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 “In this authoritative text, Luoma, Hayes, and Walser present a
clearly written and practical step-by-step guide for therapists who are
using acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). Firmly rooted in
contextual behavioral science and derived from a well-articulated
theory, this text clearly describes and illustrates the concrete strategies
to target a set of key processes that are critical to improve the lives of
people. Every clinician should be familiar with it. It is a masterful book.
I highly recommend it.”
—Stefan G. Hofmann, PhD, professor of psychology at Boston
University, past president of the Association for Behavioral and
Cognitive Therapies, and author of Emotion in Therapy

“This second edition is an exceptional guide for the skillful and

flexible implementation of ACT principles. The chapters outline the six
core flexible ACT processes and their methods, with case examples and
dialogues that bring the information to life. The book includes a unique
and invaluable set of training tools and tests of core competencies. This
is a masterful ‘how to’ for ACT suitable for clinicians at any level of
training and experience.”
—Michelle G. Craske, PhD, distinguished professor, and director of
the Anxiety and Depression Research Center at the University of
California, Los Angeles

“Firmly grounded in contextual behavioral science (CBS), superbly

organized with lucid and comprehensive explanation of all ACT concepts
and competencies, and loaded with clinical pearls and pitfalls to avoid,
this book lives up to the title and then some, as one of the best books
for learning ACT. Further, the clinical vignettes and self-reflective
exercises will deepen and advance the practice of more seasoned
practitioners of ACT. The updated text and the new inclusion of an
excellent chapter on culture and diversity make this edition more
relevant and invaluable than ever in this diverse, globalizing world. This
book is simply a ‘must-have’ for any serious ACT practitioner!”
—Kenneth P. Fung, MD, FRCPC, MSc, associate professor in the
department of psychiatry at the University of Toronto; clinical director
of the Asian Initiative in Mental Health at the University Health
 Network; and president-elect of the Society for the Study of Psychiatry
and Culture

“ACT has been at the forefront of the pioneering third-wave cognitive

behavioral therapies for many years. Not only has it uniquely linked the
human evolution of language and symbol formation to mental
processes that can cause suffering (relational frame theory [RFT]), but
it has articulated six clear processes for therapeutic intervention
centered around developing psychological flexibility. For both novice
and expert therapists of any orientation, you could not want for a more
clearly articulated, easily accessible, and therapeutically wise approach
than this by these leaders and pioneers in the field. Full of therapeutic
transcripts with clear, insightful descriptions of the therapeutic process,
this beautifully written book is an outstanding contribution to
therapeutic literature that is bound to become a classic and an essential
text.”
—Paul Gilbert, professor at the University of Derby, creator of
compassion-focused therapy (CFT), founder of the Compassionate Mind
Foundation, and author of The Compassionate Mind

“The tremendous dedication of thought and care Luoma, Hayes, and

Walser infused into this second edition of Learning ACT is evident in the
breadth and depth of every chapter. Their labor of love resulted in a
preeminent and indispensable guide for novice and advanced ACT
practitioners alike. Especially valuable are the fifty core competency
exercises that stimulate experiential engagement. The chapter on
adapting ACT to cultural contexts makes this a cutting-edge treatment
for individuals from every walk of life who want to move in valued
directions while welcoming all their thoughts and feelings.”
—Mavis Tsai, PhD, coauthor of A Guide to Functional Analytic
Psychotherapy, and research scientist and clinical faculty at the
University of Washington
 Publisher’s Note
This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative
information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with
the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering
psychological, financial, legal, or other professional services. If
expert assistance or counseling is needed, the services of a
competent professional should be sought.
Distributed in Canada by Raincoast Books
 Copyright © 2017 by Jason B. Luoma, Steven C. Hayes, and
Robyn D. Walser
Context Press
An imprint of New Harbinger Publications, Inc.
5674 Shattuck Avenue
Oakland, CA 94609
www.newharbinger.com
Cover design by Amy Shoup
Acquired by Catharine Meyers
Edited by Jasmine Star
Indexed by James Minkin
All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file

To my partner, Jenna LeJeune, for your support, your sacrifice,

and your faith in me.
—JBL
I would like to dedicate this book to David H. Barlow, and to my
fellow interns (Peter M. Monti, Kelly D. Brownell, A. Toy Caldwell-
Colbert, and Carol Heckerman Landau) who worked under him in the
first class of clinical psychology at Brown University, Department of
Psychiatry and Human Behavior, 1975–1976 and who such showed
patience and kindness in shaping up a wild man (that would be me)
to be able to work with people.
—SCH
I would like to dedicate this book to Susan L. Pickett. Thanks for
the encouragement over the years and for always having faith in me.
—RDW
 Contents
Acknowlegments vii
Introduction 1
1. The Focus of ACT and Its Six Aspects 13
2. Developing Willingness and Acceptance 37
3. Undermining Cognitive Fusion 88
4. Getting in Contact with the Present Moment 132
5. Building Flexible Perspective Taking Through Self-as-Context 163
6. Defining Valued Directions 197
7. Building Patterns of Committed Action 238
8. Conceptualizing Cases Using ACT 272
9. The ACT Therapeutic Stance 316
10. Adapting ACT to Cultural Contexts 349
11. Bringing It All Together 371
Appendix A: The ACT Core Competency Rating Form 413
Appendix B: Resources for Further Development 420
Appendix C: Using ACT in Different Settings 422
Glossary 425
References 429
Index 443
 Acknowledgments
This book was a team effort. To all those who read and provided
feedback on drafts of these chapters, thank you. The exercises were
particularly improved by those who piloted chapters of this book,
including Mary Englert, Anne Shankar, Lianna Evans, Ross Leonard,
Brendan Sillifant, Kevin Handley, Laura Meyers, Joanne Hersh,
Jennifer Boulanger, and Jennifer Plumb. Thanks to the Portland ACT
peer consultation group for their ideas about how to organize the
book, exercises, and videos. Thanks to Joe Parsons for discussions
about shaping therapist behavior, which influenced the exercises in
this book. Thanks to those who provided feedback on the first
edition including Donna Read, Ana Gallego, Miguel Lewis, Hiba
Giacoletto, Brady Henderson, Petra Berg, Andrea Sieg, Kathleen
Thorndike, Fred Kane, Magda Permut, Kaylin Jones, Sonia Combs,
and the therapists at Lutheran Community Services of Spokane. Your
input resulted in some large improvements in this edition, and your
efforts will touch the lives of thousands of future readers and their
hundreds of thousands of clients. All those people will never know
that they should thank you for the time you put into improving the
book.
To all of our clients who have honored us with their presence,
trust, and courage. Without all of you, this book would not have
been possible.
Thanks to those students and professionals who allowed
themselves to be supervised by us and who taught their supervisors
so much. Thanks to our editors, Jude Berman and Jasmine Star, for
smoothing out our language and making our jargon more
understandable.
Acknowledgment from individual authors:
Thank you to all those who helped me (JBL) learn ACT. When I first
began studying ACT, I was blown away by the rigor and scope of the
theory and was thoroughly confused by the technical language. I
was rapidly able to utilize many of the metaphors and exercises, but
didn’t really understand how it all tied together. I needed a book
about the in between moments. This is my attempt to write that
book.
I (SCH) would like to thank my wife, Jacqueline Pistorello, for her
support, advice, and patience throughout, and to thank my lab for
their input and encouragement.
I (RDW) would like to thank my mom for providing some of the
illustrations in this book. They look great, Mom! We appreciate your
willingness and action on short notice. I love and miss you. And
thank you to my brothers for being there in times of need and as
well times of joy, much love to you and your families.
 Introduction
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
“Good-morning,” and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
—Edwin Arlington Robinson

It is impossible to construct a human life untouched by suffering.

