Steven Hayes || Get Out Of Your Mind and Live a Vital Life

have Stephen Hayes on the podcast. Stephen is the father of acceptance and commitment therapy and is currently a Nevada Foundation Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Nevada. He's an author of over forty five books, including his bestseller, Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life, and he has published more than six hundred scientific articles. His interests cover basic research, applied research, methodology,

and philosophy of science. He maintains an active laboratory focused on language, pragmatics, and semantic relations. His recent applied research has been focused on the analysis of emotional acceptance methods in psychotherapy, where he currently has a million dollar grant to apply his methods in online therapy. I'm really excited to have Steven on the podcast today and hope that you can join in the discussion by going to the

Psychology podcast dot com. Thanks so much for being on the podcast, Stephen, I'm glad to be here with you. Oh boy, lots we could talk about. You do a lot of really truly life changing research. So first of all, thank you for doing such life changing research. I'm fattered by it. But yeah, we have tried to go out to the kind of the edges of where the field might be and push a little bit on the inside of the bubble without popping out into our own So yeah,

that's what's good. It puts us into issues that have broad implications for sure. So you this idea of accept and commitment therapy. I was wondering how it has changed over the years. In more recent years have updated the model much. Well, it's evolved, you know. I think you're seeing more in the way of social scaling, of trying to think about how psychological flexibility applies to couples and

families and institutions and the culture. It's become more closely linked to evolution science, and so we've combined it with elinor Ostrom's design principles for protecting common pool resources, and we extended that out into pro social groups around the world, doing these kind of ACT evolution science combinations in Africa

and things like that. You know, I think the mindfulness traditions hit, you know, kind of after ACT came out, and although it's been viewed as part of the kind of wave of interest and mindfulness that's happened in Western culture, you know, some of the technology, I think it depends on the protocol wasn't necessarily there, and so you're seeing

more combinations. I think the biggest single thing if you go now versus let's say, where we first kind of present it to the world, because ACT was developed in the early eighties, but it wasn't presented to the world right around the turn of the century because we were working on the underlying basic principle and theory of language

and cognition and things like that. You know. I think the single biggest change from let's say nineteen ninety nine to now is that it's much less focused on a protocol and more focused on these change processes that are involved in psychological flexibility, how to see them, target them,

change them. And I think we're learning that ACT is not the only method that does that that it's a really important change process in many different forms of therapy, but that ACT does a pretty good job of moving them. So it's been I think, a progressive part of the evidence based care, but is now maturing and linking out to a more process focused approach, not just to psychotherapy but to behavior change in everything from stepping up to the challenge of the Ebola crisis to how to run

your business and organization. That all sounds really good. People referred to acceptance and kind therapy as the third wave of cognitive behavioral therapies. Now, did you personally call it the third wave? And what are the first and second waves? Yeah? I did. I use that term. In two thousand and four. It was an article linked to my presidential address that the Association for Behavior on cognitive therapy, and what I saw was that it wasn't just the behavioral folks, it

was the cognitive folks. Across the line. People were beginning to question the underlying assumptions that had settled in in cognitive behavior therapy for about twenty five thirty years. So the first wave, I would say, is the behavior therapy, behavioral analysis, behavior modification wave where laboratory based principles, mostly in the learning lab, were scaled up into evidence based interventions for people. So it really was the first strong

evidence based therapy wave. Was there behavior therapy, I think you'd have to say, but you know, I'm old enough to remember when that wave happened. But also when it shifted to cognitive behavior therapy, when people realize, you know, you had to deal with language and cognition. You couldn't just let it sit there and use principles that were

only developed in the animal lab. And so there was a shift to a cognitive model combined with those that we got from that era of behavioral principles being scaled into behavior change with people like Dallas and Mahoney and

Back and Mike and Baum and so forth. And the core assumption there was that, you know, really the important focus are the nature of human cognition and the errors that we make and how we think about things, and that if we can get that cleaned up, then our emotions will fit more of the situation, we can better be able to behave to fit the situation. But unlike the first wave, the second wave wasn't built on laboratory

principles of cognition. It was more built on clinical models because we really didn't have an adequate pragmatically oriented theory of language and cognition that we could scale into the clinic and then across the board. They were not just the behavioral people, but the cognitive people began to challenge that in the mid nineties, and so two thousand and four I could see it coming and I basically said,

what's happening is that we're shifting our underlying assumptions. We're beginning to look at our relationship to emotion and thought, not just the content of thought, and the underlying model because of that is changing, bringing in, you know, some of the deeper parts of the clinical traditions, things and emotion and experiencing things like that that are popular, let's say, in humanistic existential analytic approaches, but also bringing in things

out of Eastern thought and mindfulness traditions and so acceptance, mindfulness values, et cetera were coming in as well, and it raised a lot of wouha. People ran around circles and said, no, no, no, that's not happening, what are you talking about. But you know, within a few years, you know, Tim Beck is up there talking to the Dalai Lama. I mean, it just happened, and whether you wanted it to happen or not, it just happened, and

the wave washed in. I think people were afraid that what I meant was the wave was going to wash away what was there before. But actually what I said in that article is now it's going to build. You know, you stand on the shoulder to the giants. But when things change like that, you know that everybody starts thinking about things differently. And that's happened. So traditional CBT no longer really is traditional CBT. Even behavior analysis behavior modification

isn't the same anymore. And we are definitely into an era now where that family or that tradition is in a really good position to talk to other parts of the clinical wings and beyond that of people who are more humanistic, dynamic, existential and so forth, in a way that's very respectful, and to bring in what has happened in the air of mindfulness and some of those methods, but yet do so in a new way, not just another wave of spiritual religious interest or something like that,

or you know, not the Maharishi and the Beatles, but something more like let's really dig in and see what's inside these other traditions, turn them into principles that make sense, and then put them into human lives through evidence space procedures. And that's, you know, really happening right now in front of us. In part because of changes in the federal funding apparatus, but for other reasons, evidence based therapy is moving from protocols for syndromes to an era of processes

linked to human needs. And I think that's a huge step forward that the third wave help happen. I completely agree, and I'm a big fan of the humanistic and existential psychotherapy perspectives, and they're focused on needs. It's wonderful. Okay, you know what cluts back up is like, can you

define ACT? So I think the best definition of ACT is just to think of it as a set of methods that are focused on a model called psychological flexibility, which basically says that human problems are exacerbated and human prosperity is limited via a collection of related processes that kind of hang out together. There's six of them that we've focused on. They're like six sides of a box.

