Our purpose here is to talk about how you can take the ideas from the earlier chapters and, even in the smallest of ways, do something that will take you in a direction you want to go. Whatever you can think of, whatever you can manage, right now is the time to find even the tiniest way you can begin to take action. In ACT, we call this resolve to act commitment. The idea is that, from moment to moment, you commit to do things that take you in the direction of what it is that matters to you in your life. In other words, you commit to act in a way that is consistent with what you value. But, similar to values, the ACT take on commitment is a little different than the everyday use of the word.
Commitment in the Everyday Sense When we use the word in our day-to-day conversations, we typically take commitment to mean "a promise we make to do something in the future." Whether you commit to doing something limited in scope, like showing up at a specific time to help a friend move, or you commit to something ongoing and indefinite, such as a marriage or the decision to become a parent, we understand commitment as a promise to behave some certain way at some point or points in the future. And we distinguish between keeping or honoring our commitments and breaking them. If you succeed in doing what you promised to do, hooray! If you fail, boo!
For our purposes, though, this understanding of commitment isn"t as useful as we might hope. We"ll get to what we do mean by commitment, but first, try this little exercise.
Checking in on Your Commitments
Call to mind some little thing you could do. Look back at the values you wrote about in the last chapter and see if you can find a possible commitment there. You only need to think of one, but be specific. It"ll probably come easily to you. If it takes a while, just breathe gently and wait for it to show up.
Once you"ve got your commitment pictured clearly in your mind, let yourself wonder about how it might play out in your life in a week, a month, a year, five years, if the events of your life go as you intend. What would it look like in ten years" time if you honored this commitment?
Now take a deep breath, hold it, and let it out. Start letting images gather in your mind of what your life would start to look like if you didn"t honor your commitment. What would your life look like in a decade if you discovered that you weren"t able to keep this commitment or if you just decided to walk away from it? Be careful. Your tendency will probably be to try to rescue or advise your future self. Don"t do it. Just wonder about what breaking your commitment would be like; don"t solve any problems you encounter or try to push anything away.
Now take one more deep breath and let it out. This time, consider your life as it is right now and where, to the best of your knowledge, you see it heading in the future. Let yourself wonder whether you"ll keep your commitment. Don"t try too hard to argue for one outcome or the other. Just wonder what might actually happen. Do you think you"ll honor your commitment, or will you let it go? Pay very close attention to the sensations you feel in your body.
Of the three little meditations, which seemed to cause the most noticeable changes in your body? Was it the third? If it was, there"s a good reason, and it"s called uncertainty. Will you honor your commitment? Unless you have a hotline to the future, your honest answer to this question is "I don"t know." And the bad news is that, as long as you"re still breathing, your answer will be either "I don"t know" or "No. I failed." With open-ended commitments, ambiguity is a certainty, and you can only get relief from this ambiguity in failure.
Say you have an alcohol problem. After years of problem drinking, you finally decide to make a change. You go into rehab. You get the best education about alcoholism and its treatment. You a.s.semble a team of doctors, therapists, good friends, loved ones, sponsors, and a meeting community to support you through recovery. And then you make a promise to yourself: I"m not going to take another drink.
Will you drink again? We don"t know. And as long as you"re still breathing, we"ll never know. We might talk about the odds of relapse, based on the success rates of the treatments you receive. We might look at examples of commitments you"ve made in the past and make a guess about your commitment "credit score." But the only way to "answer" the question of whether you"ll drink again is to watch each unfolding moment of your life-from now until you draw your last breath-to see whether you"ll open another bottle or raise another gla.s.s to your lips. Depending on circ.u.mstances, you could be watching this process for a very long time. And all the while, you"ll be swimming in-you guessed it-ambiguity. Many people in recovery struggle with this not-knowing, and there"s more than a little reason to suppose that this struggle is behind many a relapse: In the moment you take that next drink, the ambiguity goes away. We get our answer: yes, you will drink again. And in that answer, even if it"s devastating, even if it literally condemns you, you get a moment of peace, however short lived.