Edwin Arlington Robinson’s well-known poem reminds us that, every
day, people who seemingly have all the things a person could ever
want, at least as viewed from the outside, end their existence rather
than bearing up under another moment. We of the human species
encounter many of the same painful events as do other species;
humans and nonhuman animals alike are faced with loss,
unexpected upsets, and physically painful experiences. Yet we do
something with these encounters that other species do not: we think
about them, analyze them, predict them, and ruminate about them,
and through this process we amplify our suffering and bring it with
us.
 The human ability to think and reason is truly amazing. Our
system of language is unlike any other; as an ongoing process, it fills
our awareness with a never-ending stream of verbal connections.
This ability is both a wonderful and a terrible thing. It sustains the
capacity for human achievement: our ability to communicate, build,
plan, and engage in problem solving. It is part of our ability to love
deeply and commit to others, to dream of hoped-for futures and
work toward their realization. However, the same cognitive and
verbal building blocks that enable these possibilities also allow us to
struggle in the midst of plenty. They allow us to be Richard Cory.
Human beings struggle in a number of ways that can be painful
and life changing. When events occur that bring us into contact with
difficult emotions and thoughts, we often work very hard to rid
ourselves of these experiences, both by trying to avoid the event
that triggered them and by attempting to remove the negatively
evaluated emotions and thoughts that accompany the experience.
For instance, we don’t want to feel anxiety about failure or sadness
about loss, so when an event occurs that might occasion those
emotions, we work to avoid the event and the resulting emotional
reactions.
It isn’t surprising that we take these steps. If something is
unpleasant, it makes sense to figure out how to remove what is
unpleasant. The problem with this strategy lies in the paradoxical
effects of language—those symbolic abilities that make up what we
call in common terms the mind—as we attempt to use these abilities
to avoid or subtract that which cannot be avoided or subtracted.
When it becomes important that we not think or feel a certain way
and we nevertheless find ourselves thinking or feeling that way, our
minds can become consumed with efforts to diminish or eliminate
these experiences. Often, however, in the very effort to eliminate
these experiences, we propagate and grow the demons we wish to
destroy.
Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT, which is said as one
word, not as A.C.T.; Hayes, Strosahl, & Wilson, 1999) offers a
possible antidote to the harmful functions of this verbal capacity and
its role in human suffering. ACT is an evidence-based contextual
cognitive behavioral intervention designed to create greater
psychological flexibility and, as a result, human liberation. ACT
addresses the paradoxes inherent in human cognitive processes and
works to help people live meaningful and valued lives.
ACT employs a number of strategies to alleviate people’s problems
and promote their flourishing, including willingness or acceptance of
experience; cognitive defusion; flexible attention to the present
moment; contact with a transcendent or perspective-taking sense of
self (self-as-context); clarity and ownership of values; and fostering
commitment to larger patterns of values-based living. Each of these
processes is applied with warmth and compassion for the client’s
struggle and for the difficulties that unwanted experience can bring.
ACT is a constructive approach to psychotherapy that helps people
learn to compassionately embrace their internal experience for all
that it is while also focusing on building repertoires of constructive
behaviors that are values oriented.
ACT is informed by all of the elements of what is now known as
contextual behavioral science, or CBS (Zettle, Hayes, Barnes-Holmes,
& Biglan, 2016). CBS aims to recast behavioral science itself and
takes a functional approach to the major elements needed for
knowledge development in this domain. CBS includes functional
contextualism as a philosophy of science (Biglan & Hayes, 2016),
evolution science principles (Hayes, Monestès, & Wilson, in press),
and behavioral principles as augmented by relational frame theory
(RFT; Hayes, Barnes-Holmes, & Roche, 2001). All of these various
elements come together to define ACT as a contextual behavioral
method.
The relationship of ACT to this larger set of assumptions,
principles, and strategies has been written about extensively in
previous books, and we summarize some of this topic briefly in a
more clinical way in this volume. In particular, we describe the
manner in which ACT approaches how human language and
cognition contribute to keeping human beings stuck. In this second
edition, we also more clearly link psychological flexibility processes
to evolutionary principles. But for the most part, this book centers
around gaining familiarity and practice with the flexibility processes
targeted by ACT, and doing so in a way that is accessible.
It is our hope that reading this book will empower clinicians to
begin to apply ACT’s psychological flexibility model and methods in
their practices. That is what is most unique about this volume. It is
designed to go beyond the philosophy, theory, concepts, and verbal
knowledge of techniques to the actual production of skills and
competencies that target flexibility processes. Therefore, we have
deliberately written it in an accessible style because our focus is on
the practical.
This workbook:

Is about increasing clinicians’ ability help their clients live

more rewarding, full, vital lives
Is about helping clinicians attain sufficient knowledge and
skill with the six flexibility processes so that they can
begin to implement the therapy
Is intended as a skill-building companion for other ACT
texts that provide much more detail about the theory,
philosophy, data, metaphors, exercises, and application of
ACT, and about its relevance to various client problems,
such as anxiety, depression, chronic pain, and psychosis
Is designed to help build clinicians’ skills in the core
competencies associated with ACT’s therapeutic processes
so they can be more effective, regardless of client
presentation

ACT is not a cookbook approach; it is an enormously flexible

model that is built from the ground up with a focus on processes of
change that empower people, rather than proffering rigid protocols
for syndromes. We not only want to provide practitioners with a
clear sense of how ACT is conducted, but would also like to convey
the vitality this therapy can bring to human experience.
 We strongly encourage personal involvement with the book,
including engaging in the practices we offer. We ask this for a
number of reasons, most importantly so that you, as a therapist, can
experience what it means to personally engage ACT, just as you will
be asking your clients to do. People playing the role of therapist are
not fundamentally different from people playing the role of client. As
we will outline in this workbook, we human beings all tend to get
stuck in the same traps. It is essential to learn about these traps
from the inside out, through practice. For that reason, this therapy
can be difficult to do if you are not applying the same approaches in
your own life. Take, for example, your own personal experience with
emotion: what do you do when confronted with what is most painful
to you? If your answer includes efforts to eliminate or control your
experience, we would ask, “To what end?” Perhaps for you, as for
most people, that end is to feel “better.” However, if your answer is
to experience the pain for what it is, learn from it, and live better by
doing so, then you are ahead of the game in learning the ACT
approach and more likely to be effective at it.
Many therapies focus largely on helping people feel better. The
hope is that, at the end of the therapy, the client will have fewer
symptoms and will feel better emotionally. The focus in ACT is
explicitly on living better. Although this may involve feeling better, it
also may not, especially in the short term. Sometimes living better
actually calls for feeling the pain. If doing so promotes connection,
choice, and living with vitality, ACT tries to provide clients with the
skills needed to feel pain without needless defense. The ultimate
goal of ACT is to support clients in feeling and thinking what they
directly feel and think already, while also helping them move in a
chosen, personally valued direction.

How to Use This Book

Learning ACT is designed to be used with other books and resources
on ACT concepts and methods. We particularly recommend in the
following:

Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K., & Wilson, K. G. (2012).

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and
Practice of Mindful Change. This is the second edition of
the original ACT book. No ACT clinician should fail to read
it and keep it at hand.
Eifert, G., & Forsyth, J. (2005). Acceptance and
Commitment Therapy for Anxiety Disorders. Although this
is nominally oriented toward a specific population, it is
also a strong, generally useful ACT protocol that
demonstrates how to mix flexibility processes into a brief
therapy. It provides excellent advice on how to use ACT
to guide exposure.
Hayes, S. C., Smith, S. (2005). Get Out of Your Mind and
Into Your Life. This is the first general-purpose ACT
workbook. It can be useful for therapists new to ACT,
helping them contact the work experientially. It can also
readily be used as homework for clients.
Harris, R. (2008). The Happiness Trap: How to Stop
Struggling and Start Living. This is a general-purpose,
highly accessible ACT book that can also be used as
homework for clients.
Stoddard, J. A., & Afari, N. (2014). The Big Book of ACT
Metaphors: A Practitioner’s Guide to Experimental
Exercises and Metaphors in Acceptance and Commitment
Therapy. This book provides easy access to hundreds of
ACT metaphors and exercises, arranged by flexibility
process for easy reference.
Wilson, K. G. (with DuFrene, T.). (2008). Mindfulness for
Two: An Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Approach
to Mindfulness in Psychotherapy. This book focuses on
bringing mindfulness, a key aspect of psychological
flexibility, to therapeutic interactions, challenging
therapists to forgo standardized approaches and instead
 flexibly tune in to the client and the therapeutic
opportunities afforded by the present moment in session.
Hayes, S. C. (2007). ACT in Action. A six-DVD series with
some of the best ACT therapists showing how to do ACT.
It dovetails well with the videos for the present volume
(the latter available to view at
http://www.newharbinger.com/39492).

Should you need an initial introduction to ACT, we especially

recommend these two books:

Harris, R. (2009). ACT Made Simple: An Easy-to-Read

Primer on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.
Hayes, S. C., & Lillis, J. (2012). Acceptance and
Commitment Therapy.

In addition, there are scores of ACT books for specialized

populations, both for therapists and for individuals. One of the
authors of this book (JBL) maintains an updated list of ACT books
and other resources in the e-book Learning ACT Resource Guide
(available for download at http://www.learningact.com). The
Association for Contextual Behavioral Science (ACBS) is the main
gateway to ACT research, clinical and theoretical publications, online
discussions, trainings, institutes, conferences, manuals, protocols,
metaphors, and networking; ACBS also keeps a list of ACT and RFT
relevant titles at https://contextualscience.org/acbs_amazon_store.
Keep in mind that if you go to the ACBS website, you won’t be able
to see most of the materials if you aren’t a member who is logged
into the website. More information on the ACBS and other resources
is available in appendix B.

