The Wisdom To Know The Difference Part 3

Will You?

Growing Your Perspective Muscle.

In the last chapter, we were exploring the cultivation of stillness, learning to notice the ways we lose the moment, and allowing ourselves, as a sort of meditation, to gently touch any costs of that loss over time. The end result of those exercises is to grow your stillness muscle. While we were doing that, we had also begun practicing taking a different point of view, a different perspective. In this chapter, we are going to learn about growing your perspective muscle even more. In order to do this, we will spend some time working on issues of self. We all use the word a lot in everyday conversation, and we mean a lot of different things when we do. We have a particular understanding of the word when we use it in this book, and it's worthwhile to talk about it some.

A very common use of the term in recent years is in the phrase "self-esteem." The basic idea is that if we feel bad about ourselves, we do badly, and therefore if we can make ourselves feel better, we will do better. It is a nice idea. But, in fact, lots of things make us feel better that do not make us do better. Drugs and alcohol are some very powerful feel-good technology, and if they made us do better, we wouldn't be writing this book and you wouldn't be reading it. It turns out that science has shown that the "feel good then do well idea" has some big problems.

The Self-Esteem Myth One of the types of "view" our society has gotten very stuck on is the view we take of ourselves. We have been living for a good long time inside what psychologist Roy Baumeister calls the self-esteem myth (Baumeister, Campbell, Krueger, and Vohs 2005). The myth says that low self-esteem lies at the core of many individual and societal problems. We have been told that teen pregnancy, violence, school failure, and yes, even addiction, are the result of not thinking highly enough of ourselves. The self-esteem myth has been around for quite some time and has some powerful people and groups behind it. Baumeister and his colleagues point out that the state of California, in the late 1980s, even set up a governmental task force charged with raising the self-esteem of the state's young people. As the self-esteem myth gained momentum, it led to the development of the self-esteem industry. If you go into your local bookstore, you'll see that the shelves are filled with books that promise to show you how to improve your self-esteem. A search of a major online bookseller's site turns up more than 17,000 book t.i.tles linked to self-esteem.

Part of the myth tells us that we need to do something in order to raise our self-esteem. The myth tells us to seek self-esteem for ourselves and to promote it in our children. Every schoolteacher has had it drummed into his or her head that he or she needs to make children have positive thoughts about themselves. Maybe you have even bought into the story that your difficulties are rooted in low self-esteem. But is it true?

During the last ten years, there has been a major effort by scientists to examine whether this story about the role of self-esteem is true. As it turns out, the answer is no. Although high self-esteem is sometimes related to positive things, it is also often related to surprisingly negative things. For example, high self-esteem is related to aggressiveness, bullying, narcissism, egotism, prejudice, and high-risk behaviors.

The Positive Affirmation Trap A very popular strategy touted in the self-help books is the use of positive self-affirmations. Several studies have shown that getting people to say positive things about themselves seems to backfire for individuals who feel bad about themselves. For example, Joanne Wood and her colleagues placed students with high or low self-esteem in one of two situations. In one situation, students repeated positive self-statements such as, "I am a lovable person." In the other, students didn't repeat any statements. For individuals with high self-esteem, those who repeated positive statements showed very small positive changes in mood and incentive to engage in pleasant activities compared to those who did not repeat statements. For individuals with low self-esteem, those who repeated positive statements actually felt worse and reported a lower incentive to engage in pleasant activity than those who were not asked to repeat positive statements (Wood, Perunovic, and Lee 2009).

Even if there might be some reason to think that the occasional pep talk you might give yourself in the mirror isn't the worst thing in the world, the research evidence seems to point to the fact that deliberate attempts to raise your self-esteem are not necessarily going to result in feeling better about yourself or doing things in your life that you'll be happy about later. Even where there are positive effects, there is no good evidence that these pep talks have a lasting influence. This is not to say that we should not give encouragement for positive behavior we see in our children or spend our time with people who encourage us. It is simply to say that chasing the idea that you should "feel good about yourself" is not the path to a valued life.

