Chapter Thirteen

THE FIFTH PIVOT

VALUES—CARING BY CHOICE

One of the greatest sources of psychological distress is losing touch with the values that are truly meaningful to us. I had a client who, when asked about her deepest values, paused for a long time before pushing out the words, “That’s the scariest thing I’ve ever been asked.” After another long delay she added, “I’ve not thought about that in a long, long time,” and began to cry.

That is the most common emotional reaction to connecting deeply with values. I’ve seen it scores of times in therapy. I suspect it’s also why we cry at the sight of a newborn baby, and why tears flow at weddings. It’s why sometimes our eyes tear up at a spectacular sunset. We’re feeling connected to aspects of life we treasure.

The Yearning for Meaning

There is no yearning more important to human beings than to freely pick and pursue our life direction. A clear sense of self-directed meaning provides us with an essentially inexhaustible supply of motivation. But we can easily lose sight of what is actually meaningful to us, pursuing socially compliant goals and superficial gratifications instead. Every tick of the clock can mock us with the emptiness of such a life.

We misdirect our yearning for meaning for a number of reasons. One is that we don’t trust ourselves to make good choices, and we escape from the freedom life gives us. We fear we might pick a life course we don’t have the necessary qualities to pursue. Maybe we value dedicating ourselves to raising children but doubt we’ll be a good parent. Or perhaps we aspire to get a graduate degree to explore new knowledge, but we question that we have the intellectual prowess. We also worry that our values may be out of step with cultural norms, leading us to be looked down on, left out, or even ridiculed. Maybe we would prefer to leave our high-pressure, well-paying job and spend more time with our family, but we stick with it because we’re convinced people will think less of us if we quit. We cling to our conceptions of ourselves and fear being free to pursue a life direction—perhaps because our sense of self is fused with being that successful lawyer or business manager, while deep down we know we want to be a therapist. Most commonly of all, we turn away from our true values because of past pain we want to avoid. We might convince ourselves that we don’t value loving relationships because someone we loved hurt us. Thus, all forms of psychological rigidity show up inside our mishandling of the yearning for meaning and self-direction.

In the main, our culture doesn’t help people choose their own sense of meaning. Instead, we’re encouraged to define what gives us a sense of worth by chasing superficial wants. We mistake a quick hit of gratification for a sense of meaning, and we accumulate things and achievements, pursuing a long list of socially mandated “shoulds.” The dominant social message is that our worth is evaluated by our possessions and by culturally approved forms of achievement or compliance with social expectations, whether that’s work success, getting married and having children, or even “being happy.” We may find those things authentically meaningful, but if we are pursuing them in order to avoid the pain of social censure and of our own self-criticism for failing to make the grade, they will be an empty sack.

Consider the effects of materialism, the belief that possessions and their acquisition will lead to life satisfaction. Studies have been done in which people fill out surveys asking if they agree with statements such as “Some of the most important achievements in life include acquiring material possessions;” “I’d be happier if I could afford to buy more things”; and “I like to own things that impress people.” Agreement correlates significantly with anxiety, depression, negative self-assessment, and low life satisfaction.

Fame, power, sensory gratification, and the adulation of others all are unfulfilling “wants” and “shoulds.” Once we are grasping for them, enough is never enough. Billionaires asked what it will take to have enough money have been known to answer “more.” Buddhists call this state of focusing on achievements and material wealth “attachment,” and they identify it as a core cause of suffering. We lose sight of what actually motivates us in a lasting way, and the more we grasp, the more miserable and out of balance we become.

The Values pivot allows us to redirect our yearning for meaning toward the pursuit of the activities that align with what we truly find meaningful.

The four flexibility skills you’ve now been developing are of great assistance in making this pivot. Here’s how.

Acceptance Allows Us to Listen

If we’re blocked from connecting to our values because we’re trying to avoid pain, we ironically only contribute to our pain. By listening to our pain instead, and moving toward that yearning to feel, we can identify the discrepancies between the way in which we’re living and the way we want to live. Pain is like a flashlight if we know where to point the beam.

I once had a depressed and anxious client, whom I’ll call Sam, who told me fairly early on in therapy that the effort to help him was pointless because life was empty and there was no real reason to live. As I tried to explore with him things he cared about, he was slippery and at times even provocative. For example, he said in a matter-of-fact way that he really did not care about family, or children, or even having intimate relationships. “I just don’t think that life is for me,” he claimed, and shrugged as he shifted in the chair, as if to say with his floppy body: Who cares? Who cares if I have love in my life? Who cares if I ever have rugrats? Prove to me it matters.

