Other ACT books for laypersons?
December 12, 2005 - 7:42pm — Ben Parrish
Other than the quality workbook "Get Out of Your Mind..." are their other layman ACT books available?
-BP, singlehandedly trying to keep this forum alive. ;)
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New self help book on ACT for chronic pain
There is a new self-help book on ACT for chronic pain out. Haven't read it myself yet, but might be worth checking out.
Here's the name:
"Living Beyond Your Pain: Using Acceptance & Commitment Therapy to Ease Chronic Pain" by Joanne Dahl and Tobian Lundgren
I got it...
Browsing around the bookstore a couple weeks ago, I found that there was a section which contained literally hundreds of ACT books for the lay person!
It's the Buddhist shelves in the Religion section! I haven't stopped reading since. It's changed my life. But I think you've got grounds for a serious lawsuit, cuz there's some dude 2500 years old stealing all your best material. ;)
(All in fun, and all in thanks for helping to open my eyes and free my life.)
Everything old is new again.
Something within the theory is not making sense for me. And this may just prove the case of ACT and philosophy that, language is the source of human suffering.
For example, a Gestaltist would argue that insomnia is merely the hurt pride attempting to resolve unfinished business. Until such a time, the individual is unable to sleep. Once the 'solution' is arrived upon, the individual falls asleep. However, in recent years a group of genes has been identified as being instrumental in circadian rhythms for early onset and delayed sleep phase disorders (per2 comes to mind) in humans and other species.
The first issue is in the labeling. A lack or absence of sleep can be labeled as insomnia, unfinished business, or a genetic mutation. My understanding is that, that which is genetic cannot be controlled by thoughts. However, there is also a school of thought which seems to argue a mind-body connection.
For example, if a feeling of disgust is produce as a result of a thought then, and the urge to vomit an enacting of that thought and feeling, it does raise questions for me. Other animals vomit. Can we assume then that they too feel disgust. And if they feel disgust, must they also be experiencing thoughts which produce these thoughts.
At any rate, I am mindful that i would like to dispute the theory and therefore find evidence -- an anti-confirmation bias.
Another take on this issue
Another response to this question. You are presenting what would be an analysis of this situation based on a traditional cognitive account of how humans work. This is only one way of viewing how thoughts, emotion, and action are tied together. ACT is not cognitive in this sense. ACT is part of a behavioral tradition which does not hold that thoughts cause action. In a behavioral account, certain thoughts are only tied to action in particular contexts. For example, you might have the thought, "This is disgusting" and in one context, this would be tied to the behavior of vomiting. In a different context, this thought might not be tied to vomiting. ACT would target this context that ties thoughts to action. The context is determined by your past experience and by your current experience.
Also, to a scientist, all learning is connected to biological changes in some way. So, when we learn something new, presumably our brain changes in some way. This is the same basic process whether you are learning to live an undepressed life, or learning how to do math. In both situations, your brain has changed after the learning has occurred. However, ACT suggests the the most practical and direct methods for helping people to live more effectively are not likely to be found in studying physical changes in the brain because there is no way to change this directly, unless one intervenes medically. At this point, we are beyond the realm of psychology.
Just a few thoughts.
Pain and suffering
The traditional behavioral objection to the "disgust = thought, therefore thought, therefore disgust caused by thought" formulation is that it adds nothing to what you started with. E.g., "the animal ran away when shocked; running away = fear; the animal ran away because it was afriad" sounds good until you try to do something with the analysis and you realize the only manipulable event was the shock.
ACT theory says that human language tends to build out sources of pain into larger and larger patterns of ineffective action and greater and greater pain. Suffering is not a technical term, but that latter picture looks like suffering to me.
The theory is not mean to be all encompassing -- it says nothing about genetic differences for example, but these differences obviously bear on all psychological processes.
ACT theory does not stop with language. If it did it would not be a behavioral theory. It goes on to analyze human language itself and show why language has this effect and how to manulate contextual features to stop it from happening. And THAT is where it becomes both behavioral and falisifiable.
The way you resolve labeling issues is by showing that your labels help with prediction and influence. The philosophy underlying ACT / RFT is pragmatic -- there are multiple truths allowed by pragmatism -- but that fact does not take away the value of successful analyses within their own domain.
The best place to disconfirm the theory is from the bottom up: start with RFT. See if you can falsify relational operants. If you can't do that, see if you can show that experiential avoidance / cognitive fusion are unrelated to relational operants.
- S
Steven C. Hayes, University of Nevada
ACT books for laypersons
Well, there is the Heffner and Eifert "Anorexia Workbook."
A new one just coming is "ACT on life, not on Anger"
(Matt McCay, Georg Eifert, and John Forsyth)
Others coming soon include JoAnne Dahl on pain
All are New Harbinger -- they have at least 4-5 more under contract
Steven C. Hayes, University of Nevada