You and Self-Esteem Do some people drink or use drugs because they have low self-esteem? Maybe. But in those cases where substance abuse and low self-esteem might be tied together, it's often not clear which came first, the low self-esteem or the drinking or drug use. Do you drink because you don't value yourself highly, or do you not value yourself highly because you drink? For example, drug use can lead to poor performance at school and work. This poor performance can in turn lead to low self-esteem.

This same chicken-and-egg situation can be found in cases of high self-esteem also. High self-esteem is sometimes found to be connected to things like good grades and successful job performance, yet it could easily be the case that high performance actually causes the high self-esteem, not the other way around. Think about it this way: high levels of hot dog eating go with baseball game attendance. But increasing the number of hot dogs someone eats does not make it more likely that he or she will go to a ball game.

If it doesn't necessarily lead to good or bad things in your life, what's the deal with self-esteem? We think it comes down to this: self-esteem is a thought or collection of thoughts that you have. No more and no less. We all have thoughts all the time. Churning out thoughts is pretty much all our minds do all day long. Some of them don't get in your way as you go about living your life: Look. A redwood tree. Some, though, cause no end of trouble: I really, really need a drink. As far as we can tell, thoughts are thoughts, regardless of whether we think (still more thoughts) of them as good or bad. If working to change your thoughts related to self-esteem from negative to positive doesn't give good results, then you need to move on to something else.

Your Flexible Self So, what does all of this mean? Well, we might have taken a slightly roundabout way to get there, but we're getting ready to introduce you to one of the more challenging aspects of ACT. To put it very bluntly (and maybe too simply, but we'll deal with that as we go along), the purpose of ACT is not to make you feel better about yourself, it's not to make you think more highly of yourself, and it's not even to get you to quit drinking or using drugs, necessarily. Instead, the goal of ACT is to develop something we and the other folks in the ACT community call psychological flexibility. This is a fancy phrase that basically means the ability to do whatever you choose to do, whenever you choose to do it, without being limited in your choices by what's going on inside your head.

You know what it means to be physically flexible, right? If we asked you to twist yourself up into a very advanced yoga position, your ability to do it would be limited by how physically flexible you are. If you're double-jointed and very limber, you'd roll yourself up on cue, slipping your feet behind your ears as easy as you please. But if you're like most of us, you're not a born contortionist. "My legs just won't go that way!" you might shout. You can sit Indian-style, but the lotus position is simply not something you can do. With time and diligent practice, you could probably condition yourself to do it. For now, though, you don't have the flexibility.

Psychological flexibility is pretty much the same thing. Let's say that instead of asking you to get into the lotus position, we asked you to give a speech to a large group of people. You might be a natural public speaker, and if you are, then you'd prepare your speech and step up to the microphone. As you know, though, public speaking is hard for lots of people. For many of us, even the mention of giving a speech will open the floodgates of the mind to a rush of paralyzing thoughts and feelings: I'll make an a.s.s of myself! Everyone will think I'm a total fool! Get me out of here! There's nothing unusual about these kinds of reactions, and, frankly, it's why there aren't that many gifted public speakers. And if there's no particular reason for you to give a speech, then it's really not going to bother you all that much that you can't do it.

But what if your job required you to present ideas to a group? Or what if you felt strongly about an issue that was being discussed at a town meeting or your kid's PTA? What if you wanted to get up at an AA meeting and tell your story? If any of these things were important to you, your paralyzing thoughts and feelings would do a lot to limit what you can and can't do in your life. The same way you might not have the physical flexibility to get into the lotus position, you might not have the psychological flexibility to stand up in front of the PTA or the group at your AA meeting and speak out loud.

