Cognitive Defusion: Honesty and suffering?
As I've been reading about cognitive defusion the word "honesty" keeps creeping in my head and ears. It seems to be "honesty" needs to be a value that clients need to possess and believe in in order to for them to defuse and deconstruct language in their "minds".
I am a chapter leader for the National Stuttering Association here in Bowling Green Ohio. On Wednesday we had a support group meeting and I brought up the topic of "honesty" to see what discussion would surface just from presenting the word. What was interesting is many said that "being honest is scary and may have a cost to it." The more I think about it, being honest is hard, if you are not honest you will avoid people, events and speaking situations (which is where willingness to change behaviors of avoidance comes into play). However before we can choose to change behaviors, the value of honesty much be the strongest force in our lives. For people who stutter, this honesty means doing the one thing most of us have spent our entire lives trying to hide, avoid and NOT DO...stutter... I honesty and being "open" may go hand and hand... Just a thought.
I was talking with a friend of mine who has read a lot of ACT material and he said he has replace "suffering" with " unskilled." His philosophy is such, "The term 'suffering' implies that all of life lives in is this constant dark cloud cover and we should accept that life is negative. However, if we see all life as "unskilled" meaning, we all have the skills to change and life by our values but typically choose accepting the thought that we don't have the skills, this is more optimistic" (this was paraphrased from our conversation last night during out band practice). I have to agree, this term "suffering" makes me feel more negative than hopeful. Now, if I was going to cognitively defuse this word I would tell myself "It's just a word, it means what you want it to, but should have very little impact on your behaviors..." This true, I think. So, that being said, I'm going to think of suffering as "unskilled." For now at least. I'm still a novice with ACT so I'm very open to change.
"The pursuit begins when this portrait of life...ends" -Evans Blue
Scott
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Hi Scott. Interesting
Hi Scott. Interesting thoughts.
The meaning of "honesty" seems to vary from person to person. For me, a thought like "I must be honest here" has at times functioned not to make me more moral, as it suggests, but to limit my openness to other people & to the actual situation & its possibilities; the same for such related thoughts as "I must be true to who I am."
And for me "defusion" has been most helpful not in requiring me to be even more "honest," but in allowing me to see that sometimes honesty is useful ... sometimes being kind is useful ... sometimes connecting with people is useful. In other words sometimes for me it is now OK to be "dishonest."
My experiences remind me of p. 70 of the 1999 ACT book, wherein a socially anxious person goes to a party and has thoughts such as, "Am I really being myself? Why am I pretending around people anyway?"
Maybe "honesty" could be re-defined so it means being with yourself in the situation, whether it's worrying about stuttering or being at a party: "I am anxious, cool. I'll pretend for 5 minutes like I'm not anxious ... and then for 5 minutes I'll tell anyone who asks that I AM anxious ... let's see what happens."
Oops, one other thought a day later-
Defusion is a non-verbal process ... and a useful precursor to talking about & acting on values ... which is a verbal process. "Honesty" as a value would therefore not precede defusion but might emerge out of defusion. Or at any rate that's how I think about it. Words are slippery.
Hi Randy!
I want to first thank you for your thoughts! Something I try and do is make sure the people I appreciate know I appreciate them with with words and actions (if possible). So thanks!
Your thoughts on "Honesty" are most helpful. I always enjoy other's perceptions of language and words, which I guess is what makes this type of therapy fun and constantly changing as everyone has unique perspectives on, well, everything! I just recently started to think hard about what "Honesty" means to me, so I really enjoyed the connection you made with "defusion" and being "honest":
"sometimes honesty is useful ... sometimes being kind is useful ... sometimes connecting with people is useful. In other words sometimes for me it is now OK to be "dishonest."
Interesting way to look at it. Thanks!
Oh, and thanks for the correction with "defusion" being a non-verbal process. I'm pretty new to ACT so I'm still trying to get the terminology down. I've been a speech pathologist for nearly 10 years and I'm currently working on my PhD specializing on stuttering. I'm looking at ACT as a type of therapy to incorporate both clinically and into my research after graduate school (August 2010, pretty excited about that!). Right now I do research with Implicit Association Tests (IAT). Maybe IAT and ACT will cross paths someday in my research... We'll see.
Anyway, thanks for the words and feedback. Much appreciated! Hope to chat with you again!
Have a great day!
Scott
PS... I'm originally from NY (Scotia, just outside of Albany). I saw you were from NY.