So there's six aspects of one thing and that is that we get entangled with judgmental kind of linear, categorical, valuative thought. Out of that, we begin to avoid our own emotions, sensations, and so forth we turn our inner

life into a problem to be solved. We then lose the attentional flexibility that we need to the world within, and we start focusing only on the things that are relevant to that problem, the agenda we gave ourselves, and we climb inside the clown suit or whatever our judgmental mind tells us about who we are and who others are,

this more ego based story. If I'm a person who and other people are like this, missing the shared consciousness that brings us together with other human beings, and out of all all that we put on hold the deepest yearning for meaning and purpose that we have, focusing instead on trying to win the war within and figuring eventually we'll get out there to living and loving and contributing

and playing. And then we don't build habits of action that are organized around our values, but we build habits of our action that are build around our patterns of avoidance and self aggrandizement. Those six things which if you want to get into them. We'll get into them later. Yeah, those that we call psychological inflexibility, and if we can flip them, and in each case there's a flip, there's

a pivot, there's a turn. You can take the energy that's inside those things and just turn it like you would turn the corner like you would swing a partner around when you're dancing, and you take the energy that's inside that which is not so bad, it's just that it's being put in the wrong direction and spin it towards the direction that leads to greater flexibility and presence and connection with the deepest issues of meaning and purpose

and building habits around that. It turns out that psychological flexibility is probably the single most I'm sorry for the self praise, but the single most powerful, single set of processes in terms of predicting psychopathology over time, in terms of mediating treatment, not just to act but some other important methods. And it turns out that we've been targeting it all along. We just didn't know that. And I think the reason that it's like that is it's just

a reflection of evolutionary thinking. How do you create variation that fits the context, that can be selected and retained and that's how evolution works. And with a few other bells and whistles about the dimensions you pick on the levels that are evolving. But so I don't think it's a model that's going to disappear tomorrow. You could relabel it, you could give it different names. In fact, there's lots of people who do metacognitive therapy has concepts that line

up values aren't in there. There's a few things that aren't dialectical behavior therapy, motivational interviewing, mindfulness based cognitive therapy. You know, there's a whole fruit net seed mix of acronyms for what is spinning around a common set of processes of flexibility, selection, and retention processes. So why do we need all these different brands? We don't, I mean, it kind of drives me crazy sometimes, Like if everyone's talking about the same underlying truth, isn't it the truth

that matters, not the like the brand? You bet you and you know one of the you know, there's something like fifteen different names for ACT out there, and we have people who've been even presidents of our society, the Association for Chitectural Behavioral Science. You notice that our name for our society doesn't have the word ACT in it. Yeah, you know, like one of the presidents that does work called mindfulness based emotional intelligence training. What is that, Well,

that's acting, So it doesn't matter, you know. And I think long run, we're headed into a new era. And I'm working closely with my colleagues, including some who are active critics of ACT, like Stefan Hoffmann. He and I have finished a couple of books, and what we're basically doing is saying, look, this era of name brand protocols that fit into these cubbyholes of suffering called syndromes is passing away, and what will be left behind or evidence

based processes linked to evidence based procedures. It turns out ACT will be fine in that, whether you call it ACT or not, because all ACT ever thought it was to go back to your first question as a model for how you organize certain key change processes, and whether you call it this or that doesn't matter as long as we know what the domain is we're talking about.

And so I agree it's time to bury the acronym list. Yeah, I guess you know, from an existential psychotherapy point of view, all of us want to feel like we truly existed in this world, and I think people like one of there's a fundamental human need to like brand an idea. You have to make yourself feel as though you're this is a really deep philosophical Oh exactly. I mean, you don't have to sniff very hard before you realize people

are grasping it. Immortality. That's what's going on here. That's what they're doing, is that they don't want to face their own death. When I'm talking about this in workshops and stuff, I say, okay, everybody who can name all of your great grades one eighth of your body isn't just your father and mother or your grandfather and grandmother, but the generation. For that, I want all eight including

their maiden names, stand up. If you can name them, well, in a group of two hundred people, one person will stand up, and so I say, look, okay, and now think about this. This means that your children's children's children won't even freaking know your name. So if you are

trying to play for immortality, grow up, grow up. I mean that there is something that's important, which is, can we put something into the culture that will be there for your children's children's children even though they didn't know you had anything to do with it. Most people will sign on to that. They'll say, yeah, so the game the contextual behavioral science community is playing is not about act.

We actually actively bring in this whole fruit nut seed mix of acronyms that you named, and others, including traditional CBT folks. We've been bringing in the humanistic folks and egistential folks and analytic folks. And Susan David will be given a talk to twenty eighteen are their major conference, et cetera. I do love her. Yeah, yeah, she's been on this podcast. Well she she invited me out to the Harvard you know, the Coaching Institute, and I had

a blast out there. And it's very smart, very able, and I love that book and I recommend it, you know that. So what we need to do is get what a science show are the key processes and oops, oh, by the way, people who weren't necessarily part of our tradition have for a long time been talking about things that are pretty important. Oh yeah, I was going to say, like, when I read some of your writings, I see a

lot of it in cabin Zen's writings. Sure as well, So you know who of course, you know, adopted from Eastern philosophy, and you know you'll see those Eastern things, but you know, I'll give you broad out even more. Scott. I mean, right now, there's something like forty randomized trials on ACT done in Iran. Wow, forty randomized trials. Why because there is an Islamic tradition of psychotherapy that happened five hundred years ago that it is spooky in terms

of how much it lines up with ACT. And yeah, I got the email saying Okay, this is just Buddhism, isn't it. But I now get emails saying, okay, admit it. You read the Quran and you kind of ripped it off. Well, I am reading the Koran because I think everybody should. If you're part of you need to understand what's going on in the world and why are these struggles going on between you know, certain wings of Islamic thinking and

so forth. And I had a person from around who was also a citizen, was able to do this despite the restrictions, come and joined my lab for a year last year as a costoc. But you know, look inside the wisdom traditions of every single major religion, every single one there are ways of reigning in analytic judgmental language. You know, whether it's the Sufis or the Kabbalaists or the absolutistics, et cetera, and the wisdom traditions impact on

our deeper clinical traditions. And now what Western science can bring as a particular analytic way if it's respectful of taking those things and really digging into what are the underlying processes and not just to rename it or to claim it as our own, but to really pull it as joints. And you know, John cavin Zen has done that by sort of demystifying Papastna. Herb Benson did it

by demystifying TM and that tradition of meditation. I think the act folks are taking it down even another level because we are the only one of which I'm aware, that has a very active laboratory based science of language and cognition in the basement of several hundred articles on what is language and cognition? How does it work? That

