Understanding Myself
34 years ago, a man named Steven Hayes was beginning his journey of becoming a psychologist, while he suffered intensely from Panic Disorder and became so overwhelmed by it that it started consuming his life. Hayes discovered that no matter how hard he ran from anxiety, how hard he pushed back on it, how many times he eased the pain with tranquillisers, the severity and intensity only worsened. The more he manifested anxiety as the enemy in his mind, the more it consumed him. After Hayes realised that everything he was doing to counteract the anxiety was futile, he tried a different approach by accepting its presence and letting it wash over him like waves, welcoming it with open arms. Ultimately, this brought Hayes on a 34-year journey to the present day where ACT (Acceptance/Commitment Therapy) is now becoming renowned as a ground-breaking skill set to recovery in a range of mental health disorders.
For many years, CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) has been all the talk, which primarily focuses on trying to change one's thinking patterns. In my personal experience, this didn't work for me as the techniques became internally argumentative and didn't address the root of the issue. From a clinical perspective, it's still considered to be controversial whether CBT or ACT is more effective. My psychologist who has 20 years of clinical experience and previously only taught CBT has made a switch to exclusively using ACT over the years, as his own experience with clients along with the meta-analysis shows that signs heavily point towards ACT being more effective in the long-term.
Hayes describes the "three pillars of psychological flexibility" as "the most important skill set in mental health", being awareness, openness, and valued engagement. Awareness is becoming an observer of your mind and body, rather than fusing with the thoughts and sensations that surface within it. Openness is allowing those thoughts or sensations to be present, without the intent to change them before moving ahead in life.
This part [openness] is counterintuitive and often hard to grasp, because people tend to seek therapy precisely to get rid of their negative thoughts and feelings. Unfortunately, the mind does not work this way. Generally, the harder you try to eliminate pain, the more it will control your life. Instead, openness is about dropping the internal fight, allowing thoughts and feelings to be what they are – merely thoughts and feelings – without them needing to control you. Ironically, in that open posture, thoughts and feelings often do change in a more positive direction.
- Steven Hayes
Valued Engagement is understanding what values and objectives drive your purpose in life.
This morning I watched Hayes' TEDx talk, Psychological flexibility: How love turns pain into purpose, where he opens up about how his panic attacks were often triggered by being present when people were arguing or fighting. For years he assumed that anxiety was the problem and that it manifested on its own, only to come to realise that it was a deeply buried childhood trauma from an abusive father who was an alcoholic which surfaced memories of his parents fighting.
I spent some time reflecting on my own experience and thinking about the times in my life when my anxiety has been most present, and the answer I landed on was instability. My independence began at only 16-years-old when I embarked solo on a student exchange to Japan to explore the world and discover the person I was, only to return to Australia feeling lost with no purpose, no finances, and no place to call home. That manifested into my first experience with Panic Disorder and Agoraphobia, which took several months to recover from. I then led a very routine and enjoyable life for the following 2 years after that, up until January 2020 when I travelled overseas with my girlfriend at the time. Our plan to travel throughout China was quickly struck down by the pandemic, resulting in me returning home and her getting stuck overseas. Amidst the lockdowns, isolation, and sudden drastic changes to my relationship, my anxiety came roaring back for quite some time. Fast-forward to May 2022, where I had started a new job, was anxiously preparing to travel overseas for the first time since the pandemic for a work trip, and was also dealing with the dread of moving home in July. I experienced similar feelings in July 2021 during another move of home, but to a lesser degree.
What have I gained from all this? Mostly, trying to escape my anxiety was never the answer. When I tried to force it to leave me, it always rebounded at some point in my life. Through several recent therapy sessions I feel like I'm approaching the point of becoming "friends" with anxiety and accepting its presence, which ironically, results in it gradually dissipating over time. Like Steven Hayes, the more I escalated my feelings of panic, the worse they got. I opened up a repertoire of "skills" which my mind could use against me by creating a disaster out of panic attacks, like calling an ambulance, rushing to take medication, etc. These actions were great for short-term, immediate relief, but it worked heavily against me in the long-run.
In my heart, I never wanted to be anxious about instability. Deep down, I wanted to accept the unknowns that life naturally had in store for me. Wouldn't life be incredibly boring and meaningless if everything was predictable?
