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Becoming Okay (When You're Not Okay): A Step-by-Step Guide to Decrease Suffering and Develop Acceptance
426Overview
A powerfully detailed method of dealing with life’s pains and injustices.” Kirkus Book Reviews
Pain is often part of living; yet, humans naturally resist pain and – in the process of resisting – create more pain for themselves and those they love. In contrast, demonstrating acceptance means approaching the pain of living in a way that gives it less control and less ability to produce suffering. Acceptance is acknowledging what life is, rather than continuing to struggle with what life isn't. Acceptance lessens our struggle with pain and increases our ability to live fully. Acceptance helps us “become okay” – even when we really, really aren’t okay.
While many self-help books emphasize the importance of acceptance, how is it developed? Psychologist, Bryan Bushman, provides a step-by-step roadmap for anyone interested in learning how to rise above emotional or physical pain. Part I of the book suggests powerful ways we can avoid suffering through its innovative use of Buddhism's three paths of suffering. Part II of the book focuses on scientifically-grounded ways to develop acceptance. Combining the best of both eastern- and western-insights with the latest neuropsychological research, Dr. Bushman provides several, easy-to-remember steps that summarize information so people can live richer, more-balanced lives.
Universal in its application, there is something here for everyone. Whether you experience depression, anxiety, chronic illness, emotional trauma, relationship problems, or addictive behaviors, pain doesn’t have to define you. Using playful humor and powerful case examples, Becoming Okay (When You’re Not Okay) provides readers with scientifically-grounded, yet soul-expanding, exercises and insights. You can build a life of vitality and action – even while experiencing some of life’s greatest trials.
“The author packs a great deal of information into his pages, and he delivers all of it with the smooth skill of an expert teacher… He also includes many illustrations, including graphs and charts designed to convey multiple steps at a glance.” Kirkus Book Reviews
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780692078259 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bushman Consulting Services |
| Publication date: | 03/19/2018 |
| Pages: | 426 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.87(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
How to Make Your Life Worse
All mental health professionals share a common goal: to reduce human suffering. This is an intimidating goal, but it's why people come to therapy. People come to therapy because something in their life feels amiss. Perhaps it is a rocky relationship, perhaps it is too much anxiety or depression, perhaps it is a bad habit they can't stop. Regardless of the problem, life has become painful, and people – quite reasonably – want to experience less pain and more pleasure. Although people may define pain and pleasure in different ways, reducing pain and increasing pleasure are the common purposes behind every self-help book, every self-improvement seminar, and every well-meaning piece of advice.
Yet, the quality of our lives is less about the pain we endure and more about how we react to the pain we endure. The same is true of pleasure. Said differently, how we react to our pain or pleasure now affects how much pain or pleasure we'll experience later. Some therapists will say to their patients, "Before you can make your life better, you have to stop making it worse." This is a nice way of saying that how you act on your impulses in the present will change the quality of your life in the future. Many people understand and agree with this, but most of us still feel compelled to act impulsively when we experience the threat of pain or the allure of pleasure. It's as if we are temporarily drunk, and we experience a sudden urge or compulsion to do or say something we usually wouldn't do or say.
This chapter discusses three impulses that seem to give us the most trouble because they block acceptance. The first impulse is to resist pain by trying to avoid it. We push away pain, regardless of what avoidance may cost us in the long run. The second impulse is to become so overwhelmed by our pain we become lost or stuck in it. Our pain consumes us and, unfortunately, we make unwise decisions based on the emotional chaos or turmoil we experience inside. The third and final impulse is to become so captivated by pleasure we hold on to it. We cannot let it go, even if deep down, we know we should. We may regret holding on to this pleasure, but we elevate our temporary enjoyment over our long-term happiness.
All three impulses — avoiding pain, getting stuck or lost in pain, and holding on to pleasure — make life worse or more difficult than it needs to be. Each impulse is associated with a different pathway or pattern of suffering, and this chapter will describe all three pathways. We do not choose these impulses or pathways consciously, of course. In fact, we may feel ourselves slaves to them (hence, the word "impulse"). Yet, most of the human-created problems of this world are not caused by pain or pleasure, per se, but by the impulsive way humans react to pain or pleasure.