is directly linked to this developmental tradition. So we're trying to sort of, you know, take it to another level of taking these deepest issues of meaning and purpose and what it means to be human, but then actually trying to get what is going on here inside Homo sapiens such that we're doing what you and I are doing right now, and it's way different than what was going

on just one hundred years ago. But I can look out my side of the window and see a bird and what it's doing is not that different from what it was doing a thousand years. Something's going on here and we need to understand it. And that's really the game that the act folks are playing that does bring something new to the table. It isn't that, you know, if part of what you're saying was like, oh, there's wisdom in all these places, and yeah, there is, but

how do we create something that's progressive? How do we create something adds to what's there? And to me, it's not just doing randomized clinical trials on things that the monks were doing. For me, I really want to know, at a very basic level, what are these processes and therefore, how can we move them even faster? And that will be new, but it shouldn't be pridefully new, like we invented it, because almost everything we're looking at has been

talked about. Gosh, for hundreds of if not thousands of years. Yeah, really great points. And regarding your work, you have done a lot of work on language and cognition. You said there's a piece coming out soon that is on the topic. Is that right? There is actually in the June third issue of New Science. Relational frame theory and ACT were

developed in the early eighties at the same time. ACT out of me dealing with my own panic disorder, finding that I really only got traction when I turned back to Hippie Hill and to the human potential movement and the places that my CBT and behavioral training didn't tell

me I should turn to. And then being fascinated with that, how is that true that these traditions, which you wouldn't think of necessarily as scientific traditions having a space gave me more traction, And I became convinced that an agenda'd have since being a graduate student, that we really need to understand language and cognition should be my central focus. So relational frame theory emerged in the early eighties or right about the time that we formulated acceptance of commitment therapy,

although it's an early name, is called comprehensive distancing. And then it doesn't get released to the world until nineteen ninety nine. But in the period from the earliest trials in the early eighties to them, we worked out this alternative approach. It's kind of been in the basement and geeky and people don't really understand it, and does this say really have anything to do with ACT anyway. But

just within the last seven years it cuttered along. The first book came out in two thousand and one, it cuttered along, you know, a couple of three articles a year. Within the last seven years, there's been one hundred and sixty articles, experimental articles on our and really for the first time, just like ACT sort of broke on the scene in two thousand and six when Time did a five page story on me and on ACT. This article is kind of an example what's starting to happen with URFT.

We have the ability to do some very cool things. We can raise kids IQ by ten eleven twelve points in about six months. We can do implicit cognition better measures, better than anything exists on the planet. You know. We can establish a sense of self and kids that don't

have it. We can do language training in ways that are significant steps forward from what was there before with disabled children, and we can understand what's going on between you and I right now and what's going on in psychotherapy now that we've created what I think is the first really practical pragmatic theory of language on cognition that's robust in the lab and easily touches the clinic. I'm

sorry if it sounds prideful and self praising. I don't like that kind of thing, but I mean, you can shoot me tomorrow, and I don't care that much about where a goes. But our f T I predict is going to hang around for a while because we haven't really had an approach to language and cognition that really did the job that applied folks want. And you know, I think we've made a step forward with our f T. So it's really cool to have it coming out. That's awesome.

There's nothing wrong with authentic pride, by the way, as not eu bristic pride. There's nothing wrong with authentic It is authentic pride. It's just after a thirty plus year round, it's nice to see it finally catching eye. Well, this work on cognition and language, I want to circle back to the mindfulness based cognitive because you hinted earlier that it is just that's just a reframing of act. So what I'm trying to understand is where are the idea

of thought distortions? What role does that play in your relational frame theory? Okay, and may be careful to say, I'm not saying that NBCT, etcetera is a reframing of act, not at all. I'm just saying we're fellow travelers and we're working kind of in the same area. I do think Susan David's reframing in terms of emotional flexibility is very drinkly linked to that concepts since she says so in her book. But that's not to minimize what she's done.

It's brilliant, well done. No, NBCT is trying to bring the pasta into the clinic and do it in a way that really can be transportable, and it was wonderfully done. It's had a huge impact on the thinking of evidence based therapists around the world. But coming back to the bigger question you asked, you know, what would it may ask this question, what is really going on inside? You know, something like meditation? If you take of a pastma style

follow the breath meditation. That needs to be understood at the level of basic processes, not just looking at the underlying neurobiology. That's fine, but I want to know psychologically what are people doing procedurally. We know in terms of the underlying neurobiology, we're learning a lot. Well what you know what r FT says the thirty second version of it is language is not so it's relational and it's new on the planet with Homo sapiens or maybe some

of the early hominids. But it's not what your dog does. It's not what your cat does. It is what your twelve month infit is doing. And once you understand that that's the unit, you can push it, modify it, change it, facilitate it. And I can give you I can give you one example of a place where that unit would really hit the ground in near meditation, but it takes about two minutes. Do you want to hear it? Yeah? Please? Okay,

Well how about this thing. There's a sense of self that emerges that's transcendent, the kind of observer you know, one of the early bookman Dykman called the observing self or something from years and years ago talked about meditation with this cast that there's a sense of the observer emerging well in the lab. This idea that it's relational and not associative. Associations not to go be bi directional,

and they're bound by time and space. We put things together because they look similar, or they happen together, and it tends to be in unidirectional a little bit bi directional, but not much like bell food, bell food, bell food. The bell. You begin to salivate before the food. But when I give a dish of outpo to my dog, it doesn't run to the door to answer the doorbell. That just doesn't happen because they learned it in one direction,

not too That's not the way human beings work. If you learn it in one direction, you'll drive it into. If you know that round red things called an apple, and I say to a twelve month old infant, where's the apple, it'll move its wobbly head around to try to find the apple. Learn it one direction, drive it into. That's a relational phenomenon, and it comes, I believe, out

of social relationships. And so this sense of witnessing is something that your mama saw in your eyes and look when your mama said you sweet baby, and was looking for not just they are are awake and your eyes a grope, but that she could see that you could see her seeing you. If you actually go back and say, how do people get brought in for artistic spectrum disordered problems, it's because mother brought them in and they're saying to the pediatrician, my baby sees me, but doesn't really see me.