So the goal of ACT is to help you learn ways to build the psychological flexibility you need to do what you want, when you want, in your everyday life. If you've tried to get sober before, what happened the last time you wanted not to take a drink yet took it anyway? What raced through your head? What did you feel in your body? You might not remember, and you might not even have noticed at the time. This is one of the reasons we started our discussion with finding stillness in the present moment. If you practice going slowly when you want to, you'll have a better chance of catching those rus.h.i.+ng thoughts and feelings in flight. It'll just be this one drink, and I'll stop. I had a terrible fight with my wife, and I really need this one to take the edge off. I feel so alone. I don't want to hurt anymore. Make no mistake: these thoughts are painful and scary. It's very natural for you to want to run from them. You may have been running from them for a long time. If you can find stillness, though, you might be able to recognize these thoughts as thoughts-and then choose to do what you planned to do all along, which is to not drink.

Flexibility in Finding Alternate Perspectives The goal of ACT is psychological flexibility, so you've probably already guessed that everything you've read so far and will read from now on is all intended to help you limber up, psychologically speaking. This chapter on what it means to have a "self" is no exception.

Consider a case in which ACT treatment was given to people in a residential treatment program. One group had an ACT experience added to their regular drug and alcohol treatment and the other group just got the standard drug and alcohol treatment. At the end of the month in treatment, people who did not get the additional ACT treatment actually felt better about themselves than the people who got the usual drug and alcohol treatment. The people who got the ACT treatment reported lower self-esteem scores on a measure of shame than the group who got the usual treatment. This was just at the conclusion of the treatment, though. Three months later, when the psychologists checked in with the group members again, the situation had reversed itself. The people who got the ACT treatment, who felt worse when the treatment was over, actually reported feeling better about themselves three months later. And this effect continued for as long as the researchers followed the members of the group. In addition to feeling better about themselves, the people who received ACT treatment had fewer relapses over time. The other treatment made the people who got it feel better in the short term, but they felt worse and used more drugs and alcohol over the long term.

If the people in that study didn't chase momentary happiness, what did they do? They did a variety of things we will lead you through in this book, but one thing they did was to work on building flexibility in perspective taking-that is, they learned to look at and listen to themselves and the world around them in a variety of different ways, from different points of view.

Everybody likes an optimist, right? We might praise someone by remarking, "She's always so focused on the positives in life." Certainly, if you're always the doomsayer, you're not going to be very popular at dinner parties. It's natural (and, more importantly, comfortable) for people to try to focus on what, from their perspective, is "good." If you are in treatment, the positive view would be that treatment will be successful and that the path forward is a straight line to a good outcome. One characteristic of the non-ACT treatment in the study we mentioned earlier is that it was largely focused on the means the people in treatment could use to stop drinking and stay sober-that is, the means to a positive outcome after treatment. If you get too locked onto that positive view, though, you begin to screen out things that don't fit with that view. Problems get overlooked. Thoughts and emotions that go with problems get suppressed. What if you do want to drink? What kinds of feelings and experiences do you often a.s.sociate with drinking? What kinds of costs have you paid as a result of drinking in the past? Talking about these kinds of things is not likely to leave you feeling great about yourself at the end of your treatment session. But not talking about them in treatment doesn't mean you won't be having them in the, oh, say, three months after treatment ends. Do the ACT vs. usual treatment results make a little more sense now? Long story short: there is a good deal of research that tells us, pretty clearly, that suppressing thoughts and emotions as a strategy is unworkable over the long term.

Another thing that can happen when people lock onto a particularly rosy view of the future is that they find that it is unsustainable, so they lurch between a rosy glow and gloom and doom overattachment to a negative perspective. This is the same as every other time I tried to quit, and I know I am just going to blow it again! The last chapter was about stillness. In this chapter we want to bring stillness together with flexible perspective taking.

Building Flexibility You need to ask yourself this question: Am I going to trade a moment's good feelings for living well? This work, like in the story of the tortoise and the hare, is really more about slow and steady wins the race. If you are looking for a quick fix, this is not the place. If you worked on some of the inventories in the last chapter, you may understand why this is a slow and steady work and one that may cause some growing pains along the way. In this chapter, we will look back at some of the inventories we did in the last chapter and practice taking different perspectives on what was written.