Let's begin with a few examples of how the avoidance impulse, in particular, creates trouble. These examples will also clarify the difference between pain and suffering; two words that seem similar but, according to centuries of religious and philosophical teachings, can actually be quite different.
* Pain is not feeling loved in your marriage. Suffering is not feeling loved in your marriage and habitually avoiding your spouse so you can also avoid reminders of how you feel lonely. Now you feel unloved in your marriage and the emotional distance between you and your partner has grown.
* Pain is being laid off from your job. Suffering is being laid off from your job and repetitively going to a bar to drink away feelings of shame. Now you have both a sense of shame from losing your job and from developing a problem with alcohol.
* Pain is being sexually assaulted. Suffering is being sexually assaulted and locking yourself away from any healing relationship so you "don't get hurt again." Now you have the pain of the original assault, and you feel isolated.
* Pain is experiencing racial discrimination. Suffering is experiencing racial discrimination and then avoiding anyone in the majority because you assume they are racist. Now you have the pain of the original discrimination, and you've isolated yourself from potential sources of support.
These examples emphasize two different problems in life: the pain of living (i.e., pain), and the additional pain that comes when you try to avoid all pain (i.e., suffering). In each example, the person did not start out doing anything wrong. Life was just unjust. However, each person reacted to pain by attempting to avoid it and, in the process of avoiding, created suffering. We often cannot and should not avoid all pain; yet, if we are willing to accept some pain, we can prevent suffering. While pain is something everyone experiences, how much we suffer depends on what comes next. In other words, we experience pain because we are alive; we experience suffering because of how we respond.
As I suggested before, avoidance is not the only impulse that creates suffering. As the following examples demonstrate, acting while being lost or stuck in pain or blindly clinging to pleasure also create suffering.
* Pain is being told "I hate you" by your teenage daughter. Suffering is being told "I hate you" by your teenage daughter and yelling back, "I hate you, too!" Now you feel disconnected from your daughter and ashamed of how you handled the situation.
* Pain is having your boyfriend break up with you. Suffering is having your boyfriend break up with you and, in a fit of rage, texting him a picture of the cut on your arm to "show him" how much he hurt you. Now you have no boyfriend, and you feel foolish about how you responded.
* In comparison, pleasure is enjoying a few drinks with friends. Suffering is enjoying a few drinks with friends and not being able to stop yourself from drinking more even though you need to work early the next morning.
* Pleasure is having fun on a first date. Suffering is having fun on a first date and coming on so strongly that by the end of the evening your date is turned off.
In each of these examples, avoidance was not the problem. In the first two examples, the person became lost or stuck in his pain and reacted emotionally. He wasn't avoiding pain; he was overwhelmed by pain and became impulsive. In the last two examples, the person held on to pleasure in a way that inspired foolish action or complicated the situation.
These three impulses (avoiding pain, getting stuck in pain, or holding on to pleasure) create suffering; they make life worse – much worse – than it needs to be. Despite the title of this chapter, I don't want you to make your life worse. But understanding how people make life worse is an important first step. Therefore, this chapter, which is based on both millennia-old spiritual teachings and modern scientific data, gives an overview of the three metaphorical pathways people take to transform their pain or pleasure into suffering.
Resisting Our Way Into Suffering
The Unavoidable Pain of Living
Pain is natural and universal. We use different words to describe psychological pain. Words like sadness, guilt, anxiety, worry, or jealousy are all good examples of emotions most people find painful. But psychological pain includes more than just uncomfortable feelings. Psychological pain also includes uncomfortable thoughts ("I shouldn't be this way!"; "I'm a horrible person"), images or memories (vividly recalling a time when you were rejected by someone) and bodily sensations (tightness of chest, racing heart beat). For simplicity's sake, I lump these internal experiences or reactions under the label of mental pain or aversion. Mental pain, as I will be using the term, is a broad category of automatic internal reactions, which includes difficult or uncomfortable emotions, bodily sensations, visual images, or automatic thoughts. Pain is the deep, gut-level sense that something is wrong, we have been wronged, or we will be wronged.
