Whole Sight

Befriending resistance

In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, “resistance” means the way we sometimes fight against painful thoughts, feelings, sensations, etc. It’s a good word for getting across the physicality of what is supposedly a mental struggle: when we’re resisting, it can feel like someone is tugging on us, trying to pull us over, and we’re fighting to stay upright or get away.

Resistance can set up quicker than thinking, as quick as throwing a hand in front of our face if an object seems about to hit us. Bang! It hits us anyway, and we find ourselves grappling with our anxiety, our depressive thoughts, our hostility or panic or self-loathing.

Resistance can also be slow. It can build from some seemingly minor incident, some event we shrug off as no big deal. Our shrugging off is how it begins, but we don’t notice this. Over hours or even days the heat of the resistance spreads the way a coal seam fire spreads underground beneath an entire town. Suddenly it bursts into the open, and we find ourselves behaving badly, hurting ourselves or people we love. Not understanding why. If this happens enough times, and if we pay attention, we may start to remember the small triggering incidents - we may start to see the pattern.

Resistance seems like a bad thing, does it not? It’s avoidance; it’s the thing we’re not supposed to have, the thing we’re not supposed to be doing. We’re supposed to drop the rope, but here we are hauling away on it. Ashamed of ourselves, even. Why haven’t we made more progress?

Yet we can think of resistance as our friend. Why not?

Once we notice it, we can work with it. Over and over, the same way we do everything in life over and over: sleeping and waking, eating and fasting, resisting and accepting. Naturally, over and over. Seizing the possibility of something more.

It is clear that resistance begins with the mind’s judgment that whatever we are feeling or thinking or sensing is so wrong as to be intolerable. Letting go of resistance begins with letting go of this judgment - not denying it, just opening our hand so it can slip free. Sometimes I’ve felt the release as a physical event. Other times, most times, not. There is no rule I know of.

The release may result in thoughts springing up: What does this say about me? What do I do next? A hard part is realizing that in fact we don’t know what will come next. Here, experience helps. We can learn that in certain situations, opening up leads to unpredictable but generally good things, so that we become willing to repeat the experiment, create a habit of openness.

That goes only so far, of course - at first. Until we realize sometime later that yes, we did succeed - and triumphantly yet fearfully begin to generalize, to work our way farther away from comfort, extending willingness with each step into more difficult territory.

I wonder what awaits us - what awaits me. If I begin to find beauty in unguessed places inside myself, will I also find it in unguessed places in the world?

Add comment June 14th, 2008

Repealing the Law of Attraction

I picked a friend up from the bus stop the other day to drive them up to the art colony run by my girlfriend. This friend asked how I was doing, and being in a self-deprecating but decent mood I said something I hoped was witty: “Oh, smelly, grouchy, and broke, but I’m okay.”

My friend’s ears pricked up at the sound of the word “broke.” Being a singer-songwriter, she too is a struggling artist - like so many of us up here in Woodstock - and thus no stranger to the dilemma of how to make money from what you love without necessarily being at the top of your field. Her own solution of late has been to enthusiastically believe in the so-called Law of Attraction. So when she heard “broke,” she instantly concluded that (a) I probably was broke, but more importantly (b) I was thinking the kind of negative thoughts that would keep me broke forever.

And so what I got as I drove her to the local drugstore to get the toothbrush she’d forgotten to pack was a well-meant monologue on how I needed to replace my thoughts of poverty with thoughts of prosperity.

“Our minds get grooves in them, the neurons and stuff,” she said. “That’s why when I pick up a guitar, I can make a G chord instantly. And it’s the same thing with negative thoughts. If you’re grooved into thinking about negative outcomes, that’s what you’ll attract. Like attracts like, right? That’s the way the universe works - it’s been proven, it’s science.”

Changing her thoughts had been difficult at first, she said, given how used she had been to thinking of herself as undeserving. But she had persevered, and now her solo music business was booming. She was careful to add that hadn’t just sat around - she’d made the calls and connections she’d needed to. But none of it would have happened if she hadn’t guided her thoughts gently into the right direction in the first place.

I congratulated her. And really, I am happy for her. And also somewhat conflicted. I find the Law of Attraction dubious, even dangerous, yet I have great sympathy for those who choose to believe in it - for in many ways, their position resembles my own and that of nearly everyone I know. We are all seeking happiness, and those of us who feel restless and unfulfilled seem to spend much of our time rooting around for a belief system that won’t let us down, that will fulfill our yearnings for certainty and success. So it’s not really so strange that in a tiny art colony in Woodstock, New York, a struggling writer who believes in mindfulness, meditation, and behavioral psychology can find common ground with a struggling musician who believes the universe is a giant tuning fork, ready to send good or bad vibrations your way depending quite literally on the quality of your thoughts.