Really showing up in your life-slowing down and meditating on exactly where you have come to in your life-can be painful. (There is an important distinction here between "meditate" and "ruminate." Meditation is about observing and noticing; rumination is about explaining and judging. Understand that the two are not interchangeable.) But not all pain is bad. Stubbing your toe is painful and damaging. Going to the gym can mean a certain amount of muscle pain, but it's not destructive pain. The work we are doing in this book is more like going to the gym. Over the short run, it can cause some pain. Over the long run, it can produce some real results. You can learn to tell the difference between destructive pain and healthy growing pains.

Based on the evidence, we do not advise you to chase self-esteem. Some people might suppose that there is some "just right" amount of self-esteem and then go about chasing the "just right" amount. We counsel against this for two reasons. First, no one has even demonstrated that there is such a magical level of self-esteem. And, second, getting into the business of managing your thoughts or feelings (including self-esteem) so that you can live more effectively is a little like managing clouds. There may be some number of clouds that is optimal for living, but clouds are notoriously hard to manage. And, while we have our hands and eyes pointed up toward these unruly, puffy clouds, we trip over obstacles that could be avoided and miss small things we could love that lie right there at our feet. ACT is like working when there are clouds and when there are no clouds...including the clouds that say, "I don't like it when it is this cloudy!"

Our work on self is not about winning the war about whether you are a good or bad person. It is more about ceasing to fight that battle. We will talk more about stepping out of the battle in the next two chapters on acceptance and holding stories lightly. Some of us have tried to win that fight and found the wins to be few and short-lived. Instead, we are going to grow our perspective muscle and perhaps see that there is a way forward that does not involve fighting-or at least we will be fighting fights that we have a shot at winning.

What Is a Perspective Muscle?

If you look at something from only one angle, you can know only a little bit about it. Look at the object below.

What is it? At first glance, you might be inclined to say a circle. But if you could look at it from a lot of different angles, you might find that it's not a two-dimensional circle. It could also be part of a cone or a funnel or a cylinder, or even the end of a long piece of plastic tubing. The only way to know it thoroughly would be to look at it from many points of view. In fact, if you could look very closely at the circle, you might see a very tiny wall of black ink (if you're reading this on paper) or an organized row of glowing pixels (if you're reading this on a screen.) Perspective is a big deal. You can probably see examples of it in your own life. Have you ever seen two people in conflict? From outside of the conflict, you can sometimes see things that the people who are in conflict do not see. For example, sometimes in a divorce, the couple becomes so involved in fighting over who is right and who is wrong that they cannot see the harm that is being caused to the children. This is sometimes true even when both parents love the children.

Having your vision narrowly fixed means that you see some things very, very clearly, but it sometimes also means that there are a lot of things you miss. The trouble is that each member of the couple can see only from their own point of view. Imagine if they could see from their own perspective and the perspective of their spouse, perhaps not agreeing with the spouse, but allowing themselves to see the world from that place. Imagine they could see from the eyes of their own children. Imagine that both parents could close their eyes for a moment and picture their own child-seeing into the eyes of that child, perhaps seeing the fear in that small face. Imagine that they could pour their awareness into the child's body and open their eyes, seeing from the eyes of the child. Picture how terrifying the world looks from that child's eyes-two beloved people, deep in battle. Imagine if the parents could come to stillness in that witnessed moment. Such flexibility in perspective causes the world to look a little different. Our view is richer. Being able to see a bit from all these perspectives makes it less likely people will miss things they care about.

There is an ancient story from India that tells of six blind men who were to determine what an elephant looked like by feeling it. The one who felt the trunk said it was like a water spout. The one who felt the leg said it was like a pillar. The one who felt the side said it was like a wall. The one that felt the tusk said it was like a pipe. The one who felt the tail said an elephant is like a rope. Imagine that "what an elephant is like" was a good reason to go to war! They could all get their armies together and battle it out. Losses would mount. In the end someone would win, but many more would lose. The irony is that they were all correct, but only from a limited perspective. Again, look at the advantage offered by multiple perspectives.

