Watch Your Thinking

Homework and the Next Session

Homework is essential. Defusion, like any skill, requires practice. Not all clients will do it, of course,
but we should at least ask them. Homework could involve a quick technique to practice intermit-
tently throughout the day—like Naming the Story. Alternatively, if you took the client through
Leaves on a Stream or a mindful breathing exercise, you could ask him to practice that each day.
You might like to record these exercises while you’re doing them in session, then burn them onto a
CD and give them to your clients to assist their practice at home. Most clients find this very helpful.
(These days I have prerecorded CDs that I give to all my clients on the first session. The CDs are
imaginatively titled Mindfulness Skills Volume 1 and Mindfulness Skills Volume 2, and, if interested, you can
purchase them from www.actmadesimple.com.)
Another type of homework involves asking clients to fill in a worksheet such as Getting Hooked,
which you’ll find at the end of this chapter.
For a more informal homework, you might say something as below:

Therapist: Between now and next session, I wonder if you’d be willing to practice a few things.
First, I’d like you to learn more about how your mind hooks you and reels you in. In
what situations does it happen? What sort of things does it say to you? And as soon
as you realize you’ve been hooked, just acknowledge it: “Aha! Hooked again.” Second,
I’d like you to play around with one of those defusion techniques we covered. (Select
one or ask the client to pick one.) Then whenever you’re feeling wound up, stressed, anxious,
or whatever, identify the “hot” thought—the one that burns you the most—and try
defusing from it. Third, I’d like you to notice any times that your mind tries to hook
you, but you don’t take the bait—you just let the mind do its thing, but you don’t get
caught up in it.

Practical Tip You can make homework a win-win experience. First, when you
introduce the homework, you could say, “Do this as an experiment to see what happens,”
or “Do this to learn more about how your mind works,” or “Do this to discover more
about yourself and how you operate.” Second, say something like, “Let’s make this a
win-win proposition. I hope you follow through because, as I said earlier, practice is
important. However, if you don’t do it, I’d like you to notice what stopped you. What
thoughts did you get caught up in, what feelings did you get into a struggle with, or what
kind of things did you do that got in the way?”
  During the next session, if the client hasn’t followed through, you would address
these barriers as in chapter 13.

The first thing to do on the next session—preferably after a brief check-in and mindfulness
exercise—is review the homework and see what happened. We may need to do more work around

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defusion, or if the client has fallen into the control agenda, we may need to move to creative hope-
lessness. If he’s making progress (that is, he’s finding it easier to defuse from unhelpful thoughts),
we traditionally move on to acceptance and contacting the present moment—but we could move to
any other part of the hexaflex.
Of course, it’s not as if defusion is covered entirely in one or two sessions and then never men-
tioned again. As mentioned at the start of this chapter, in every single session, we help our clients
defuse from unhelpful cognitions with simple interventions like these: “Notice what your mind is
telling you. Is this an old story or a new one?” or “So if you let that thought dictate what you do,
will it lead you to vitality or suffering?”

Homework for You

Is this the end of defusion? No way. We’ll be revisiting it throughout the book. But before reading
on, let’s talk about your homework for this chapter. Here are a few suggestions:

1. Try out all the defusion techniques on yourself. You’re the best person to practice on!

2. Read all the exercises, metaphors, and psychoeducational components out loud, as if taking
a client through them.

3. Review the cases of two or three clients, and identify key thoughts that they’re fusing with.
Especially look for fusion with past, future, self, rules, reasons, and judgments. Then consider
which defusion techniques you might try with them.

And if you don’t do any of this, identify what’s stopping you, in terms of fusion, experiential
avoidance, and ineffective action. What thoughts are you fusing with? (For example, “I can’t be
bothered” or “I’ll do it later” or “I don’t need to do this stuff; reading is enough.”) What feelings are
you avoiding—reluctance, impatience, apathy, anxiety? What ineffective actions are you taking—
procrastinating, distracting yourself, skim reading?

Summary
The ability to think is very, very useful, but the greater the degree of fusion with our thoughts, the
more inflexible our behavior becomes. We facilitate defusion in every session of ACT by repeatedly
asking clients to notice what they’re thinking, discriminate fusion from defusion, and look at their
thoughts in terms of workability. And we never need to debate whether a thought is true or false—
all we need to ask is something like this: “If you hold on tightly to this thought, will it help you to
live the life you want?”

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Getting Hooked
In ACT, we talk colloquially of being “hooked by your mind” or “hooked by thoughts.” By this,
we mean you get all caught up in your thoughts and they exert a strong influence over your
actions. In what situations does your mind manage to hook you? What sort of things does it say
in order to hook you? How do you manage to unhook yourself?

Date/Time What did your mind say How did your behavior Did you manage to
Triggering events or do to hook you? change when you got unhook yourself?
or situation hooked? What did those If so, how?
actions cost you?

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