Acceptance as a liberating force is freely available to anyone at any time, but for many people, alas, it’s like a latent superpower—one they’re not even aware they possess.
One has to be willing to allow painful thoughts and feelings to be as they are, and even then, our instinctive reaction will always be to fight or flee. Toward that end, even acceptance itself can be bent into yet one more element of a control strategy:
Holy heck I’m anxious!
how can I make this anxiety go away?
I guess I could try that weird ACT stuff—maybe that would make me feel better?
(tries “sitting/making room” exercise)
well, I’m still anxious…
maybe I’m not doing it right??
it’s not working!
If you catch yourself saying “it’s not working,” that’s a strong indicator you’re engaged in a control struggle with your feelings.
For someone deeply entangled within unbearable thoughts and feelings—and struggling mightily to get rid of them—the very notion of “accepting” them may sound offensive.
So how do you reach a person who is trapped in this state?
To (hopefully) breach the impasse, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy employs the use of metaphor as a way to try to help people break free from the limiting paradigm of experiential control.
Perhaps the most powerful of these is the tug-of-war metaphor, which was first described by one of Stephen Hayes’ (ACT’s creator) own clients, who was in the grip of a 20-year struggle with agoraphobia:
I realized I was in a tug-of-war with a monster. It was big, ugly, and very strong. In between me and the monster was a pit, and, as far as I could tell, it was bottomless. I thought that if I lost this tug-of-war I’d fall into the pit and be destroyed. So, I pulled and pulled, but it seemed that the harder I pulled, the harder the monster pulled back. I felt like I was getting closer and closer to the pit. And suddenly I realized it was not my job to win this tug-of-war. My job was to drop the rope.
(Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, 2nd ed., p276)
It is not the case that any one metaphor, however eloquent, will free you from all of life’s struggles. But when we are locked in the grip of an experiential struggle, the critical insight is not that what we’re doing isn’t working—it’s that it can’t work.
With that insight comes the possibility of change.
True, what happens when we drop the rope is unknowable. The monster will still be there. So will the pit. But we do know what will happen if we keep pulling—we will remain trapped in stalemate.
If, like me, you’ve been locked in an unwinnable tug-of-war with your thoughts and feelings, you may someday come to feel a sort of thrill when you catch yourself pulling on the rope.
Because, in that moment, you suddenly have a choice.
You can keep pulling.
Or you can let go, and see what happens.