Organization of This Book

 ACT is an evidence-based intervention, but we want to be clear
about what that means in a contextual behavioral science approach
so you can understand the organization of the book. ACT is not a
protocol or a set of techniques; rather, it is an approach to therapy
that targets a small set of key flexibility processes. This process-
based approach is a feature that distinguishes ACT from the many
forms of therapy that emphasize protocols over processes.
The introduction and first chapter of this workbook provide an
overview of the theory behind ACT and some tools to help you think
about cases from an ACT perspective. Specifically, chapter 1 outlines
the ways in which basic processes of learning and evolution science,
combined with the problematic effects of language, lead to increased
suffering for humans. The ACT theory of change is also outlined in
chapter 1.
Chapters 2 through 7 and chapter 9 cover the knowledge and
practices necessary for ACT clinicians, with chapters 2 through 7
focusing on the six flexibility processes. Each of those chapters
includes a description of basic metaphors, stories, and techniques
used in connection with that process, as well as vignettes
demonstrating those methods, and ends with a practical writing
assignment in which you’re asked to apply the principles you’ve
learned to various sample client scenarios. Each of these chapters
also addresses when to use the methods discussed, indicators that
work with that particular process, and how to address problems that
commonly arise when targeting given processes, and includes at
least one experiential exercise. The goal of these chapters is to help
you get what each process is about. No particular ACT technique is
foundational, so the goal of these chapters is to help you abstract
how to manipulate the underlying flexibility processes through
reading and practice.
In chapters 2 through 7, each of the psychological flexibility
processes targeted by ACT is presented largely as if it were
separate. In actual sessions with clients, however, a single process is
rarely the sole focus; rather, multiple processes are explored and
worked on within each session. Chapter 8 focuses on how case
conceptualization and treatment planning can help you begin the
task of integrating the six processes into a coherent treatment and
gives you an opportunity to apply the ACT model to practice cases.
Chapter 9 shows you how to utilize the flexibility processes in the
context of the therapy relationship, and chapter 10 offers guidance
on flexibly working with cultural factors during interventions and
case conceptualization. Finally, chapter 11 is designed to help you
integrate your use of the various flexibility processes in sessions and
to be flexible in doing so. And just as ACT attempts to build
psychological flexibility in clients, we hope this workbook will
increase your flexibility as a clinician in the application of ACT. To
that end, chapter 11 provides various exercises to help you develop
this flexibility.
We’ve also included three appendices. Appendix A presents the
ACT Core Competency Rating Form, which you can use to assess
your abilities in delivering ACT. In the core competency practices in
chapters 2 through 7 and 9, we ask you to demonstrate these
competencies. It’s only in appendix A that you can see all the
competencies in one place, so you may wish to review that appendix
before diving into the chapters. Appendix B offers information on
additional resources for deepening your knowledge about ACT, and
appendix C addresses adapting ACT to different intervention
settings.

Online Resources
Various resources related to the book are available for download
at http://www.newharbinger.com/39492. There, you’ll find the ACT
Core Competency Rating Form (appendix A); a document of FAQs
answering some of the most common questions of therapists new to
ACT; and audio recordings of several client exercises described in the
book (we’ll provide a reminder about the downloadable recordings
where those exercises appear). Another downloadable resource is
the document “Learning ACT in Classrooms and Peer Groups and via
Peer Supervision.” Regarding the latter, experience has shown us
that it’s important for ACT therapists to have a community that
supports them in their ACT work. Whether it’s a group of friends or
colleagues, a virtual community accessed through the Internet, a
temporary course, or a relationship with a supervisor or mentor, this
social/verbal community is essential in keeping you on track as a
clinician, particularly as an ACT clinician. Fortunately or
unfortunately, many of the ways of speaking or thinking that are part
of the repertoire of an effective ACT clinician are not common
outside of this context. Many of the messages of mainstream
Western culture are so dominant and automatic, particularly those
fostering feel-goodism (i.e., experiential control) and literal ways of
interacting with thoughts, that without support from a social/verbal
community versed in ACT, newer, less practiced repertoires of
behaving and thinking based on ACT are less likely to be maintained
over time.
In addition, we highly recommend that you visit
http://www.newharbinger.com/39492 to find videos that
complement the book, with experienced ACT clinicians role-playing
examples of the core competencies, using trained actors to play the
clients. We have created these examples to show both relatively
skilled and relatively unskilled applications of the ACT methods and
principles. Not all the competencies are covered in the videos, but
with the exception of chapter 8 (case conceptualization), examples
are provided for approaches presented in chapters 2 through 10. We
recommend reading the corresponding chapter before watching its
video.
The videos offer models of exercises and techniques that go
beyond what we can adequately demonstrate in written form. One
good way to use them is to play each clip and then pause the
playback before the narrator describes what was being done. Try to
determine what fit or did not fit with the ACT model in the clip, and
only then resume the video to hear the narrator debrief the
interaction. This start-and-stop method is especially recommended
for workshops or classroom use of this book.
Using the Practice Exercises in This Book
Although reading about ACT techniques and skills is important, to
become an effective ACT clinician it is even more important to
practice these skills. Having extensive mental knowledge about a
therapy can clearly set the stage for implementation. However, it is
not only verbal knowledge that will guide you through the therapy;
experiential knowledge is also key to understanding the ACT
approach and providing quality implementation. This book is
structured to give you that experiential knowledge through
engagement with exercises.
Learning to use ACT is like learning to play the violin. You can
read a book about how to hold the bow or how musical scales are
structured. However, reading about playing does not make you a
violinist. Practice is essential. Although reading (verbal knowledge)
can teach you how to hold the bow, the exercises in this book are
designed to help you begin to play the violin (experiential
knowledge). In ACT, we ask clients to engage in the process of
experiential learning and to be willing to experience all that comes
along with that learning, including painful failures and mistakes. We
ask them to do this with the goal of learning from their own
experience in the service of living a rich and valued life. We would
like to ask you to do the same by engaging fully with the exercises
presented in this workbook. Many of the exercises require a written
response. If you’re reading an electronic version of this book or
simply prefer not to write in the book, or if you need more space for
your responses to any of the exercises, feel free to use a notebook
or a computer or other electronic device to record your answers.
At the end of chapters 2 through 7 and 9, we’ve included a section
titled Core Competency Practice, in which we provide practice
exercises based on dialogues with clients. (Many of the cases
presented in this book are amalgamations of actual clients but have
been altered and combined so that no one, not even the clients
themselves, could recognize the material.) These exercises give you
the opportunity to formulate and practice responses to hypothetical
clients prior to doing so with real clients. In the exercises, you are
asked to generate your own responses before comparing them with
the suggested ACT-consistent responses provided at the end of the
chapter.
Feedback from readers of the first edition of this book indicates
that they were often tempted to jump directly to the sample
responses, skipping the process of generating their own responses.
This is definitely the easier path and one way to engage with this
workbook. However, this strategy has a major downside: it negates
what is most unique about this book—the opportunity to actually
practice ACT and get feedback on your responses. Here’s what some
of our previous readers have said about how important it was to
actually do the exercises versus just reading them:

“Actually doing the exercises makes all the difference.

Doing them allowed me to test what I had learned in the
chapter, and it was very useful to do them and then
compare my responses to the answers.”
“I enjoyed the core competency exercises, as they really
made me think about my responses. They helped me
integrate the material I’d just read in the chapter.”
“I appreciated the core competency exercises. They
nudged me to really think through how I would respond
to very realistic situations.”

Only you can decide whether learning ACT is worth the time and
effort. If you decide that the answer is yes, we suggest that you give
yourself the space to generate responses to the exercises, even if
your mind thinks those responses will be wrong or of low quality.
One thing that can help with sustaining motivation to do these
practices is to reflect on what larger purpose this might serve. We
suggest you take a minute or so to reflect on that right now. In fact,
we’ll use that invitation to offer you an initial exercise.
 Exercise:Identifying Your
Values in Working with This
Book

What honest, sincere, and heartfelt

purpose would you have your
engagement with this book serve? What
larger patterns do you hope to feed by
completing this workbook?

For me, completing this workbook is in the service of

BRINGING SELF-COMPASSION TO THE LEARNING PROCESS

There’s a saying we like in relation to learning something new: “If
something is worth doing, it’s worth doing poorly at first.” Learning
something new generally means that our performance will be poor;
otherwise, it’s not really new. Doing the exercises in this workbook
rather than simply reading them is not the easy way. You will make
mistakes—perhaps many mistakes. However, mistakes are our
teachers. And even though mistakes are an inevitable part of
learning, it’s often the case that the mind will beat us up for making
mistakes or for our perceived lack of knowledge, even though this
makes it harder to learn. Because this is an all-too-common thing for
minds to do, it’s important to be able to find ways to respond to
ourselves in a supportive and kind way when we’re learning. In line
with this aim, we ask that you reflect for a bit on the kind of
relationship you’d like to have with yourself as you complete the
exercises in this workbook. So, once again, we’ll use that invitation
as a context for you to begin engaging with the exercises in this
book.