Hitting the Road

I have a personal example of this. Teenagers often feel misunderstood by adults in their lives. I left home when I was sixteen years old. This was most definitely a bad idea. My home life was fine. I had a great mom and a stepfather who loved me without limit. But the late sixties and early seventies were tumultuous times. I dropped out of high school and had no permanent address. There was a whole generation of us. .h.i.tchhiking around the country, riding our thumbs to wherever they might take us.

I recall one particular trip. I had stopped in to see my mom and dad in Spokane, Was.h.i.+ngton. After a couple of days at their place, I had my mom drop my friend Shawn and me off on Highway 395 so we could hitch up to Canada, just to look around. We had our backpacks, our sleeping bags, and five dollars between us. As a parent, in this moment, I feel like I should call my mom and tell her how sorry I am to have put her through that. I am sure she went home and cried her eyes out.

Could I see it? Nope, not one bit. We just saw ourselves as free spirits, unenc.u.mbered by material possessions. In a certain sense we were right about that, but we failed to see a lot that was wrong in our behavior. I lived very carelessly like that for a long time and was fortunate enough to live to tell about it. But a good number of my buddies from those careless days found their way to the graveyard.

Part of what we call wisdom and maturity has to do with being able to see from different perspectives. Mature does not mean "over twenty-one years of age" and wise does not mean "knows a lot of facts." Lots of people are over twenty-one and are not mature. Lots of people know a lot of facts but are not wise. I did not even really start to grow up until I was thirty. It was at the age of thirty in 1985 that I started to look back. I started to look ahead. I started to look at my lot in life from the view of my ten-year-old daughter, her mother, my wife, my parents, the community. I started to look ahead as well as backward. I started listening to people who saw in me things that I could not see in myself. This last was perhaps the hardest-trying to see with the eyes of people who saw possibility in me. I stopped seeing the world through a single lens and things started to look different. Let me be clear: I am not saying that I am wise or mature, but I feel like I'm on track, and I endeavor to practice the things spoken of in this book persistently.

Working It Out It's kind of hard to know where and when you'll want or need to look at your life from a different perspective. It's like someone once said about art: you'll know what the uses are when you see 'em.

The two little exercises that follow are good for learning what it feels like to drop in and out of alternate perspectives. As with the stillness exercises in the last section, please approach each one of these gently. Skillful perspective taking takes time to develop, and there is no guarantee that what you'll see with your fresh eyes will be easy or pleasant over the short term. It does make it more likely that you'll like what you see over the long term, though. Be kind to yourself as you go.

The "Who Am I?" Exercise

In this little exercise, we will explore the question "Who am I?" We don't mean this in any goofy sense. We mean it in a very simple sense. People confuse who they are with what they see when they look at different bits of their experience. And this can lead to a lot of problems. Sometimes people confuse themselves with their job. If you think that your job defines you, and your job goes away, it can be like dying. Sometimes people confuse themselves with their body. If you have a model's body or a super athletic body, and anything happens, like age or disability, it is like losing "you." This is a pretty easy mistake to see when it is happening to someone else, but not so easy to detect when it is happening to you. There are a thousand stories we tell about ourselves that define us. The problem is that the stories can become traps and we end up living inside the trap. If we hold rigidly to a story about being a "good person," we sometimes blind ourselves to places we are going wrong. If we hold rigidly to a story about how bad we are, we sometimes miss what we are doing right in our lives.

Am I my body? If someone walks into a room and says, "Where is Kelly Wilson?" I might point toward my own chest and say: "Right here." Everywhere I have ever gone, my body was there. But am I my body?

Think of a time when you were little-maybe six or seven. If you have a picture, take a look. Describe that small child's body in just a sentence or two. See if you can close your eyes and picture yourself in that body.

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Think of a time when you were a teenager. See yourself then. Close your eyes and see if you can remember what it was like being in that body.

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Describe a particular time when your body was at its healthiest. Close your eyes and see if you can recall what that was like.

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Describe a particular time when you were very, very sick.

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Now let's look at emotion. Think of a time when you were very sad. Picture yourself in that moment. See if you can picture your own face. See if you can see the sadness in those eyes, in the way that you hold your body. Describe what you see.