Notice we don't actually have to be wronged to experience mental pain; just the threat of pain, observing someone else in pain, or the memory of pain is ... well ... painful. This means that pain can be experienced by humans at any time. Other species don't seem to have this problem.
My wife and I have a cat named Pawtucket, who squeaks nervously every time I come around her. This is because she remembers, on some level, how I like to mildly tease her. But Pawtucket doesn't really think about me when I'm not there. While I'm at work, she does not, for instance, think about the future ("What will I do when Bryan comes home and teases me again?"). She does not get trapped in thoughts about the past ("It was so scary yesterday when Bryan said 'No!' after I peed on the carpet. I can't handle something like that happening again!"). She also does not think about her personal flaws ("Why can't I stand up to him? Maybe it is because I was the middle kitty in a litter of twelve and my mother didn't lick me enough."). Based on what we can observe, animals live in a blissful out-of-sight, out-of-mind existence. When Pawtucket is sunning herself, she is only sunning herself — no more, no less. When Pawtucket is napping or eating or stretching, she is only napping, eating or stretching — no more, no less. Animals, like Pawtucket, are capable of emotional learning and remembering (why else would she squeak nervously?), but such capacities often lie dormant because most of the time animals are only concerned with the present.
Humans are different. Once a person reaches a certain age, her advanced ability to remember, plan, and forecast events makes her both a creative problem-solver and potential basket case. When I remember, for example, being rejected by a former lover, I re-experience the pain of unrequited love as if the whole rejection was happening again. Mental pain can also be experienced in a future, conditional sense. For instance, I could imagine being rejected before I even ask someone out. Even though the rejection hasn't actually happened, I experience emotional pain as if it has. In both scenarios, the pain has only happened in my mind. That isn't to say the pain isn't real. It is. But it's experienced either as a memory or as a possibility.
Unfortunately, our brains don't make a distinction between pain based on what is actually happening and pain based on memory or imagination. Unlike Pawtucket, humans carry their emotional pain with them all the time, and sometimes it takes little to activate it. A person, for instance, can be enjoying a beautiful sunset. But something about the sunset reminds him of a friend who died. The person goes from enjoying something peaceful (the sunset) to feeling lousy (grief) in a matter of seconds — and sometimes without even knowing why.
The sad reality is that we cannot escape pain completely. Mental pain is universal because it is automatic. It comes automatically when (1) we come in contact with, remember coming in contact with, or think we may come in contact with something painful; or (2) when we lose, remember losing, or are threatened with losing something pleasurable. These two conditions are inevitable; no one is immune to them. Consequently, no one is immune to pain. We cannot escape pain because we cannot escape ourselves, or – more specifically – the tendencies of the human mind that create pain.
Yet, as we're about to discuss, our obsession with escaping pain is exactly what creates suffering.
The Decision to Suffer
As I'm going to define it in this book, suffering happens when we do something impulsive in response to pain, typically when we are trying to escape from it. Yet, people who insist on avoiding all pain experience at least two types of hurt. The first hurt is the pain itself (e.g., the shame of being laid off, the trauma of the sexual assault). The second hurt is created by the impulsive way people resist the first hurt (e.g., drinking alcohol to numb shame, cutting off contact with everyone to "protect" the self). Buddhism calls the first and second hurts the first and second "darts" of human pain and suffering. The first dart is the pain of living, while the second dart is the pain created by our impulses.
Someone may ask, "Isn't this all just semantics? Why is knowing this important? Does it matter?" Yes, it does matter. In fact, it matters quite a bit.
There is a big difference between someone who accepts legitimate pain and someone who rigidly and persistently avoids it. In my clinical practice, I sometimes see the second type of patient. Here is how it sounds:
Patient: "Doc, please help me feel less anxious."
Me: "In order for you to feel less anxious, you have to challenge your anxiety. You have to face some of your fears."
Patient: "Won't that make me more anxious?"