Exercise:Envisioning Self-
Compassion

If you were to be a caring friend to

yourself as you practice, what qualities
would you hope to have in your
relationship with yourself? This isn’t
about how you usually are with yourself
around mistakes; it’s about your
intentions. How do you want to treat
yourself while you’re learning? In the
following space, list the qualities you’d
like to bring to yourself as you work
with this book.

As I make mistakes and struggle with learning, I would want to

have a relationship with myself that is characterized by these
qualities:
________________________________________
________________________________________
________________________________________
Here’s one thing I can do when I notice my mind getting down on
me during these exercises:
________________________________________
________________________________________
________________________________________
GETTING EXPERIENTIAL
In addition to the core competency exercises, each chapter
includes experiential exercises. By “experiential,” we mean that their
purpose is to help you find the ACT space, stance, or psychological
posture from which you as an ACT clinician are likely to be most
effective. The nature of these exercises is both personal and deeply
connected to the nature of the therapy.
While we don’t recommend that you skip these exercises, it’s okay
if you do. You are the expert on your own experience and what will
help you achieve your valued goals. However, if you choose not to
do them during your initial reading of the book, we suggest you
come back and complete them later so you can extract the full value
of this volume.

Beginning to Use ACT

We have several recommendations about beginning to use an ACT
approach to therapy, set forth in the following sections.

Consulting Other Texts to Round Out Your Understanding of

ACT
Before you begin using ACT with clients, we recommend that you
have a good sense of the entire ACT model. This includes knowing a
variety of core metaphors and exercises you can use and having a
working understanding of the basic theory. While this book provides
a good overview of the theory, it does not provide many of the core
metaphors you need or exercises you will want to use. Thus, you will
need at least one other ACT book to supplement this volume and
give you more specific instructions about how to sequence
interventions and introduce the different processes, and to give you
access to a range of metaphors and exercises. In short, this book is
not meant to provide a comprehensive introduction to ACT; rather,
it’s a practice guide that will allow you to apply the tools you gain
during your learning process to all of the in-between moments that
aren’t specific to particular exercises or metaphors.
Good books to consider for an introductory text that will give you
more step-by-step instructions for using ACT with your clients
include the second edition of the original ACT book, Acceptance and
Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change
(Hayes et al., 2012), or ACT Made Simple (Harris, 2009). We usually
recommend the original ACT book, as it is the most comprehensive.
However, if you would prefer a simpler introduction and step-by-step
guide that focuses on tools, tricks, and techniques and is lighter on
theory, ACT Made Simple is an excellent alternative. If you have a
strong background in more traditional CBT methods and are
branching out into ACT, A CBT Practitioner’s Guide to ACT (Ciarrochi
& Bailey, 2008) is another good starting place.
To be clear, we don’t recommend Learning ACT as the first book
you read on ACT. Instead, it is an excellent second book that will
allow you to apply knowledge gained from more comprehensive
books, like those suggested above. Then you can begin to branch
out, delving into more specific ACT literature. There are now ACT
books for most major categories of problems (e.g., eating disorders,
anxiety, chronic pain, substance use, depression), as well as
applications to particular professions (e.g., social work or pastoral
counseling), settings (e.g., primary care), or types of practice (e.g.,
groups or couples).

Bringing Flexibility to the Process and Connecting with the

ACT Community
Second, we recommend allowing time for a period of growth with
the theory and therapy. Although, as mentioned, the flexibility
processes are initially presented in this book as if they were
separate, they are actually interdependent. Lacking a basic
understanding of one process could lead to difficulties in
implementing other processes, as well as confusion and dead ends
in therapy. In addition, without an overall understanding of the
approach, therapists can easily introduce inconsistencies that might
undermine the overall thrust of the intervention. It takes time to
learn this complex and comprehensive model. We encourage you to
be compassionate with yourself as you practice, and to give yourself
time to reread sections on relevant concepts and approaches as you
try to apply them. Also, be forewarned that you may experience
some disruptions in your practice when you begin to use these
approaches, particularly if you’ve been operating from control-based
theories of intervention. It is not at all uncommon for practitioners
who are drawn to this work to initially feel awkward, confused, and
anxious as they begin to apply ACT.
A dissertation by Douglas Long (2015) examined the use of the
videos in the first edition of this book and found that clinicians being
able to detect competent ACT was predicted by workshop training,
knowledge about ACT, reading books about ACT, supervision in ACT,
and membership in the group most responsible for the continuing
development of ACT, the Association for Contextual Behavioral
Science. Competency improvement following training was also
predicted by therapists’ psychological flexibility. These findings make
perfect sense. To be good at ACT, you need to put in some effort,
give yourself time, work on your own flexibility processes, and come
into community with others on the same journey.
Fortunately, we also know that feeling confident isn’t necessary for
ACT competence. An effectiveness study done a few years ago with
beginning therapists showed that, compared with traditional
cognitive behavioral therapy, doing ACT tended to produce more
anxiety in these therapists, who were new to ACT—and also led to
significantly better clinical outcomes in patients (Lappalainen et al.,
2007). Based on these kinds of findings, we recommend that you try
to make room for whatever discomfort you may experience as you
learn to implement ACT. To that end, you may find ACT self-help
books helpful, allowing you to apply ACT to your discomfort in
learning it. We now know that applying ACT to oneself as a therapist
has broad benefits. It decreases the stress and burnout that can
come from being a therapist or therapist in training (e.g., Brinkborg,
Michanek, Hesser, & Berglund, 2011; Frögéli, Djordjevic, Rudman,
Livheim, & Gustavsson, 2016) and helps therapists apply evidence-
based therapy methods even when doing so is psychologically
difficult (Varra, Hayes, Roget, & Fisher, 2008; Scherr, Herbert, &
Forman, 2015).
Time and effort, combined with openness, will produce a greater
sense of wholeness and empowerment. However, be aware that
there is a sense of vulnerability when doing ACT that never
completely disappears. ACT asks the clinician to stand with the client
as another human being in a horizontal relationship, without
needless defense. This brings great richness to the process, along
with a rawness that can’t be avoided without undoing the work itself.

Incorporating ACT into Your Practice

We recommend two basic ways of beginning to incorporate ACT into
your practice. One is to start by implementing ACT based on one of
the standardized manuals available. Many are listed under “Therapist
Guides” in the e-book Learning ACT Resource Guide (available for
download at http://www.learningact.com); you’ll also find a list of
many therapist manuals for specific client presentations on the ACBS
website https://contextualscience.org/treatment_protocols. Ideally,
you would follow the manual from beginning to end with a client
who presents with problems matching the specific treatment
discussed in that manual. This has the advantage of pushing you
into corners of the work where you may still feel awkward.
We also recommend the fairly common approach of first using
ACT with a client with whom you find yourself struggling. If this
client is difficult, which is often the case, this may seem like a
counterintuitive place to begin; however, because your old repertoire
has already been failing in an important way, if you continue with
the same approaches you’ve been using, you’ll probably continue to
find yourself in the same place as the client: stuck. Giving ACT a try
can allow you to see whether something new can happen and free
up the therapy process.
After you’ve followed a detailed ACT protocol with a few clients,
we suggest that you put the protocol aside and move to tracking and
targeting flexibility processes based on clients’ needs and your case
conceptualizations. This book will be especially helpful to you in
continuing to develop your skills during this phase.
Finally, we encourage you to attend an experiential ACT workshop.
This is truly one of the best ways to learn the ACT approach. ACT is
centered on living fully with all experience—both negative and
positive—and on the freedom and richness that purposeful living can
bring. Attending a workshop can help create these dynamics in your
life, both in your personal way of being in the world and in your
work with clients. It can also provide intuitive guidance about the
function of flexibility processes, not just the form of these processes.
ACT trainings and workshops are listed at
http://www.contextualscience.org.