Commitment in ACT We"ve devoted a whole chapter to commitment, and we"ve already told you that committed action is one of the fundamental processes that makes ACT work. But now we have all this business about ambiguity and the anxiety that comes with making promises about the future. So, what gives?
It turns out that there"s more to commitment, from an ACT perspective, than just making promises about the future. While the everyday sense of the word is certainly a part of commitment in ACT, it doesn"t tell the whole story. It is not even the most important part of the story. The most important part of the story about commitment is written in this very moment.
Looking to the Future, Acting in the Present If it were common for us to always keep the promises we make to ourselves and others about our actions in the future, our commitments would be effectively synonymous with our values. There wouldn"t really be a need for this chapter. You could just read the last chapter, spend some time deciding what you want your life to be about, and then you"d be in business.
But we all know this isn"t the case. The narratives of our lives are made up of story after story of broken promises, of honest commitments made today that become the burdens and disappointments of tomorrow. Whether these setbacks are due to circ.u.mstances beyond our control, our own inability to live up to the expectations we set for ourselves, or because on that day we were unstill or prideful is beside the point. Whatever its cause, failure is a familiar friend to us all. And how do you feel when you fail? Free and easy and fresh as a daisy? No. You feel bad. It weighs on you. And so commitments-to the extent that they"re promises we make to act a certain way in the future-may not lead us to greater psychological flexibility.
But what if we were less concerned with the outcome of these promises we make than about what we"re going to do today? What if we understood commitment as something that we do in the present? Consider again what your experience with alcohol addiction might look like. You commit to stay sober. Will you drink again? As we said, we don"t know. Only time will tell. We can"t answer that question, but there are others we can answer: Are you drinking now? Right now? No. And what about now? Still no. Moment by moment, you can renew this commitment to not drink.
The understanding of commitment that interests us is committing to act in the present moment in ways that are directed by values. Sure, you can have values-directed goals along the way. We"re less concerned, though, with whether you achieve those goals. It"s great if you do, but it"s not the whole story. This is because, sometimes (and maybe much of the time), we can"t really imagine what"s possible in our lives until it happens or is, at least, about to happen. Have you ever known someone who really turned his life around? Someone who went from rock bottom to a life that he was delighted with?
You can imagine such a situation even if you can"t think of anyone off the top of your head. Again, imagine what could very well be your own drinking problem. If we took a look at your life, let"s say, five years ago, you might be waking up on the floor most nights. You might be in and out of abusive relationships and unable to hold a job for very long. Maybe you wrap your car around a tree some rainy evening. At this point in your life, what do you suppose you might hope for? Is it perhaps the case that the most you can let yourself think possible is that you might-just might-be alive at the same time next year?
Now jump ahead ten years. Let"s say you really turn your life around. You fall in with some people who help you kick your drinking problem. They set you up in a job in the mail room of an import-export company. Over the years, you work your way out of the mail room and into the sales department. Eventually, you"re promoted to manage a team of salespeople based in China. You find yourself in the business cla.s.s of a jetliner, flying from Los Angeles to Beijing. You"re wiping your hands on a hot towel; flight attendants are offering you sparkling mineral water and extra pillows.
To go from skid row to business cla.s.s, you have to beat some pretty steep odds. But stories like this aren"t unheard of by any means. When you were trying just to make it to the next year, though, do you suppose you were dreaming of hot towels and sparkling water served to you thirty-five thousand feet over the Pacific? Chances are you weren"t. Life is often like that: we can see only so far ahead, and to be able to imagine the possibilities once we"ve reached a certain future point, we sometimes need to just move off in that direction and see what happens next. Life is like traveling on a road with a constant bend in it. You look up ahead, but you can only see as far as the bend allows. Stop and look as hard as you would like. Strain your eyes. You still can only see as far as the bend allows. Travel a bit farther and you can see a bit farther.
We just don"t know how things will turn out much of the time. This being the case, the outcomes of our commitments aren"t something we have a lot of control over. But moment to moment, we can commit to doing something that will get us a little closer to something that matters to us. And when we fail-and we will fail-we"ll suddenly find ourselves in a new moment where, once again, we can turn back toward the values we choose. It"s in this turning back where you"ll find the heart of commitment in ACT.