As his eyes caught mine, though, I did not see indifference. I saw pain.

I did not confront him then and there. Instead I sent him out with a simple homework assignment: to notice places he was hurting and to consider the possibility that these places were ones he cared about. He said he’d do it but did not expect much from the exercise.

When he came back the next week he said, “I’m such a liar, even to myself.” He reported sitting in a fast-food restaurant having a hamburger when a family came in and sat down at the next table to eat. As he watched the mother, father, and two small children unwrap their burgers, he was surprised to notice a feeling of sadness. Instead of shaking it off as he would usually, he remembered what I asked of him and looked more closely at what he was feeling. Metaphorically, he opened a long-closed door to his inner self.

A wave of intense sadness washed over him and he turned away from the family, trying not to show his tears. Next he felt a shock of yearning. He longed to be in a loving relationship and to be a father.

As he told me this in session, the tears began again and he had to choke out his words. He then told me about his long history of childhood neglect and traumatic betrayals by his parents and stepfather. He had for many years dealt with that pain by trying to shut down his caring and focusing instead on his work and success.

But his “success” was not sustaining him emotionally. He was like a person lost at sea who has decided to drink ocean water because he was thirsty: the immediate effect might be quenching, but the net result is greater thirst.

To help clients see how their pain relates to their values, I tell them that as they open up to pain they should flip it over and ask, “What would I have to not care about for this not to hurt?” I’ve never met a person with social phobia who did not deeply desire to be with people in an open way. I’ve personally never met a person with depression who did not deeply desire to be vigorously engaged in life again. In your pain you find your values, and in your avoidance, you find your values disconnection. Without emotional flexibility and openness, it’s impossible to live according to chosen values.

By the way, I saw Sam a few months ago for the first time in nearly twenty years. He went on to have a family and to found a business that allowed him to work with scores of children over the years. His two sons, now adults, run his business with him. He is proud of them and happy about their time together. All of that never would have happened had he not used his pain as a flashlight to help him find his values and the direction he really wanted his life to take.

Defusion and Self Skills Allow Us to Stop Judging

The problem-solving mind loves to sort through reasons that we should or should not do things, which is great when doing your taxes or choosing which stock to pick. But it’s a lousy way to pick values. That’s because coming up with justifications assumes we need some reason to make a choice—other than that it is simply intrinsically meaningful to us. If I tell myself I should value being a good father because that’s what society expects, then I’m robbing myself of a connection to the fact that I actually choose to be a good father, because it’s so richly meaningful to me. Once we focus on justifying our values, we’re falling under the sway of pliance, and that often pulls us away from what we really care about. By defusing from judgment, we can satisfy that yearning for coherence that sits inside that we really want; by connecting with our transcendent sense of self, we can foster the yearning for belonging that resides inside our values.

When I want to show my clients how tricky it is to have all sorts of reasons for their values, I stick out three fingers of one hand and put it behind my back. Let’s say that a client has told me that he is happy with himself because that day he chose to eat a salad for lunch rather than the cheeseburger he craved. I would ask him why, and the dialogue would proceed something like this:

Steve: Why did you choose the salad?

Client: It has fewer calories. [Justification 1]

Steve: Why is having fewer calories important?

Client: It keeps me from being unhealthy and overweight. [Justification 2]

Steve: Why is avoiding being unhealthy and overweight important?

Client: Because I will live longer! [Justification 3]

Steve: Why is living longer important?

Client: . . . I don’t know. It just is! Everyone wants to live longer!

I bring my hand out from behind my back, with my three fingers still stuck out, and I explain to the client that usually this questioning goes no more than three rounds. By the fourth question, if not sooner, almost everyone has answered with, essentially, “I don’t know.” This helps them to see that they’ve been buying into the need for all sorts of culturally scripted reasons and not really appreciating that the answer is not really all of the whys anyway. It is far closer to the truth just to say “because I choose to.”

I recall once working on weight control with a client with diabetes who, after a values conversation, said she was going to work on her health so she’d have a better chance to see her daughter grow up. It rang true; I sensed that this was her authentic motivation. Just to test that, though, I asked her why seeing her daughter grow up mattered. She wasn’t fooled. “It doesn’t,” she said a bit flippantly, and then after a short pause she peered down at me over her glasses and with a clipped intensity added, “except . . . to . . . me!”

