After conducting a functional analysis of the problem behavior and establishing therapeutic goals, therapists working with acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) use the process to show clients that attempts to control thoughts, feelings, , sensations and emotions (private events) are not effective strategies to reduce discomfort and ironically generate the opposite: they increase psychological suffering. This entire process is not done through simple theoretical explanations, but through experiential exercises and metaphors.
The colleagues of ContextualTherapies.com (who by the way have a great one) shared this well-known metaphor in ACT that illustrates this concept in the treatment of depression:
Imagine that the depression you’re in right now feels a little like a game of tug-of-war with a big monster.
Sometimes you feel like you’re not going to win, the more you pull, the harder the monster pulls towards its terrain.
You realize that between the two of you there is a bottomless abyss, and if you lose you know that you will be dragged into the abyss and there you will stay forever.
But imagine that to actually win you have to do something completely different.
Maybe to win you don’t have to pull excessively on the rope. Maybe to win you must discover a way to let go of it.
In this metaphor, the person and the rope are a representation of what one wants to control with depression, whether it is the way one feels or one’s own thoughts.
And the monster is the paralyzing fear, that because of that same fear we stop doing many things, or on the contrary we do many things to avoid feeling it. The monster can have different forms, emotions, people, events or situations that you are avoiding.
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Many times to win the battle with fear, we just have to let go of control, let go of the rope. The monster will always be there, but now you know that it will no longer drag you into the abyss, because instead of pulling and fighting with it, now you only accept its presence.
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