Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #181589 in Books
• Published on: 2007-11-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 146 pages

Synopsis
We typically have little control over our thoughts, but we often invest them with a lot of authority - even when they contradict what our experiences tell us to be true. Take a moment right now and think, "There's a hungry grizzly bear sitting next to me". Chances are you didn't take that thought literally and run screaming from the room. But what if instead you had thought, "I'll never get a better job", "I'm boring", or "No one loves me"? Just like that terrifying grizzly, these more garden-variety thoughts are just words and pictures that pop into our minds. But often we take thoughts like these literally and let them trick us into avoiding the lives we really want to live.This book offers a collection of light-hearted practices readers can use to learn to observe their thoughts without getting caught up in them. Each practice is grounded in a component of the new acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) called cognitive defusion: the process of "de-fusing" or not identifying or becoming one with your thoughts. Sometimes downright strange - imagine yourself hearing your thoughts in the voice of a headless monster!

- these activities don't seek to stop or control problematic thinking. Instead, they work to show readers how to observe thoughts without judgment and learn to live with the confounding and marvellous word-making, story-telling machine that is the human mind.

Customer Reviews

Not great
Our minds can be quite chaotic and at times it would be great if we could just switch them off and be at peace. Unfortunately that is never the case and we become often tormented by a recurrent thought or enveloped in negative thought patterns.

This book promised much but really didn't deliver for me, advertised as a new approach to psychotherapy called ACT. If I were to describe it I would call it a cross between NLP and mindfulness. So I didn't find anything new in here, only old techniques with different names. Also it was difficult to read as a book due to the many exercises contained which really did interrupt the flow of things. Ah well not for me but maybe there's help here for someone else