Embracing Change: The Journey to Achieving Psychological Flexibility

The approach of entering into Psychological Flexiblity helps people live rich and meaningful lives by changing their relationship with difficult thoughts and feelings, rather than fighting against them. This journey can be understood through three core principles: Accepting, Learning, and Engaging.

1. Psychological Flexibility is Accepting: Creating Space for What Is

Acceptance is not about giving up or resigning yourself to a difficult situation. Instead, it is an active process of allowing your thoughts and feelings to exist without judgment or struggle. This is the opposite of avoidance, a primary source of long-term suffering.

Mindful Acceptance: This involves being present and aware of your internal experiences—your thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations—without trying to change them. It’s like watching a movie of your mind, acknowledging each scene as it passes without getting tangled in the plot.

Willingness: This is the conscious choice to let go of the struggle. When you stop fighting a difficult feeling, you free up a huge amount of energy that can be used for more meaningful actions. This can be a profound shift, moving you from "I must get rid of this feeling" to "I can make room for this feeling and still move forward with my life."

2. Psychological Flexibility is Learning: Understanding Your Inner World

Once you've made space for your experiences, the next step to acheiving Psychological Flexibility is to learn from them. This involves gaining a deeper understanding of your own mind and how it works, particularly through the process of cognitive defusion.

Defusion from Thoughts: Your mind is a powerful problem-solving machine, but it can also get stuck. Defusion is a technique that teaches you to see your thoughts for what they are—just words, stories, and images—rather than absolute truths. For example, instead of thinking, "I am a failure," you learn to notice, "I'm having the thought that I am a failure." This simple shift can dramatically reduce the power of a negative thought.

Noticing Patterns: This principle encourages you to observe your own behavioural patterns. When do you try to avoid difficult feelings? What are the short-term benefits and long-term costs of those behaviours? By learning to see these patterns, you gain the psychological flexibility needed to make different choices.

3. Psychological Flexibility is Engaging: The Active Approach to Emotion

Engaging is a direct and courageous approach to not avoiding emotion. It's the action of deliberately turning toward and engaging with difficult feelings, rather than running from them. This process is essential for psychological flexibility and is the opposite of experiential avoidance.

Mindful Immersion: Instead of pushing away fear, sadness, or anxiety, engaging means mindfully immersing yourself in the feeling. It's about paying attention to where you feel the emotion in your body, noticing its texture, and observing its intensity without trying to change it. This active engagement helps you learn that a feeling, no matter how uncomfortable, cannot harm you. You discover that you can hold and experience the feeling without being controlled by it.

Connecting Emotion to Values: When you engage with an emotion, you often find a deeper connection to what matters to you. For example, the pain of grief tells you that you deeply loved someone. The anxiety about a difficult task signals that you care about your performance or a particular outcome. By not avoiding these emotions, you can trace them back to your core values, turning a seemingly negative experience into a compass for living a more meaningful life.

The Opposite of Avoidance: Much of our suffering comes from trying to avoid or suppress painful emotions through behaviours like substance use, procrastination, or overworking. Engaging is the direct antidote to this. It's a brave choice to stop the struggle and use that energy to move toward a valued life. This is where the commitment comes in—you commit to acting on your values even when the emotional terrain is challenging.