V
Vengeful
Victimized
Violated
Vulnerable
W
Withdrawn
Woe
Worried
Wrath
Step 3: “What am I doing to reduce, avoid, or control unwanted mental content?” (Get in Touch with Your Coping Mechanisms)
It’s important to chart what you’re currently doing to escape from the unpleasant thoughts, feelings, or sensations charted out in the previous step. Your go-to responses might not be helping you, and they could actually be hurting. Traditionally, people try to ignore unwanted thoughts. They suppress them, correct them, replace them with a positive affirmation, or seek out distractions. If Marty Goddard had tried to distract herself from her anxiety after pitching rape kits, she probably would have felt good for the two hours spent watching a movie or the ten minutes eating an ice cream sundae. Once she was reminded of the backlog of unsolved rape cases in Chicago, her distress might have returned. And then what??
Like many people, I respond to distress in a whole slew of unhelpful ways. I take medication, sometimes far too much. I drink too much booze. I distract myself, watching television mindlessly. I force myself to think of something else. I avoid social contact. I exercise excessively. I provoke verbal altercations with strangers and loved ones. I attack people relentlessly online, rarely for any decent reason. I bury myself in work. I hide away at home and withdraw from friends and family. I yell at my kids. I stop talking to my wife. I make excuses for not socializing, for saying no to things, for doing nothing. I play music or listen to podcasts throughout the day to avoid being alone with my thoughts.
Pull out a piece of paper and list (for yourself) your favorite coping mechanisms. How well are these working for you? Even if they ease your pain in the moment, do they cause problems for you afterward?
As an alternative to these and other common coping strategies, try “cognitive defusion.” The name sounds pretentious but stick with me here. It’s an approach uncovered by psychologists that you can easily perform at home without involving others, and has been shown to help you reduce the influence of unwanted thoughts and feelings. Cognitive defusion is a psychological exercise in which you create a mental space between yourself and the thoughts you’re thinking. If you can create this space, it becomes easier to consider thoughts and feelings in a detached way, since you’re no longer binding them to your identity. If our emotions and thoughts are like slices of pie, cognitive defusion has you switch from being the judge of a pie baking contest to a nonchalant audience member given a free taste—who notices the flaky crust that offsets the warm, soft apple filling, and the excess cinnamon that offers a tingling sensation on the tongue (hungry yet?). You don’t get upset at the imperfections of the pie slices tasted. You’re just observing. And the act of observing neutralizes the power of your emotions.
Dozens of techniques exist to help us separate ourselves from our thoughts and feelings. One powerful method is simply to treat thoughts and feelings like objects by externalizing them. Scientific studies have asked people to recall intensely distressing words about their identity (such as the words “fat,” “ugly,” “unattractive,” “uninteresting,” “unlovable,” “friendless”) and write them down on a piece of paper or say them aloud for thirty to sixty seconds. As participants view these ugly thoughts for what they are—just thoughts, not a reflection of reality—they regard them as less important and in turn become less distressed by them. The effect lasts as long as people keep practicing the technique. Even cooler, people find these thoughts to be less believable. When people write their ugly thoughts on paper, researchers ask them to rip the piece of paper into tiny, unreadable shreds and toss them into a garbage pail. Multiple studies have shown that the mere act of physicalizing unwanted thoughts and feelings and destroying them literally and metaphorically reduces their impact.
Here are a few other techniques you can use to neutralize thoughts and feelings by separating them from yourself and your identity:
1. Treat your mind like a separate creature. It’s not as if we believe the mind is separate from the rest of us, but something psychologically powerful happens when you treat it as nothing more than an opinion generator. Get in the habit of using descriptive phrases when your mind produces ugly thoughts and feelings. Be playful or be serious. “Thank you, Mind, for being so unhelpful this morning.” Ask questions such as, “Mind, what’s your opinion on whether this section will be persuasive to readers?” Give feedback to what your mind produces with short phrases such as, “Good one, Mind” or “That’s a new one” or “Way to go for the jugular!” This exercise will help you create distance between your thoughts and you, the thinker.
2. Give the story a name. You can label stories your mind generates that are getting old, trite, and appallingly boring. For instance, as a New Yorker, I speak rapidly, to the point where people often ask me to slow down. I’m a bit self-conscious about it. This is my “speed demon story.” I have many moles, birthmarks, and brown spots on my body. For years, I felt insecure about it and never took off my shirt. This is my “chocolate chip story.” Name it, play with it, and your negative thoughts will lose some of their sting.
3. Go into detective mode. When talking to ourselves, we rarely stop and ask: Who the hell is talking to us? And what is their sex, gender, race, age? When an ugly thought arises, go on a scavenger hunt and figure out the answers to these and other questions. What does the voice in your head sound like? Who is doing the talking? Where is the voice located? Is the voice moving or changing? What will this voice come up with next? Show a level of curiosity about your thoughts, reminding yourself that you’re not what shows up because a part of you notices what is happening. You can’t be both the thing itself and the noticer of the thing (unless we are playing quantum physics games).
