Lessons from Traveling in Time

By Annabelle Parr, MA, AMFT

Have you ever wished you could have a do over? Go back in time and alter an embarrassing moment, or seize a missed opportunity, or simply get more time to do the things that matter most to you?

What might we learn if we could travel back in time and do things differently?

Every year around New Year’s, I watch my favorite movie, About Time. It’s a rom com about a man who learns that the men in his family can travel back in time within their own lives, and it is filled with sweetness and some profound messages that are remarkably consistent with the core principles of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). If you haven’t seen the film, warning: spoilers ahead. In his travels through time, Tim, the main character, learns a number of lessons about creating and living a full, vital life.

Lesson #1: Traveling in time gives you unlimited chances to behave differently, but the outcome of your behavior is still always beyond your control.

Upon learning that he has the ability to time travel, Tim quickly clarifies that what matters most to him is love (values), and what he most wants to use this unique ability to achieve is finding someone with whom to share his life (goal). One of the first things he learns is that even with the ability to go back in time and try things differently, he ultimately cannot control the outcome of his behavior, just like the rest of us. He can pursue his goal by showing up to each moment bringing the qualities he most wants to embody (values), but the outcome of his actions is outside of his control. He may get to test things out more than the rest of us, and may gather more information on what behaviors may make a particular outcome more likely, but just like the rest of us, in the end, the outcome is still beyond his control.

Lesson #2: All the time travel in the world can’t erase pain.

Nevertheless, Tim continues to show up to each moment fully (present centered awareness), holding his goals for the life he hopes to build lightly and being the kind, loving, humorous man he hopes to be (committed actions), and ultimately he does build a beautiful life and family filled with love. As he does so, he learns that even his gift cannot shield him from the pain that comes with being human. Just like the rest of us, if he wants to engage in the joys, he must also be willing to have the pain that is inevitable if we are willing to care, to love, and to be loved (willingness).

Lesson #3: The secret to a rich, meaningful life is being fully present and choosing how you will meet each moment. 

Toward the end of the film, Tim shares my favorite lesson of all. He shares his father’s secret to a good life. His father tells him to live each day twice: “the first time with all the tensions and worries that stop us noticing how sweet the world can be, but the second time noticing.” In the simple act of noticing (present centered awareness), and making a conscious decision about how he responds (committed action), Tim finds how much richer and fuller life can be.

The film finishes with Tim sharing,

“And in the end I think I've learned the final lesson from my travels in time; and I've even gone one step further than my father did. The truth is I now don't travel back at all, not even for the day. I just try to live every day as if I've deliberately come back to this one day, to enjoy it, as if it was the full final day of my extraordinary, ordinary life.”

In this final lesson, Tim sums up the goal of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: to meet each day fully, with openness to whatever shows up and awareness of our experience, and to choose to actively engage in each moment with the qualities that we most hope to embody. When we are fully present, we begin to notice all of the opportunities we have to engage in our lives as the people we most hope to be. As Tim discovers, we don’t actually need time travel at all; the moments we are given are already full of opportunity to be who we most hope to be right now.

CSAM IS HERE TO HELP

If you or someone you love needs support and might benefit from cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) or acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) for anxiety, panic, phobias, stress, PTSD, OCD, uncertainty or stress related to COVID-19, or if you would like more information about our telehealth services, please contact us at (858) 354-4077 or at info@csamsandiego.com

5 Life Lessons From Taylor Swift’s Miss Americana and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

By Annabelle Parr

In her new documentary, Miss Americana, Taylor Swift not only gives her fans a whole new window into her life, she also beautifully exemplifies a way of being that is remarkably consistent with the principles of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).

The documentary takes us through Taylor’s life and her rise to fame. She shares how for the first part of her career, she was consumed with a hunger for approval from others. Her entire persona was built on the premise of being a “good” girl: sweet, agreeable, likeable, pretty, thin, reserved, perfect.

A nice girl doesn’t force their opinions on people. A nice girl smiles and waves and says ‘thank you.’ A nice girl doesn’t make people feel uncomfortable with her views. I was so obsessed with not getting in trouble, I’m just not going to do anything that anyone can say anything about.

In ACT, we would say that Taylor was caught in “self-as-content” mode. She viewed herself as equivalent to the content of her thoughts and the content of others’ opinions about her. She was fused to an idea about who and how she was and had to be. And for good reason. She was and is constantly bombarded with both positive and negative messages about herself from millions of people.