Saying that we freely choose our values doesn’t mean that our choices aren’t shaped by family and cultural influences, such as parental guidance and being taught religious beliefs. We absorb these teachings, but as we do, we exercise our ability to choose, even if we don’t acknowledge that to ourselves. All choices are informed by our history. But justifying our choices with the rationale that they’re what we were taught is a way of avoiding personal responsibility. This is a precept of all the world’s major religions. They emphasize that human beings have the capacity to choose to live in accord with religious teachings or not. The affirmative leap to do so is often called a “leap of faith.”

Defusion and self skills help us stop the justification process from kicking in and connect with others in a deeper way. We learn to catch ourselves as our minds begin spinning out compliant reasons for our behavior. They also help stop self-recrimination as we begin doing values work. The Dictator can become quite harsh as we begin acknowledging to ourselves that we haven’t been living in accord with our values. It will start berating us—“See I told you, you’re no good. You’re a hypocrite, a charlatan.” We may also get caught up in excessively evaluating whether we’ve chosen the right values, ruminating over whether they’re really our “true values.” With the ability to disregard these unhelpful messages, values work is freeing rather than punishing.

Presence Helps Stay Focused on the Ongoing Journey

Recall that earlier I discussed that values are not goals but rather are qualities of living—such as living lovingly, playfully, kindly, compassionately, protectively, persistently, and faithfully.

Goals can be helpful to staying on course in your values-based journey, once the distinction between goals and values is clear. The key point is that values-based living makes goals meaningful, rather than goals being valuable in themselves. If you value alleviating the suffering caused by addiction, you might set a goal of becoming a certified addiction counselor. The certificate will enable the expression of your value; it’s a stepping-stone on the journey. I have taught in universities for more than forty years and I’ve seen many a graduate student forget why they initially pursued a degree. The goal of getting it overshadows the value of getting it; once they graduate, they ask with a bit of shock, “Now what?” Keeping attuned to the here and now helps avoid this pitfall.

Goals are in the future until they are achieved, and then they’re quickly in the past. Values are always in the now. And that is crucial to their motivational power. Living day to day according to our values is enormously rewarding.

When people are focusing primarily on future achievement, or what they want or “must get,” they miss the richness of life in the present; the yearning for orientation is thwarted. This important wisdom is actually contained in the word want. By definition, wants are something you do not have (the word came from the Old Norse vant, which meant “missing”). Once we achieve our wants—we get that car, or spouse, or job that we’ve taken to be a value—life calls our bluff. We soon feel how empty those aspirations were because they were not connected to living according to what was truly meaningful. Our thirst for chosen meaning and purpose will be unquenched.

As we work to make the Values pivot and then stay on our new course, attention to the present helps focus on our current behavior—on the journey rather than reaching the destination.

A wonderful benefit of values is that at the very moment we identify them, we are already beginning to live them. There is no wait period, no certificate you’ve got to earn. You will never “get there,” you can only “be going there.” That also means we don’t finish with them; they are an inexhaustible source of meaning. Suppose you value being a loving person. No matter how many times you do loving things, there are more loving things to do.

The effects of making the Values pivot can be dramatically transformative. And sometimes it does not even require extensive work once the other flexibility pivots are in place. A case in point is a client of JoAnne Dahl, the ACT therapist whom you met in Chapter Five. Niklas was a respected, elderly author who lived on a distant small island. He had become powerfully agoraphobic; as he ran from his fear, fear demanded more and more of his freedom. His life was a horrible irony. He wrote soaringly beautiful stories about the natural world around him, and yet he was terrified to step out of his house into the landscape he so loved. He had been housebound for many years.

Things came to a head when he needed to go the hospital to get treatment for a worsening case of diabetes. He reached out to JoAnne for help. It was hard to get to his home—she had to make something happen in a single day.

Instead of trying to restructure his fearsome thoughts or damp his difficult feelings, JoAnne focused first on her genuine curiosity about his anxiety. Within minutes of meeting him she asked if he was anxious; of course he was, and she said that was wonderful. She wanted to understand it, and that meant she had to see it as he did. “Close your eyes and let it come,” she asked, adding, “Let it do anything it wants to; we are just going to sit tight like two kids watching the stars at night and just explore it.” He agreed. It came but as she asked with great enthusiasm exactly what it was like, and where he felt it, it slowly began to disappear. “Oh, no,” JoAnne cried, playing dumb. “Get it back! Hold on to it this time . . . hold its tail tight so that we can explore it.” It came but disappeared even faster this time. “What else can we do?” JoAnne pleaded. Over a riotous few hours they locked the door to the room, lay on the floor, went outside, walked far from the house, did somersaults down a hill, got in a car (for the first time in thirty years), went over bridges, and finally went to the ferry (the boat he needed to ride to get to the hospital), and both stood at the front on the railing like in the movie Titanic. For each step forward, anxiety would come but as together they tried purposefully to feel it fully and see it clearly, it was felt and then faded.