4. Modify the thinking machine. Your brain talks a lot. It rarely stops talking. You are better able to remain in the present moment, doing what you care about, if you change your relationship to the words. Alter the voice. Choose your favorite television character and imagine your mind speaking to you with their speaking pattern (I prefer Morty from Rick and Morty). Imagine your mind’s thoughts appearing on a scrolling banner, just like the breaking news banner at the top of a newspaper website. Write your thoughts on index cards with artistic calligraphy (I prefer bubble letters). Envision leaves floating on a river. Put your ugly thoughts on a leaf and watch it float past. Do the same thing by putting your thoughts on clouds and notice as they blow by, slowly. As you experiment with how thoughts appear through your five senses, their influence on behavior lessens. When you normalize thoughts, they are less likely to pull you out of the present moment to ruminate instead of live.
Again, the point of cognitive defusion isn’t to help you escape, avoid, or minimize negative thoughts and feelings. It’s to let you experience negative thoughts so that you can behave courageously in the face of adversity. An extension of the immortal words of the renowned existential psychologist Rollo May in 1963, “Freedom is the individual’s capacity to know that he is the determined one, to pause between stimulus and response and thus to throw his weight, however slight it may be, on the side of one particular response among several possible ones . . . I would define mental health as the capacity to be aware of the gap between stimulus and response, together with the capacity to use this gap constructively.”
Step 4: “What am I doing or could be doing to chase my values?” (Gauge Your Opportunities)
Now that you’ve reconnected with your purpose, acknowledged your thoughts and emotions, and broken with unhelpful ways of processing them, there is one more step: invest in aspirational behavior that guides you toward meaningful living. Here you make that sharp turn and recommit to chasing a heroic version of yourself, even if it’s psychologically difficult. You choose to contribute to a better society rather than tie yourself up in another attempt to escape pain. How will you deal with the onslaught of adversaries and detractors in the push for creating healthy, personally meaningful social change? What kind of person will you really be? Here is where you make that call—and start to live it.
Begin by noticing what you’re already doing that, even in an emotionally intense situation, is bringing you satisfaction and fulfillment. For Goddard, it was the ability to retain decency amidst adversity. As she remarked, “I would say the most important strategy is don’t name call. But along with that is, be nice, have a little class, and keep one foot in with the institutions and one foot out and then you can move any way you want. Left, right, up, down, backward, forward.” For others, it might be asking for someone’s perspective on an issue, acquiring new knowledge and wisdom, sharing knowledge to benefit other people, improving health by exercising, eating, and sleeping well, keeping a journal of lessons learned and exceptional moments, offering genuine apologies, or spending time connecting with friends and supporting each other’s wins and losses.
When thinking about how you’re chasing your values, be intentional. Don’t rely on the kinds of superficial descriptions you’ve long used when introducing yourself to strangers. In fact, you might find it helpful to pause for a moment and separate out the real “you” in your mind from the public persona you cultivate. Pretend you’re on a desert island with nobody serving as your audience. What music would you enjoy listening to, what books would you read, what movies would you watch, what topics of conversation would you find enthralling? How would you identify yourself to yourself if nobody else were listening?
Once you’ve thought about how you’re already chasing your values, consider your current activities and how you might frame goals for intentionally spending your limited time in the days and weeks ahead. We might call these objectives “strivings.” They capture what we’re “trying” to do right now and plan to continue pursuing in the future. For example, we might adopt “trying to produce more persuasive arguments” as a striving, even if we don’t necessarily succeed at it on a daily or weekly basis.
We can frame strivings broadly (for instance, “trying to transform my passions into a job”) or more specifically (“trying to seek sources of financial support to transition into a full-time artist”). We can also construe strivings positively or negatively; they might convey something we’re trying to obtain or keep, or something we’re trying to avoid or prevent. For example, you might be trying to gain more attention from others, or perhaps you’re trying to avoid calling attention to yourself.
Note that strivings are a pretty cool way of describing yourself that don’t make use of personality adjectives such as “friendly,” “intelligent,” or “honest.” For now, forget about personality adjectives. Focus just on defining the personal projects you’re currently working on and would like to continue pursuing, jotting your ideas down in a notebook. Thinking carefully about what you value in everyday life, try to compose six strivings starting with the stem “I am trying to . . .” Don’t mentally compare what you are striving for with what other people do. Keep returning to the idea of what you would like to pursue, even if nobody ever found out about your accomplishments. Just as carefully describing your exact feelings in a demanding situation can help you, you can benefit by breaking down your life into precise personal strivings.