Me: "At first, yes. But if you face your fears and experience your anxiety without avoiding it, eventually you'll get desensitized, feel less anxious and, more importantly, reclaim your life from anxiety."
Patient: "I don't think I can do that."
Me: "How come?"
Patient: "Because I hate feeling anxious. I just can't handle it ..."
Here is another example of someone who is unwilling to experience pain (first dart) in the service of reducing suffering (second dart).
Patient: "I want to stop drinking."
Me: "Okay. What happens when you've tried to stop drinking before?"
Patient: "Oh, I hate it. I get the shakes. I feel horrible. I can't hang out with my drinking buddies. I feel so lonely."
Me: "I can understand why it is tough, but is it worth it?"
Patient: "Is what 'worth it'?"
Me: "Is reclaiming your life from alcohol worth paying the price of feeling horrible and lonely for a little while?"
Patient: "hmmm. ... I'm not sure. ... I just can't stand feeling that way. Isn't there another way?"
Me: "We can do things to help, but we can't avoid all the pain entailed in making change. After all, if it wasn't painful, you probably would have changed already."
Patient: "I don't know ..."
In this last example, I am meeting again with an obese patient who previously committed to an exercise and diet routine to lose weight.
Me: "So how did the exercising go?"
Patient: "Hmm. ... I didn't get around to it. It was just a really busy week."
Me: "I can understand that, but we spent our last session clearing your schedule so you could have time to exercise."
Patient: "Yeah ... but something always came up."
Me: "What do you mean?"
Patient: "I just wasn't feeling it."
Me: "... 'feeling it'?"
Patient: "You know — I just wasn't motivated."
Me: "You thought you would be more motivated?"
Patient: "Yeah, let's talk about how to increase my motivation."
Me: "We can do that, if you like, but I have to be honest with you. You're 150 pounds overweight. We can reset your goals for exercise, but I think initially you aren't going to be motivated because exercise is not going to be particularly enjoyable for you. It isn't likely you're going to be 'feeling it' until you are almost done with your workout."
Patient: "I know. ... I just hate exercise so much. ..."
In each example, the patient started with clear and admirable goals, like reclaiming a life from anxiety, stopping drinking, or losing weight. Each patient was tired of the second dart of suffering; yet, each of them became hesitant with the realization that he or she would have to experience the first dart of pain, like an increase in anxiety, symptoms of withdrawal and social loneliness, or the discomfort of exercise. These patients aren't morally inferior or stupid. They are just like all of us from time to time; each patient shifted to discussing how much he or she hated experiencing pain to justify continuing down a path of suffering.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Becoming Okay (When You're Not Okay)"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Bryan Bushman.
Excerpted by permission of Bushman Consulting Services.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction. 1
Part I: How to Decrease Suffering
1. How to Make Your Life Worse. 11
2. Awareness and Acceptance: How to Start Making Life Better 43
3. Unpacking Baggage: How the Past Influences Suffering. 65
4. Lies We Tell Ourselves 89
5. Self-destructive Behaviors: Our Best Frenemies 113
6. TRIALS: Putting it All Together 135
Appendix A: Our Three Minds: A Brain-Based Model of Suffering. 159
Appendix B: Examples of Completing TRIALS Journal 171
Part II: How to Develop Acceptance
Introduction to Part II 185
7. Acknowledge Pain and Pleasure. 193
8. Compassionate Defusion. 213
9. Connect to Principles 249
Appendix C: Am I Connecting with My Principles, or Am I Really Just Beating Myself Up? 269
10. Explore Possibilities 271
11. Put Aside Pride. 297
12. Take Action. 313
13. Take Action (Part II): Communicating with Others Effectively. 343
Appendix D: What is Emotional Manipulation?. 367
14. ACCEPT: Putting it All Together (Again) 369
Appendix E: How TRIALS and ACCEPT Compare to Other Models of Psychotherapy. 379
Appendix F: Examples of Using ACCEPT. 383
Appendix G: Using Our Whole Mind: A Brain-Based Model of Acceptance. 391
15. Reflections: Looking Up, Looking Back, Looking Forward. 397
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