But if my friend were ready for a conversation that challenged rather than confirmed her belief in this supposed law … well, I can’t imagine her part in it, but here are a few of the points I would bring up.

My problems with the Law of Attraction

It’s not science and not even close. When my friend told me that the Law had been scientifically validated, she was merely parroting what she has been told via books and flim-flam films like The Secret. But the supposedly “scientific” basis of the Law, summed up in the phrase “like attracts like,” can be found nowhere in science - not as a general proposition of any sort, nor as a summary of observations in any particular field, and certainly not as represented by the various equations that have long served as models in physics, chemistry, and other hard sciences. Indeed, you could more easily find even very prosaic examples of opposites attracting: a gas rushing into a vacuum, or the flow of electric current between objects with opposite electrical potentials.

Even quantum mechanics, which seems suitably mysterious and thus a potential source of “proof,” is really no proof at all. Quantum mechanics speaks only of various subatomic particles behaving in particular ways, all of which require brain-numbing equations to describe. As a branch of physics it is utterly mute on the question of whether our thoughts can influence the future, for the simple reason that it is not concerned with such matters. Anyone who tells you otherwise is blowing smoke. You can claim to like the flavor of the smoke, but it’s still smoke.

It blames the innocent. You may have heard of Louise Hay, founder of Hay House, which has become quite successful publishing a wide variety of New Age and self-help authors. Hay is a big advocate of the Law of Attraction in her own writings. And she is not afraid to take it to the logical conclusion - which is that if our thoughts control our destiny, than anyone who suffers a terrible outcome - people who die from cancer or AIDs, or the Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust - has only themselves to blame. Here is an excerpt from a recent piece by journalist Mark Oppenheimer on Hays in the New York Times Sunday Magazine:

When I asked her if, since people’s thoughts are responsible for their conditions, victims of genocide might be to blame for their own deaths, she said: “I probably wouldn’t say it to them. I don’t go around making people feel bad. That’s not what I’m after.” I pressed harder: Did she believe they are to blame? “Yes, I think there’s a lot of karmic stuff that goes on, past lives.” So, I asked, with a situation like the Holocaust, the victims might have been an unfortunate group of souls who deserved what they got because of their behavior in past lives? “Yes, it can work that way,” Hay said. “But that’s just my opinion.”

You may be a believer in the Law but nonetheless say you don’t agree with this sort of cruel nonsense - that Hay has taken things too far. Very well - but tell me, exactly how far should they be taken? Where does the influence of the Law begin and end? To be more blunt - why is it that it seems to work (if it does) only for well-off Westerners who want some more cash or romance in their lives, but not for Afghan schoolgirls who wish not to be machine-gunned to death by extremists (a news story from the past year that I still can’t forget), or for children dying of hunger in Africa, who wish only for something, anything to eat? Why is the Law reserved only for those of us in developed countries, with enough material resources on hand to buy self-help books and iPods and literally any food we desire, whether or not it’s in season?

It’s impossible to show cause and effect - in other words, that the Law has any influence whatsoever. My friend the musician didn’t just sit around working on her thoughts, but also made the phone calls and other efforts needed to drum up more business. Her behavior seems to indicate that she knew more was needed than merely re-grooving her mind - yet in speaking to me, she insisted the universe was indeed responding to her wishes simply because she sincerely wished it. But how could she know? Where is the control study, the counter-example, the attempt to falsify that in failing would advance the argument? No doubt if I asked her she would speak of unlikely coincidences that began to accrue, of strange serendipities, but is this evidence of anything except that coincidence and serendipity do occur? Think of those times you had discouraging thoughts but good things happened anyway; think of those times you just knew things would work out, and yet they didn’t. Where was the Law then?

It encourages the control strategy behind much of human suffering. In attributing so much power to thoughts, the Law is not contradicting but confirming the ancient and pernicious tendency in most cultures to view natural emotions such as anxiety, anger, fear, and sorrrow as damaging and therefore to be gotten rid of. And yet a tremendous amount of research, most of it within the past 20 years, shows that attempts at controlling thoughts and feelings typically make matters worse, not better. The anxious person who cannot bear an anxious thought becomes even more anxious; the depressed person who attempts to escape self-critical thoughts only generates more of them. This is one reason that Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which I practice, holds such promise: rather than lead us deeper into combat with our own experience, it offers a path away from the battleground.

