Give these instructions to your clients, adapting for gender and life situation:
1. The next time you feel yourself getting swept along by your unhelpful thoughts, personal scripts, mental images, and emotions, imagine that they represent a one-hundred-car freight train barreling down the railroad tracks at maximum speed.
2. Loaded down with the freight and baggage that make up your mind, the cars are labeled
“troubling thoughts,” “unhelpful and outdated personal scripts,” “scary pictures,” and
“painful emotions.”
3. Imagine that you see the train on the horizon and race toward the railroad crossing to try to beat the train so you can get home from work on time.
4. As you near the crossing, the lights start flashing, bells start clanging, and a barrier descends, warning you of the approaching train and imminent danger. You can still outrun the train and cross the tracks before the barrier completely descends, but you slow down and stop before getting to the tracks. The barrier descends, leaving you stuck so that you can’t meet your goal of getting home at the designated hour.
5. As you sit there, your mind starts analyzing why you got stuck and what things you could have done to avoid arriving at the railroad crossing at the same time as the train.
Your mind says you could have left your meeting at work earlier, driven faster on the ride home, averted a couple of traffic lights that held you up, and so on. Your mind also starts racing ahead, for example rehearsing the argument you assume you will have with your wife because of your lateness for dinner. She’ll say, “You never get home on time when I’m preparing a nice dinner. You never take my feelings into consideration. You know I like to serve the food hot, right out of the oven. You are so inconsiderate.” Your son chimes in, “You know that I have a game tonight, Dad, and that you and Mom need to drive me. Do you want me to be late and have the coach get all pissed off? You never think of anyone except yourself.” You try to eliminate these thoughts, images, and feel-ings, and work on getting them out of your head, but the more you think about them, the more vivid they become.
6. Now shift gears and imagine that the railroad crossing is a protective barrier that pro-vides a safe way for you to stop and pay attention to what’s going on in your mind and
life. You stop, take notice, and feel protected by the distance your mind’s own personal railroad crossing establishes between you and your troubling thoughts, unhelpful scripts, scary pictures, and painful emotions.
7. Instead of trying to avoid the train by outrunning it, your decision to stop and observe it creates some helpful space between you and your runaway-train brain. Instead of analyz-ing and judganalyz-ing what your mind tells you about beanalyz-ing late for dinner, imagine that each differently painted railroad car represents a painful thought, unhelpful personal script, scary picture, or painful emotion that’s flying by and trying to sweep you along with it.
8. Protected by the distance of your mind’s railroad crossing, you begin to accept your thoughts and feelings as temporary, as fleeting as the cars that make up the train. As you continue to watch your train roar by, you accept that you cannot control this power-ful force. You tell yourself that the train will soon pass, the blinking lights and clanging bells going off in your mind will cease, and your personal barrier will rise, allowing you to continue on home to your family and dinner.
After your clients have completed this exercise, explain to them that with practice, they can use this and other defusion activities found throughout this book to distance themselves from their stressful thoughts, personal scripts, mental images, and emotions.
MANAGING VS. AVOIDING, ELIMINATING, OR CONTROLLING
While clients can’t control, eliminate, or avoid your troubling thoughts, outdated personal scripts, scary mental images, and painful emotions, they can learn how to manage them. Most clients get stuck because they confuse avoiding, eliminating, or controlling thoughts, scripts, images, and feelings with managing them. Let’s look at the differences among the terms.
To avoid something is to limit exposure to it. People usually try to avoid things because exposure to them causes discomfort or distress. When someone tries to avoid something, we assume he knows what he wants to avoid, can anticipate it, and understands its relationship to his discomfort and distress.
For example, imagine a client named John, who knows that going to the bank on Saturday morning causes him stress because it’s usually very crowded, it takes four times as
long to do his business, and it’s often difficult to speak to one of the managers if he needs to. John can avoid his exposure to all of this simply by going to the bank during the day in the middle of the week, when it’s less crowded, managers are usually available, and he can get his business done in a few minutes.
To eliminate something means to cause it to disappear, or to permanently get rid of it.
There are many things in life that people can eliminate. If someone doesn’t like her computer, she can throw it out and replace it, or she can live without a computer. If someone’s unhappy with his career, he can go back to school for some retraining and start a new career. If someone doesn’t like her neighbors, she can move away from them. While none of these things is neces-sarily easy to do, people can do it and eliminate the discomfort and distress associated with it.
I’m not pretending they will be completely happy or satisfied after making such a move; I’m simply illustrating the fact that people can eliminate these environmental stressors.
To control something is to regulate it. Think about controlling the volume on a television set. When the television set is turned on and it’s too loud, we can turn down the volume.
If the volume is too low when the set is turned on, we can dial up the volume and make it louder. The sound can even be muted when we want to temporarily prevent any sound from coming from it. Speed, sound, temperature, and taste are common things in life that people are used to controlling without even thinking about it.
What all the examples I’ve given so far of things that can be avoided, eliminated, or con-trolled have in common is that they are part of the physical environment. They exist in the outside world and are subject to prediction and manipulation. Clients don’t have to accept them for what they are if they don’t want to. They can change physical environmental factors at will. Unfortunately, because they have a lifetime of experience avoiding, eliminating, and controlling things in their physical environments, clients assume they can do the same with things in their internal environments. They use the same model for controlling the volume on the television to try to control the volume of the thoughts, personal scripts, mental images, and emotions their minds crank out. As discussed throughout this book, this isn’t a very good idea. As you saw in chapter 2, when people focus their attention and efforts on controlling troubling thoughts, outdated personal scripts, scary pictures, and painful emo-tions, they only make them worse. These internal factors are beyond our control.
If your clients can’t avoid, eliminate, or control their troubling thoughts, outdated per-sonal scripts, scary pictures, and painful emotions, what can they do to get relief from them?
What they can do is learn how to manage them. Managing troubling thoughts, outdated personal scripts, scary pictures, and painful emotions is the only reasonable way to deal with them.