Meanwhile, he was becoming almost overwhelmed by the beauty of his island that he loved so but had to write about from memory. As he ventured farther from his house, he literally cried tears of joy at the beauty of nature. As he held his anxiety the way you might hold a precious baby, he saw that he could once again freely choose what mattered. Values work was more like a somersault down a hill than wielding a mental lash.

Closing the deal, JoAnne asked Niklas what he might do if the diabetes proved to be controllable. What were his growing diabetes symptoms costing him that he cared about? “A walk on the beach during the first signs of spring,” he said. JoAnne had Niklas tell her what nature walks were once like, and why they mattered. In the future, if his condition worsened, what would that cost him? “Sharing beauty through my writing,” Niklas answered.

JoAnne had playfully and cleverly drawn Niklas into the possibility that feeling fully liberated him to do what he really cared about. I personally think she’d also shown with her own playful caring for him that values matter. She’d modeled what needed to be done as she herself stood on that railing with him. From there it became obvious that the potential cost of this disease was far too high for him to leave it untreated. He saw in clear relief that appreciating and sharing beauty was his very lifeblood and he had the ability to pivot toward what mattered without anxiety first having to go away.

Niklas faced his fears and went to the hospital for treatment. Going turned out not to be a difficult “grit your teeth” affair. The words he used to describe the trip was that he chose to “hug himself and go.”

JoAnne is a brilliant clinician and no, most decades-long anxiety struggles are not abandoned in a long session in a single day. But there is a deep wisdom inside Niklas’s story. What is standing between us and caring deeply? Why can’t our values-based journey be more like “hug yourself and go”?

Taking the Valued Living Questionnaire

Another person whose life was transformed by reconnecting with his true values is Kelly Wilson, who entered my lab as a graduate student in the late 1980s and has been an important contributor to the development of ACT methods. Kelly altered the direction of ACT’s development to include more emphasis on values. Before pursuing a psychology degree, he had experienced a harrowing struggle with addiction, including lying on a bed in a detox ward in four-point restraints wondering how he might kill himself. It was only a couple of years after that, as he fought his way from addiction to succeeding in school, when he realized that he wanted to devote his life to helping others overcome psychological challenges. He read some of my early work on ACT and sought me out to help continue to develop it. After getting his degree, he created the Valued Living Questionnaire (VLQ).

The VLQ asks a series of questions about what your values are and how much you have been living in accordance with them, evaluating that measure in a set of life domains, on a scale of 1 to 10. Taking the VLQ is a good first step in doing ACT values work, and you should fill it out now.

It is best to plan not to let anyone see this so you can answer as honestly as possible, setting aside as best you can social pressures and the wagging mental fingers of should and have to. This is between you and you. So perhaps rather than filling in your answers in this book, download the VLQ, which you can do at my website (http://www.stevenchayes.com). If you find you are beating yourself up in the process of filling it in, step back and remind yourself that values are what you choose to work toward, not what the mind says you have to do or care about, or else.

VALUED LIVING QUESTIONNAIRE

The following are domains of life that contain values for some people. We are concerned with your quality of life in each of these areas. One aspect of quality of life involves the importance one puts on different areas of living. Rate the importance of each area (by circling a number) on a scale of 1 to 10. A score of 1 means that area is not at all important. A score of 10 means that area is very important. Not everyone will have notable values in all of these areas, or care about all areas the same. Rate each area according to your own personal sense of importance.

Family (other than marriage or parenting)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Marriage/couples/intimate relations

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Parenting

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Friends/social life

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Work

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Education/training

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Recreation/fun

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Spirituality

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Citizenship/community life

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Physical self-care (diet, exercise, sleep)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Environmental issues

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Art, creative expression, aesthetics

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

In this section, we would like you to give a rating of how consistent your actions have been with your values in each of these domains. We are not asking about your ideal in each area. We are also not asking what others think of you. Everyone does better in some areas than others. People also do better at some times than at others. We want to know how you think you have been doing during the past week. Rate each area (by circling a number) on a scale of 1 to 10. A score of 1 means that your actions have been completely inconsistent with your values in this area. A score of 10 means that your actions have been completely consistent with your values.