The real attraction

There’s a simple reason why the Law is so popular among the striving classes. It has nothing to do with ensuring success, and everything to do with psychology.

Research over the last 20 years by many different scientists coming from many different backgrounds has all reached essentially the same conclusion: the nature of human cognition is such that we (or rather, our minds) want the world to “make sense” - so much so, that even the smartest of us habitually distort or ignore evidence in order to come up with a coherent “explanation” of why events occur as they do. The flip side of this is that we fear anything that cannot be explained - any incident smacking of randomness, ambiguity, uncertainty, and so on. The likely reason for this is that as the supreme logicians among all species on the planet, we evolved to fear uncertainty as threatening to survival.

Cognitive bias of this sort explains many things - for example, why juries so often blame the victim (to avoid the scary conclusion that bad things can happen to good people, and so might happen to themselves); or why we have such a hard time acknowledging when we have wronged someone (being “wrong” is hugely punishing for a mind that needs to be right all the time).

And cognitive bias also explains the Law of Attraction. The Law offers a grand scheme in which everything “makes sense”: if we have failed previously, it was because we were thinking the wrong thoughts; if others fail or succeed, it can also be attributed to their thoughts. We no longer need to worry about randomness or uncertainty - everyone is always getting exactly what they “deserve,” even if they don’t know it or if we can’t trace the exact tangle of their past thoughts. And after all, we don’t really need to know anyone’s thoughts - we can tell after the fact whether they were positive or negative by what happens to the person: karma as hindsight.

Yet the real salvation offered by belief in the Law is more personal. We may have feared failure in the past, but the Law asserts that so long as we think positively, we cannot fail; success is guaranteed, even if the timetable and specifics remain a bit foggy. Suddenly we are seized with confidence; we can make those phone calls, take those bold steps we once feared, without being afraid of falling. We can move forward at last.

Living life outside the Law

And really, isn’t the success of my friend a strong argument in favor of this aspect of the Law? Even if it’s only the equivalent of a placebo effect, isn’t it a good thing that she could psych herself into doing all the things she needed to for success? Isn’t this approach fairly close to what cognitive behavioral therapy (a sober, respected, mainstream psychotherapy, far from the ravings of “The Secret”) advises clients with anxiety and depression to do? That is, challenge their dysfunctional negative thoughts and replace them with more rational and positive thoughts?

In fact the comparison with this aspect of CBT is apt. But from the perspective of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, I don’t agree that we need this kind of artificial confidence to get moving. Rather than attempt to defeat our negative thoughts - ultimately, an impossible task - we can simply see them for what they are, as thoughts. Seeing them in this way, their threat diminishes; we can begin to make day-to-day choices that are more reflective of our hearts, of our entire beings. That’s the path of nonjudgemental mindfulness, whether travelled via ACT or via any of the many forms of Buddhist-style meditation. This is a much more compassionate, flexible, and scientifically sound method than trying to hoodwink yourself into believing in a nonexistent natural law.

The wisdom of Dr. Seuss

My friend does not seem especially anxious at the moment - rather, she seems to be reaping the rewards of an engaged life: teaching yoga, writing songs, enjoying a new relationship, and so on. Good things are happening for her, and she’s helped make them happen. And maybe some strange and wonderful coincidences have helped her along the way too, although I don’t know. I may be against the Law of Attraction, but I’m in favor of intuition, chance, mystery, and all the other phenomena we can’t explain. The universe is very large; we don’t need to reduce it to a single recipe to enjoy it.

When I stopped by the main building of the art colony yesterday afternoon, I peeked into the big room with the piano and saw that the musician was teaching a yoga class to the other residents. She was wrapping up, and I was in time to hear her give the final blessing of the hour: a quote not from a guru of any sort, but from Dr. Seuss:

You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself
any direction you choose.

Now, that’s cool.

2 comments June 8th, 2008

Book review: The Mindfulness & Acceptance Workbook for Depression

The Mindfulness & Acceptance Workbook for Depression, by Kirk D. Strosahl and Patricia J. Robinson (New Harbinger, 2008, 305 pages, $21.95)

Yet another specialized workbook has come out on putting Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to work in your life - “The Mindfulness & Acceptance Workbook for Depression,” by Kirk Strosahl and Patricia Robinson. That makes seven specialized ACT workbooks in all - two on anxiety, and one each on anger, diabetes, post-traumatic stress disorder, chronic pain, and now depression.