Mama sees that there's not this interactive consciousness there. Well, it turns out that's built out. That's the core of human language, and it then builds out. It's bidirectional. It isn't just one directional. I and you are in a relationship, and this starts echoing into some more deeper clinical traditions, and it then gets built out into language. And so there's a coming together in consciousness of I, you, of here, there,

and of now. Then we can measure it, we can target it, we can change it, and we can take kids and don't have that sense of self that person behind their eyes and establish it at least facilitate it

by targeting these processes. I know that's only a thumbnail version, but theek science of it is a little hard to say out loud, but suffice it to say that I think we can measure the underlying cognitive processes that are giving rise to this transcendent sense of self that is fostered in meditation and is critical to being able to be more open and more flexible with your own emotions, your own thoughts, your memories, your past pains, and being

able to allocate attention towards what brings meaning and purpose in your life, which is basically what the mindfulness traditions are all about. So I want to figure it out at that level, all the way down to what that baby was doing and what mama did in language training about bringing that baby into human consciousness. It's such a nerd. Yeah, yeah, completely, Well you really fit in at the here at the

psychology podcast to so you know. So you know, I want to just define psychological flexibility, and I'm not going to define it. I'm going to read how you've defined it. Sure, the ability to contact the present moment more fully as a conscious human being and to change your persistent behavior when doing so serves valued ends. Do you still agree with that? Yeah? Okay, so I thought it was it

would be beneficial to actually define that term. And you know, another aspect from Buddhism that you build off of is the idea that human suffering is universal, and your work on language also shows how language leads directly to suffering.

Is that right, man? True? Although I probably say human pain is universal, suffering is something we kind of add to it because of our mishandling of pain driven by this problem solving mode of mind that has been so put on steroids by the modern culture that we've created a huge problem for ourselves by how we use our cognitive capacity. But yeah, basically I would agree with that. Well, I'm just repeating back with what you said. You said, but yeah, you say, well, then what is the problem

with pain? There isn't a problem with pain other than a needless pain, of course, should be dealt with. I have no interest in putting our hands on the hot stove. But some forms of pain come with living. Knowing that you're going to die is painful. Knowing that your children are going to die is painful, and it's part of living.

It's part of life itself. Suffering actually comes from an etymology that has this idea of carrying a burden, and it has from up and under your carrying, Like the fairy part is like a fairy boat, and the soft part of suffering is up and under. It has that metaphor of like getting up under something really heavy and carrying it. Well, once you just put it down, just put it. Oh yeah, carry it. You do not have to carry it. Pain, yes, you know, pain that's willingly

experienced is not the same pain for one thing. Pain contains things that you care about. If you've lost something and you're just grieving over it, what's inside that is the love that you had for what you lost. That's not your enemy, I mean, for goodness sakes. In the modern world, two weeks are more of grief, and it's enough to trank the person up. I mean, think about it.

Think about it that we've got a culture that's so hostile to emotions that these basic biological functions of walking through grief in order to come out the other side with the energy to learn new things, which is what happens when you know, with a sense of withdrawal and stepping back and almost a sensory deprivation, and then you explode out into new relationships and new exploring. Even non

human animals do that, but no we don't. We want to run from pain at all costs, and then the cost is huge because it's kind of the cost of our own vitality. Our capacity to experience pain of loss is directly linked to this is just the poets who say this to our capacity to experience joy and connection. When we first measured experiencial avoidance and psychological inflexibility, I used to say experiencial avoidance was avoiding difficult, aversive, negative emotions, thoughts,

and feelings. That's not true, it's not true. We know there's an example of something that's changed because what it turned out was the case is that if you did that chronically, you started avoiding positive emotions too, because the bigger you are, the harder you fall. If you're happy now,

you might be sad tomorrow. And we all know this, you know, like if you've been rejected in love and now and you're really start getting in this defensive place where I'll never be so vulnerable again, meaning I'm not the works to not be woundable. Yeah, but if somebody's close to you, they could wound you. If they die suddenly, that's going to wound you. So closeness and wounding is one thing. It's not two things, it's one thing. So what your mind does is it says, I'll solve the

problem of pain by solving the problem of vitality. Well, vitality is not a problem. Vitality, enjoyment and recreation, play, love. So you know, the same space, this anti life space that says I can't hurt is the one that says I can't laugh, I can't love, I can't dance, I can't sing, I can't play. I mean, it'll get you down to a numb and where you can't do anything except wait for life to be over. So we actually see this Todd Kashton, who you should have on your

program one day. I did. I've had him on Awesome. Okay, Well, Todd's wonderful you know about what energy he brings to his work. Oh and he's kind of part of our larger community. But he has this cool study where he's followed highly experienced, the avoidant, socially anxious people doing experienced sampling, and wonderful things happen. People get complimented, they get invited to social events. You know, good things happen. What happens, Their joy goes up and then boom at plummets like

way faster than normal. Why they dare not laugh, they dare not smile, they dare not feel connected and loved and cared for. I mean, it's just enough to make you almost want to cry. The human condition that inside are running from pain. We have to run from life itself. So pain is unavoidable suffering. Let's learn how to put that down, put that burden down, and have just a good, clean pain of living and loving and losing and dying. That's beautiful. You have a little poet in you as

well as nerd. You're a nerdy poetry, you know. I'm just thinking that if this relates at all. You know, my dissertation was on openness to experience, and that's the

topic I've studied for the past fifteen years. That's been the main construct that I've been studying in my own work, and I think there needs to be better linkages between that work and the work you're doing the flip side of experiential avoidance, because I found a factor in an openest experience that had been neglected that I argued and my dissertation had been neglected in the openness to experience demean and I call it effective openness, you know, affective openness.

And really what it was is I was drawing a lot on Seymour Epstein's experiential cognitive model and he has

experiential mind and then the rational mind. So he was really influenced me a lot, and we were in discussion with each other a lot when I was working on my dissertation, and I adapted some of his tests of experiential thinking preference style versus rational preference things, and I found that, you know, in factor analyzing the experiential thinking styles with the other openness to experience, it fit within the openness to experience domain of personality as and effective

openness I defined as being fully open to both your positive and negative emotions. But I found that correlated with so many variables like creativity, this pre consciously and inhibition type thinking, you know, of compassion. It actually was really strongly correlated with compassion. So from that in our work too.

And you know when I when I've said, I'll struggle about the names, but come to get you know, we're fellow travelers, oh doin what they're saying is right inside the act work, and I why break it up by the way, Yeah, yeah, of course, it's absolutely fine with that. We can have different names and different traditions. It doesn't have to be agreeing on the names, but we can agree on the core of it and then play it out and stay in conversation with each other. And we

found the same thing. I mean, I've seen that link to a compassion. We've seen, you know, this kind of emotional openness, which is the flip side of experiential avoidance.

