Chapter 5: Reducing Suffering
Good news – ACT is designed to help reduce your suffering.
In ACT, we distinguish between pain and suffering. Pain is inevitable. You’re bound to experience challenges that are painful. But suffering is optional. If you like maths, here’s a formula:
Pain x Avoidance = Suffering
Everyone experiences pain. You’re bound to experience some physical pain and perhaps even chronic pain. But beyond physical pain is the mental pain of difficult thoughts and emotions. Feelings of sadness, despair, anxiety and loneliness. Memories of past hurts and worries about future uncertainties. That’s part of being human.
ACT teaches you skills so you don’t compound your pain. For example, if you feel sad and you make lots of effort to deny, suppress or avoid feeling sad, this leads to an unnecessary deepening of your sadness – and that’s suffering.
And quite often, you need to feel some pain to live a meaningful life. By avoiding painful thoughts of feelings, you end up avoiding the very activities that you’d find rich and meaningful.
By learning to apply the powerful skills of ACT, you’re able to reduce your suffering and increase your sense of fulfillment in life. You achieve this by learning to both accept and step back from painful experiences, and to motivate yourself through taking meaningful action.
The Two Bullets
Imagine you’re walking along the street and, without warning, you’re suddenly shot in your arm.
You’d experience two forms of pain. The first pain would be the physical pain in your arm, as you’ve been shot. But you’d also experience a whole range of thoughts, such as: ‘Will I be shot again? Why did this happen to me?! What if the bullet causes an infection? What if I bleed to death? What if they need to chop my arm off? How will I pay my rent? Will I end up on the streets?’ Along with these thoughts, you’d most likely experience feelings of anxiety, frustration, anger or despair.
The first bullet is the physical pain of the actual bullet, and the second bullet is the process of you struggling and fighting with your mind – that’s your suffering.
This suffering, the second bullet, is an experience you can do something about. Using the flexibility skills you learn in ACT (see Part 2), you’ll be better able to see the thoughts as more like what they are: sounds and pictures in your head. And you can make peace with your feelings too – by using your ACT skills to let them be. In this way, you suffer less and focus on what really matters.