Mindfulness and Acceptance for Depression
New Harbinger Publications
An interview with Kirk D. Strosahl, Ph.D., and Patricia J. Robinson, Ph.D., authors of The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Depression
How do you define depression in your book? Should someone be professionally diagnosed before using this workbook?
In our approach, depression is the result of living life out of balance in some important way. The conventional way of thinking about depression is that it causes people to get of balance. We disagree with that way of thinking. Depression is actually a well designed signal that can be used as a call to action to think about where you are going in life, as opposed to where you would like to be going—the old saying, “If you don't figure out where you are headed, you're bound to end up where you are going.” The book is designed to help anyone who is suffering from symptoms of “depression compression,” which can be thought of as a constriction in vitality-producing activities. Thus, a person could easily use this book without the aid of a professional. However, it can be used in conjunction with therapy.
What is the depression trap?
The depression trap very simply is the mistaken belief that the goal when one is depressed is to manage uncomfortable feelings and that doing so will produce “health.” As the person uses more and more energy trying to control mood, the person's life constricts and becomes an increasing source of unhappiness. It is only by accepting uncomfortable realities and the feelings that go along with them that the person can reverse this downward cycle.
What kinds of activities will readers find in this book?
This book contains many practical exercises that help the reader identify his or her depression experiences and look at how they function to trap the person in depression compression. There are lots of guided mindfulness and experiential exercises that show how use acceptance and detachment skills to promote solution-oriented problem solving, rather than avoidance-oriented responses. There are exercises designed to help the person identify personal values and develop specific action plans to move toward valued outcomes. There is an entire chapter of exercises devoted to developing a long-term, acceptance-oriented lifestyle.
What’s the difference between a wise mind and a reactive mind? Do they ever work together?
In our book, we describe two types of self-experience. The reactive mind is the source of our learned cultural rules about how to behave, how to feel, how to think. It is the type of minding that we spend most of our time doing in contemporary society. It is full of opinions, beliefs, evaluations, prejudices, stereotypes, and so forth. It is also the source of hidden rules which tell us what to do to achieve health and psychological prosperity. Unfortunately, as useful as reactive mind is in addressing the external realities of living, it is highly suspect as a “mental advisor” when it comes to emotional realities. The rules that work so well in the external world backfire miserably in the emotional world. Wise mind is a bigger type of self experience that is simply there. It is a non-judgmental, passive type of awareness that is the source of great peace and compassion for self and others. Most Eastern religious traditions focus on regaining acccess on an ongoing basis to wise mind. To live a life in harmony with oneself, there must be a balance between reactive mind and wise mind. In depression, reactive mind becomes completely dominant and literally tricks the person into engaging in unworkable behaviors over and over again.
How does psychological flexibility contribute to the overall purpose of this book?
We would describe psychological flexibility as a state of open-mindedness that results from a health balance between reactive mind and wise mind. A state of open-mindedness allows a person to do what works in life and to stop doing things that don't work. This allows the person to give up sacred cows if doing so produces more vitality, purpose and meaning. The ability to persist with workable behaviors and to desist using unworkable behaviors is what we strive to teach the reader in this book.
Step five is titled: “Learn that Sense Making Doesn’t Make Sense.” Can you explain what you mean by that?
Sense making is one of the most dangerous features of reactive mind. Sense making involves establishing cause and effect relationships between events, situations or interactions. This reflects are in born need to construct a causal model of the mental world we live in. There are various levels of sense making that we are concerned with in the book. One is explaining why one does or doesn't do some socially desired behavior. This involves giving reasons that essentially create a cause and effect relationship (e.g., I didn't go to work last week because I was too depressed). The problem is that these causal relationships are not really causes at all. They are constructed verbally to look like causes because the social world demands an explanation (e.g., your boss wants to know why you didn't show up to work last week. If you give an incorrect explanation, you likely will be fired). At the bigger level, sense making activities combine to help form our “life story line,” or a version of self experience in which we describe how we became the way we are, what is missing in our self, and what the future likely will hold for us. This type of sense making actually can devolve into a type of self-fulfilling prophecy; yet, it is a type of self experience that people tend to hold onto very tenaciously because it is their way of understanding their mental world.
What is phishing and how do you use it in your workbook?
Phishing is a term we use to describe the trickier activities of the reactive mind. Like phishing scams on the internet, mental phishing involves being tricked into attaching to highly provocative mental content (like the thought, “I will never be happy in life”) and treating it as real. When a person is phished, they act on the basis of this imaginary reality, even though the actual event that happened is that the person had a thought called, “I will never be happy in life.” Seen as a thought, and just a thought, there is no trick played. Part of learning to be mindful and to detach from mental processes is the ability to recognize negative content that is likely to be form of phishing from the reactive mind, the world's most accomplished phisher!
New Harbinger Publications has been publishing psychology and self-help books since 1973.