Appreciating the Plain Fact of Human Sorrow
We live in a culture that doesn"t like sorrow much. The signs of it are everywhere. Commercials ask us if we feel anxious or sad and then sell us drugs if the answer is yes. The framers of the new fifth edition of the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders are ready to transform bereavement into a disease.
But there"s another thing we can do. We can pause. We can take some time. We can appreciate the plain fact of human sorrow.
A few years ago, I was in a conversation about a client who had lost a child in an automobile accident. It brought me to a standstill. Carl Rogers, in his landmark 1961 book On Becoming a Person, said "What is most personal is most general." I take that admonition seriously. So, upon hearing of the loss of this child, it seemed right to look deeply into my own experience before responding. I haven"t lost a child, but I have lost a brother. I thought about losing Randy and about the meaning of that loss in my own life.
Thoughts of Randy took me to the deep, dark evergreen forests of Western Washington, where my brothers and I grew up. There is a scent in the air in those woods-wet and rich. You can smell life and death in equal abundance. Sometimes a great evergreen would fall. It is sad when you see a big beautiful hemlock crashed to the earth after a hundred years of soaring. Those old trees would lie in the woods for years decomposing, and out of that a neat little row of eight or ten new trees would grow all along that fallen trunk. Slowly, over decades, the trunk would be taken up into the new growth. These fallen trees are called nurse logs.
It turns out that it"s very hard for a new tree to find a good spot to germinate and grow on the forest floor. The light is low and the ferns compete for every bit of s.p.a.ce and light they can gather. Those fallen trees give the seeds a place above the ferns with a bit more light and moisture and nourishment. If you have an eye for those rows of trees, you can spot them long after the old tree has sunk into the forest floor.
Sometimes in life, new things grow from things that have fallen, not away from them. I find myself wondering, if something new could grow out of the tragedy of a lost child, what might grow there?
And I find myself wondering about the people reading this right now. Do you know about things fallen? About things irrevocably lost? I wonder if you would be willing to stop a moment to acknowledge that loss, to know its face when you see it. If you could grow something new and beautiful from that loss, something that could honor what has fallen, what might that be?
I feel that way about my older brother Randy, who we lost to suicide so many years ago. I have told the story a hundred times in workshops, cla.s.ses, and coffee shops. I ask people about their own losses. "What would you grow," I ask them, "What would you grow?"
The small trees didn"t start growing right away. But the minutes, hours, and days have filled years since that tragic day in 1987-to the brim. And nearly twenty-five years later, I can still see Randy"s face, especially his lopsided grin. As I look at all I"ve nurtured in my life since then, people and projects that stand across the years like seedlings, all in a row, fed by that tragedy, I wonder if he would be proud of me. If he would feel honored by my memory of him.
My own little row of trees can be found in my students, in clients, and in the people around the world who have joined with me in a conversation about meaning and purpose, about the sweet and the sad in life.
I think we owe it to our friends, family, and fellows, to do better than making an illness of the sadness that will surely visit us all one day. Love and loss are poured from the same vessel. There is no way to turn away from what we have lost without turning away from what we have loved.
I invite people-students, clients, you-to come to rest in my little garden where an appreciation of sorrow is not a disease. Let yourself settle in and breathe. Let yourself be saturated. Let a conversation grow up. Let yourself wonder what new things might grow from the rich loam of living.
John Erskine said it beautifully in his 1906 poem "Actaeon"
One drought of Lethe for a world of pain An easy bargain; yet I keep the thorn, To keep the rose.
Randy? If you"re listening? Please know that I remember you, fondly, still, and tend a little garden in your honor.