And in the act work, you know, there's a lot of kind of emotional exploration that deliberately has been taking the time to feel and of creating contexts in which you can learn about your own feelings, thoughts, memories, bodily sensations and so forth, without grabbing on them and turning them into a problem to be solved just because your

mind judges them. And so yeah, you're learning to hold the mind, the judgmental part of the mind at bay, coming into the present moment, being able to broaden out your focus see what's there inside. Now, that's the sense in which I was saying, I think we're agreeing on a common core set of processes, and one reason I'm trying to move the field towards process based therapy is that then we can put down our differences of school and language and technique and then focus instead are what

are the underlying change processes that liberate human beings? And it makes a lot of sense us to experience, you know, it will do the lion's share of the work around psychological flexibility. If you just had I bet you I could take your measure and it will correlate heavily with ours and it'll do the lion's share of the work. Now, there's a few things that are not in that, you know,

like the values piece. It steps up the values piece because for example, you can't really value something like, let's say, being a loving person if love is threatening, because you're going to feel vulnerable, you know. So the emotional openness openness to experience thing is a form on which attentional

flexibility or values based work then gets placed. Because as long as that's not solid, you can't afford to know what you care about because you hurt where you care, and if hurting is something you can't do, then you better just better not care. Oh it's I mean, it's a really profound point. Yeah, absolutely, I don't know, like I really would like to get into the six I'd really love to dive a little bit deeper into the six processes. Could you go through each one step one

by one. Yeah, maybe I should do it in a positive way since I just did it in a negative way. That'd be great. One nice thing about the model is that the model of psychopathology or of restriction of behavioral growth and prosperity flipped over is the model of treatment

and of behavior change. So you know the flexibility processes are this cognitive flexibility we call cognitive diffusion of being able to notice your thoughts with an attitude of open curiosity and kind of pick the ones that are useful, that are helpful to you, without being wrapped around the axle of them or entangled with them. It includes acceptance, which we mean by that is not tolerance or resignation. But the original imological meaning of acceptance, which was to

receive is just to receive a gift. It's still in English in the form of here will you accept this when you give somebody a gift? And to accept what is inside thoughts, feelings, memories, and bodily sensations that are of use to you doesn't mean accepting a situation doesn't mean accepting your behavior. It means getting present with the gift that's offered inside your own capacity to feel, sense,

and remember. It includes flexible attention to the now, of being able to come into the now within and without and including finding in the now or thoughts about the past or thoughts about the future, that's okay. It's not that the future and pastor irrelevant or not disappear into the now, but we're coming into the now in a way that's flexible, fluid, and voluntary, so we can allocate attention to what's present inside and out that are of use to what it is that we're trying to accomplish.

And we do that from a sense of perspective or point of view. That's the hardest of it. It's the one I'm starting to do a geek thing on with the underlying RFT theory. It's almost that which shall not be named. There's fifteen different names for it in the act world. And not because it's Voldemort, but because it's not thing like. It doesn't have clear edges or spaceo temple dimensions. It's the eye here now inness of awareness. It's not awareness of something. I'm talking about pure awareness

just awareness. It's like here the firmness of experience, which is deeply connected to what your mama saw when she looked in your eyes. It's really we are conscious. We as a human species are conscious, and you were brought into that kind of consciousness that can move around across time, place in person, where you can imagine looking at yourself from the outside. You can imagine being older and looking at yourself now, or looking back at yourself when you're

a kid. You can imagine what it's like to be in Bangladesh and facing the storm that you just read about. You can imagine what your great grandchildren will face if we don't do something about global warming. You can move I hear nowness awareness across time, place in person. And so it's this ineffable, transcendent quality of just pure awareness that is established I think in all the wisdom traditions, and we're learning ways to do it in quicker fashion

for people who are on the factory floor. We call it self as contexts because nobody understands what that means. The perspective taking self, you might say, the observer self, the psychological you, everything nothing, no self, big mind, one mind. I mean every freaking tradition out there that's onto This has caution about speaking about it because it's not it like, but it's the firmness awareness. From there, we then move towards qualities of being and doing that you want to

bring into the world with your life. Those between by values. Values are not goals. They're not anything you can obtain and finish. Their adverbs, their qualities of being and doing, so they disappear when you stop doing them, and you can orient towards them. You can do them. Orienting towards them is a kind of doing them, of admitting that you care about something, that it's of importance to a quick and dirty way of thinking about values, or can you turn it into an adverb? Can you put an

l y on it? And is that something that will be there constantly over time? You know, like lovingly I it's not like I have love now I'm finished. I can go out and hurt people and it's not like that. It doesn't have a beginning and middle and end. It's just a direction like going west and then committed action are just this gradual process of building larger and larger patterns of behavior that are organized around values. Choices, So those are the six diffusion, acceptance in the now, consciously,

values based and created patterns of action. If you put those all together the sentence that you read earlier, when you said is this psychological flexibility, you'll see all six are in there. And that's the one thing that is

the assemblage of the six things. When we try to study them, we find that the six can collapse into three Sceptance in diffusion or opening and variability processes, flexible attention to the now and consciousness are fitting it into the current context and centering processes, values in committed action or selection and retention processes. When you turn those six into three, you can turn them into one just called psychic flexibility. I see, so this is all a model

of psychological flexibility. Yeah, those are the processes that are the one that are really just another way to talk. I think about how works with a psychological being that can do what we do with human language. That's what we're trying to solve. That's where the major religions start,

that's where psychotherapy goes. They're called mental disorders for a reason, which is we do not have the sense that a dog or a cat or a cockroach has sometimes we just get in our own way, and this mind, you know, this wizard of Oz voice inside our head will if we're not careful, we'll take everything, everything, all the way to the point of suicide and the most least functional things we know to do. And we're learning. We've only been doing it for you know, maybe two hundred thousand years.

It's we're not yet good at it, but we're learning how to both have our cake and eat it too, to have this ability and not have it just have us. I loved in your book how you talk about you don't have to fight the battle, like you have this battle within your head and you're allowed to just like step off the field, step off the leave the field of battle. Yeah. I love that, And actually I have have been thinking about that a lot. Every time I get too much internal drama, I say, you know, I think

I'm just not going to play this game anymore. Drama is a good that's a good read. If you ever since that kind of pull the drama, that's the voice. What about people that pull you towards their drama? What can you do sure it becomes social? You know, we love, we love, and the thing about the social one, you know, we look at Trump, let's say, oh, yeah, dude, in that very moment, as you do that, you're doing the very process that you're criticizing. So be careful, be careful,

you know. But yeah, we love the drama of being dramatic about other people's drama. We do. But I'm saying some people legitimately try to pull us into their drama. Absolutely, we respectfully decline the invitation. I would like to not play, please. So I have another question, how can you didn't come up with some cuts acronym for the six core prole. I tried to do it just now while you're talking ACB, s VC, and I can. I couldn't come up with anything.

