14 Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life

THE PROBLEM WITH PAIN

Psychological pain hurts, by definition. But it does more than that. Often pain holds you back from living
the kind of life you want to live. There is no question that a person with a panic disorder would rather not
experience the feeling of extreme fear, because it is so unpleasant. But that discomfort is compounded by
the fact that the panic seemingly gets in the way of living itself.
If you have a panic disorder, you may have begun feeling too afraid to engage in the activities you
normally would because of your fear that you might panic. It may be that you no longer go to the super-
market because you are afraid you might have a panic attack there. Perhaps you are uncomfortable in
social situations, because you don’t want anyone to see you panic. You cultivate friends with whom you
feel safe, but then you are dependent on their schedules and availability. You start to live your life in
ways to accommodate your problem, and, as a result, your life becomes narrower and narrower, less and
less flexible.
It is worth noting how much of the pain we feel is a focus of attention because it seems to interfere
with other activities. One way to get at this core issue is to imagine how your life would be different if your
pain went away. Imagine that someone has waved a magic wand over you, and your pain has vanished.
Imagine that you wake up one morning and suddenly, for no reason at all, the chronic depression you’ve
suffered from all these years (or the anxiety, or worry, or whatever your core struggles may be) is gone. The
cloud has lifted and the pain is over. What would you do? This question isn’t a rhetorical one, we mean it
literally: What would you do? What would you want your life to be about? How has your current psycho-
logical struggle interfered with your goals and aspirations? Let’s explore that in the exercise below.

EXERCISE: The Pain is Gone, Now What?

If ________________________________________________ weren’t such a problem for me, I would

____________________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________________.

If I didn’t have _______________________________________________________________, I would

____________________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________________.

We would like you to fill in the blank lines above in the sentences you’ve just read, but first let us
describe how to do that. Take an item from your suffering inventory. It could be any item, but it might
be best to start with an item high on your list and connected to other items. This is probably an issue
that greatly inhibits your life. Go ahead and fill in your problem, but don’t fill in what you would do if it
were gone.
Now, think about what you would do if that pain were suddenly lifted. The point of this exercise is
not to think about what you might like to do on a given day if your problems weren’t plaguing you. The
idea isn’t to celebrate by saying, “My depression is gone, I’m going to Disneyland!” The point is to think
more broadly about how your life course would change if your constant struggle with emotional pain was
no longer an issue. Don’t worry if you think that you don’t have a good grip on this yet. We will do a
 Human Suffering 15

whole lot more work on these issues later in the book. Just go with your gut instinct. Somewhere within
yourself you have some idea about the things that really matter to you. Concentrate on those.
Here are three examples to give you an idea of what we mean:

If anger weren’t such a problem for me, I would have more intimate relationships.

If I didn’t have so much stress, I would work harder at my career, and I would try to find the job I always
dreamed of having.

If I wasn’t so anxious, I would travel and participate more fully in life.

Now, go back and fill in the blank lines about what you would do if your pain disappeared. Be hon-
est with yourself and think about what you really want. Think about what has value to you. Think about
what gives your life meaning.
Now, let’s do that again but this time, let’s use a different area of suffering (although it certainly
wouldn’t hurt to do this exercise with all of the items on your Suffering Inventory). This time, choose an
item that appears to affect a different area of your life than the first one you chose. (Although after
thinking about them you may find that they are not as different as they seem to be.)

If ________________________________________________ weren’t such a problem for me, I would

____________________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________________.

If I didn’t have _______________________________________________________________, I would

____________________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________________.

THE PROBLEM WITH PAIN: REVISITED

You’ve just discovered that all of your problems provide you with two sources of pain. It is not just your
anxiety or depression or worry that creates pain. Your pain is also holding you back from living the life you
want to lead. There are activities you would be engaged in if it weren’t for your pain and the role it has
played in your life.
The problem you wrote down in the exercises above refers to the pain of presence (issues that are
present that you would prefer to go away). Social anxiety might be an example of the pain of presence.
The anxiety you feel on social occasions is real and present in the moment you feel it. You may wish it
would go away. Nonetheless, it persists in the face of your best efforts to defeat it. This is the pain of
presence.
Those activities you would engage in if matters changed, represent a different kind of pain: they are
called the pain of absence. As an example, consider the same socially phobic person above. Perhaps this
person truly values engaging with other people but their fear keeps them from doing so in ways that are
16 Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life

meaningful. The connection with others that is so yearned for is not there. This is the pain of absence.
You have pain on top of pain, suffering on top of suffering. Not only must you deal with the immediate
pain of your thoughts, feelings, and physical ailments, you also must deal with the pain caused by the fact
that your pain prevents you from living the kind of life you want to live.
Now see if this next sentence is true for you: Generally, the more you live your life trying to ward
off the pain of presence, the more pain you get, particularly in the form of the pain of absence.
Remember, we asked for honesty and openness about your own experience. Even if it doesn’t seem
logical that this should be so, look and see if it isn’t true. While you’ve focused more on getting rid of the
pain of presence, you’ve been feeling more of the pain of absence. If that’s what’s been happening for
you, it may feel as though life is closing in around you. It may feel as though you’re in some kind of trap.
If you’ve been experiencing those kinds of feelings, then this book is about finding a way out. There’s an
alternative to living as though you’ve been trapped.

LIVING A VALUED LIFE: AN ALTERNATIVE

Often, we attach ourselves to our pain, and we start to judge our lives based on how we feel and not on
what we do. In a way, we become our pain. The answers you’ve filled in as your responses to the four sen-
tences in the two exercises above contain the seeds of another kind of life: a life in which what you do is
connected not to your pain, or to the avoidance of your pain, but to the kind of life you truly want to live.
This book is not about solving your problems in a traditional way so much as it is about changing
the direction of your life, so that your life is more about what you value. Moreover, the unnecessary
amplification of pain stops. When that happens, the issues you’ve been struggling with will begin to
diminish. Your life will begin to open up and become more wide-ranging, more flexible, and more
meaningful.
We ask you to allow the possibility of living a life you value to be your guide as you read these
pages and work with the exercises. We aren’t asking you to go out and lead a different life right this min-
ute. There is a lot of work to do first. None of this will be easy because the traps our minds set for us will
continue to be laid.
In our work on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) we’ve developed a set of processes
that appear to empower the people who work with these processes to improve their lives and to disman-
tle troublesome traps and dead ends. Gradually, step by step, we will walk you through those processes in
the service of living a vital, valued, meaningful life.
If you are willing, let’s begin.