The Heart of Commitment in ACT We choose our values and we transform them from words into deeds with commitment: I will be a good mother to my daughter, I will be kind, I will excel in my profession. Sure, we make promises about the future-and we fail. We fail often. Sometimes we fail spectacularly. Sometimes it"s hard, if not impossible, to imagine a value of any significance that anyone could succeed in furthering all the time. The most loving parent is occasionally self-absorbed and unavailable to his child. The most dedicated professor sometimes blows off her students. Saint Augustine pleaded with G.o.d to make him chaste and constant-just not yet. Achievement is wonderful, but perseverance is at the heart of commitment.
The Well-Stocked Pantry
This exercise is kind of a warm-up to commitment. Start by imagining a pantry, like you might have in your kitchen (or remember from TV shows about life on the prairie). Imagine the shelves empty for the moment. Now, think about some value you hold. Give yourself a few minutes to roll the value around in your head while you consider the following question: If you were going to stock your pantry with acts, both big and small, that would serve this value, what would they be? Put each of these acts into a mason jar or brown paper bag and place them one by one onto the shelves.
Value being a great partner? Maybe your first jar contains a greeting at the front door after your love comes home from a hard day. The second might be listening calmly next time the two of you have a quarrel. On another shelf, maybe there"s a little box that contains a time when you will cheerfully agree to the movie or the restaurant of your partner"s choice. Just let your pantry fill up with acts you can do. If you fill up one pantry, consider another value and stock up with acts that support it as well.
Let the acts be big and small, but be extra sure to have many very small acts. Acts do not need to be big to be meaningful. Kelly tells a story at workshops about being sick when he was little. When he was sick, his mom would come in and tuck him into bed and lay a gentle hand against his brow to check for fever. Maybe you had a mom like that. Or maybe you wish you had. That small act that took perhaps a minute is remembered fondly by Kelly fifty years after the fact. Some very small acts of kindness can really stretch out over time.
Seen from an ACT perspective, then, there"s much more to commitment than just making promises about what will happen tomorrow or the next day. In contrast to the everyday, fixed-and-future sense of commitment, committed action from an ACT perspective involves an ongoing, in-the-moment process of choosing and rechoosing the directions in which we"ll move. This nuanced commitment is a dynamic process rather than a static fact, and it has the potential to show up for us in each unfolding moment. More than being a measuring stick for our successes and failures, this kind of commitment is a skill we can refine that will help us reach our goal of finding the freedom to live a rich and meaningful life.
Commitment-Right Now Commitment is another area where there"s an affinity and intimacy between process areas. If commitment seems to recall what we said about present-moment contact, you"re getting a good feel for this stuff. The breathing meditation game we described a while back is a very apt metaphor for the kind of commitment we"re talking about. If you consider your experiences following your breath, you can observe what commitment from this perspective looks like in flight.
Commitment in ACT links up to a really important type of treatment for depression. The treatment is called behavioral activation. Often people think that they need to change how they think in order to do better in life. It turns out that there is very, very good evidence that getting people active produces outcomes as good as antidepressant medications for depression (Dimidjian, et al, 2006). In fact, some forms of behavioral activation contain values elements similar to ACT (Lejuez, et al, in press). We are not made for inactivity. It makes us sick. Living in our heads makes us sick. Getting active is good medicine. Use these commitment processes to gently ease yourself back into the stream of life. Move your body. Engage socially. Eat a healthful meal mindfully, perhaps with good company. Visit a sick friend. Go read to an old person at a nursing home. Walk the dog. Take a yoga cla.s.s. Engage in even the tiniest acts and watch what happens over time. And the key here really is over time. The impact of these things will not likely be immediate. In fact, if you obsessively check to see "if they are working"-meaning do I feel better?-you will likely inhibit your development. These acts are not aimed at "feeling better." They are aimed at "living better." Thoughts and feelings will come and go, but a series of small, committed acts, over time, will take you to new places.
The best metaphor for commitment in ACT is a breathing meditation. In the meditation, we bring our awareness to the rise and fall of breath. Even the most dedicated meditator, over time, will find herself making grocery lists in her head, thinking about what is for dinner, the next job, and on and on. In those moments, perhaps we notice that we have strayed from breath. When we find that is so, we kindly acknowledge straying and gently return to the breath. How many times? We return one more time than we go away. ACT is like a meditation, except the focus is not the breath-it is valued living. No matter how dedicated, we will find ourselves off our values, perhaps in small ways, perhaps in large. When we do, we pause and notice that disconnection from our value and make that gentle return. How many times? One more time than we turn away. The heart of commitment is found in that persistent return to a valued pattern of living. Commitment lives and breathes in that moment of return.