There are some that are out there actually that you can summarize them. But you know, I find it hard to remember some of those acronyms. But we've we've done it. Inside the act literature. Russ Harris is brilliant as a writer. A popularizer of act is really not a great job. He's particularly good at it. But I don't know, they don't stick in my head, and you'd want acronyms to help things stick in a head. So yeah, I do have a great appreciation for those processes. Well, thank you

so much for describing them. I'm still trying. I'm sorry if I keep like returning to this point. This the fourth time I've returned to the third or fourth time return to this point. But the idea of cognitive distortions, I'm trying to understand what place you see them? What I didn't pick up the thing that you laid down there, and so the error is on my part. But look, two different kinds of things. I mean cognitive distortions for sure. I mean our thinking about things can be distorted and

lead us in incorrect ways. And relational frame theory is a theory about how language works and we work. We've actually done research on how to teach people to think more logically, how to use these ideas to do logical syllogisms and so forth. After all, most of what your logic teacher taught you is how to do relational framing in a way that's coherent. But the problem is is that most people have had a fair amount of training

on that. It's like the old social skills the literature where it really slowed down when they ask people, pretend you're superman and show me your best social skills and suddenly these people who we thought were socially unskilled but show us skills, and then you know, it almost killed the field. It's the same kind of thing. I think very often people kind of know, if not okay, walk them through the logical errors, but you're still here's the problem.

When you really get into logical errors and you focus on the content of your thinking, you're very close to losing your balance and becoming wrapped around and entangled with your cognitive thinking. Now you know when I say this to Mike CBT friends, and we're part of the CV tradition writ large or part of those family of methods. I've been president of ABCT, et cetera. But the third wave is more cautious about dealing with the content of

cognitive distortions. And it's because when you do, it's very very close to I shouldn't think this way, I should think that way. And then the next step is is, holy beans, i'm thinking this way, what's the matter with me? And then the next step is stop thinking that. Well, by the time you're there, you're into thought suppression. And

what happens now you're stuck on that thought. You're monitoring whether or not, it's come back and you're taking I mean, we're already thinking in ways that are goofy and weak and irrational. The last thing you want to do is focus on that more and more. You know enough, if it's real information that we need, Okay, get the information. If I had a heart attack, I will die. Well, let me show you the data on that turns out occasionally, did I say I've had a heart attack and if

I had a panic attack, I will die? Excuse me here? Well, you know it turns out if you have a severe panic attack, there is a pub building. It's tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, But most people think it's like this big increase you hear about as a panic disorted person in recovery, I can tell you from the inside out it really feels like, you know, your heart couldn't stand what you're experiencing from the inside. But you know, give them information, but if

it's still sticky. What I want to do is help people change their relationship to that distorted thought and now to focus on forms of thinking that, yes, are probably more rational, but also just more useful and productive. So if you ask somebody this, how has that thought worked for you? Is that a familiar thought. Yes, have you had that thought before? Yes? Has it been transformational in terms of it's helped to you? No? What does your instinct tell you? Do you think you know? Dealing with

that even more is going to be helpful? Now? Not really? What if we focus over here? In other words, you can take just simple questions about the person's own experience with how thoughts work and which ones are helpful or not, and they will be able to sort it out and say this looks more helpful than that one. Well, then the problem is not that they have that one. It's that they don't know how to focus their mental energies and attention towards this one. Well, I can teach you

how to do that. Well, one thing is to find a way to diminish the focus and intention on the other one, not by criticizing it. If you criticize it, judge it, and analyze it, you're focusing on it. If I can give you a personal example, I have tentatives. It's pretty loud. I hardly ever notice it. I went through a three year period as an adult. You know one too many punk rock concerts, but not too long ago. It was about ten years ago. Of more and more focus on it, and oh my god, this is awful,

and how when does this noise stop? And ah, and then the thought came into mind, I should just shoot myself. If I shoot myself, I won't hear this noise anymore. It's twenty four nobody could live with this. And then this guy go like, dude, that's a suicidal thought. Maybe you should aply your life's work to it. It took me three years before it even occurred to me once that I should take what I worked my whole life on, Yeah, apply it to this domain. I did it in about

two days. It was almost one hundred percent gone. In a week it was one hundred percent gone. And for ten years it's been gone. And now what's gone? The noise? No kind of yes, kind of no. It's now very loud in this moment, five minutes ago, it was one hundred percent gone and had been gone, I would guess for at least two weeks. Was the noise still there? Of course it was still there. Of course it was my ring, my ears ring twenty four to seven. But

I actually hear a ringing. Yeah, yeah, but I think the static here? Are you sure it's not just static? But it's actually transfered. There's actually static coming from your computer. Are you sure that's not it? I'm sorry for the bad audience. Well, my point here is, you know, with things like cognitive distortions, et cetera, reapprais oh great if it's cognitive flexibility, if it's out with a bad end with a good bad because then you're gonna have to

keep checking like a bad Verizon commercial. Is it gone yet? Is it gone yet? Is gone yet? And every time you look the answer will be no because you just looked. And the same thing with things like you know this bringing in my ears. If, on the other hand, we can just focus on what brings medium purpose and vitality and growth to your life, that cleans up a lot of your cognitive errors. Will you still be able to think in a wacky way? Sure you can, everyone can.

We know how to do it. We have done it. But it won't get in our way as long as we're cognitively flexible and able to focus on what's workable in the area of cognition. So the reason why cognitive distortions are there but not a huge issue in the act work is it hasn't empirically been shown to be that much helpful. And oh, by the way, that's true in traditional CBT, true as well. It's very hard to show in meta analysis that challenging cognitive distortions add to

the outcome of traditional CBT, as you probably know. So what is the aspect of CBT that shows its effectiveness? Then the behavioral aspects dominantly, very dominantly. I mean if you look at component analyzes, I mean the late Neil Jacobson did two wonderful, expensive, multi site component analyzes of traditional CBT and found that adding the cognitive elements didn't lead outcomes, and in fact, in one of his studies in severe depression, compared to just plain behavioral activation, it

diminished outcomes. So and it's not just those two studies, even though that was supervised by Keith Dobson or Steve Holland you know, with people literally calling back to Tim Beck every night and getting guidance, you know this is the best of the best, and that data are what

the data are. So I look at the meta analyzes, the component analyzes, and the mediational analyses what's functionally important and I say, I'm just not all that interested in cognitive distortions a little bit because it's kind of interesting that we do it and sometimes we can correct it. It's not just me. The metacognitive therapy people say the same thing. From a space cognitive therapy people said say the same thing. So let's see focus on the processes.

