Mind and Emotions (9 page)

Why Do It?

Defusion helps you take your mind less seriously. The techniques you’ll learn in this chapter will help you stop buying into your negative thoughts so you can carry on with your life despite doubts and fears. Defusion is a powerful tool for understanding your mind’s upside and circumventing its downside.

The Mind’s Upside

The mind is the human species’ most important survival mechanism. Over millions of years, it has evolved into a nearly perfect language machine. It constantly scans your environment for danger and opportunity and converts sense impressions into thoughts—mental symbols expressed as language. Then your mind manipulates these symbols as if they were reality itself, making all kinds of symbolic connections and conclusions. It does this language trick at incredible speed, all the time, and mostly unconsciously. You hardly notice the language machine at work as it helps you avoid danger and evaluate whether things are good or bad for you.

The Mind’s Downside

The mind’s design as a survival mechanism has some problematic side effects. You tend to automatically trust that your thoughts are true so that you can react quickly to either danger or opportunity. For example, if you see dark and light stripes moving in the grass, your mind converts the sense impression into a language symbol (the word “tiger”), and then correlates the symbol with all of your other associations related to tigers and concludes, “Danger!” This thought causes a flight response in your body, so you run away. If that movement in the grass is actually a tiger, that’s clearly an upside of how the mind works.

The problem is that many thoughts aren’t accurate. Sometimes your sense impressions are wrong: It’s actually a chipmunk or the wind in the grass, not a tiger. More often, the inaccuracy is that you’ve been alerted to something that has nothing to do with reality. Unfortunately, the mind manipulates symbols as if they were reality. Perhaps, years ago, you had a bad experience involving a stranger, driving, or your mother. Since then, your mind has been making up symbols derived from symbols derived from other symbols until finally you may distrust all strangers, fear driving, or hate all tall, blond women because your mind has associated them with your mother.

Coping with the Downside

When your habitual thoughts are causing you emotional pain, you can try to uncover the original experiences, the formative traumas that started your mind on its long history of symbol manipulation. This is a core technique of classical Freudian psychoanalysis. But it’s time consuming, expensive, fraught with myths and metaphor, and as difficult as unscrambling scrambled eggs.

Alternatively, you can forget about the original trauma and try to detect, analyze, and correct your current mental errors, which is exactly what early versions of cognitive therapy tried to do. But that’s also time consuming and difficult because your mind runs constantly. Thoughts tend to be fast and furious, so analyzing them is like trying to drink out of a fire hose, and disputing and correcting them is like trying to work on the engine of a car while it’s going ninety miles per hour. Meanwhile, you’re suffering.

We think the best approach is defusion. Because it’s a way of taking a time-out from believing everything your mind comes up with, defusion is a shortcut to serenity. When you defuse, you step aside from the fire hose of thoughts that are pushing you around. You put in the clutch to disengage from the constantly running motor of your mind so that it stops driving you down the road to depression, anxiety, shame, and other difficult emotions.

Defusion targets two transdiagnostic factors: the maladaptive coping strategies of negative appraisal and rumination. When you can stop identifying with negative thoughts and begin observing them in the context of the many other thoughts and feelings you experience, negative appraisals will become much less powerful, and possibly less frequent. And when you dismiss the thoughts that lead to rumination about the past or worry about the future as “just another thought,” you stop the process of rumination and worry in its tracks.

What to Do

This section contains two kinds of defusion exercises: teaching exercises that allow you to experience and understand fusion and defusion, and simpler, shorter, real-life exercises that you can use in your day-to-day life. We’ve given you quite a few exercises in both categories. If one technique doesn’t work to create distance from painful thoughts, try a different one.

Teaching Exercises

Try each of these exercises in turn. They will give you a good feel for how your mind creates and processes the meaning of words, and how thoughts and images flow through your awareness.

MilkMilkMilk

This exercise is a language game that shows how meaning attaches to and detaches from words. It was originally created by British psychologist Edward Titchener (1916) and is now widely used in acceptance and commitment therapy (Hayes 2005). It’s very simple.

Find a private place where you can speak without any concern about being overheard.

Close your eyes for a moment and imagine that you’re opening a container of fresh, cold milk. Feel the texture of the container, then imagine pouring some milk into a glass. See the white, creamy stream bubble up and fill the glass. Smell the milk, then take a sip. Dwell on this sequence until it becomes very clear to you. At this point, you probably have the faint taste of milk in your mouth, even though you aren’t actually drinking any milk. That’s because your mind’s incredible ability to code sense impressions into symbols works backward as well: it can turn symbols like the word “milk” into imaginary sense impressions.

Now you’ll temporarily turn off your mind’s symbol-sense mechanism for the word “milk.” Say the word “milk” out loud, over and over again. Say it as fast as you can while still pronouncing it clearly. Time yourself and do it for twenty to forty-five seconds.

What happened to the meaning of the word? Write your reactions here: _______________

_______________

_______________

Most likely, the word “milk” became a nonsense sound for you, no longer calling up vivid sense impressions of the wet, cold, creamy substance you’ve known all your life. Did you notice that the word started sounding odd? Did you start focusing on the way your mouth and jaw muscles moved or how the end of one repetition of the word transitioned into the beginning of the next?

Most people find that the meaning of the word “milk” fades after repeating the word for a while. This fading of meaning rarely happens in real life. We’re all so immersed in a stream of talk and words that we rarely notice that they’re just a bunch of sounds.