It’s an interesting phenomenon, all these different books. The granddaddy of ACT workbooks, Get Out Of Your Mind and Into Your Life, was written to appeal to folks with pretty much any condition, rather than just anxiety or just depression or what have you. And why not? The ACT model of human suffering pins virtually all of it on avoidance of emotional pain and fusion with mental chatter. So what works for thee should work for me, and vice versa.

Still, there are reasons to be glad of these new, more narrowly targeted workbooks. It’s a good marketing move; it helps get different shades of opinion within the ACT community into print; ditto for introducing us to the latest in ACT techniques, which keep evolving as the ACT movement grows; and finally it allows authors to respond in greater detail to readers’ concerns about particular symptoms associated more with one syndrome than with another. Someone with panic attacks, for example, may be ultra-worried about heart palpitations, while someone mired in depression may wonder how the heck they can ruminate less.

So what about this latest book, “The Mindfulness & Acceptance Workbook for Depression?” It’s worth noting that one of the two co-authors, Kirk Strosahl, contributed quite a bit to early ACT research; among other things he worked with other ACT biggies like Steven Hayes and Kelly Wilson to put together the original 1999 book on ACT for clincians, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: An Experiential Approach to Behavior Change. The other co-author of this new book, Patricia Robinson, is someone I know less about, but I gather she’s heavily involved in ACT as well.

Here be quibbles

There are a few things I don’t love about “The Mindfulness & Acceptance Workbook for Depression.” For my money (all $21.95 of it, or less if you buy from a chain bookstore or on Amazon), the authors have borrowed, begged, and coined a few too many cute, New-Agey sounding terms for their versions of standard ACT concepts. I got tired very quickly of “Wise Mind” versus “Reactive Mind,” didn’t get why the standard ACT distinction of “pain versus suffering” needed to be rephrased as “suffering versus execssive suffering,” and hated cutesy references to things like “poison pills,” when plain language would have been clearer and more helpful. I also didn’t buy the authors’ argument that ACT’s meditative practices give us quick, easy access to the very deepest states of mind attained by Buddhist practitioners. That’s a misleading comparison and unfair to both Buddhism and ACT.

And here be great stuff

So much for my kvetches. Most of them are peculiar to me. And even if they weren’t, you’d still be safe in ignoring them, because this book has too many good points to pass up. Here are just a few:

A compelling and useful model of depression. If you frequent the Yahoo discussion list on ACT, you’ll often hear from people who have benefited from reading “Get Out of Your Mind,” and who now view distressing, anxious, or self-critical thoughts as mere mental chatter, with no more meaning or value than static on a radio. Just tune the noise out, the idea goes, and you’ll be fine. This is an oversimplification of what ACT is really saying, but in many cases probably does no harm.

Strosahl and Robinson take a stronger stance. In their view, depressive thoughts and feelings do mean something - just not what society tells us they mean. If our heads are crammed more than usually full of self-critical or fearful thoughts and feelings, it’s not the fault of our parents, our genes, or any other uncontrollable force. Rather, it’s a sign we’ve been avoiding important things in our lives: painful emotions, difficult decisions, and so on. This is a refreshingly sensible place from which to begin learning such techniques as defusion and mindfulness: even as we learn to detach from too much whackiness, we can see why it arose and even in a way cherish it. It’s all part of being human.

A focus on movement and engagement. As Steven Hayes puts it in his introduction to the book, “Depression is not just a feeling. Depression is an action.” In line with this, Strosahl and Robinson spend much of the first part of the book looking at how inaction and withdrawal contribute to the state of morbid passiveness they call “depression compression,” while engagement and concrete action propel us out of depression and back into the wider circle of life. There’s actually a well-respected form of therapy for depression called “behavioral activation” that takes a similar approach; Strosahl and Robinson’s recommendations are similar, but with the added benefits ACT makes available through mindfulness, willingness, and values.

A full chapter on reason-giving. In my own experience, depression hangs on as long as it does because of where it hides: behind a façade of rules and logic that seem compelling, yet in fact prevent us from leading fulfilling lives. In my case, I still follow too many rules about “how to behave,” and I still depend too much on “making sense of things.” So it’s really good to have so many insightful pages pointing out the folly of both of these approaches. I would highly recommend this book for this material alone.

