Life Sucks And Then You Die
Salon.com Life | Getting over happiness
“Our [ACT] model — of accepting your feelings, disentangling yourself from your mind, connecting with your values, showing up in this moment and getting your feet moving in accordance with your values — it helps an amazingly broad array of problems, from chronic pain and epilepsy to doing well at work, anxiety, depression, substance abuse …”
Well… this is Buddhism! And yet, oddly enough, in salon.com’s interview with psychologist Steven C. Hayes not a single mention is made of it. Hm.
Hayes is promoting his new book Get Out of Your Mind & Into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Apparently it’s a big deal — article in Time magazine and all that.
Huge disclaimer: I haven’t read the book — only a few reviews of it — so feel free to take everything I’m saying here with several grains of salt.
“Acceptance and Commitment Therapy” (ACT) is supposed to be a whole new kind of psychotherapy but it doesn’t sound new to me. I suppose, though, that there are millions of Americans who have no familiarity with Buddhism whatsoever and so, to them, these ideas are brand new. The amazon.com site (link above) does have several reviews mentioning Buddhism, though, so I know I’m not the only one who’s seeing it.
I don know… It almost seems a little intellectually dishonest that Hayes doesn’t mention in the salon.com interview that “his” ideas aren’t really HIS at all — that they’re simply a rehash of Buddhist teaching. Maybe he gives the credit where it’s due in the book itself.
Anyway… if you want to learn a little about this way of living without having to buy Hayes’ book, check out this essay on The Four Noble Truths.
Truth Number One: Life Is Suffering.
Sound familiar?
Posted by RebeccaHartong on February 25, 2006 under Uncategorized
Sounds intellectually dishonest that you haven’t read the book, yet you’re making accusations about the author’s apparent lack of citations. By the way–you should be able to tell just from the salon.com excerpt you posted that ACT is ‘not just’ buddhism. Show me where virtually any form of Buddhism refers to “connecting with your values, showing up in this moment and getting your feet moving in accordance with your values”?
Bob, I think you need to read my entry a little more carefully. I haven’t accused the author of lacking citations in his book. Quite the contrary, I suggest that he may very well have citations in his book. It was his not mentioning the Buddhism link in his salon interview that I criticized. Not only that, I freely admit in my original post that I haven’t read the book and that people are free to take my opinion — based as it is only on reviews I’ve read — with “several grains of salt”. I don’t know how I could be more honest than that!
As for “connecting with your values, etc, etc”, please refer to the web site I referenced in the original post. Scroll down and read about the “8-Fold Noble Path”
Sure sounds like the same thing to me.
Since it’s been over a year since I wrote my original post on this topic, I went on back to the salon.com site to see what kinds of comments had been generated by the Hayes interview. Apparently a LOT of people noticed the similarity to Buddhism and many of them were pretty bent out of shape by what they, too, perceived as Hayes failure to acknowledge it. Hayes followed up with comments of his own, basically saying ‘yes, there are elements of Buddhism but it’s more than that’.
That’s good enough for me.