If I have ever given the impression that I imagine I can go through life intact, in one piece, I apologise. I desire to feel a gamut of emotions from sad to happy and everything in between. (I can be ecstatic over one relationship and heartbroken over another, all at once.) I trust that this flexibility will give me strength, because I can create value for people in my life when I understand what they are feeling.
We all experience emotions in our own patterns. What helps is having a connection with yourself that allows you to diagnose emotions and urges successfully, because knowing how you are feeling is a big clue to understanding the motives of your own behaviour.
In turn, you can then begin to guess at the patterns of people who are like you. Eventually, perhaps even predict the motives of the behaviours of people who are not like you; who originate from backgrounds that have little in common with yours.
This is the power of human emotion. What does not overpower us will help us transcend.
Mindfulness: casting off selfish drives; putting our best needs first
When we are in that space where we can retain a rationality and objectivity district from our selfish, visceral nature, we can become emotionally dependable and animated by our true desires. This is the big benefit of mindfulness, and why it is growing in popularity today.
When you are being mindful, the chatter of life doesn't disappear. The pull of strong emotion will try and divert your attention away from the practice. What the mindful person can do is simply fade those narratives out in favour of re-focusing on the birdsong, for example, or the crash of waves on a beach, or the traffic noises outside the window.
The pause: letting go to catch yourself up on how you're feeling
The Acceptance and Commitment Therapy course I finished three weeks ago taught that we needed to take regular pauses in our day like this. The purpose of these was to step back from ourselves and then step back into the moment. When you notice what there is in the senses and sounds you come to know you are not causing these events to happen. Perfectionism or anxiety can take a back seat. Life just is.
The idea is that being present will help me assess how my body feels, what thoughts I am having, and how appropriate my coping skills are at this time. If I am not the origin of events unfolding before me, then I cannot control the majority of them. I can reflect my values in how I respond to them.
Will your anchor hold & how to find it?
Because values are a keystone of ACT, we are hoping to arrange a support group where we can journey through what our values are together. Mindfulness is key to ACT, and we spent huge amounts of time on this because the logical order is “pause to find your anchor,” with the anchor being the reaction (feeling or thought) that would best reflect your values in the world. For example, a good anchor would be lovingkindness.
It's surprising how we struggle as humans to articulate our values, and this is perhaps because we are bombarded constantly by objects or relationships we 'should' value, without thinking what would bring our values to their best realisation in the world, and give us the highest long-term emotional pay off. The process of finding values can be remarkably nuanced. Lovingkindness may incorporate a value of social justice, for example. A pause gives the opportunity to consider which value is of primary importance in that moment.
Grasp the nettle & move on in spite of yourself? Yes, you can!
My values are Christian. ACT processes refuse pat answers. I've endured a pain for the sake of my individual values within the faith, and it's interesting to look at that and examine the take I have on life. There is a 'grasp the nettle' element to ACT that may appeal if you are a person who feels easily bruised by life. I'm not ready to give up right now. This doesn't lessen the intensity of how I feel. To persevere in my Christian faith it's imperative that I learn to progress through my disappointment.
We are all programmed to avoid pain. What ACT does is ask how you are coping with the pain you can't avoid. If coping is unhelpful, you are asked to feel the pain instead, and press on with a meaningful direction. The hope is that when you get to where you want to be the pain won't have prevented you from reaching your destination.