If you can really show me that it's all that helpful, I'll do it. Well, thanks for elusting that, because I really wasn't aware that the cognitive stortion's approach wasn't in meta analysis how to be effective because it forms the core part of the resiliency training here at PEN for instance, the ABCD you know model you know become al Yeah, but easier packages and so what you need to do is the components and the mediators and you know, yeah, the CBT package plug. And I have to give you

the other part, which is inside Western culture. Singing that song really gives us a good rationale for doing some of the other things we do, like you know, delivery, doing behavioral homework that challenges some of the distortions, things like that. So and you need that, you need a rationale that people understand in some ways act and things like that a little bit harder because we come at it from left field, and sometimes people have a little

harder time. I guess now, with the issue of mine fullness becoming so central, it's a lot easier, But back in the day it was a little harder to sometimes explain to people why you even want to take this approach. So there's different reasons why you still might want to do it. And I don't want to bang the table. Let's see, let's see what the data show. But right now, I think you'd have a hard time really building it out as central and important fascinating. I mean, thank you

for your perspective because I wasn't fully aware of all that. Well, you got to just tell the audience what is the mind train? Because I have found that thinking about my thoughts in that way have been so helpful to me

and my own anxiety issues. Well. The metaphor of the mind train, which is in get out of your mind in your life, is one of several physical metaphors that allow us to detect the moment when we get hooked and fused with thoughts versus that moment when we're stepping back and watching our thoughts and basically all it is.

There's a whole set of these exercises that have some kind of physical perceptual structure for something that is repetitive and passing, and then asking the person to put their images if they think in images or words, and if they think in words, to put them on that object, and then to watch them go by, but with the instruction that if you lose it, if you disappear, if you're somewhere else, to stop, go back and see what

just happened. And so you could do it with clouds in the sky, with the cars on the freeway, leaves floating down on a stream, a person's walking by with placards in a parade, or like being on a bridge

and watching them a train go underneath the bridge. What it adds that I think does add something to some of the things that are in Vipasto style meditation, things like that is a very clear perceptual hook for something that happens in a few milliseconds, when the thought catches you and hooks you and it focuses on that transition. And if you do something like following the breath, let's say, you'll find that the puppy wanders away and you'll come

back to the breath. But sometimes you miss the egg exact moment that you wander it away. And these exercises, these perceptual exercises, really focus in on that exact moment because you can sense when you lost the image, the train is no longer going. You're on the train. In the train, you become the train. I mean, you catch it. And what we're asking people to do is back up

a little bit and watch what was going on. And very often it's it's not a thought that you necessarily would have thought would be difficult, like here's one boy, I'm doing a good job doing this, or here's another one. What is this for? Or here's another one? How long is this going to go on? Or is it so for? These are a collection of thoughts that are about the process, right, but your mind's doing and saying time out. What I have to say now has nothing to do with you

watching your mind. Now. I'm not sure why this matters. I'm not sure you're even doing it right. And oh, by the way, you like that. And just because the voice says time out is different thing you get tricked. Of course you can do that meditation too, you know, Oh I'm doing a great job meditating today. Yeah, well,

your face to hit the floor. You know, it is well, so we have an in the This is part of the kind of trying to pull it at its joints, not of disrespect for the mindfulness traditions, but in an

effort to add something new to those traditions. We've tried to come up with exercises that really value into these critical moments that the theory tells us a key like the difference between a thought that you interact with that structures your world versus interacting with a thought that you can look at as a process of structuring of the world. You know, It's like the difference between watching a handwright

versus reading the story and disappearing into the story. And the mind train and exercise is one of the whole body of exercises that we have out there to help people practice noticing that pivot point between fusion and defusion that's inside contemplative practice and meditation. That's so great, you know. I like the you know, like opposed to being the freight, you know, or being the coal on the trae, you know,

and actually watching it go by. I really like that you said something about mindfully said your face just hit the floor. What did that mean you know. All I meant by that is that you know you all anybody who meditates knows that you are in the flow, but then your mind starts talking to you about it and suddenly you're not. I mean, you're not falling the breath, You're not present, You're you know, I ride a bicycle. You just fell off the bicycle and did a face

plant and the asphalt. You get back on the bicycle, get your balance, start pedaling again. I was using that as kind of a metaphor for being in the flow of this continuous process of noticing and noticing. And actually, a bicycle is not a bad idea, because in contemplative practice you're getting knocked off balance. It's not that you're

always perfectly in balance. If you slowed down a picture of you riding a bike, you could show, you know, moment by moment you're falling out of balance, but you adjust to it and you come back and balance and you can keep pedaling and moving. Meditations like that. Life can be like that. Life, life is like that. People to be like that, And really, you want a single

metaphor for psychological flexibility, that wouldn't be bad. Cool We get buffeted by emotions and thoughts, we get knocked off balance. If we can come into the present and find balance, that's that process of the centering processes of aware consciously in the moment. Well, then we can look ahead down the road where are we going and start pedaling. Well, that's values and committed action. So you know, we're just riding a bicycle. That's cool, We're just riding a bicycle.

Don't get the right now, Scott, I'll call it the Scott metaphor, the bicycle metaphor psychological SBK, call it SBK. It's my friends call me. I mean, look, if I'm not my thoughts, then who the heck am I? I mean? Can you tell, like, is there a way of doing this active push but still keeping a sense of a strong identity. Yeah, well that's a funny one because by identity we also mean, well usually mean verbal identity. We mean the ones that we can say or good voice to.

And and you know it is true that in the act tradition we're pretty hostile to verbal identities. Yeah, if I disidentify with all my thoughts, then what am I allowed to identify with? Sir? Yeah, well, you know what if you did it more descriptively and in the situation like when I'm in this situation, I do this, then I feel that. Well that's the kind of thing. You know, there's a kind of a but the problem a couple problems with the overall identity. Let's take something like, Hm,

