aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Saturday, February 25, 2006
Don’t be happy, worry
Or, more accurately, “Accept your history, feel your feelings, notice your thoughts, and carry all that forward down a path that you value that’s neither indulgence nor suppression.”
Huh?
Psychology has an improbable new rock star in Steven Hayes, a 57-year-old University of Nevada at Reno professor whose newest book, “Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life,” coauthored with Spencer Smith, earned him a splashy profile in the Feb. 13 edition of Time magazine. The arresting headline of the Time story was “Happiness Isn’t Normal”—and while that’s not a sentence Hayes actually penned, it has quickly become the catchphrase associated with his controversial school of “acceptance and commitment therapy.” ACT, as it’s known, is an approach to mental and behavioral health that flies in the face of traditional cognitive therapy and is being referred to as “third-wave” psychology (following second-wave cognitive therapy and first-wave behavior therapy).
From the interview:
Western culture promotes feel-goodism. In part it’s a side effect of having technology to make things easier or feel better. It’s natural progress, so we don’t have to do the sweaty, hard things our forebears had to do. But inside that is a meta-message, which is that you’re supposed to feel good from morning to night. And add on top of that commercialism and medications—because they feed it too: If you consume the right products, eat the right pill, drink the right beer, drive the right car, you believe that you’re not going to feel anything you don’t like. What I’m saying is that that is not the definition of a meaningful life, and I’m saying people know it.
Oh. I agree.