New Harbinger Publications
An interview with Kirk D. Strosahl, Ph.D., and Patricia J. Robinson, Ph.D., authors of The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Depression
How do you define depression in your book? Should someone be professionally diagnosed before using this workbook?
In our approach, depression is the result of living life out of balance in some important way. The conventional way of thinking about depression is that it causes people to get of balance. We disagree with that way of thinking. Depression is actually a well designed signal that can be used as a call to action to think about where you are going in life, as opposed to where you would like to be going—the old saying, “If you don't figure out where you are headed, you're bound to end up where you are going.” The book is designed to help anyone who is suffering from symptoms of “depression compression,” which can be thought of as a constriction in vitality-producing activities. Thus, a person could easily use this book without the aid of a professional. However, it can be used in conjunction with therapy.
What is the depression trap?
The depression trap very simply is the mistaken belief that the goal when one is depressed is to manage uncomfortable feelings and that doing so will produce “health.” As the person uses more and more energy trying to control mood, the person's life constricts and becomes an increasing source of unhappiness. It is only by accepting uncomfortable realities and the feelings that go along with them that the person can reverse this downward cycle.
What kinds of activities will readers find in this book?
This book contains many practical exercises that help the reader identify his or her depression experiences and look at how they function to trap the person in depression compression. There are lots of guided mindfulness and experiential exercises that show how use acceptance and detachment skills to promote solution-oriented problem solving, rather than avoidance-oriented responses. There are exercises designed to help the person identify personal values and develop specific action plans to move toward valued outcomes. There is an entire chapter of exercises devoted to developing a long-term, acceptance-oriented lifestyle.
What’s the difference between a wise mind and a reactive mind? Do they ever work together?
In our book, we describe two types of self-experience. The reactive mind is the source of our learned cultural rules about how to behave, how to feel, how to think. It is the type of minding that we spend most of our time doing in contemporary society. It is full of opinions, beliefs, evaluations, prejudices, stereotypes, and so forth. It is also the source of hidden rules which tell us what to do to achieve health and psychological prosperity. Unfortunately, as useful as reactive mind is in addressing the external realities of living, it is highly suspect as a “mental advisor” when it comes to emotional realities. The rules that work so well in the external world backfire miserably in the emotional world. Wise mind is a bigger type of self experience that is simply there. It is a non-judgmental, passive type of awareness that is the source of great peace and compassion for self and others. Most Eastern religious traditions focus on regaining acccess on an ongoing basis to wise mind. To live a life in harmony with oneself, there must be a balance between reactive mind and wise mind. In depression, reactive mind becomes completely dominant and literally tricks the person into engaging in unworkable behaviors over and over again.
How does psychological flexibility contribute to the overall purpose of this book?
We would describe psychological flexibility as a state of open-mindedness that results from a health balance between reactive mind and wise mind. A state of open-mindedness allows a person to do what works in life and to stop doing things that don't work. This allows the person to give up sacred cows if doing so produces more vitality, purpose and meaning. The ability to persist with workable behaviors and to desist using unworkable behaviors is what we strive to teach the reader in this book.
Step five is titled: “Learn that Sense Making Doesn’t Make Sense.” Can you explain what you mean by that?
Sense making is one of the most dangerous features of reactive mind. Sense making involves establishing cause and effect relationships between events, situations or interactions. This reflects are in born need to construct a causal model of the mental world we live in. There are various levels of sense making that we are concerned with in the book. One is explaining why one does or doesn't do some socially desired behavior. This involves giving reasons that essentially create a cause and effect relationship (e.g., I didn't go to work last week because I was too depressed). The problem is that these causal relationships are not really causes at all. They are constructed verbally to look like causes because the social world demands an explanation (e.g., your boss wants to know why you didn't show up to work last week. If you give an incorrect explanation, you likely will be fired). At the bigger level, sense making activities combine to help form our “life story line,” or a version of self experience in which we describe how we became the way we are, what is missing in our self, and what the future likely will hold for us. This type of sense making actually can devolve into a type of self-fulfilling prophecy; yet, it is a type of self experience that people tend to hold onto very tenaciously because it is their way of understanding their mental world.
What is phishing and how do you use it in your workbook?
Phishing is a term we use to describe the trickier activities of the reactive mind. Like phishing scams on the internet, mental phishing involves being tricked into attaching to highly provocative mental content (like the thought, “I will never be happy in life”) and treating it as real. When a person is phished, they act on the basis of this imaginary reality, even though the actual event that happened is that the person had a thought called, “I will never be happy in life.” Seen as a thought, and just a thought, there is no trick played. Part of learning to be mindful and to detach from mental processes is the ability to recognize negative content that is likely to be form of phishing from the reactive mind, the world's most accomplished phisher!
New Harbinger Publications has been publishing psychology and self-help books since 1973.