CBS and the Research Context Surrounding

ACT
ACT is based on a now enormous body of scholarly and research
work in the fields of philosophy of science, basic psychology,
psychopathology, evolution science, and clinical intervention. As we
were writing this second edition of Learning ACT, there had been
almost two hundred randomized trials on ACT (for a partial list,
minus some of those available only in non-English languages, see
http://contextualscience.org/ACT_Randomized_Controlled_Trials).
These studies have looked at almost every conceivable area of
mental health, behavioral health, and social functioning. About 83
percent of that literature is less than five years old, and over the last
few years, a new randomized trial has been published every ten to
eleven days, on average. Across all areas of CBS relevant to ACT and
its foundations, there are nearly two thousand articles currently
available. In this book, we deliberately use relatively informal
language because our purpose is intensely practical and focused on
skills. As your skills in ACT grow, however, you may find that
exploring the broader body of research deepens your understanding.
Practitioners who attend their first ACBS conference are often
surprised to find workshops and sessions on RFT, behavioral
principles, evolutionary extensions, and a contextualistic philosophy
of science. Perhaps even more surprising, after gaining some
experience clinicians themselves begin to demand such sessions and
are often enthusiastic about their practical usefulness. In this book,
we use clinical and commonsense terms, generally without stopping
to link them to basic principles. For example, we speak easily of
“mind” without delving into the work done in RFT labs to identify the
component behavioral skills involved in this commonsense domain. If
you’re interested in learning more about these aspects of ACT, you
can start by reading more of the CBS literature.
If you connect deeply to the work, you will eventually learn that
ACT is part of an attempt to restructure psychology and, indeed,
behavioral science itself. Although at this point you are probably
concerned with immediate practical purposes, this book will help you
learn enough about ACT to care about that larger context. Most
importantly, we hope that reading—or perhaps the better word
would be “doing”—this book will help you learn enough about ACT
to begin to use these methods with clients who can benefit from
them.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 IX
THE DAWN OF INTELLIGENCE

