Hello to all my new and old subscribers alike!
Welcome to part 2 of my 5-part series exploring intersections with Alexander Technique (Expanded Awareness) - AT(EA).
To avoid repetition, I won't redefine AT(EA) here. I invite you to review the content and podcasts that I shared with you on my first post in the series - Stack 13 of Insight Axis. Moving forwards, I assume you broadly understand the ideas around Expanded Awareness.
This week I want to talk about AT(AE) and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
What is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)?
ACT is a type of talking therapy that is often used to treat or help alleviate depression or anxiety. Among other things, it’s also an effective way of managing chronic pain.
Back in the 80s, a psychologist named Steven C Hayes started developing the framework. More recently, Russ Harris wrote an excellent book called for the lay reader called "The Happiness Trap" which simplifies the standard ACT framework.
Essentially, ACT is a way of:
Accepting difficult thoughts or emotions,
Choosing a valued direction, and
Taking meaningful action
It encourages people to accept thoughts and emotions for what they are. It gives these thoughts and emotions room to exist. It acknowledges them as real. But then, it aims to empower the individual to be able to engage in meaningful action in the presence of the negative emotion.
It’s different to the more conventional models of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), which can often by quite “thinky”. In standard CBT, people are asked to write down and then logically challenge negative thought patterns, and also monitor emotions/moods whilst doing different activities.
Unlike standard CBT, ACT aims to improve psychological flexibility by promoting:
De-fusion: the ability to not get “hooked” by thoughts, feelings or memories
Acceptance: allowing the experience to exist without struggling against it
Presence: being aware of the here and now, in an open way (this is where AT(AE) intersects)
Observing the self: identifying with “the unchanging observer” of the emotion, rather than identifying with the emotion itself.
Values: identifying principles and things that are most important to the individual
Committed action: taking meaningful action in line with these values.
Russ Harris takes these 6 principles, and simplifies them into a number of acronyms to help people implement these tools in daily life. Here are the 2 most powerful ones:
For troubling thoughts (the words that play in your head) - ACE
Acknowledge the thought
Connect with your body
Become aware of your surroundings. Slowly move your fingers or hands to assert that you remain in control of yourself
Engage in meaningful activity
For emotions (the feelings you have in your body) - TAME
Take note of what you're feeling - label the emotion if you can
Allow the feeling to exist - don't struggle against it or be hooked by it
Make room for the feeling - breathe into it, expand around it, be curious about it
Expand Awareness (aha!) - start noticing what's around you, and inhabit the space you're in
Interesting.
Expanding Awareness is the "last" thing to do in this framework.
My difficulties with ACT Principles
Russ Harris's book is fantastic. But I personally found 3 main issues.
First, when you are within the whirlwind of strong emotion, your awareness is collapsed. So focusing on an emotion to label it just keeps your awareness collapsed. I found that trying to label a feeling took me too long, and it meant I was more likely to get hooked by the emotion.
Second, some people may not even have enough awareness to begin with to notice an emotion playing out. Your heart might be pounding, but with a super-collapsed awareness, you might not even completely notice it. This was the trouble I faced when trying to implement tools from ACT. I felt like even noticing an emotion or thought was quite tricky - because I wasn't aware enough.
Third, whilst making room "inside yourself" for an emotion or feeling is great, there's all the space outside yourself to notice as well! By focusing on being "in the body", I felt a higher chance of getting hooked into these emotions, rather than acknowledging them as existing alongside everything else in the universe.
Combining ACT and Alexander Technique (Expanded Awareness)
So, to incorporate my learnings of Alexander Technique (Expanded Awareness), I propose a modified, less catchy, but more practical set of acronyms:
For troubling thoughts (words that play in your head) - FENCE:
First Expand Awareness
Notice the floor, your peripheries, the space above and behind you
Notice the thought within the expanded awareness. Acknowledge it, and give it all the room it needs
Consciously choose to connect with something else in your Expanded Awareness space
Engage in the consciously chosen activity
For emotions (the feelings you have in your body) - PEACE:
At first your awareness might be too collapsed to even "label" an emotion or take note of it. So first:
Pause to realise that "something's not quite right"
That’s all you might manage at first with collapsed awareness.
Expand Awareness
Notice the floor, your peripheries, the space above and behind you
Allow the feeling to exist in the Expanded Awareness space, along with everything else in the universe
Now that you are more aware, you can label the emotion
Consciously choose to connect with something else in your Expanded Awareness space
Engage in the consciously chosen activity
Russ Harris talks about labelling emotions, like:
"Yes, I notice the feeling of anxiety."
I expand it to say:
"Yes, I notice the feeling of anxiety, but I am also open to noticing the world around me."
Closing thoughts
To be clear, I don't see this as a dismissal of the emotion or thought. Neither ACT nor AT(EA) propose this.
To me, it's allowing the emotion "full membership" within expanded awareness space.1
It's a way of acknowledging a thought or feeling, without getting hooked by it, or fighting against it.
It's a way of noticing the thought or emotion whilst also being open to noticing other things. It’s not about forcing yourself to actually notice anything, just being open to noticing.
I would be interested to hear your thoughts on this.
I got the terminology of “full membership” from an author of a Substack post that I can’t find - if any of my readers have also come across it I am happy to give credit where it’s due.
EDIT 9th July 2023: I have found the source:
’s comment on ’s post on Incurably Human: At Peace With Not Being At Peace.
Coincidentally last month I both read a different book by Hayes (The Confidence Gap) and also did the Expanded Awareness course. I think the ACT framework of defusion from thoughts and approaching emotions through some sort of 'awareness and expansion' is a really useful one, but that there are different ways of doing both of those and I can now see for example that the Internal Family Systems techniques are ways to do those for example.
I also read Russell Kennedy's Anxiety Rx (which is worth reading even if you don't suffer from anxiety explicitly - I don't get anxious as such, but I do get my emotions strongly triggered by certain things) and I think that's been another important part of the jigsaw, which helped me a lot with the defusion part in particular. His approach to emotions is 'Awareness' then 'Breathing' (into the area where you experience the emotion) and then 'Compassion',. I think the 'Breathing' and then 'Compassion' is one way to get yourself into a place where you can start to experience an expanded sense of awareness, when going straight there is too much.
I think all four - ACT, Expanded Awareness, IFS and Russell Kennedy's stuff are all very compatible with each other. I feel there should be some meta-approach combining them all!
In practice, I'm finding it very helpful to 'practice' on milder versions of the emotions when they come up.
Also, I've never found labelling emotions very helpful (although I find it easy to identify the felt sense of emotions in my body). I think labelling emotions also takes me too much into 'thinking' - I start wondering if I have labelled them correctly etc!
This is great. I sometimes work with clients who struggle to label emotions, and ultimately I want to try to help them improve on this, but this could be a good first step on the journey. And for some it might really be all they can manage.
I do sometimes use ACT in my work, but not as much as I should. Thanks for bringing this back into my awareness!