Steven C. Hayes

Dr. Hayes has written an excellent book about a method of therapy he pioneered called ACT (spoken, according to the author, as "act", not by spelling out A.C.T.). ACT is an acronym for Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, a method which I have already been practicing through meditation and other spiritual exercises--to me, ACT parallels a group of contemplative practices but minus the spiritual underlying context. He explains the inspiration for his developing this form of therapy and offers show more test results and simple exercises to get readers started. Since I already use many of the tools Dr. Hayes teaches in this book, I want to give it five stars, but his constant declarations of how superior ACT is to other forms of therapy put me off, hence the lower rating. I believe that not every technique works for everyone, and that alternative therapies may well work better for some people. show less

Spent 15 min. with it, enough to know that I want my own copy, so I can mark it all up (it is a workbook, after all), next time I'm feeling the need. The clincher is the chapter titled "Choosing your Values" with the exercise about attending your own funeral - what eulogy might be said, and what would people think but not say. ('Course, I'll have to do extra imaginary work cuz nobody would attend my funeral.)

Hayes is the “originator” (his term) of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT. ACT uses six pivots—defusion, perspective-taking, acceptance, presence (i.e., mindfulness), values, and action—to improve a person’s psychological flexibility in the face of adversity. Hayes is deeply enthusiastic about ACT—sometimes to a fault—but there’s a lot to be said for many elements of its approach. Of A Liberated Mind’s three sections, the first, which explains the mental roadblocks show more and misapprehensions that lead to rumination, self-condemnation, and similar mental ruts; and the second, which discusses the six pivots in detail, are the strongest. The third section is ostensibly about applying ACT to various facets of life (e.g. spirituality, work, addiction) but reads more like an extended infomercial for the approach.

ACT owes a lot to other methods for taming the mind, such as CBT, or Zen or metta meditation, and to be honest, the latter work far better for me because I find much of the ACT approach twee (e.g. imagine your difficult thoughts as leaves floating away on a stream, tell yourself “I’m incapable of walking around this room” while walking around the room, write your fears on notecards and carry them with you throughout the day). But my guess is those methods will probably work for people who find other methods too austere or abstract, and as the principles underpinning them all are the same, it can't hurt to have ACT in the arsenal alongside the other methodologies. show less

Suppose you need therapy. How do you start? This book may be the answer -- if you meet the conditions....

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is a relatively recent form of therapy, using some tools of Cognitive Behavior Therapy but adding some aspects of its own, particularly with reference to language and how it distracts and drives us. Steven C. Hayes is the primary creator of ACT, although others have been involved. The therapists of the local Autism Society with whom I work are fond of show more ACT, so I decided to request this book when it was offered.

We should probably be clear that this is not a book about ACT; there are several such (which Dr. Hayes will try to sell you if you go to his web site https://stevenchayes.com/), but this is informal -- a self-help book. That doesn't make it a quick or easy read -- it's actually longer than the primary ACT textbook, Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy by Hayes and Spencer Smith. And I'll freely admit that I found it a slog.

There are several reasons for this. Hayes isn't a great writer. Also a roadblock for me Hayes's attitude toward himself and his work. He freely admits to having had an anxiety disorder and panic attacks. This sounds disarming and vulnerable -- but the rest of the time, he is pretty full of himself. ACT is perfect; it's everywhere, it's working; the results are all positive. Maybe they are -- but anything that gets hyped that much gets my hackles up. Hasn't it ever failed?

This is problematic because I can tell you one person for whom the approach failed: Me. For a very specific reason. Time and again, Dr. Hayes tells us to envision something. Envision a parade of people with signs. Envision... well, it doesn't matter what, because I can't envision. I don't have a mind's eye. (Current estimates are that about 2-4% of the population have this condition; it has been proposed to call this condition "aphantasia.") So I sit there and try and obtain no results. That's not really a knock on the therapy; it's just that it has to be adapted for people with aphantasia.

Or try this one. We are told to stand up and walk around the room we are in while saying, "I cannot walk around this room."

That, Dr. Hayes, is a lie. A patent falsehood. You, in your neurotypical narcissistic way may be willing to tell lies. I don't tell lies. Not on purpose, anyway. I make mistakes and get things wrong a lot, but that's different. I'm not interested in your stupid deceptions.

The other thing that grated was some of the popular knowledge that... isn't right. For example, Chapter 9 ("The First Pivot") early on claims that "But is an ancient contraction of be out." But it's not. It's from Middle English bute/but, itself from Old English būtan/būte. Want to see it in Middle English? Look up the Hengwrt manuscript of Chaucer, the earliest and best manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, from around 1400. Line 73 starts wth "But." Not "Be out," "But." I've seen the photo.

Oy.

Yes, I know I am an incredibly obnoxious nitpicker! But the point is, for a nitpicker like me, and someone with my limits, this book doesn't work. Is ACT good? I trust the people at the Autism Society who like it, so it probably is. But I suspect it works better if you have an actual therapist who can adjust it to meet your peculiar limitations -- or, at least, if you're a more typical person than I am.

[Correction 6/30/2019: added a missing quotation mark after be out. Also, I should perhaps stress that I'm not out to criticize ACT, which is apparently a good form of therapy. It's just that this book calls for tools that I, as a person with autism, don't have. That's not a knock on ACT; it's a peculiar failure of this particular implementation to work for a person like me. The other things that irked me would probably have irked me a lot less if I hadn't been expected to be a liar who could visualize things in my head.] show less