Negative Label Repetition

In this exercise you’ll apply the MilkMilkMilk effect to one of the negative labels you tend to apply to yourself. As in the previous exercise, find a private place where you can speak without any concern about being overheard. Start by summing up a negative thought you have about yourself into one word. Pick a really harsh, emotionally loaded, negative word, like “stupid,” “loser,” “wimp,” “bully,” “worthless,” “coward,” or “failure.” A one- or two-syllable word is best; the shorter the word, the better this approach will work. Write the word you’ve chosen in the space below. Rate how painful or distressful it is to think that this word applies to you using a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 means no pain at all and 10 means maximally painful. Then rate how true or believable the word seems to you at this moment using a scale of 0 to 10 in which 0 means not believable at all and 10 means totally true and accurate.

Word: _______________ How painful (0 to 10): _______________ How true (0 to 10): _______________

Now, repeat the word out loud for twenty to forty-five seconds, just like you did the word “milk.”

Notice how much meaning detached from your negative word. Did it become less painful? Did it start to become less true or believable? Rate your word again to see how much it changed.

Word: _______________ How painful (0 to 10): _______________ How true (0 to 10): _______________

Leaves in a Stream

This is a classic meditation practice, used in various forms all over the world to quiet and clear the mind. We thank Steve Hayes (2005) for this particular version. Find a quiet place to practice where you won’t be disturbed.

Sit down, close your eyes, and imagine that you’re sitting on the bank of a slow-moving stream on a warm, peaceful autumn day. Occasionally a leaf falls into the water and floats away on the current, drifting out of sight downstream. Give yourself enough time to form a clear picture of the scene.

Start noticing your thoughts. Whenever a thought comes to mind, sum it up in a simple word or phrase: “boring”…“Johnny”…“sad”…“dumb exercise”…“what’s for lunch?”…and so on.

Put your word or phrase on a leaf and let it float away, out of sight and out of mind.

If thoughts arise as images, without specific words, then place the images on the leaves and let them float away.

Don’t try to make the current flow faster or slower, and don’t try to change what’s on the leaves in any way.

Don’t worry if the stream won’t flow or if you find yourself stuck on a leaf along with a thought or image. Don’t be surprised or worried if the leaves disappear, the whole scene disappears, or you go somewhere else mentally. Just notice that these things happened and then return to the scene beside the stream.

Keep doing this for about five minutes. This should give you enough time to have the experience of trying to let go of your thoughts.

Open your eyes and record your reactions below.

If the stream stopped flowing or you went elsewhere mentally, describe what happened:

_______________

_______________

_______________

If you never really got a clear image of the scene, describe what you were thinking while trying to do the exercise:

_______________

_______________

_______________

This exercise shows how sticky some thoughts are. They can grab you and take you along for a ride even when your intention is entirely otherwise. But this exercise also gives you some practice in letting go of thoughts and letting them drift away. When the stream wouldn’t flow or you were stuck on a leaf with your thoughts, you were experiencing cognitive fusion. When the stream was flowing freely and the leaves carried your thoughts out of sight, you were experiencing cognitive defusion.

White Room Meditation

Like the previous exercise, this is a meditation technique for observing thoughts as they pass through your mind, this time visualizing a simpler, indoor setting. Again, find a quiet place to practice where you won’t be disturbed.

Sit down, close your eyes, and imagine that your mind is an empty white room with two doors. Your thoughts enter through one door and leave through the other.

As each thought crosses the room, dispassionately observe and label it: “jealousy”…“depressing thought”…“thought about Joan”…“mother”…“guilty thought”…and so on.

Notice when thoughts don’t quickly leave the white room and instead hang around in your mind. This happens when you start buying into or believing your thoughts.

As before, record what happened or failed to happen: _______________

_______________

_______________

This exercise gives you practice in labeling or categorizing your thoughts, a key skill for practicing the real-life defusion exercises in the next section.

Real-Life Defusion Exercises

In your day-to-day life out in the real world, you can’t walk around saying, “MilkMilkMilk,” or periodically drop into the lotus position on the sidewalk to meditate. You need shorter, simpler defusion exercises that you can do in an elevator, on the bus, in a meeting, on an airplane, in the shower, in your car, or wherever you find yourself. Here are some approaches you can use in your day-to-day life.

“What’s My Mind Up To?”

This technique helps you defuse from your thoughts by creating some analytical distance. You’ll find that most distressing thoughts fit into the categories of worry, judgment, or planning, so you shouldn’t have to search very long for the right word to fill in the blanks.

When you feel distressed, try this simple technique: Instead of dwelling on distressing thoughts, ask yourself, “What’s my mind up to?” Then answer yourself by labeling each thought as your mind presents it:

“Now my mind is having a _______________ thought.”

“And now my mind is having a _______________ thought.”

“And now my mind is having a _______________ thought.”

Continue in this way until you’ve labeled five to ten thoughts.

Labeling Thoughts

Notice that instead of using statements like “Now I’m worried” or “Now I’m worrying,” the previous exercise uses the phrasing “Now my mind is having a worry thought.” This is labeling: describing a thought as something your mind produces, rather than something you are or something you do. It’s a subtle distinction, but it lies at the heart of defusion. There are a variety of other ways you can label your experiences. When you have a distressing thought, feeling, or urge, try labeling it using one of these forms:

• I am having the thought that _______________ (describe your thought).
  
• I am having the feeling that _______________ (describe your emotion).
  
• I am having a memory of _______________ (describe your memory).
  
• I am feeling the bodily sensation of _______________ (describe your bodily sensation).
  
• I am noticing a desire to _______________ (describe your behavioral urge).