1. We are designed to crave acceptance and connection.

For Taylor, just like for every one of us, there are very good reasons for why we come to view ourselves in a particular way: we exist in a context in which we pick up messages about who we are or how we should be, and our minds latch on to those ideas to try to protect us. Back in our hunter-gatherer days, our literal survival was tied directly to social acceptance and cohesion with the group. So we are hard wired to need connection and acceptance.

2. Often we seek that acceptance out by trying to make ourselves into who we think we are supposed to be.

Taylor, like so many of us, tried to fit herself into the mold of what others wanted from her. However, as Taylor found, this strategy often comes at a high price.

First, it cuts us off from parts of ourselves that are absolutely integral to who we are.

Our wholeness suffers when we are required to squeeze into a box of who we think we “should” be. We lose touch with who we truly are as we seek approval and try endlessly to please others. Taylor notes, “I became the person who everyone wanted me to be.” She literally stopped feeding herself in an effort to make herself small enough to fit into the mold of what was expected of her. 

Second, no matter how desperately we try, we will never please everyone.

Approval from others is a fragile foundation on which to lay our self-worth, because inevitably we will disappoint some people sometimes. Even as Taylor was starving herself, she saw that “there’s always some standard of beauty that you’re not meeting.” There are a number of double binds that are particularly present for women, and they include more than just paradoxical beauty requirements (e.g. be skinny, but also have a big butt). As Dr. Jill Stoddard noted in Be Mighty: A Woman’s Guide to Liberation from Anxiety, Worry & Stress Using Mindfulness and Acceptance Strategies, “we are evaluated as less competent when we are seen as likeable; when we are considered competent, we are more likely to be labeled unlikeable (Heilman et al., 2004; Rudman and Glick, 1999)”. This likability bind is another that Taylor is intimately familiar with. As Taylor states so poignantly,

When you’re living for the approval of strangers, and that is where you derive all of your joy and fulfillment, one bad thing can cause everything to crumble…When people decided I was wicked and evil and conniving and not a good person, that was the one I couldn’t bounce back from because my whole life was centered around it.

Most of us are not mega-famous like Taylor, but her words are incredibly relatable for anyone who has ever relied on approval from others to feel okay.

3. The thing is, we cannot avoid discomfort.

It might seem like if we just make ourselves perfect enough, we could avoid rejection or criticism or failure. But even if we could be perfect and avoid all of those things, we then would have to wrestle with the pain of making ourselves smaller to be more acceptable. ACT teaches us that pain is inevitable, and that the problem is not the pain itself but the rigid and inflexible ways we respond to it and the ways we restrict our lives to try to avoid it. 

4. It’s not your fault, and it is your responsibility to do something different if you want to see change.

Taylor describes feeling muzzled for most of her career. She says that it was her own doing, which is true to an extent in that she discovered that she could choose to speak up and be true to who she really is. However, it’s also important to note that she was muzzled by a culture and a context that told her in order to be liked, accepted, successful, and safe, she was not allowed to have an authentic voice. It was not her fault that she was muzzled, but it was up to her to break free. And in doing so, she is setting a powerful example for other women, pop star and otherwise, that authenticity and success are not mutually exclusive. She is helping to shift a culture that has muzzled women for centuries.

I want to wear pink and tell you how I feel about politics. And I don’t think that those things have to cancel each other out.

5. Our values can help set us free.

As viewers watch Taylor descend into isolation and depression resulting from others’ negative opinions of her, we also see her begin to change and grow in really powerful ways. She transforms from the stereotypical picture of a “good girl” into a bold, strong, mighty, authentic woman. She is no longer driven by the opinions of others, but grounded in what is important to her: being present with her family and her partner, and using her voice to stand up for what she believes in. She displays a willingness to risk rejection and discomfort in the service of speaking up for women, the LGBTQ+ community, sexual assault survivors, and minorities. She is often advised to stay small and quiet, but chooses instead to be true to who she is.

ACT in ACTion.

In cultivating a willingness to risk pain and rejection, getting present to who and what matters most, and recognizing she is far more than the stories told about her, Taylor is able to make choices in line with her own authentic, personally held values. The documentary finishes with Taylor saying,            

I want to still have a sharp pen and a thin skin and an open heart.

This last piece of wisdom is important: the key is not to stop caring, but rather to get grounded in who you are and what you care about. Our pain points us toward our values. It hurts precisely because we care. Vulnerability is a strength, and it is only when we are willing to risk discomfort that we are truly able to connect with what matters.

