reinventing the wheel
Wednesday 11 June 2008 | 3 cookies in the jar
Slowly, slowlyslowly, as in “slowly the Ice Age ended,” this morning I remembered—hey, there’s a whole section of the DBT skills training manual on acceptance! Fireworks, bells, applause, cheering, cherry bombs.
The all-caps in the following passage actually aren’t my affectation (anyway not this time); they’re the Guilford Press typesetter’s, or maybe Marsha Linehan’s; but the overall effect they have on the reader is of being told reassuring things in a loud clear firm voice whose timbre is calculated to penetrate your dysphoric panic—kind of like STOP DROP AND ROLL, or SQUEEZE TUBE FROM BOTTOM, FOLDING AS YOU GO UP.
ACCEPTING REALITY
Acceptance of reality as it is requires an act of CHOICE. It is like coming to a fork in the road.
You have to make an inner COMMITMENT to accept. The COMMITMENT to accept does not itself equal acceptance. It just turns you toward the path. But it is the first step.
You have to turn your mind and commit to acceptance OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN. Sometimes you have to make the commitment many times in the space of a few minutes.
•
WILLINGNESS
Cultivate a WILLING response to each situation
Willingness is doing just what is needed in each situation, in an unpretentious way. It is focusing on effectiveness.
Willingness is listening very carefully to your WISE MIND, acting from your inner self.
Willingness is allowing into awareness your connection to the universe—to the earth, to the floor you are standing on, to the chair you are sitting on, to the person you are talking to.
In five years from now, will the situation that causes the distress matter?
•
WILLFULNESS
Willfulness is SITTING ON YOUR HANDS WHEN ACTION IS NEEDED, refusing to make necessary changes.
Willfulness is GIVING UP. It is the OPPOSITE of doing what works, of being EFFECTIVE.
Willfulness is TRYING TO FIX EVERY SITUATION and refusing to tolerate distress in the moment.
•
TURNING THE MIND
Acceptance of reality as it is requires an act of CHOICE. It is like coming to a fork in the road.
You have to make an inner COMMITMENT to accept. The COMMITMENT does not itself equal acceptance. But it is the first step.
You have to turn your mind and commit to acceptance OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN. Sometimes, you have to make the commitment many times in the space of a few minutes.
•
RADICAL ACCEPTANCE
To accept something is not the same as judging it to be good. Accepting reality does not mean you have to like the circumstances.
Freedom from suffering requires ACCEPTANCE FROM DEEP WITHIN. Let go of fighting reality.
Deciding to tolerate the moment is ACCEPTANCE.
ACCEPTANCE IS THE ONLY WAY OUT OF HELL. Pain creates suffering only when you refuse to ACCEPT the pain.
ACCEPTANCE is acknowledging what is.
•
Et voilà, here is Mme Marsha herself, demonstrating a handy posture which might help one achieve radical acceptance. I find this picture oddly endearing, especially the oh-so-willing look on her face. [Muchas gracias, by the way, to both dtbselfhelp.com and borderlinepersonality.ca, since I couldn’t be arsed to dig out my skills training manual, buried helpfully deep within the closet where I hope it’s doing the quilting flannel some good.]
The Dialectical Behavioral Therapist and I struggled for a couple of months with how difficult I found it to accept (or ACCEPT) the word willful—maybe because my mother employed it thusly, in fundamentalist Xian argot: “I don’t want to hear any more of your lip, young lady—you’re being willful, and I want you to go to your room and pray about your hard heart, and see if you can’t let the Holy Spirit come in and soften it!” (I think this is what the Umbrella once referred to as, having the chicken-wire monkey-mother? Or maybe just the one covered with indoor-outdoor carpeting.) Predictably, whether due to the ineffable ghostly action of the Holy Spirit or attachment disorder NOS, I would emerge begging to be forgiven for my willful lip.
So the DBT and I devised instead the more-cumbersome phrase, mood-dependent behavior—meaning, succumbing to an action urge whether or not it’s helpful—or as the Group Leader liked to repeat metronomically, Is Your Behavior In Line With Your Long-Term Goals? Mood-dependent behavior I could understand, whereas willfulness just had me sticking out my chin, digging in my heels, and devising elaborate logical defenses.
