Be Serious but Have Fun

Anything that affects the body or mind can also affect the other dimensions of the self. Recovery from human suffering can be progressive, gradual, or a continuous process of restoring balance in these dimensions. Human suffering is regarded as both a cause and effect of distressing emotions and the catastrophic thoughts associated with pain. Your influence is just a drop in the ocean of all these other, often contradictory influences. Why then would they change exactly and exclusively in the way you desire? Seen like this, the chances that someone changes in a direction that you have in mind are extremely slim, and counting on such a change is asking for disappointment, or even worse, disaster. Take people's current behavior as a given, not a variable, and try to create a change anyway if that's what you feel you should do. If you succeed, hurray. If you don't, that's what you expected. You have at least remained on the safe side and no bones have been broken; Rule #4: You're not alone. Never infer that absolutely no-one out there is like you. At times it may look like you're all alone being `like you' and that there's no-one even remotely similar to you out there. These may include helplessness, hopelessness, loneliness, shame, guilt, frustration, depression, fear, anger, irritability, and anxiety. The bad habit of negative thinking can also make our situations seem worse than it actually is. Most people, especially those who are not suffering from chronic pain, tend to magnify the negative aspects of the situation through overthinking. Our minds are capable of making us miserable, and negative thinking can become a self-defeating and self-fulfilling prediction. For those who are suffering from chronic pain, there is a direct link between the level of pain and negative thinking. It can be a dangerous cycle in which pain can result in negative thinking and self-doubt that translates to emotions that coincide with human suffering. This experience can increase stress and muscle tension that in turn amplifies the pain signals that trigger more pain.

The progression of human suffering can be like this: Pain results in negative thinking or self-doubt. Negative thinking or self-doubt results in negative feelings such as sadness or depression. While there's a minute chance that this is true (although you probably aren't all that special or weird that among the billions of people on Earth you are completely incompatible with absolutely every other individual), there are other possible explanations. You might have been so busy overadapting and mimicking neurotypical behavior, and the same may be true for those other people like you, that it has become almost impossible to mutually recognize each other as actually similar beings. You may have been together at the same party, both thoroughly hating every aspect of it, and both so successfully mimicking joy and integration, that you didn't even recognize each other's similarities. The point is: if you don't show yourself as you truly are, ever, to no-one, by definition you, the real you, will always be lonely. If two people both living in a fortress never come out of the safe confines of their reinforced walls to even have a look at each other, they'll never meet each other and they'll die lonely and miserable while they could have had at least one good friend. This doesn't mean of course that you should just show off your weird (from the viewpoint of neurotypicals, that is) self to everyone everywhere. You don't just throw open the doors of your fortress and let the whole world come and party inside, only to find yourself just as lonely again the next day, with the only difference that your complete interior has been destroyed, you trip over empty beer bottles, there's vomit under your bed and a turd in your sink, and you find cigarette butts for weeks to come in the weirdest places (end of metaphor, I think you get the picture). You can drop a hint now and then, vocally, visually or otherwise, for those of good understanding to catch. Be just that little bit weird that doesn't alarm neurotypicals too much (they're indifferent enough to not really notice). It will show potential `others like you' that they might have some special compatibility with you. Sadness or depression can lead to stress or muscle tension. Stress or muscle tension leads to more pain. Pain results in more negative thinking and self-doubt. As you can see, it's a vicious cycle, and the longer this cycle continues, the more out of balance we become. We can do something about human suffering when we become more aware of the cycle and learn how to respond differently to our pain. The recovery process for pain includes significantly modifying the negative progression beginning with the cognitive and emotional balance through mindfulness and acceptance strategies. By restoring balance, you can counteract the dynamics of deviation.