Rather than let her experiences and her pain harden her, Taylor allowed herself to feel her feelings and to use them as fuel to get clear on who she wants to be in the world. Her thin skin and open heart are not only the things that give her songwriting such power, but also the things that empower her to stand strong in herself even when it isn’t easy or comfortable.

Mental Wellness Month: How Do We Define Wellness?

By Annabelle Parr

According to the internet, January is Mental Wellness Month. Sounds like a good cause, right? Absolutely! But pausing to consider our definition of mental wellness is important. Because if you spend much time on the internet, it might have you believing that wellness and self-care are defined by bubble baths, weighted blankets, and being perpetually Zenned out. And bubble baths, weighted blankets, and being in touch with your inner Zen are great! But mental wellness and caring for ourselves are not quite that simple.

So from a therapeutic perspective, what exactly is mental wellness? If we define illness based on a list of symptoms, do we define wellness simply as a lack of said symptomology? Or does wellness have its own particular set of characteristics equally worth defining?

If illness is a sense of dis-ease, is wellness a perpetual state of ease?

Psychiatry and psychotherapy developed based on a model which was focused primarily on pathology and illness or “dis-ease.” Beginning with Sigmund Freud’s exploration of the unconscious mind and evolving toward a medical model of treatment centered around the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), psychotherapy has historically been centered around identifying and diagnosing a problem and working to treat it. And of course, this is a worthy mission, but it is an incomplete picture of the larger whole of life. Life is not simply about absence of illness, dis-ease, or discomfort. It is about engaging in life in a way that brings us meaning, purpose, and hopefully some joy as well.

Wellness is not about the absence of discomfort, but rather the presence of meaning.

From an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) perspective, mental wellness is defined by our ability to engage in life in ways that bring us a sense of meaning, purpose, and vitality. Mental wellness is characterized by our ability to, moment by moment, make choices and take action in the service of our personally chosen values. And this might be surprising, but it is actually deliberately NOT defined by a lack of painful emotions, such as anxiety, fear, worry, and stress. Not only are these feelings and experiences an unavoidable part of being human, but they are directly and inextricably linked to our values.

“We hurt where we care.”

Steven Hayes, one of the ACT co-founders, noted that we hurt where we care. As Dr. Jill Stoddard pointed out in her book, Be Mighty: A Woman’s Guide to Liberation from Anxiety, Worry & Stress Using Mindfulness & Acceptance, when we look at the things that keep us up at night, the ones that weigh heavy on our minds and hearts, they probably do not include the fate of Netflix. We might enjoy a good Netflix binge, but whether Netflix will continue to thrive is probably not on our list of worries. Instead, the things that we worry about tend to be the things that matter to us on a deep level, such as our family, friends, work, home, etc.

Pain and values are two sides of the same coin.

In other words, when we look closely, the emotional pain we experience tends to point directly to what’s important to us. If we want a life that is full of wellness – full of those things that truly matter to us, that bring us joy, connection, passion, and purpose – we have to be willing to risk having difficult and painful feelings. We cannot have one without the other because it wouldn’t hurt if we didn’t care and vice versa. When we try to rid ourselves of all painful feelings, we also restrict our ability to engage with the things that we really care about. As much as we might wish otherwise, we cannot have joy without also risking pain. As Brené Brown said so well, we cannot selectively numb emotion. When we are unwilling to have pain, we will also be less able to experience joy.

Our emotions are not problems to be solved; the problem is when our behavior prevents us from engaging in life in functional and fulfilling ways.

From a diagnostic perspective, it is not simply the presence of anxiety that warrants a diagnosis; rather it is the functional impairment that the anxiety creates that helps determine whether someone meets criteria for diagnosis. Said otherwise, a diagnosis includes consideration of whether your experience of your emotions, thoughts, and sensations causes you to limit your behavior such that your life is restricted in significant areas, like work, school, and relationships.

Wellness is about how we respond to pain when it shows up.

Therefore, wellness is not defined by the absence of stress, anxiety, grief, worry, anger, or frankly any other emotion. Instead it is all about how you are able to manage difficult thoughts, feelings, and experiences and still continue to engage in life in a way that is fulfilling, meaningful, and guided by what is important to you. And ACT, beyond emphasizing the importance of values-based actions, has plenty of wisdom regarding how to increase psychological flexibility such that you are able to respond more effectively when discomfort arises.

