth as well.

That's wonderful. So I'd like to talk about your more recent book, A Liberated Mind. It seems like for me that, you know, pivot towards what matters in your life. That's really an apt description of what this summit we hope it's all about is inspiring people to really be able to work at all the different levels of their being and psyche to be able to focus their life on what really matters and to not give up on life. Despite all the challenges we're going through and everything we're going through with the pandemic and all the other. Really, I mean, life has not gotten any easier of late and it doesn't look like it's going to get any easier anytime soon. But we hope to be giving people the inspiration and the science really and the support to continue to move forward in their lives and to really focus on what matters. Because I mean that seems like just that's what's going to provide meaning in our life. Right? That seems pretty obvious. So could you Talk a little bit about that book and why you wrote it and kind of what your focus is there.

Well, the concept of pivoting is the newest thing there because the book kind of links up to the psychology of needs and yearnings and the process focused work that we've done in bringing processes of change into our focus as opposed to protocols named interventions for, especially not for this kind of, I think, artificial set of things that we've created in the DSM and so forth, these pseudo latent diseases that never turn into real diseases because human suffering is not a disease. That's not what it is. Well, the concept of pivoting, what it says is if you look at what you're doing that is absolutely pathological. It contains within it a perfectly reasonable yearning. You're trying to solve a problem. It's not what you're yearning for that's a problem. It's that what you're doing is gradually narrowing your repertoire and ironically taking away your ability to actually meet those yearnings in the name of meeting them. Take the emotion one, for example, because we've been focusing on that most of the six flexibility processes in our journey together fleet, where there's a built in yearning to feel. Babies arrive with it and it's necessary for them to be able to then explore and learn many things that they need to. And then when language and cognition gets to the point you can do human problem solving, it says, I've got a solution to feeling. Let's feel only good stuff.

Bad idea. For one thing, is there a human motion you can't name that isn't useful? Is there one you can name that you don't pay good money to produce? You read tearjerker novels, you ride roller coasters, you know, so you what you're going to say fear is your enemy really? Sadness is your enemy really? What happens when your mother dies?

What are you going to do then? Not be sad really?

What kind of relationships are you going to have then? What does love really mean then? So the mind gives you this thing that gives you this short term pop, hey, I'll avoid that. When I was in my panic disorder struggles, if I said no to giving a talk and having my graduate students do it because I'm such a great mentor, boy, did I feel great because I was relieved because I didn't have to go there and face the horror of locking up with a panic attack on stage, which happened multiple times to me. But was my life getting bigger or smaller? Well, duh. Was I more emotionally open or less double Duh. And so the yearning to feel only the good stuff eventually gets. And this is something I didn't see early on in my science journey. I wrote about it in Liberated Mind. It turns out that eventually isn't this sad, you have to avoid joy too.

Because it will go away and you know it. And so you end up yearning to feel. And what you get is the happy numb.

Except numb's not happy and there's no feelings inside numbness, except numb.

I mean, if you look at even antidepressants, yes, they bring the floor up, but you know, they bring the ceiling down. And don't just be telling me it's bipolar. If you take measures of happiness, they go down.

The happy numb is not happy. That's not what we, you know, emotions are here to help give us direction, to help guide us, to help us bring our history into it. They can serve that function, but not if we say, you know, one size fits all. They only want this one. So.

When.

We look at it, here's what the pivot metaphor says. It says, look at the squeezing down that's happened when you let your problem solving mind run you, where even what you yearn for, you get less and less and less of it. And embrace the yearning and pivot it in a different direction. Take the energy that's inside there and put it in a new direction. The energy is not your enemy. And if you know, if you know how to dance, you want your partner moving, you don't want them as a dead standstill. So I celebrate things like panic disorder. It tells you something you're yearning to feel and you don't know how to deal with anxiety. Great, let's work on that. Because the energy that's inside those panic could be the energy that's put inside connection, contribution.

Being creative, being a loving person, some of that same energy, that emotional energy that is now tormenting you can be there for you. When you're really needing the emotion, you need the motion, the motivation to do hard things that are in the service of the things that you most value. So emotional deadening is not a route towards transformation. It's a route towards.

Emptiness. And each of the psychological flexibility processes contain that. And we can pivot towards what matters. You can take what torments you and have it empower you if you can see what's inside it and how to direct that. And then one step at a time, you learn to narrow one step at a time, learn to broaden one step at a time. And sort of, sort of like a funnel that Then gets turned around to more like a, you know, an amplifier of your voice, but in a new direction.

Well, the really powerful thread that I hear running through all your work and your teaching is that we really have everything we need and life will give us what we need if we're open. I also hear the classic hero's journey in what you're talking about. And that ability to see, to recognize these challenges as gifts is so profound. And it really does seem to be. It's where the journey of healing and transformation begins to be able to make that specific pivot, really, Absolutely.