Once you become aware of your negative thoughts you can harness yourself to accept the situation and detach from it. This will then lead to decreased negative emotions that will result in less muscle tension and stress. Again, this is not supposed to be easy. You can gradually let these select other people, the maybe's as you could call them, a bit further into your personal garden, step by step, so that if it goes wrong after all, they still didn't get very close. The damage will be manageable and you can easily recover. And you should consider the fact that no social damage is actually `real'. It may hurt but it doesn't kill, so the benefit of finding a true friend definitely outweighs the risk of things going socially a bit awry. Root cause #2: The Mask in the Mirror As I explained above, we generally haven't the foggiest idea what's happening around us. Or more precisely, we only have foggy ideas and next to no real contact. We live our lives as if we're wearing a pair of Virtual Reality glasses on which our brain displays reductions, abstractions and filtered, distorted concoctions, based on extrapolations, projections, and self-projections. The more we (self-)project instead of observe, the more virtual this reality is. Welcome to reality: it's virtual. But it is completely possible if you work on it. By adjusting our thoughts, and the way we think we can effectively reshape our emotional responses, including the extent to which we suffer. Thanks for downloading this article. It's my firm belief that it will provide you with all the answers to your questions. Understanding Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT, is a form of therapy that draws from mindfulness practice and cognitive behavioral psychotherapy. It is also known as a contextual psychotherapy because it encourages patients to exhibit values-based positive behaviors even if they are experiencing negative sensations, emotions, or thoughts.

In other words, it helps patients increase their psychological flexibility. As a third wave Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), ACT (said as one word) is strongly connected to the power of behavioral change. However, ACT differs from CBT. In the same way that we create avatars of the people and things around us in this game we call `Life' or `My Conscious Experience,' we also create an avatar, or even several, of ourselves. We construct something like a first-person shooter or sim where we give our character a range of scores on abilities and weaknesses, and imagine it being equipped with certain attributes and characteristics, and lacking others. This imaginary character then interacts with the imaginary other characters in the game, using its (imaginary) characteristics with or against the (imaginary) characteristics of the other avatars. It's like a huge digital twin orgy played on a buggy console. At the same time, in the real world outside our `VR-glasses,' as real people we're having real-life interactions, that couple back to our virtual reality - but with distortions and reductions. As long as our virtual world and Self correspond largely with `real' reality, there aren't too many surprises, negative or positive. But the further apart our virtual reality from `real' reality, the bigger, and mostly the more negative, the surprises and unwanted effects. We already talked before about how we construct simplified and partially mistaken models of others. We do the same with ourselves, only here the reasons are somewhat different. With others the main materials for constructing avatars are self-projection and the extrapolation of experiences with `similar' people. It can change the relationship you have with your thoughts rather than change them directly. ACT promotes the notion that you don't have to do anything with your thoughts to push change in your behavior. ACT focuses on mindfulness, diffusion of challenging thoughts, and acceptance of unpleasant emotions. With ACT, your efforts are concentrated on moving you towards a momentous life by helping you learn to separate yourself from your thoughts. Your efforts are based on your committed action towards establishing your values. ACT mindfulness skills have 3 categories: Acceptance: enables patients to make room for sensations, urges, and painful feelings, and allowing them to easily come and go

Defusion: enables patients to let go of and distance from unhelpful thoughts, memories, and beliefs Contact with the present moment: enables patients to fully engage, with an attitude of curiosity and openness, with their here-and-now experience ACT can be delivered in many different ways: We construct our self-image mainly on the basis of outside pressure and what we believe others think, or should think, of us. Let's explore this last point a bit further and jump head first into our own dark, deep waters. Just like at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, where plastic candy wraps mingle with the most outlandish natural creatures, we'll find in our own shadowy depths surprisingly familiar stuff joyously twirling around among the surprisingly weird. The key word here is surprise, as you might have noticed, which means: you aren't who you think you are. We exist in the midst of an ocean of often conflicting expectations. Our parents ask of us to be strong and have a career he can brag about. They also want us to take care of the children, the curtains and the cobwebs. The kids need us to be as relaxed, cool, and fun as possible (or impossible). Our partner desires that we're responsible, trustworthy, fun, adventurous, strong, and empathetic, all at the same time, and that we regularly wash our socks (they're right about that one, by the way). The dog begs for walks and play time. Ultra-brief ACT - ACT can be highly effective even in one or two twenty to thirty-minute sessions. A good example is treatment by Kirk Strosahl, co-founder of ACT, in primary care medical settings. Brief ACT - ACT is done with only four sessions of 1-hour each. A good example is treatment by Patty Bach, assistant professor of psychology at the Illinois Institute of Technology, used on patients with schizophrenia. Medium-term ACT - ACT is completed for a total of eight hours. An example is a protocol for chronic pain by professor of psychology at Uppsala University in Sweden, JoAnne Dahl. Long-term ACT - ACT takes forty sessions of 2-hours each.