A Liberated Mind: The essential guide to ACT

Social Sharing and Defusion

Seeing your thought processes that way is the critical shift from cognitive fusion to defusion; it is shifting from looking at the world structured by thought (the “main movie” or story), to looking with a sense of dispassionate curiosity at the process of thinking itself.

We mistake a quick hit of gratification for a sense of meaning, and we accumulate things and achievements, pursuing a long list of socially mandated “shoulds.”

Values are enduring, ongoing guides to living. You cannot achieve a value; you can only manifest it by acting in accordance with it.

The problem is that instead of orienting us to where we actually are and the opportunities we have, our problem-solving mind tries to orient us by ruminating about what’s happened in our past and worrying about what will happen in our future.

His results suggested to me that it was not fear itself or its associated sensations and thoughts that cause our problems, but our relationship to these experiences that does the damage. That

by building your acceptance skills you can begin to listen to your painful memories and cope with current distress in a less defensive, impulsive way.

As we learn the many relational frames, we move from being able to derive relations by observing events in the world to being able to imagine relations

We often shut ourselves off from expressing the depth of our love, denying ourselves the richness of relationships we might have. Isn’t this in large part because it hurts to risk failure or rejection?