Guided meditations for getting in touch with values. Values are one of the areas in ACT where it’s easy to get fouled up by fusion - they touch so directly upon our pain and upon difficult questions of what to actually do, how to take meaningful action knowing that whatever we choose to do will be imperfect. Strosahl and Robinson offer a neat way out of this trap: guided meditations set in imagined landscapes such as mountains and rivers, intended to free us from everyday “rational” thought, so that we can receive the gifts of our intuition. This approach reminds me of the “spirit quests” that Native Americans supposedly embarked on. A CD that comes with the book has very nice recordings of these exercises, making it easy to follow them with your eyes closed. A bit New Age-y? Sure, but having learned the value of defusion in relation to values, I intend to check it out.

компютриLots of tips on structuring and maintaining your ACT practice. “Get Out of Your Mind” is a terrific book, but one of its few shortcomings is in the area of how to actually maintain an ACT practice over weeks and months - it offers a wall chart for keeping track of how well you’re living your values, but not much else. By contrast, Strosahl and Robinson go into extensive detail on what they call “developing an ACT lifestyle.” As just one example, they provide a form for creating an “ACT Practice Plan,” where in you pick in advance the specific ACT techniques you want to practice in different situations and at different times. Again, this section alone would make the book worth getting.

Summing things up: if you’re struggling with depression, “The Mindfulness & Acceptance Workbook for Depression” is a powerful place to start. I would especially recommend the book to those who have worked their way through “Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life” and still feel they’re struggling - the chapters on reason-giving and maintaining good ACT habits should prove especially helpful. On the other hand, if you’re brand new to ACT, I’d recommend picking up this new book and a copy of “Get Out of Your Mind” and reading them together - or one after the other, or however you choose to do it. Each book will shine a mirror on the other.

Add comment May 26th, 2008

“Physicalizing” exercise from “Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life”

There are several neat exercises in Chapter 10 of Get Out of Your Mind and into Your Lifeмебели, the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy workbook, for increasing our ability to be present with uncomfortable (or even downright crazy-making) thoughts and feelings.

One technique in particular is borrowed from Gestalt psychology - it’s called “physicalizing,” and involves imagining that a scary thought or feeling or sensation is an object that we’re looking at - an object complete with all kinds of imaginary attributes, such as shape, color, weight, and so on. It’s a way of defusing the scariness of whatever it is by putting it into the same category as other external objects, like chairs, trees, used Chinese food cartons, and so on.

Once you learn this technique you can use it in combination with other ACT work, such as values and commitments. Values & commitments often raise scary barriers, and by having a tool handy such as physicalizing, you can work on accepting these barriers, then moving back to the values and commitment part of it again. You can go back and forth as need be, in other words.

This is something I want to try more of myself. So as I’ve done before, I’ve made a recording of the exercise, based on the written exercise in the workbook. I mean to play this to myself & try it out a few times. If you’re interested you can try it too, via the link below - if you find it helpful let me know. Or you can just check out the exercise right in the workbook - it’s on page 137.

MP3 file: ACT physicalizing exercise

Add comment May 12th, 2008

Reason-giving & roses on the cliff-edge

When do lists of reasons get in the way of actually deciding? And how else might we decide, if not for reasons?

This has to do with choices we tell ourselves we “should” say “yes” to, as part of going after our values - but which we end up saying “no” to all the same. For me these are things like getting a regular job, going on a diet, etc. For someone else it could be having a kid, going back to school - whatever it is in life that seems both important and scary.

Naturally for each such decision we’ve got plenty of reasons pro and con. Reasons why we should do what we’re not doing - a big long list - and reasons why we haven’t done it yet and may never do it - another big long list.

I recently took a look at one of my own typical “no” lists, and realized that every single reason on it can be boiled down to one or another of a handful of primal fears: fear of rejection, fear of failure, fear of making a mistake or taking a risk, fear of death, etc. Of course, the way my reasons are phrased, they’re always much cleverer than that - very subtle, very convincing. Terrific, really. It’s only when I follow their trail that I see where they eventually lead.

But let’s get back to the question of values & not doing anything about them & why this might happen.

It’s my belief that if we know we “should” do something because it’s in line with our values, but enough pain & fear is involved that we say no, our reasons “yes” actually function as part of the reason we say “no.”

How can this be? Well, from my experience, if I feel coerced, the whole thing feels futile. I put it off, which is like saying “no.” Or even if I do say “yes,” I feel like it pretty much sucks, and quickly find a way to break my commitments if at all possible. And many others report the same experience. The more difficult and risky or painful the choice, the more we snare ourselves in our lists of reasons.