The sixth month, though it lay between two great development

periods,—that of learning to use the senses, and that of learning to
carry the body,—was not in itself a period of suspended
development. It is true that its progress, being more purely mental,
could not be so continuously traced as that which came before and
after, but rather cropped up to the surface every now and then in a
more or less broken way; still, no doubt, it really went on in the same
gradual method, one thread and another knitting together into the
fabric of new powers.
It was to this month, as I said in closing the last chapter, that the
beginnings of adaptive intelligence belonged; and this alone marks it
a great epoch.
There is a great deal of discussion about the use of the words
“intelligence,” “reason,” “instinct,” “judgment,” “inference,” and the
like: what these faculties and acts really are, how they come about,
where the line is to be drawn between their manifestations (in the
minds of animals and of man, for instance), and many other
problems. But I think that all agree upon recognizing two types of
action that come under the discussion: one, that which shows merely
the ability to adapt means to ends, to use one’s own wit in novel
circumstances; the other, that which rests on the higher, abstract
reasoning power, such as is hardly possible without carrying on a
train of thought in words. Whether these two types are to be called
intelligence and reason, as Professor Lloyd Morgan calls them, or
whether both come under the head of reason, lower and higher, we
need not trouble to decide. If we call them adaptive intelligence and
higher or abstract reason, we are safe enough.
Even if it be true that any glimmer of the higher reason penetrates
back into the grades of life below the attainment of speech, it must
be only into those just below, and is not to be looked for in our baby
for a long time yet. But the mere practical intelligence that I am now
speaking of seems to appear in babies close on the completion of a
fair mastery of their senses, about the middle of the first year, and it
goes pretty far down in the animal kingdom. Darwin thought the
lowest example of it he knew was in the crab, who would remove
shells that were thrown near the mouth of his burrow, apparently
realizing that they might fall in.
Recent psychologists have shown strong reason for thinking that
such acts as this are at bottom only the same old hit and miss trick
that we have seen from the first, of repeating lucky movements; only
in a higher stage, as the associations that guide the movements
become more delicate and complicated, and memory and
imagination enter in. However this may be as a matter of theoretic
analysis, there is in practice a clear test of difference between the
unintelligent earlier type of actions and those that all agree in calling
intelligent: I have indicated it above, in saying that in intelligent action
one’s own wit must be used “in novel circumstances.” The case must
be such that one cannot fall back on race instinct nor on his own
previous habit.
Our baby, for instance, first used her intelligence to steer her toe into
her mouth, and the way she did it, compared with the way she slowly
settled on the proper movements for getting her rattle into her mouth,
shows clearly the practical difference between unintelligent and
intelligent action, even if both are at bottom made of the same
psychological stuff.
It was just before the sixth month began that the baby accomplished
this feat, but it belongs with the developments of that month. She
was already fond of playing with her toes; and sitting unclad that
evening in her mother’s lap, she first tried to pull them straight to her
mouth. This was, of course, the mere repetition of a frequent
movement, learned by simple association. But when it failed—for the
toes would kick away, just as her arms used to do, carrying the
thumb from her lips—the little one put her mind on corralling them.
She took them in one hand, clasped the other hand about her instep,
and so brought the foot safely up. Still it escaped, and at last she
clasped ankle and heel firmly, one with each hand, and after several
attempts brought the elusive toe triumphantly into her mouth. It is
true that by looking up to us for sympathy in her success, and
relaxing attention, she promptly lost it once more; but she recaptured
it, and from this time on, for weeks, had immense satisfaction in it
every time she was undressed.
There may have been a certain element of instinct in this—getting
the toe to the mouth is so persistent a habit with babies that it seems
as if there must be some inheritance about it; but inheritance could
hardly have given the special devices for managing the
insubordinate foot; there was clearly some use of individual
intelligence. All through the process of learning to manage the body,
the baby showed instinct and intelligence most intricately mingled;
and, indeed, we do so ourselves our lives long.
Of all a baby’s doings this toe business is the one that people find it
most impossible to regard with scientific seriousness. But its indirect
usefulness is considerable. The coöperation of different parts of the
body that it teaches is remarkable; and it must have great influence
in extending the sense of self to the legs and feet, where it has
hitherto seemed but weakly developed. This is important in getting
the body ready for standing and walking.
The baby now showed intelligence in her actions in several little
ways, such as tugging with impatient cries at her mother’s dress
when she wanted her dinner, and leaning over to pluck at the
carriage blanket, under which her mother had laid some flowers to
keep them from her. She slipped a long-handled spoon farther down
in her hand to get the end of the handle into her mouth (almost
exactly the same act as the one that Darwin thought first showed “a
sort of practical reflection” in his child at about the same age: the boy
slipped his hand down his father’s finger, in order to get the finger tip
into his mouth). In the second week of the month she began to watch
things as they fell, and then to throw them down purposely, to watch
them falling.
I have already mentioned certain doubtful imitations in the fourth
month, and a clearer one in the fifth. Now the baby began to imitate
unmistakably. Her uncle had a fashion of slapping his hand down on
the table by way of a salutation to her, and one day (when she had
passed a week of her sixth month) she slapped down her little hand
in return. The next day as soon as her uncle came in, she began to
slap her hand down, watching him, delighted to repeat the
movement back and forth, as long as he would keep it up. She would
imitate me also when I did it; and in the course of the month several
other little imitations occurred.
I have already spoken of the great importance psychologists attach
to imitation. Professor Baldwin makes it the great principle of
development in child and race—all evolution one long history of its
workings; but he uses the word in a far wider sense than the ordinary
one, tracing “imitation” from the mechanical repetition of life-
preserving motions by the lowest living things, up to the spiritual
effort of men and women to live up to their own highest ideals. Even
using the word in its ordinary sense, we know what a potent force in
the little one’s education imitation is. The age, however, at which it is
most efficient is considerably later than the sixth month, and it did
not count for much yet with our baby.
Her sounds had been more various and expressive from the first
days of the month. She had taken up a curious puppy-like whine of
desire or complaint, and a funny little ecstatic sniffing and catching
her breath, to express some shades of delight; and she had also
begun to pour out long, varied successions of babbling sounds,
which expressed content, interest, or complaint very clearly. She
would “talk to” any interesting object (a hedge in gorgeous bloom, for
instance) with this expressive babble, sometimes holding out her
arms to it at the same time. But now, in the second week of the
month, the day after the first decisive imitation, a surprising advance
beyond these means of communication took place.
I must explain that the wise grandma, who believed in encouraging
babies to creep, as the best possible preparation for standing and
walking, had begun to set the little one on her hands and knees on
the big dining-table, putting a hand against her feet as a brace in
case she should be moved to struggle forward. The baby had a habit
of pushing with her feet when she felt anything against her soles;
and pushing thus, thrust herself forward; and as the table-cover slid
with her movement, she would half slide with it, half shove herself,
across the table, grunting with exertion, and highly pleased.
On the day in question I was sitting with her by this table, and she
pulled at the table-cover, as she was wont to pull and handle
anything she could reach. Suddenly she threw herself back on my
arm, and looked earnestly in my face; sat up and pulled at the cover
again, then threw herself back and looked at me again.
“What does she want?” I said, surprised, and hardly able to think that
the little thing could really be trying to say something to me. But
grandma interpreted easily, and when I put the baby on the table
accordingly, to make her sliding sprawl across the surface, she was
satisfied.
This remarkable advance in sign language comes well under our
definition of intelligent action: it was not a stereotyped sign, already
fixed in her mind in association with a certain wish, like holding out
her arms to be taken, but a device of her own, to meet the special
occasion.
Her increased power of communication was not the only way in
which her mind showed itself more wide awake to other people. A
rather uncomfortable phase of this development was timidity. In the
first week of the month, she was frightened by some one who came
in suddenly between her and her mother, in a strange house, and
spoke abruptly, in a deep, unfamiliar voice; and after that she often
cried or became uneasy when strange men took her, or came near
her, especially if they were abrupt. She drew distinct lines, according
to some principle of her own, and certain people were affably
accepted at once, while others, no more terrific that we could see,
made the little lip quiver every time they came near. This timidity
toward people was not at all deeply fixed in her temperament, and
though it lasted all this month, it was never very marked afterward.
Some indications of the dawn of affection also appeared now. The
baby’s desire to touch our faces with her mouth and hands seemed
to have a certain element of attachment in it. The touches were often
soft and caressing, and they were bestowed only on her especial
friends, or on one or two strangers that she had taken at once into
notable favor. Once she leaned out of her baby carriage, calling and
reaching to me, as if she wished to be taken; but when I came to her,
she wanted only to get hold of me, to put her hands and mouth softly
on my face.
Up to about the middle of the month, in spite of her daily exercises
with her toe, the baby had not altogether annexed her legs to her
conscious self and brought them under her orders. She still had to
hold the foot forcibly with her hands all the time her toe was in her
mouth, or it would have kicked away from her as if it was none of
hers. It is likely, too, that she had scarcely any idea of those parts of
her body which she could not see and did not often touch. Indeed,
the psychologists tell us that we ourselves have a decidedly inferior
bodily consciousness in such parts—say between the shoulder
blades. Even her own head must have been mainly unknown
territory to the baby still, in spite of the curiosity she had felt about it
the month before. But now she discovered by a chance touch that
she could investigate it with her hands, and proceeded at once to do
so, with a serious face.
In the latter half of the month, she went a good deal farther toward
getting a roughly complete knowledge and control of her body. She
investigated her ear, her cheek, and the back and sides of her head,
from time to time. She became quite expert in using legs and hands,
head and mouth, together, in get getting hold of her toe. She sat
alone longer and longer, and by the end of the month could have
done so by the half hour, if she had not always upset herself in five
minutes or so by turning and reaching about. She had become very
free in bending, squirming, and changing her position when she lay
on the floor, and early in the third week of the month she had turned
clear over, from back to stomach, in reaching after something. She
followed up the lesson at once, and soon was rolling over whenever
she wished—at first having much ado to get her arm disentangled
from under her, but managing it nicely before long.
It is possible she would have begun creep creeping at this time but
for the impediment of her clothes. She did stumble once upon almost
the right movement, in trying to get forward to something she
wanted; but her feet and knees became entangled in her skirts, and
she gave it up. A week later, she was put into short skirts, but by that
time the ability to roll over had diverted her mind from creeping.
Babies must lose a great deal of their normal activity through
clothes. They are retracing a stage of human history in which clothes
had no part, and this new element must hamper the repetition
immensely. Clothes they must wear—they do not live in tropic forests
nor own hair coverings; but we ought to leave the little limbs as free
as we can without risk from cold. A chance to roll about nude in a
room that is safely warm is a great thing for a baby.
She did not again use any sign language as advanced as when she
had asked to be put on the table; that incident was a sort of herald of
a later stage of development. But in the latter part of the month her
regular means of communication were decidedly better developed
than in the first part. She would coax for a frolic by leaning forward
with an urgent “Oo! oo!” and expressive movements of her body; but
if she was asking instead for an object she wished, or to be taken
into her mother’s arms, there were small but quite definite
differences in tone, expression, and movement, so that we usually
knew at once which she meant.
About a week before the end of the month a great step toward
intercommunication by speech took place. We began to suspect that
the baby knew her own name, she turned to look so often just after it
had been spoken. To test it I stood behind her, and in an ordinary
tone accosted her as Bobby, Tom, Kitten, Mary, Jacob, Baby, and all
sorts of other names. Whenever I said Ruth, Toodles, or Toots, she
turned and looked expectantly at me, but not at any other name.
Now, Ruth is our baby’s proper name; so it was evident that she
really did have some inkling of the sound that meant her.
Not that she could rise yet to any such abstract conception as that of
a person or of a name. But she had learned that this sound was
connected with interesting experiences—with frolics, and caresses,
and trips outdoors, with relief from discomforts, with dinners, and all
the other things that happened when people were attending to her. It
was out of such a beginning as this that full understanding of
articulate speech, in all its logical intricacy, was to develop.
One of the most marked traits of the latter weeks of this month was
the surprising rapidity with which things were grouping themselves in
the baby’s mind by association, in a way that came nearer and
nearer to definite memory. She coaxed for a spoon, and when she
got it was still discontented, till we found that she wished it to have
milk in, as she knew befitted a spoon—though for the milk itself she
did not care at all. She understood what particular frolic was to be
expected from each of us. She turned, when she saw reflections, to
look for the real object. She made demonstrations of joy when she
saw her baby carriage, knowing well what it portended.
In two or three cases, there was at last unmistakable evidence of
true memory, for at least a few minutes. For instance, in the last
week of the month, sitting on her mother’s lap, the baby caught sight
of a knot of loops that adorned the centre of an ottoman close by,
and reached her arms for it. By way of a joke on her, her mother set
her on the ottoman. It was quite beyond the baby’s sense of locality
to divine what had become of the knot, and she looked all about her
diligently to find it, leaning this way and that. By and by her mother
took her back into her arms to nurse; but all the time she was
nursing, she would stop now and then, sit up, and lean over to look
for the lost knot.
At another time, when her mother came into the room with a new hat
on, she reached out her hands for it with delight; her mother
retreated at once, and put the hat safely out of sight, but when some
minutes later the baby saw her again, her first look was at the top of
her head, and seeing it now bare of lace and buttercups, she broke
into a disappointed whimper.
All this time practice in her earlier attainments went vigorously on.
She was watching, handling, reaching after things, all day long.
Especially she watched all the movements of people; often, now, as
they went in and out of doors, as they were seen through windows,
came into sight or disappeared around corners. She must have been
getting thus some idea of the way walls acted in shutting out her
view, and of the relation of visible and invisible positions.
She had perhaps more troubles in this month than ever before, what
with some fear of people, and the discomforts connected with her
first pair of teeth, and also with the beginning of the weaning period.
There were a number of days when her health and spirits were
considerably depressed, and there was a good deal of fretting. When
the teeth were fairly through, and the insufficient food supplemented,
her spirits came up with a bound, and she was more joyous than
ever.
She had her first skin pain in this month—a scratched finger from a
clasp on my shoulder—and wailed with vigor; yet it was forgotten in
a few moments, and never thought of again. It was evident that skin
sensitiveness was still low, and that hurts left no after soreness.
It was about ten days before the end of the month that she first
showed a decided emotional dependence on her mother. She had
been separated from her for some time (by a tedious dentist’s
engagement), had become hungry and sleepy, and had been
frightened by an abrupt stranger. At last she settled into a pitiful,
steady crying—stopping at every angle in the corridor where I
walked with her, and watching eagerly till it was turned, then
breaking out anew when her mother did not prove to be around the
corner. This tragic experience left a much deeper mark than the
physical woes, and for some days the baby watched her mother
rather anxiously, as if she feared she might lose her again unless
she kept her eyes constantly upon her.
And so she was come to the end of her first half year. The breathing
automaton had become an eager and joyous little being, seeing and
hearing and feeling much as we do, knowing her own body
somewhat, and controlling it throughout to a certain extent, laughing
and frolicking, enjoying the vision of the world with a delicious zest,
clinging to us not so much for physical protection as for human
companionship, beginning to show a glimmer of intelligence, and to
cross over with sign and sound the abyss between spirit and spirit.
 X
BEGINNINGS OF LOCOMOTION