If you find that your thoughts and feelings are holding you back from living your life in the way that you might want, ACT can help. For some excellent resources, check out our suggested reading and our suggested podcasts. For professional support, an ACT therapist can help guide you on your journey.

CSAM IS HERE TO HELP

If you or someone you love needs support and might benefit from cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) or acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) for anxiety, panic, phobias, stress, PTSD, OCD, or insomnia, or if you would like more information about our therapy services, please contact us at (858) 354-4077 or at info@csamsandiego.com

My Horcrux Diary

guest blog post by Dr. Nic Hooper

Have you read the quote below by T.E. Lawrence?

"All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.”  

I’m a dreamer. Always have been. Ever since I could remember, I wanted to do remarkable things that would make the world a better place. Over the years, I’ve had lots of ideas for how to do this but often I would ‘wake up in the day to find it was vanity’. In other words, the ideas remained just that; ideas. On a recent project, I became a ‘dreamer of the day’.

I research an approach to human suffering named Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). The pitch of ACT goes something like this: if we can be willing to experience all of our thoughts and feelings, both positive and negative, whilst continuing to move in valued directions, then we will do a decent job at this game of life. One night, after delivering an ACT intervention to teachers, I had this thought: “It is really easy to forget our values; I need to create something that will remind people of what is important to them.” In the following weeks I came up with the idea of an annual diary. For the most part, this diary would be like any other diary i.e. it would have days and dates and spaces to record meetings. However, it would also provide an opportunity for the user to record what is important to them at the beginning of each week.

Ok, so there was the idea. Now I had to do something with it. The first step was easy; I loaded Microsoft Word and spent hours and hours and hours (with my co-author Dr. Freddy Jackson Brown) shaping the words and lines that would make up the inside of the diary. The second step was more difficult. I had to figure out how to take that file and turn it into a product. First question: a publisher or a printing house? No publisher was interested so we went with a printing house. Then, more questions. What sort of spine to go for? How thick should the paper be? How many copies should we buy? How should we sell it? What are the best postage and packaging options? How should we advertise it? How should we accept payment for it? How do we pay tax? Who is going to post them? How should we grow the product over time?

During the first and second steps I faced a fair bit of discomfort (i.e. seemingly powerful negative thoughts often crossed my mind: “this is a waste of time”, “nobody will like it” or “you should be spending this time with Max”). However, the third step of making my idea a reality brought the most discomfort: once I had the completed product, I sent it out there into the scary world. And given that success or failure has implications for how I feel about myself, my diary is a bit like a Horcrux in the Harry Potter story. In that story, the bad guy (Voldemort) poured his soul into a number of items and placed them out there in the world. Those items were called ‘Horcruxes’. His thinking was that this strategy would make him more difficult to kill.

Like Voldemort, I poured my soul into this Horcrux. And like Voldemort, any attack on the Horcrux feels like it kills a part of my soul (‘attack’ is an extreme word that is possibly misplaced here. By ‘attack’, what I mean is any evidence I see that the diary is not worthy, whether it be a lack of sales, little interest on social media or negative feedback). My Horcrux diary is now out there in the world fending not just for itself but, in some ways, for me also. A bit of my soul is unprotected; it can be scrutinized, criticized or ignored. It can fail. And if it fails then it will hurt like hell.

The feeling of vulnerability that comes with trying to do something remarkable is tiring, and it often makes me question whether it would have been better to stay a ‘dreamer of the night’. If my Horcrux is inside my mind then nobody can see it; nobody can hurt me. However, every time I think about this I come to the same conclusion. Although being a ‘dreamer of the night’ comes with built-in safety, if I didn’t do something with my dreams then I’d be living a life out of step with my value of making the world a better place, and consequently, I’d feel empty.

Why am I telling you all this? For two reasons. Firstly, I want you to see how ACT is in my blood. Just in this blog you will spot how I used important ACT processes (willingness, defusion, self-as-context, values). Secondly, and more importantly, I want you to see that having ACT in my blood helped me to chase my dreams, and that it can help you to do the same. Chasing dreams will bring vulnerability but if you know what to do with vulnerability then you will be free.

Interested in checking out Dr. Hooper’s Annual Diary for Valued Action? Check it out here.

CSAM IS HERE TO HELP

If you or someone you love might benefit from cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) or acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) for anxiety, stress, PTSD, insomnia, or chronic illness, or if you would like more information about our therapy services, please contact us at (858) 354-4077 or at info@csamsandiego.com