Not knowing what else to do, we keep digging. We revise our lists, going over them & over them, still seeking to solve the problem in some way that yields pain-free, risk-free certainty. To quote ACT researchers Kelly Wilson and Amy Murrell, in a chapter they wrote a while ago on values and decison-making, we wind up “dwelling in the land of should I/shouldn’t I, making little lists in our head of the reasons we should and reasons we shouldn’t, in the vain hope that the scales will finally tip decisively and will tell us the truth about the choice we should make.”

But what if we can draw back a bit and see our various lists of reasons as simply that - “lists of reasons,” whether scribbled in our head or on a pad of paper?

Seeing a list of reasons as a list of reasons would be like seeing thoughts as thoughts. A list of reasons can seem as plausible, as 100 percent true, as we can imagine. We can even go so far as to agree that each reason on the list is true. Why argue? But it will still be a list of reasons.

And since the reasons all boil down to those primal fears I mentioned - of rejection, of failure, of risk, of not just my death but the end of everything human some day sooner or later - we can reduce even the most complicated of lists to a simple choice - a choice we can finally see as a choice.

Hanging from the cliff, about to die, do we choose to smell a rose anyway? We can say no if we want. No reason is required.

What matters here isn’t picking the right reasons. It isn’t trying to get a spotless, risk-free, perfect outcome. It isn’t even whether we end up finally saying “yes.” What matters is that we get free of that sense of “having no choice.”

Even that is still putting it too strongly - “what matters” has a coercive ring to it. So what happens, then. What happens is, we get free of that sense of “having no choice.”

And face to face with the silence and emptiness that is freedom, we can choose.

2 comments April 28th, 2008

ACT words

This post will be revised from time to time as I accumulate definitions of some of the more common terms used in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT. It’s less of a glossary, and more something I’m throwing together on an as-needed basis. So expect it to be incomplete - even haphazard.

Values

Values are those qualities of action which point to how we may live a more vital and engaged life. Typically they are described as “directions” rather than goals, and are often phrased as adverbs, adjectives, or gerunds hooked to nouns that describe a particular domain (work, family, spirituality, etc.).

You might value being a “loving parent,” for example. It is a direction in that there is no defined end to “loving,” as there would be with even an important goal such as “making sure my kids get a good education.” The value of being “loving” in this case might direct many goals, including the one involving education.

An important aspect of values is that they must be experienced as freely chosen to be effective. Typically in ACT work this means doing lots of defusing - both when exploring values, and quite often while actually carrying them out in the form of goals and action steps. The reason for this is that if you’ve previously withdrawn from areas of valued living due to pain and suffering, re-engagement in such pursuits is almost guaranteed to bring up some heavy barriers in the form of punishing thoughts and emotions.

One classic ACT question about values is this: “In a world where you could choose to have your life be about something, what would you choose?” The question is phrased in this hypothetical manner to get past the usual objections that X, Y, and Z lie in the way and make valued living impossible.

Here is an excerpt from a post by ACT founder Steven C. Hayes, to the professional ACT list on Yahoo Groups, in which he talks about an interesting aspect of values - namely, that you can hold a value even if the current situation doesn’t give you a chance to show it:

When values are applied to specific events, situations, people and so on, affordances can shift our attention from chosen qualities of action that can be instantiated but not possessed to behavioral, emotional, or cognitive outcomes. Suppose you value a close relationship with your mother, but she is emotionally and physically abusive. Logically it appears as though either the value must change or you must accept abuse. Psychologically neither is true and for the reasons that underlie your distinctions. You can value kinds of relationships that the situation does not currently afford.

Think of human beings like ourselves as water and gravity as their values. In the context of gravity, going down is more important than going up. If we are in a bowl, that value will not be given obvious expression. Nothing goes down. But punch a large hole in the bowl and you will immediately see that the value was present all along. Put in a hairline crack and the value will not be given obvious expression but by watching it over time you will see that down in more important than up as water ever so slowly seeps through.

If Mom is absolutely dangerous and rejecting—and you value a close relationship with Mom—you may be like water in a bowl. If there is the littlest crack in the system, and you value a close relationship with Mom, in whatever way is afforded that value will seep through. If Mom is open to the relationship, the opening will allow the value to become immediately manifest. But the value was there throughout. If one asks “was the value there even when there was no opportunity afforded its obvious expression?” isn’t this much like asking “Was there gravity even before the hole was drilled?”

In other words, your valuing is your valuing, even when it might seem you have no capacity for control; it is only your possible actions that are constrained. This is the reverse of how we normally think of such things.

Add comment April 26th, 2008