In the second example just presented, you can see the therapist transition from working on the sense of creative hopelessness to more explicitly outlining how experiential/emotional control might be part of the problem, rather than the solution to the client’s current difficulties. Many clients come to therapy believing they need more control over their internal experience. However, what happens instead is that misapplied control lands them in an unworkable agenda—and does so at the expense of their lives, as they put their lives on hold while they work to get their emotions or thoughts under control.
We’ve all heard clients make statements such as, “When I get my anxiety under control, I will get a job” or “When the pain stops, I will find another relationship” or “When I don’t feel guilty anymore, I will reconnect with my children. I don’t want to subject them to my guilt.” These kinds of statements come in all shapes and sizes, and are all about the client beginning to live only after his or her internal experience is under control. Of course, the problem with this is that life is occurring in the present moment, and it is very difficult to change what happens internally in any lasting and meaningful way. Additionally, efforts at control can lead to more problems and costs. This can happen in obvious ways: a client drinks heavily to avoid feeling sad, for instance. Misapplied control can also be problematic in more subtle ways. Imagine a client who subtly changes the topic whenever you begin to talk about painful issues, yet desires to have intimacy. The following transcript points to this issue.
Therapist: So you had a good time this weekend at the lake?
Client: Yes, it was a lot of fun. I water-skied and swam. I really got to catch a break… But I was alone, and that was kind of a bummer.
Therapist: You were alone? I know it has been hard for you to be alone. Was it painful?
Client: Yes, but I was also able to go hiking, and you would not believe what happened. I came across a bear on the side of the trail …
Therapist: [interrupts] I noticed that you skipped past that painful part. Client: Yeah, but I wanted to be sure and tell you about the bear.
Therapist: It seems it just happened again. What do you think would happen if you showed up to the
pain?
Client: [gets tearful] I would start to cry and I don’t want to do that.
Here you can see how the client is avoiding vulnerability at the expense of intimacy. The goal of the therapist is to point out the cost of this kind of control: loss of valued living. For this client that means, for instance, loss of intimacy, connecting, and lovingly participating in relationship.
Misapplied control can be tackled by both an appeal to experience and by use of metaphor. Creative hopelessness appeals to experience; the therapist might ask, for example, “In your experience, has control worked?” Additional flexibility can be fostered through metaphors that model the problem of control. The ACT literature is replete with them: the Chinese Handcuffs metaphor, the Driving with the Rearview Mirror metaphor, the Feedback Screech metaphor, the Box Full of Stuff, the Tug-of-War with a Monster metaphor, the Jelly Doughnut metaphor, the Falling in Love exercise, and the Polygraph metaphor (Hayes et al., 1999, pp. 104–105, 108, 136–138, 109, 123–124). All illustrate the paradox of control: the more you try to control your internal experience, the more you lose control.
This paradox is captured by the message “If you aren’t willing to have it, you’ve got it” (Hayes et al., 1999, pp. 120–122), or its variant, “If you are not willing to lose it, you’ve lost it.” If you are not willing to have anxiety, then anxiety is something about which to be anxious, and even more anxiety will be created. If you’re not willing to lose love, then you cannot have love because you will constantly be trying to control your beloved.
Many of these examples are focused on experiential control related to emotions, but this kind of paradox also can be applied to thoughts. If you try to control what the mind is thinking, an immedi- ate problem arises: you have to contact what you would like to control in order to know that you want to control it. As an example, you can ask clients not to think about a banana. What will happen is that they will immediately think about a banana. And the harder they try not to think about a banana, the more they will be thinking “banana,” and then perhaps even about banana splits and the color yellow and batches of bananas and the banana they had for breakfast. You might discuss how this effort is likely to backfire when applied to thoughts that seem particularly important to control. Distracting ourselves from thinking about a banana might work unless we see a banana or hear the word “banana.” The seriousness of thinking about a banana is probably miniscule for most people. However, other thoughts can have quite a strong impact; for example, thoughts the client really wants to eliminate, such as, “I’m damaged goods” or “There is something wrong with me” or “I’ve wasted my life.” These are weighty thoughts, and distraction will be much more difficult. In other words, clients don’t generally try to control or get rid of happiness or good thoughts. Those are welcomed and stay as long as they stay. Efforts to control are applied to that which we don’t want: the negative stuff. This is where the paradox shows up. Exploring this issue with the client can be useful when he or she points to distraction as a technique to control unwanted private experience.
In the following transcript, the therapist returns to the Quicksand metaphor (Hayes et al., 1999), but this time for a slightly different purpose—as a way to begin to point to what willingness is like.
Client: Yeah. You mean how the harder I try to get out, the worse it gets?
Therapist: Exactly … The harder you try to get out, the faster you sink. We didn’t talk about it before,
but this metaphor also points to what to do when you get stuck in a situation like this— besides struggle. With quicksand, in order to not sink, what you need to do is the opposite of what you would think to do. In order to stay afloat in quicksand, you have to gently spread out and let as much of your body contact the sand as possible. The more surface area is in touch with the sand, the more you will float and not drown. What if this getting rid of anxiety thing is like drowning in quicksand? The harder and faster you try to get out of it, the more you get into it, the worse things get. And maybe the thing to do is to stop struggling, to get in contact with the emotion, to float in it.
Client: But floating in it doesn’t get me out of it, either.
Therapist: That’s right. What you feel is still there to be felt, you have just given up the struggle. Is that
something you would be willing to do if it means you don’t drown?
Client: Yes, but how?
This is just one example of how to introduce the idea of willingness as an alternative to control. This process is further outlined in the next section.