From here, consider what it might feel like to embrace your pain and act in ways aligned with your core values. What do you want to do? What do you want to be about? You can accomplish a great deal in any situation when you switch from avoiding pain to hunting for a sense of meaning. Committing to positive behavior change can go far. In our research, my colleagues and I found that even adults suffering from severe social anxiety disorder enjoy practically the same sense of self-worth as healthy adults on days when they commit to positive behavior change or work toward personally meaningful strivings. A measure of their daily sense of meaning in life rose by 19 percent and they saw a 14 percent increase in how many times they experienced positive emotions. Meanwhile, their negative emotional experiences fell by 10 percent.
To ramp up your commitment to principled rebellion, share your plans with peers. Such tactics work with a wide range of personal goals we might have. In one study, a sample of 324 overweight, sedentary adults participated in a sixteen-week “Internet-mediated walking program.” Participants who could post their goals, effort, and progress on an online discussion board were 13 percent better at sticking with the program than those without such access.
Whom you disclose your personal strivings to matters. If you really want to maximize performance toward personalized, mission-related goals, disclose this information to an audience that includes someone you respect, admire, and whose opinion matters. Sharing your mission plans with people you view as lower in status doesn’t help, nor does recording your objectives in a secret black book with private notes and musings. As we’ll see in the next chapter, we care about making a positive impression on others, and we worry about how others will think of us if we fail to meet our goals. Such concerns render us more likely to do the hard work of Hunting Meaning. Anxiety is energy, so find your carefully curated tribe and show your commitment by publicizing the plan. Our allies only benefit us if they know our commitments.
To Hunt Meaning effectively, we must prepare for obstructions, both internal and outside us. Think of the prison sentences levied on heroic liberators such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Emmeline Pankhurst, and Ahmet Altan (what a story, look him up!). Imagine how prison compromised their ability to deliver on their goals. At the beginning of each day, contemplate the efforts you’ll make toward your strivings, but also anticipate disruption. I find the following meditation by Marcus Aurelius instructive:
When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own—not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural.
Don’t stop at anticipating obstacles. Plan for them. Answer this question often: “What might get in the way of following through on today’s intention to devote effort toward my strivings? And what will I try to do about it?” You want backup plans at your disposal, so make sure you envision the multiple paths available as you direct energy toward strivings. In short, hope for the best, but brace for the worst. Positivity alone won’t help you build mental fortitude. You need to crack open a jar of psychological flexibility whup-ass. Above all, don’t shrink from adversity. Do the hard work of realizing your full potential, using the four steps of the Psychological Flexibility Dashboard as a helpful set of tools.
REBEL ANYWAY
Rebels who are psychologically flexible possess an enviable ability to dissent despite pain. They suffer—and rebel anyway. To walk through the Dashboard is to reset yourself, turning away from merely escaping pain and toward the renewed pursuit of your goal. You engage in a variety of complicated tasks including a clarification of values (“What and who is important to me?”); a discovery of the unpleasant feelings and thoughts experienced (“What unwanted thoughts, feelings, memories, and bodily sensations show up?”); an analysis of your habitual reactions to those feelings and thoughts (“What am I doing to reduce, avoid, or control unwanted mental content?”); and an affirmation of aspirational solutions (“What am I doing or could be doing to chase my values?”). All along, take note of your experiences, planning how you might build the life you seek going forward. Working with a common language and set of questions, you sift through mental content to arrive at intentional, workable behaviors.
Use the Dashboard over time, and you really will become more psychologically flexible. You’ll learn to break quickly from old patterns and prejudices and swap in new, healthier behaviors. You’ll become more aware of the freedom of action you truly have, increasing the chance that you’ll act on non-conformist ideas that occur to you. The key, as simple as it sounds, is to question. By opening up our assumptions to fresh analysis, we create a new potential for creativity and principled insubordination. The emotional hardships of pushing for a new, better way no longer seem as unsettling as sticking with status quo ideas, processes, and products.
Let’s say you do manage to handle your distress and stay in the game long enough to defeat the establishment. You’ve won! But as you savor the glory of victory, you face a choice: How will you treat the members of the establishment who lost power and prominence? Will you extend your hand in partnership, treating your former enemy as a colleague, friend, or even ally? Or will you exclude them as you were once excluded, lording your newfound power over them?
Dealing with relationship transitions in group dynamics can prove just as difficult as remaining resilient during a hard fight. Although people often seek therapists to deal with distress, they seldom do so upon winning in the face of adversity. But we need help to adjust to winning in healthy ways, both as individuals and as groups, lest we compromise the very mission we as rebels have been advancing. As science reveals, wounds we inflict on others have a way of coming back at us. To rebel successfully, you must know how to win gracefully and inclusively, and you must challenge yourself to stay true to the humane values and intentions you nurtured all along. We’ve talked about the pain of fighting. Let’s now turn to the responsibility that comes with winning, and how to exercise that responsibility admirably.