When a baby has learned to see things clearly, and has known the
joys of handling them, it is natural that he should soon come to feel
the need of getting to them when they chance to lie beyond arm
reach. Apparently the first impulse to move the whole body does
always come from this desire to get at something; but I doubt if this
remains a very important motive throughout the whole process of
learning. There is so much in that process that is instinctive that the
baby seems to be in great part taken up and carried on by a current
of blind impulse. Then, too, the whole structure of bone, and joint,
and muscle is so fitted to certain positions and movements that in
the mere chance exercising of his limbs he is steadily brought nearer
to the great race acts of balance and locomotion.
One might suppose that with babies sprawling, creeping, and
toddling on every hand, we should not lack evidence on the
beginnings of human locomotion; but as a matter of fact, the stage
that precedes walking is involved in a good deal of confusion.
Records are scanty, and children seem to vary a good deal in their
way of going at the thing. Most of them “creep before they gang”; but
there seems to be a stage before creeping, when, if the child is given
full freedom of movement, he will get over the floor in some cruder
way, rolling, hitching, dragging himself by the elbows, humping
forward measure-worm fashion, or wriggling along like a snake.
Perhaps, as I have already suggested, this is because skirts delay
the natural beginning of creeping, and these other movements
require less freedom of the legs; perhaps there is some deeper
reason connected with race history. Sometimes the baby makes
these less efficient movements answer till walking is acquired, and
never creeps at all.
Our baby, as we have seen, had already made her first ineffective
attempts to pull herself forward and reach something; and lying face
down, unable to turn over, had so propped herself with hands and
knees that when she tried to move she almost stumbled on creeping
unawares. But soon after she was six months old, she discovered
the other half of the trick of rolling—reversing herself from front to
rear as well as from rear to front; and this gave her such an enlarged
freedom that it stopped all aspirations in other directions.
She did not deliberately turn over and over to get anywhere. She
simply rolled and kicked about the floor, turning over when she felt
like it or when she wished to reach something, highly content, and
asking odds of nobody. If by chance she turned in the same direction
a number of times in succession, she would drift halfway across the
room, meeting no end of interesting things by the way—mamma’s
slipper tips, chair rockers, table legs, waste basket, petals dropped
from the vases, and so on. It was a great enlargement of life, and
kept her happy for six or seven weeks.
During this time, her balance in sitting grew secure, so that she could
sit on the floor as long as she chose, occupied with playthings; but
she cared more for the rolling.
It was in these weeks, too, that two great new interests came into
our baby’s life. The first was a really passionate one, and it seized
her suddenly, the week after she was half a year old. The door had
just opened to admit a guest, amid a bustle of welcome, when a cry
of such desire as we had never heard from our baby in all her little
life called our attention to her. Utterly indifferent to the arrival of
company (she who had always loved a stir of coming and going, and
taken more interest in people than in anything else!) she was leaning
and looking out of the window at the dog, as if she had never seen
him before—though he had been before her eyes all her life. She
would think of nothing else; the guest, expert in charming babies,
could not get a glance.
Day after day, for weeks, the little thing was filled with excitement at
sight of the shaggy Muzhik, moving her arms and body, and crying
out with what seemed intensest joy and longing. When he came
near, her excitement increased, and she reached out and caught at
him; her face lighted with happiness when he stood close by; she
showed not the least fear when he put his rough head almost in her
face, but gazed earnestly at it; she watched for him at the window, or
from her baby carriage. No person or thing had ever interested her
so much. Muzhik, on his part, soon learned to give the snatching
little hands a wide berth; and his caution may have enhanced his
charm.
Later in the month, she showed somewhat similar excitement at
sight of a cow. About the same time, too, she first noticed the
pigeons as they flew up from the ground.
This was the beginning of a lasting interest in animals, animal
pictures, animal stories. It is not easy to account fully for this interest,
appearing in such intense degree, at so early an age. All children
show it to some extent, though in many it is mingled with a good,
deal of fear. One is tempted to connect both the fear and the interest
with race history—the intimate association of primitive man with
animals; but a six-month baby is traversing a period of development
far earlier than that of the primitive hunter. Professor Sully has some
good suggestions about the sympathy between children and
animals, but these, too, fail of application to a baby so young.
Probably to her the main charm was the movement, the rough
resemblance to people, joined with so many differences, now first
noticed with the interest of novelty—and (as later incidents made me
suspect) the quantity of convenient hair to be pulled.
The other new interest waked late in the seventh month: that joy in
outdoors that was for many months of the little one’s life her best
happiness. Up to this time, she had liked to be taken out in her baby
carriage, but mainly for the motion. Now, one morning, grandma took
her and sat down quietly on the veranda, saying that she wanted her
to learn to love the sunshine, the birds and flowers and trees, without
needing the baby carriage and its motion. The little one sat in her
lap, looking about with murmurs of delight; and after that, her
happiness in rolling about freely was much greater when we spread
a blanket on veranda or lawn, and laid her there. Within two weeks,
she would coax to be taken outdoors, and then coax till she was put
down out of arms, and left to her own happiness. She would roll
about by the hour, the most contented baby in the world, breaking
occasionally into cries and movements of overflowing joy.
I did not think that at this age the novel sights and sounds outdoors
had much to do with her pleasure; she did not yet notice them much.
Nor could it have been the wideness and freedom of outlook, for she
had not yet come to distant seeing—a hundred feet was as far as I
had ever seen her look. Later, all this counted; but now I thought that
the mere physical effect of activity in the fresh air, together with the
bright light, and perhaps the moving and playing of lights in the
leaves, must make up most of the charm.
In the early weeks of the seventh month idle baby’s rollicking spirits
were striking; in fact, she became for a time quite a little rowdy, ho-
ho-ing and laughing in loud, rough tones, snatching this way and
that, clutching at our hair with exultant shouts and clamor. In the
latter part of the month, her manners were better—indeed, it was
fully a year before I saw them as bad again; but she was much given
to seizing at our faces, flinging herself at them with cries and growls
(exactly as if she had been playing bear), and mouthing and lightly
biting them. And indeed it must be confessed that while our baby’s
behavior was often very pretty for weeks together, she had many fits
of rough play and hoydenish spirits, and our faces and hair were
never quite safe from romping attacks before she was two years old.
This boisterousness was not overflowing spirits (real joyousness
showed itself more gently) and I could never trace its psychological
origin.
At intervals during the month, she continued to improve her bodily
knowledge of herself, investigating her head and face and even the
inside of her mouth, with her fingers; she rubbed her forefinger
curiously with her thumb; she ran out her tongue and moved it about,
trying its motions and feeling her lips. And the very first day of the
month there had appeared that curious behavior that we call
“archness” and “coquetting” in a baby (though anything so grown up
as real archness or coquetry is impossible at this age), looking and
smiling at a person who was somewhat strange, but very amusing,
to her, then ducking down her head when he spoke, and hiding her
face on her mother’s shoulder. Whatever the real reason of such
behavior may be, there is plainly self-consciousness in it. So, too,
when, at seven months old, she began to try deliberately to attract
the interest of callers, wrinkling up her nose with a friendly grimace
till they paid attention to her.
Both these forms of self-consciousness were common after this.
Neither is what we could call human or rational self-consciousness.
Any dog or kitten will show them. But they certainly are something
more than mere bodily feeling of self. If we need a name for it, we
might call it a beginning of intelligent self-perception, as
distinguished both from bodily self-feeling, and rational self-
knowledge—in which the mind, years later, will say to itself clearly,
“This is I.”
We now began to suspect (as she ended her seventh month) that
the baby was beginning to connect our names with us; and when we
tried her by asking, “Where is grandpa?” or “mamma” or “aunty,” she
really did look at the right one often enough to raise a presumption
that she knew what she was about. The association of name and
person was still feeble and shaky, but it proved to be real. In a few
days it was firm as to grandpa (who was quite persona grata,
because he built up blocks for her to knock down, and carried her
about from object to object, to let her touch and examine); and in a
week or two as to the rest of us.
Professor Preyer complains of teaching babies mere tricks, which
have no real relation to their development; and certainly it is a sound
rule that self-unfolding, not teaching, is the way in which a baby
should develop in the earliest years. But Preyer’s baby learned to
wave his hand, and play “patacake,” and show “How big is baby?”
and the rest of it, just as other babies do; mammas and nurses
cannot resist it. And as long as the babies like it, I do not see that it
can do any harm, if it is not overdone. Besides, it may be said that
these standard tricks are all closely related to the sign language, and
so fall in well with the natural development at this stage. And again,
the extreme teachability of the human child is his great superiority
over the brute—all our civilization rests on it; and when the time
comes that he is capable of receiving training, it may be as well that
his power of doing so should be used a little, and that these simple
gesture tricks of immemorial nursery tradition are good exercises to
begin with. It is possible to make a fetich of “self-development,”
beyond all common sense.
At all events, as our baby approached seven months old, her
mamma had begun to teach her to wave by-by. For a couple of
weeks, the mother would hold up the little hand and wave it at the
departing guest, and before long the baby would give a feeble
waggle or two after her mother had let go; next, she would need only
to be started; and a week after she was seven months old she
waved a spontaneous farewell as I left the room. There was a long
history of the gesture after that, for it was lost and regained,
confused with other hand tricks and straightened out, and altogether
played a considerable part in the story of sign language and of
memory, which I shall not have time to relate. But at all times it paid
for itself in the delight it gave the baby: it reconciled her to almost
any parting, and even to going to bed.
Her objection to going to bed, which had been evident since the fifth
month, was because she thought sleeping was a waste of good
playtime, not because she had any associations of fear and
repugnance connected with it. She had never been left to cry herself
to sleep alone, but was rocked and sung to in good old fashion. But
she did show signs at this time of timidity and distress in waking from
sleep, clinging piteously to her mother and crying. She had waked
and cried alone a number of times, and, as I have already said, she
seemed to have formed some associations of fear in this way. But I
think there were deeper reasons for the confused distress on
waking, which from now until halfway through the third year
appeared at times.
I have spoken several times of the ease with which even we grown
people lose our sense of personal identity; and changes in brain
circulation make such confusions especially likely at first waking from
sleep. With babies, whose feeling of identity is but insecurely
established, this must be much more common; moreover, a baby’s
conditions of breathing are less regular than ours, and it is probable
that as he comes out of sleep, and the circulation and respiration of
the waking hours slowly reestablish themselves, he has all sorts of
queer, lost feelings. I was pretty sure, from our baby’s behavior I in
the next two years, that she struggled back to the firm shores of
waking consciousness through dark waters of confusion, and
needed a friendly hand to cling to. This, I suspect, is the secret of the
wild crying in the night, which doctors call “night terror”: it is not
terror, I think, but vague distress, increased by the darkness—loss of
self, of direction, of all one’s usual bodily feeling.
In these sensitive states attending sleep it is likely that some of the
emotional conditions for life are formed, and the ties between mother
and child knit firmest. My observation is that the one the baby loves
most is the one that sleeps close by, that bends over him as he
struggles confusedly back to waking, and steers him tenderly
through the valley of the shadow of sleep; and next, the one that
plays most patiently and observantly with him—not the one that
feeds him.
In her absorption in her growing bodily activity, the baby had taken
no marked steps in intellectual development, though in skill of
handling, and in ability to understand what went on about her and
put two and two together, she made steady progress. Early in the
eighth month, some definite instances of this appeared. She showed
a discreet preference at bedtime for anybody rather than her mother,
and clung vigorously round my neck or her grandfather’s when that
messenger of fate came for her. She dropped things to watch them
fall, with a persistent zeal and interest such as she had not shown in
earlier experiments of the sort. She knew what it meant if one of us
put a hat on, and pleaded with outstretched hands and springing
motion to go too. Once she found that in moving a long stick she was
moving some twigs at its farther end, and kept up the experiment
with curiosity.
It was about this time—the first fortnight of the eighth month—that
taste first became a source of pleasure to our baby. She had been
given an experimental taste of several things before, but beyond the
grimace of surprise (it looks like utmost disgust, but there seems no
doubt that it really means surprise only) with which little babies greet
new tastes, she had shown no great interest in them. Now, as
nature’s supply grew scant, she was introduced more seriously to
several supplementary foods, and at least once rejoiced over the
taste a good deal. Still, she was apt soon to tire of them, and on the
whole taste did not at any time in her first year take a large place
among her interests.
As the middle of the eighth month approached, it was evident that an
advance in power of movement was coming. The baby was getting
up on hands and knees again; she made daily a few aimless
creeping movements; and in her bath she would draw herself to her
knees, and partly to her feet, holding by the edge of the tub, and
somewhat supported by the water. A few days later she drew herself
forward a few inches, flat on her stomach, to get something. But she
still did not catch the idea of creeping, and rolling remained her great
pleasure for another fortnight.
In this fortnight, which brought our baby to eight months old, the
rolling grew very rapid and free. She would now roll over and over in
the same direction, not to get anywhere in particular (she never
learned to use rolling for that purpose), but just for fun. She varied
the exercise with the most lively kicking—heels raised in air and
brought down together with astonishing vigor and zest; and with
twisting about and getting on hands and knees, or even on hands
and feet, prattling joyously, and having a beautiful time all by herself,
for as long as the authorities would leave her alone. I have no note
or memory that she ever tired of it, or asked for attention or change;
it was always some one else who interfered, because meal-time or
nap-time or something had come.
In the last week of the month she learned to raise herself to a sitting
position; and as she could now sit up or lie down at will, she tumbled
about the floor with still more variety and enjoyment. In the same
week she began to pull herself daily quite to her feet in the tub. It
was an ordinary wooden wash-tub which was bridging the interval
between her own outgrown one and the grown-up bath-tub; and she
would stand, leaning her weight partly on her hands, on the edge of
the tub, with her feet planted wide apart, quite on the opposite side,
giving her a pretty secure base.
In this fortnight the baby’s understanding of us and feeling of
nearness to us were noticeably greater. Her attachment to her
favorites was striking. She would cling to us with all the strength of
her little arms, sometimes pressing her lips against our faces in a
primitive sort of kiss. Her desire for our attention was intense—little
arms stretched out, face full of desire, while she uttered urgent cries.
Now and then she was entirely unwilling to eat a meal till the person
she had set her heart on at the moment had yielded to her pleading,
and come to sit close beside her, for company.
She understood one or two little directions—“by-by,” and “patacake”;
or, at least, associated them with the acts. She had some idea of
what “No, no!” meant, and she knew perfectly that she must not keep
paper or flower petals in her mouth, and after biting off a bit would
put out her tongue, laughing, to have the forbidden scrap removed.
And one day when I said to her, “Don’t you want to come to aunty?”
without any gesture, she surprised me by leaning forward and
putting out her hands to me, exactly as if I had reached my arms out
for her. She could not have understood the whole question, for she
hardly understood words at all at the time; but she must have made
out “come,” and, putting it with “aunty,” which she had known for
weeks, got at my meaning.
On the day she was eight months old, at last, the baby half sprawled,
half crept, forward to get something. The early, aimless stages of
locomotion were over, and she was about to start in in good earnest
to learn to creep and to stand.
 XI
CREEPING AND STANDING