This revamped piece of vocabulary led to the revelatory moment when I, having called the DBT sniffling and hiccoughing, was dutifully taking eggs out of the fridge to scramble. One of the rules of DBT is that if you call for coaching, you have to be WILLING to ACCEPT whatever advice you are given—you can’t say “I need help!” and then parse every suggestion offered.
The DBT’s recommendation in that moment had been that I get some protein in my bloodstream. Also, we’d discovered that cooking seemed to be a grounding activity for me during a meltdown (which is why so many practically scheduled middle-of-the-night fights with the Young Monk also meant that he got fresh blueberry muffins for breakfast a few hours later—admittedly, positive reinforcement for bad behavior, but at least I didn’t throw things at his head and then feel ashamed afterward).
I sighed, dug out the frying pan, and complained that I wasn’t hungry. “Oh!” the DBT said, brightening. “Well, that’s great, because guess what? You don’t have to want to eat! All you actually have to do is just eat.“
Bingo.
Flashbulbs, fireworks, brass bands, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir: You don’t have to want to _______ [grade papers, do taxes, wait out psychic pain, take deep breaths until you stop crying, get dressed, take a shower, get on your bike and go to class, file divorce papers, eat a carrot instead of a cookie, eat a cookie and not feel guilty, call the DBT when you’d rather stick with some nice safe familiar mood-dependent choices like crawling under the desk and hiding from the looming deadline and frustrated employers]. If I had to want to do those things, I don’t know what power on earth could make me; no wonder I felt for so long that doing things was impossible, because first I had to want to do them.
No, it’s so much easier than that. Instead you only have to follow the instructions on the DBT’s personalized license plate, a motto I found insulting and kitschy until I came to know her better:
JST D# IT
(Where the # is a zia, that red solar doodad on the yellow New Mexican state flag). Or, as those crazy-wise Zen people say: Just follow the schedule.
—Speaking of which. It’s another fine blistering Woden’s Day here in my weird new state of residence, approximately 3,800 bazillion degrees Kelvin; my study is so overrun with fabric and papers I can’t walk from the doorway to the desk; and, well, you know, I got some stuff I think I’m gonna do.
One of which is REVISE MY FREAKING BLOGROLL. Dude, those links are hoary. Positively antediluvean, if not prelapsarian. Some of them are, I suspect, officially from the days of the World Wide Web. The Brujo and I are always snickering over his collection of cactus journal back-issues, because there’s always some goggle-eyed article about the wonders of teh Interwebs which laboriously spells out these LONG-ass URLs, scores of characters with tildes and dashes and numbers and forward-slashes and ridiculous extensions and I don’t know what all, as if you would ever TYPE all that nonsense into your nice little Netscape Navigator 2.0 browser with the captain’s wheel logo; but oh, we did, we did. And we used Infoseek, and Lycos, and ALTAVISTA. To say nothing of Betamax, and the Apple IIe. And the TRS-80! And the Commodore 64! On which I once wrote programs in BASIC (FORTRAN, anyone? PASCAL?) and recorded them on an ancient piece of steam-punk machinery called a “tape deck.”
No, I know you don’t know what those things are. That’s okay, you’re too young. Just enjoy it while it lasts, honeyhoney.
3 cookies in the jar
post your glowing encomium (or bitter philippic) »
Follow this heated, lively discussion through its very own feed; also, you can pingback or trackback from your own doubtlessly much more interesting site.
my first computer was an apple IIgs that my dad handed down to me once he upgraded to a “fancy” pc. (he just bought himself his first apple since then and he’s tickled).
and! because i just love tape decks, record players and that kind of thing…i bought a 8 track stereo at a garage sale a few years ago. i only have one cassette for it though!
off to enjoy the latest in technology…
the a.r.w.
p.s. yes, we’d welcome a blogroll revision…
xo
p.s. we LOVE TWO POSTS IN ONE DAY!!!
Gotta try this avatar thing.
•
Editor’s note: HEY GORGEOUS!!! Mighty nice to see your (un-Christian) name around these parts. I’m so sorry I’m the world’s worst correspondent. In utterly inadequate recompense you shall have a beautiful avatar; only I gotta get ‘em to work, first…maybe a different plugin is the answer. Muchos besos to you, and to Ms. A.—