I'm smart and loving. Right. If you really dig into it, you'll probably realize that the reason that you can say you're smart is that you're smart er. Then who if you're alone in a desert island, you can't really say you're that smart. You kid said fair, So no, so think about what this means. It isn't just I'm smart, I'm smarter than you, and you and you, And then you wonder why you feel alone? Really you wonder, I mean, dude, right inside the you know, swallowing that pill of identity

is a loneness and alienation. It's objectification and dehumanization. It's comparison. I'm better than you or I'm worse than you. It doesn't matter. You could say, you know, I'm a borderline person. And you've had clients, you know, who will give you a challenge and you can almost hear them whispering. You've never seen anyone so disturbed as me very prideful, you know about how great and grand they're suffering is when in fact it's as common as dirt. You know, you

talk to anybody and you're good. So not that I don't mean, actually, I know how that could sound. You know, obviously some people have had horrific histories, and I don't want to I do know what you mean. Yeah, but you know, when you climb inside the clown suit of the story and pridefully hold on to it, you know, that's a different thing. So what would happen if we kind of held all that a little lighter? Like, let's

take something like smart and loving. When I do things like this in situations like this, that's smart, that's cool, that's great. That orients you towards something that's important. When I mean these kinds of situations like for example, when I'm tired and my wife wants a backscratch, doing that is loving. Okay, that's great, But why do we need the i'm part? Couldn't you say something more like I'm

committed to these kind of patterns. I care about that without the clown suit of i'm, that will have the comparison Part Number one, Number two here's another one. I ask people to write down the things that they identify with, and then I say, take all the ones you really like, and I look at them and I just have a few questions all the time everywhere with everyone, question mark and I usually pause and then say, liar, you know so, and you look at them like I'm loving all the

time with everybody. No, it's not true, dude, you know it. You've betrayed people, you've lightened people, You've let them down, even people who are close to you, you've left them down. There are times, right, and so when you climb inside the identity now, your own experiences is your enemy. If you see the places where you're just telling the story, so you've got comparison and you've got self deception. You know, I'm starting to make a list here. This is a

little dangerous. Here's an identity part that's inside the backward, this more specific one of what you care about and what you're trying to build. That's come to specific. But then the only other one that's really safe is I'm that's it. I'm I mean, being is just being okay. I mean, if you took all of thee all of the kind of attributes and instead you got to consciousness itself and your connection with others. Your part of a human community is just being enough. Well, I think it is.

My answer is yes. But you know, personality psychologists have revolved their entire career around administering personality surveys and questionnaires which have the explicit prompt you know, I am dot dot dot on a scale one to five. Yeah, I mean I am a personality psychologist in parts, so I see value in classifying these patterns. But you said something that was really brilliant. I think you don't need to commit to the patterns. Now you just threw away that comment,

but that's I just want you know. That's basically I'm going to use many years in my career. It's just a very very good reconciliation of personality psychology with act therapy because you can notice mindfully your patterns. That's all personality is. It doesn't mean you're always this way. It's tendencies. Tendencies, you know, distributions like a bell curve. During the course of your day, you tend to have be more four

or five on a dimension versus someone else. That's all it means, but doesn't mean you don't have ones and twos and threes at every level, So I love it. It's context bound, it can evolve over time. There are some really clear central tendency and some of these are temperamentally. You hop out of the woomb with these some of these features. But you know, you don't have to go very far with the etymology of personality before you realize

there's a toxic little core there in persona. It was the Latin word for a mask or a false face that actors put on the play masks and Roman theater, so you know it's right in there. Our persona is also once we grab it and hold on to it, and you say, I'm filling the blank. Now you've got a mask. Now you're wearing the mask. Now you've climbed into the clown suit. And is that really in your interests?

Would it be better just to come into the respectful ambiguity of I don't know, and let's see the presence of awareness that affords connection with others and in your behavior, play out these tendencies that are of importance to you, Like I really do want to be careful in my work because of what it's able to do for others, you know, And so you're sitting here, let's say, doing an interview with a psychologist, and you've prepped enough that

you can ask good questions and somebody can benefit from later on, and you know that hundreds of thousands of people may listen to it and things might happen in their lives as a result and stuff. You know, do you need the mask to do that or could that just be something that's of importance regularly for you that you do with verb and regularity and care and not be attached to it. But that's the diffusion piece. You know, we've done this in areas. I'm going to mention one

that's probably going to get us in trouble. But we publish something on helping people coming out and dealing with the ambiguity about their sexual orientation. Jamie Atovayah, a member of my Lab, an out gay member of my Lab, did some work on this and part of what it got into and I know you read it to look at the protocol and look at his tapes because he's actually on the article. You can actually see the tapes

of him working. He actually tries to soften the identity part because if you go too far down to I'm a gay man who there's another clown suit there, There's another clown suit there. And I understand it. I understand it, you know, I get it. But maybe we don't need quite so much of it. You know, a lot of introverts are claiming that as an important identity. Giftedness is another big one. A lot of adults who've been identify as gift as children that it's a very important part

of their identity, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, you can can make a whole list of identities that are you know, personality dimensions where people have internalized it, and you're saying, isn't it getting longer and longer and longer, and there's more and more effort to train it, And I'm wondering, what are we doing, really, what are we doing there? I'd get that there's heart to it and people are trying, especially if these are areas of special

needs and have been stigmatized. I get that, And of course I'm with you. I'm talking about inside white privilege, et cetera. Although also in my family of an African American daughter, you know, you know, I can list how many great aunts and uncles died in ovens. You know, I mean I were married to two Hispanic wives, and I understand you're married to two wives right now, and no, but I've had two Hispanics of the three that I've had.

But you know, I'm not saying that by way of saying that my own sense of privileges erased by that. That's not true. I'm just saying I've been interested in

watching how stigma and self stigma works. And part of what we've tried to do in the act work, because we've done about fifteen trials of stigma, prejudice, et cetera, is to increase the connection with values, increase the kind of presence and emotional openness and working together in community, and so often a little bit in these areas of identity where they're not fostering what we really want, there's pieces of it that we do want, like what we

were just talking about right right. Because it could be the case that some of those identities are linked to your values, Yes, then that's fine, grab onto that part

and make those values really relevant in the world. So what I will end here with just assummation and all this seems to be that you can choose to live a vital life exactly right, if you learn how to sort of rain in the excesses of the voice within the dictator, within that Wizard of Oz voice, so that choice can now be part of your life, selecting among alternatives. I'm a behaviorist, you know, I'm not talking about something that's airy fairy and beyond what we can learn how

to do. You know you can choose to live a vital, committed human life. And you know, even inside your pain, that doesn't have to go away before you get the privilege of being human. You got that as a birthright. Well that let's just end right there. Thank you so much, even for being on the podcast and for your quite revolutionary impactful work. Thank you. I enjoyed it a lot,

and that really a lot of fun. Spka. Thanks. I think we both have a sort of child I would like curiosity spirit at the heart, so it was a nice match. Thank you so much for listening to the Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott Barry Kaufman. I hope you found this episode just as thought provoking as I did. If something you heard today stimulated you in some way, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the psychology podcast dot com. That's the psychology podcast dot com.