The hero's journey. Why do we love those stories? Because they're all our story. This is our human story as a species. But not just that. Each and every person reading that story.

Relates to it. And it always has these qualities, you know, of a challenge emerges and immediately you don't feel up to it. Who are me? Why me? Why should I be carrying the ring and throw it into the doom? And these thoughts sort of interfere, you know, I'm not afraid. Yoda says you will be, you know, and you find a different sense of self and with allies and social mates who help you connect to what's of importance and take arms against it and get the Golden Fleece or drop it into the Mountain Doom to destroy the ring or whatever it is. And then life returns to normal. And Harry Potter sending his kids off to stop, you know, Hogwarts and that circle of I'm not up to it. Emotional and cognitive difficulties coming into a present where you can connect with your values and get your feet moving. That's the psychological flexibility journal of learning how to be open, aware and actively engaged in a life worth living. And so we're all living the hero's journey.

So what kind of hero's journey do you want to be on? With regard to Covid, with regard to relationships, with regard to your business, with regard to your work, with regard to your work as a therapist, with regard to your work as a parent, with regard to your work as a friend. What kind of hero's journey do you want to be on?

And I think those great stories are there for a reason. Our artists and writers, our wisdom teachers are not just the meditators and the spiritual leaders. They're the ones who have, you know, seen that, you know, pain scoops out a space in which love can be poured. They're, they're wiser than the problem solving mind. And I'm lifted up by seeing that, that we're on a human journey together and our artists and writers and filmmakers and dancers and music makers are on that journey with us. Yeah.

This is just so beautiful. I've just really appreciated this conversation so much. You know, we tend to enter into the relational field so much with idealization and fantasy, and then we flip to, you know, disappointment, dejection, you know, resentment. Right. Instead of. Instead of having some realization that. That the relationships we find our way into and the relationships that seem to be coming our way, this is our own hero's journey. And this is the landscape of where we're going to discover all our gifts and our wisdom and our powers and all the rest of it. So being able to make that. That flip, this is so empowering and, you know, creates, you know, shifts that sense of life from that resignation of this really kind of burdensome journey to this incredible adventure. And I guess that's just something we need to rouse in ourselves each day because it's often. It's a little hard to find it on some days, but it's there.

It's there, and it's there where you least expect it, right inside the things that are most painful and difficult. And so the. The wish of the mind of, oh, if only had I had a journey in which, you know, Darth Vader was Mary Poppins, and which, no, excuse me, if it was all flowers and sunshine from morning to end, you'd probably say, yeah, but this flower is better, number one. Number two, that's not how life comes. So can we just be humble about this? You know, humble comes from that word hummus that means dirt. Can we put our feet in the dirt and just say, okay, this wasn't up to us. Life is like this. And do I have something to learn inside that pain, inside that imprisonment, inside that addiction, inside that betrayal, inside that ruining of yet another relationship that I see in hindsight, I did. I ruined it. Can I learn from that in a way that I can carry it forward towards a life worth living? And, you know, if you can find a way to say yes to your history, yes to your present moment, not the situations it contains, no part of those you need to say no to, you want to say no to. We're not going to say yes to having a planet where, you know, billions of people are underwater, or, yes to a place where the economic disparities of what they are now or racism or whatever it is. No, it doesn't mean yes to the situation. It means yes to us and to your immediate situation. With your history here now, what's next? And, you know, no promises, you Want to guarantee by a washing machine.

You want an adventure? You're on one.

Wow.

Thank you so much. Stephen C. Hayes, developer of Act Something, a model that's benefited countless people and around the world and author of many, many exciting books. And I really encourage people to check out your two TED talks and you know, to see kind of I really why I watched the first one, I'm going to watch second one. The first one. You really described that bottom you hit in the middle of a panic attack and it really kind of brings reality and depth and life to your message.

That wounded healer kind of message. So thank you so much for being part of our summit.

Well, thanks for the opportunity. And if I could just add, if people do want to follow my work, they can go to my website, stevenchayes.com and click on yes, please send it to me and I'll send them a newsletter. I don't spam people. If I really don't like it, it's one click opt out. But you know, we're on a journey and I'm here to be abuse and.

So see, see if some of what if something resonates inside what I'm saying. If you just google actors psychological flexibility. There's so many voices and I really it's important that there be be so many voices. I don't allow people to say I develop that. I co developed it. Hundreds if not thousands of people have developed it and so there's tools that are available here and I think the model will empower your journey whether it's a mindfulness journey or if you're working with, you know, body work with Steve Porges, etc. There's so many wise voices out there, so no need to be grabby. But I hope what I've said lands in such a way that it's useful to you and your journey. Thanks for the opportunity.

Thank you so much. Be well.

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