AA and the Gift of Commitment
AA is all about active recovery. This sensibility can be found in the AA basic text. Chapter 6 of Alcoholics Anonymous is called "Into Action." In the twelfth step, the larger purpose of all the steps is illuminated in the phrase "we...practice these principles in all our affairs" (AA, 59). In a discussion of the twelfth step in Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, you"ll find "right action is the key to good living" (12 & 12, 125).
One way to think about commitment is to think of it as applied acceptance. One of the things people struggle with a lot when they set out to change their lives is acceptance. And the problem is often with where they go looking for acceptance. Don"t put too much effort into seeking acceptance as something you think about. In other words, don"t sit around waiting for your mind to agree that something is acceptable. Your mind is not likely to call something acceptable that it has previously cast into the category of "bad" things. Looking for that kind of acceptance is a little like looking for sunny days in Seattle. They happen. When they do happen, they are truly lovely and to be enjoyed. However, you don"t want to plan your life around them. You"re very unlikely to find acceptance in your head. Even when you do, you can"t count on it to show up on the day and in the moment you need it. So, if acceptance is not the thought or feeling of acceptance, what is it?
The kind of acceptance that makes a difference, that changes lives, that invigorates, and that is always available is lived acceptance. This kind of acceptance is in your life, not in your head. Even on the rare days when your mind delivers the thought, "Hey, this acceptance stuff is not so bad," little will come of it if it"s not backed up by lived values. The good news is that acceptance as lived-values is something that is always available to you. In the ACT model, commitment involves a gentle return to lived values. This is acceptance that walks and talks. It does the next right thing, it takes the next inventory, it makes the next amend, it serves coffee at a meeting, it straightens the chairs afterward, it walks up to a new person at the meeting and says "You"re not alone. Together we can do what we couldn"t do alone."
People often think about commitment in terms of the future. In ACT, commitment is not about the future. In AA, commitment is not about the future. Even when it comes to drinking, promises about a future of not drinking have little place in AA. Sobriety is a "one day at a time" activity-sometimes one minute or one second at a time.
Commitment to live well, which includes sobriety and a lot more, involves allowing yourself to persistently live in the question that life asks: "In this very moment, am I engaged in right action? What would it look like to pause for a moment, become aware of myself and my actions, and then to make any course correction that puts me in better alignment with what truly matters to me?"
In terms of the steps, the ninth step represents major engagement in commitment processes. Sometimes people think about the amends described in the ninth step as apologies. I don"t recommend this approach. An apology may be part of the ninth step, but it"s seldom the most important part and may in fact be insulting to the person receiving the apology.
Consider that the root of the word "amend" is the same as "amendment." It means some sort of change that corrects something amiss. For some, life has already consisted of a nearly endless stream of apologies. If this is so, then another apology, no matter how sincerely intended, may not represent any change at all, let alone a change for the better. If you"ve done your values work in the last chapter and have worked through the fourth through eighth steps, you"ve likely found that you have been deeply engaged in patterns of living that are at cross purposes with your own most deeply held values. Very often these areas involve your relations with others. Sometimes these breaches of trust take many years to heal.
The world often exhorts people to think big. In fact, we often exhort people to think big and to dream big. However, especially in this area of commitment I want you to remember to think small. I advise it for a number of reasons. One reason is that some days, the only thing you will find yourself prepared to do will be a very small act. Go back and take a look at the invitation at the front of the book. Read it carefully. Find this pa.s.sage in it: It was a starting point. From there, people began to teach me about acceptance and about holding my story in the world a little more gently, about letting go of limitations and opening up to possibility. By inches, I made my way up off the floor and out of that bathroom.
