What’s the best way for coping with stress? Sometimes, when I’m starting to feel overwhelmed, it’s easy to forget everything I’ve ever learned and every skill I’ve ever mastered to stay sane. So then I have to retrace my steps and go back to first principles. It’s like being a musician who practices scales every […]
Self-Help
Overcoming Resistance
Writing is a way of reclaiming my mind from depression, but there is a darker side to it called resistance. I won’t call it writer’s block because the same thing stands in the way of any purposeful activity or major life commitment, including the process of recovering from depression. It usually begins only after I […]
Beyond Depression to Guiding Values
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy reminds me of the tense time I spent learning how to drive a car. Venturing onto a two-lane highway, I fixed my mind on the big worry – how to get where I wanted to go without crashing into anything along the way. The most important thing was to stay in […]
Before ACT – Doing Depression Right
When I started learning about Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), the idea that I was doing depression rather than having it as an illness didn’t make a lot of sense to me. I could understand that avoiding painful situations could worsen depression and that I often acted in self-defeating ways. But weren’t those the effects […]
Starting on a Path toward Acceptance
For some time I have been working with the idea of accepting depression rather than trying to fight it. That’s an approach to therapy based on mindfulness and an attempt to broaden the range of experience you can live with comfortably. Although I haven’t worked with a therapist trained in any of the acceptance and […]
Fear of Change in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
One of the interesting things about Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is that you can’t think about it too much. You have to do it. Hence the acronym ACT, to be spoken as the word. If you try to understand it with your mind alone, you’ll get stuck because the mind has too many blinders. I […]
Finding Self-Compassion through Focusing
Focusing is one of the few methods that has helped me understand depression as I experience it, well beyond the scope of clinical descriptions. It has also given me an approach to self-compassion that is more effective than the various meditations I have tried. As Eugene Gendlin acknowledges in Focusing, his self-help version of the […]
Inner Beliefs and Outer Action
A few months ago, I found a picture of myself from college years that gave no hint of the turmoil of inner beliefs I held at the time. There I was, a lean young guy, sporting a cigarette for a role I was acting. The strange thing about this is that at the time I […]