Now, at eight months old, began a fortnight of rapid development in

movements, all branching out from the position on hands and knees
which the baby often took as she sprawled on the floor.
First she hit on two ways of sitting up, beginning on hands and
knees. One of them, in fact, had appeared in the last days of the
preceding month. She would tilt over sidewise till she was half sitting,
leaning on one hand, then straighten up, raising the hand—and there
you are, sitting. The other way, a few days later, was to begin as
before on hands and knees, separate the knees, and lift herself over
backward till she was sitting, turning the legs out at the knee. No
grown person but a contortionist could do it, for our hips have not
enough play in the socket to carry the movement through the last
inch or two; but babies’ joints are flexible. This became our baby’s
regular method, and the position it left her in—legs spread out before
her, bent directly out at the knee—was her every-day one for many
months. Most babies, I believe, sit monkey fashion—legs straight,
with soles turned in.
Watching carefully, we were sure that the baby did not at first use
either method intelligently; she wanted to sit up, and shifted and
lifted her body, scolding with impatience, and never knowing whether
she would bring up in the desired position or not, till she found
herself by luck where she wanted to be. In a few days, however, the
right movements were sifted out from the useless ones, and she sat
up and lay down at will.
In the same early days of the ninth month, another movement came
of experimenting while on hands and knees—a backward creeping,
pushing with the hands. The baby at once tried to utilize it to get to
people and things, and it was funny to hear her chattering with
displeasure as she found herself borne off the other way—backing
sometimes into the wall, and pushing helplessly against it, like a little
locomotive that had accidentally got reversed. She soon gave up
trying to get anywhere by this “craw-fishing,” however, and then she
enjoyed it, merely as movement.
The only reason I have heard suggested for this curious back-action
creeping (which is not uncommon just before real creeping) is that
the baby’s arms are stronger than the legs, and as a pushing
movement with them is more natural than a stepping one, a
backward impulse is given, which the baby, as a rule, resents with
comical displeasure.
Next, from hands and knees the baby learned to rise to hands and
feet; to kneel, and then to sit back on her heels; and to make sundry
variations on these positions, such as kneeling on one knee and one
foot, or sitting on one heel, with the other foot thrust out sidewise,
propping her.
In spite of two or three chance forward steps, she was eight and a
half months old before she hit at last on real creeping; then one day I
saw her several times creep forward a foot or two, and presently she
was rolling an orange about and creeping after it. I tried in vain to
lure her more than a couple of feet, to come to me or to get a
plaything; she would creep a step or two, then sit back on her heels
and call me to take her. Until almost the end of this month, indeed,
she would creep for but very short distances, and always to reach
something, not for pleasure in the movement.
But while she fumbled in such chance fashion towards creeping, she
was carried on towards standing by strong and evident instinct. She
pulled herself up daily, not to reach anything, but from an
overwhelming desire to get to her feet; and when she found herself
on them she rejoiced and triumphed. At this stage she almost
invariably used a low object to pull up by, so that she could lean over
it, propping her weight with her hands—or with one hand, as she
grew more confident. It was after the middle of the month that she
first drew herself up, her knees shaking, by a chair, to reach a