The key to this pa.s.sage is "by inches." Life is a game of inches. When it comes to action, often facing a long history of failures, the world seems too much. Those are times to take your eyes from the horizon and look down squarely at your own feet. And, just for today, let inches be enough. Find what you can do, however small, that is in the right direction. Find one tiny action that is in the right direction. Enormous change comes from such small, persistent acts.
This doesn"t mean you shouldn"t plan. This doesn"t mean you shouldn"t raise your eyes to the horizon. You should. The AA program suggests it quite directly.
The only urgent thing is that we make a beginning...If we would gain any real advantage in the use of this Step on problems other than alcohol, we shall need to make a brand new venture into open-mindedness. We shall need to raise our eyes toward perfection, and be ready to walk in that direction. It will seldom matter how haltingly we walk" (AA 12 & 12, 68).
So we shall have to settle, respecting most of our problems, for a very gradual progress, punctuated sometimes by very heavy setbacks. Our old time att.i.tude of "all or nothing" will have to be abandoned (AA World Services, Inc., 1999, 6).
And, of course, from the Big Book itself, heard in nearly every meeting in the reading of the steps from "How It Works": Many of us exclaimed, "What an order! I can"t go through with it." Do not be discouraged. No one among us has been able to maintain anything like perfect adherence to these principles. We are not saints. The point is, that we are willing to grow along spiritual lines. The principles we have set down are guides to progress. We claim spiritual progress rather than spiritual perfection (AA, 1976, 60).
Let your life grow from a thousand small committed acts. Some of them will be big, like writing a check for your child support, every single month on exactly the same day (practicing consistency). But let some also be the small committed act of pouring a cup of coffee, straightening chairs, or welcoming a newcomer to the meeting. Each small act builds upon the last. Over time, these small acts will pile up into a tower from which you"ll be able to see farther than you could in the past.
Most people learn to play out of their strength. If you do this, you get to play on your strong days, and on your weak days, you have to stay home or lie. You must hide-either literally or you must hide inside of lies that conceal your weakness. If you can learn to play out of both your strength and your weakness, you"ll have learned something most people never learn. And, most importantly, you"ll get to play every single day.
What does it mean to play out of our weakness? It means noticing where your running, fighting, and hiding have taken you. It means gradually letting go of running, fighting, and hiding in their grosser and subtler forms. It means a gentle return to the patterns of living that you would want mentioned when you have pa.s.sed from this earth. It means that you bring yourself fully to the table of life each day.
Epilogue.
The Next Day, and the Day After That We think books are just the beginning of conversations rather than complete conversations unto themselves. It"s quite true that this book is just paper (or pixels) until you, reader, consider it and in some way make it your own. The book needed two of us, our teachers, our editors, and our publisher just to get started; you"re the one who actually gets to make it into something that matters, by breathing life into these words with your kind attention and good intentions.
We said someplace in the book that we don"t really love linearity, that we don"t have a lot of confidence that things ever get smoothly from point A to point B. This is never truer for us than with introductions and conclusions. What do we say to "conclude" the book? How the h.e.l.l do we know?
Recovery has been on Kelly"s mind for more than twenty-five years. ACT has occupied his thoughts for most of those years. Troy and Kelly have worked together for five years, and one of their first face-to-face conversations was about the match between ACT and 12-step. In some ways this book brings that conversation full circle. In others, it"s just another installment. Our understanding of this stuff will change as we learn from the ways this book is received, in very real ways remaking it as we go along.
You, reader, came to this book for your own reasons. If you"ve read this far, we"re humbled, and we thank you from the bottom of our hearts for your attention. When we decided to put all this down on paper, the goal of serving you was really all we had in mind. We"ve both tried to bring stillness, varied perspectives, acceptance, a light touch with stories, values, and turning-back-in-kindness commitment into our lives, and we believe, for us, it"s been a good thing. We hope it helps you too, in whatever you decide you want your life to be about.
Recovery takes a lifetime, yet it"s measured only in moments. With each of them, our hearts and thoughts will be with you. Take care, and best of luck on the journey.
Afterword.