When we talk about happiness, we cannot forget our responsibility to achieve this goal, however, the emotional education we receive leads us to the wrong approach, in this way, the typical question that worries us and generates a lot of discomfort, “I can live without you”, should be replaced by this: “I can live without me”.
Work experience has helped me understand and internalize the line in which we work in acceptance and commitment therapy and other contextual therapies; acceptance, which consists of self-awareness and self-awareness, is the main objective of a therapeutic process, making it a key element in achieving and maintaining our well-being.
- “You can’t generate life if you’re not imbued with life.
- You will speak with passion and emotion as long as you live with passion and emotion.
- The best way to show up is to be.
- The only way to be unique is to be authentic?.
- ?Francisco Alcaide?.
The main goal of all people in life is to be happy, achieve well-being and make our dreams come true, yet have you ever considered that everything you think is true in the pursuit of happiness can be false?What if all the efforts you make to achieve happiness end up taking you away from it?
Studies on contextual therapies, particularly those focused on acceptance and engagement therapy (Steven C. Hayes and Wilson, 1994), speak of the existence of a series of unnecessary and inaccurate beliefs in relation to the pursuit of happiness.
At first glance, they seem to make sense. However, based on the philosophy of life they convey, these beliefs are the cause and engine of the vicious circle in which we enter in search of desired happiness.
In this way we enter into a spiral and, in the search for well-being, we increase suffering. We are talking about ideas accepted by society, but which make us prisoners of a psychological trap that we are not aware of and that inevitably. guide us to self-deception and dissatisfaction.
To live without me is to live away from everything that makes us happy, simply because it causes us some discomfort, and we want to live comfortably, of course.
We know that every effort is rewarded. That way, you spend hours sitting studying to take an exam, do sports to feel better afterwards, fall in love with the risk of not being matched and even give up an immediate reward with the intention of receiving a bigger one afterwards.
However, sometimes the fear of suffering, of failing, of being rejected, of not feeling good about ourselves, makes us act in a certain way to avoid this fear, what happens is that we avoid or flee from these situations that involve feeling This emotion can lead us to distance ourselves from what makes sense in our life and, therefore, from ourselves.
Being honest helps us to live every situation of our day to day with presence, to be in the here and now it allows us to have a conscious perspective of how we feel, what we think, of what drives us, for this as psychologist and coach Laura Chica says, “the attention must be on ourselves and not abroad”.
“They told us that everything was there: the solution to problems, unconditional love, success. That’s why we always look there; in the world, in things, in others. No one ever told us that everything we were looking for was inside; in everything we wanted to be, in fact we were already, we would just have to let ourselves be; that everything we dreamed of, we could make it come true. To this day. Right now. Even you. being yourself?. ? Laura Chica?
Experience avoidance disorder — a way of life without me — is a phenomenon that takes us away from those particular experiences that make us feel unhappy, when we fall under the effects of this condition, our behavior aims to avoid, control or modify the consequences. (catastrophic thoughts, painful emotions, etc. ) that these events provoke in us.
Avoiding, fleeing or attacking feared events is incompatible with psychological acceptance, in this way we are talking about a strategy of change that is to do nothing, that is, to face our emotional experience feeling uncomfortable, admit and tolerate particular events and the situation itself without trying to change or avoid them.
Finally, we conclude that experience avoidance and psychological acceptance are two incompatible forms of behavior when we find ourselves trapped in aversive situation.
Is living without me, then, a condition that leads us to live far from what matters to us, whether out of fear, out of laziness, because we are going through difficult times and we feel sad, for fear of what others will say?
We must not forget that avoidance and avoidance take us away from our goals and objectives, so becoming aware and taking responsibility for our emotional management would be the fundamental elements promoted by ACT (acceptance and commitment therapy) as effective strategies of change.