Family (other than marriage or parenting)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Marriage/couples/intimate relations

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Parenting

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Friends/social life

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Work

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Education/training

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Recreation/fun

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Spirituality

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Citizenship/community life

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Physical self-care (diet, exercise, sleep)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Environmental issues

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Art, creative expression, aesthetics

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

There are a number of ways to assess the results. The first is to look at all domains that have relatively high importance scores (a score of 9 or 10) and also have relatively low consistency scores (6 or less). These are clear problem areas, and I suggest doing your initial values work with any one of them. Then you can move on to other areas.

It’s also good to calculate your overall score. Multiply the two numbers from the first and second parts for each domain. So if for family, in the first part you scored it as 10 and in the second part you circled 4, for that domain you’d get 40. Add all of those numbers and then divide them by 12 to get your composite score. To get a rough sense of how your score compares to those of the broad public, the average composite result is 61. Do not begin beating yourself up if your score is lower than that. Practice some defusion from that negativity. This is a discovery process, not a critique, and after all, you’ve embarked on this journey—give yourself some credit for that. You’re here to embrace change.

If you scored quite a few of the domains as low in importance to you, you should consider whether you were being fully honest with yourself about them. It is perfectly reasonable to have some domains that are unimportant. You may not care about citizenship, or the environment, and if you do not have children, you may not care about the parenting practices of others, and so on. That being said, research suggests that if many of these domains are unimportant, that’s a contributor to psychological distress. Use this assessment as an opportunity to admit your true values to yourself.

Now, with a good idea of the values domain you’d like to start working on, you’re ready to get going.

A Starter Set of Methods

I recommend that in this reading session you do at least the first exercise. Then you can either read the others but return to work on them later on, or if you want to, jump to the next chapter on committed action and come back to them. You will find as you move into committed action that all of the flexibility processes now become relevant, but values especially so, because they provide motivational energy to go ahead with behavior change. For example, the second and third exercises in this chapter are great ways to start identifying actions that you want to commit to change.

Don’t be surprised if this work stirs things up. There is a palpable sense of vulnerability that comes from doing values work. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself getting unexpectedly emotional over the next few days, or cranky, or anxious. If you do catch yourself getting caught up in rumination of past difficulties and self-recrimination, go right to a little defusion, self, and presence practice. If you feel yourself pushing back against emotions, or procrastinating, practice some acceptance exercises. Remember, we hurt where we care, and values work is all about caring.

Values Writing

I want to ask you to write about your values, answering a small set of questions I will ask. This values writing will help you explore further, in an open and unregulated way, the story you’ve been telling yourself about your values and how you can reconnect with your authentic values.

Research has shown that values writing has more impact on behavior and health than just asking people to pick their values from a list or state them in a few words. Values writing can reduce defensiveness, making us more receptive to information that suggests changes we need to make in our lives. It reduces physiological stress responses and buffers the impact of negative judgments of us from others. And we know a bit about why all of this happens. Values writing is most powerful when it leads us to care more about transcending our own ego and self-story and helps us link our caring to the good of others. Values work helps build socially positive emotions, like gratitude and appreciation, and the feeling that you are making a meaningful difference in others’ lives.

If that sounds preachy, please remove any sense of “should” from it. You don’t need a wagging finger from me any more than you need one from anyone else, including you. I’m advocating values work because science shows that it improves our lives. It’s just the way we are wired.

To start, take out a piece of paper and write for ten minutes about a value you care about deeply in any domain from the list I just gave you. Really do it—ten minutes is not very long! As you do so, address the following questions:

What do I care about in this area? What do I want to do in this area that reflects that caring? When in my life has this value been important? What have I seen in my life when others pursue this value, or not? What might I do to manifest this value more in my life? When have I violated this value and has that been costly?

Try to focus your writing on the qualities of your life as you want to live it—qualities of your own that you hold as being of intrinsic importance. This is between you and you; it’s not about seeking approval or following a bunch of rules. You are not trying to avoid guilt or tell a self-justifying story.

If it feels like you are beginning to write a holiday list to Santa—a list about what you want from life or others—redirect your writing in the direction of describing the qualities of actions you would like to manifest in your life. If you get bogged down, just rewrite things you’ve already written until new things show up. Since this is between you and you, you cannot get it wrong.

Don’t continue reading until you’ve written for at least ten minutes. Trust me on this. Just do it.

Now we can look back at what you’ve written. But before turning to that, consider that I asked about times in your life when this value was important, because that helps reaffirm your commitment to it. For me, one of these times was crying under my bed as my parents fought, which helped me see how I longed to help others in a new way. To this day, I sign off on most of my e-mails (especially ones in which I’m trying to help others who are looking for ACT resources and the like) with the phrase peace, love, and life.

I asked what you can do to act more in accord with this value, to help you identify specific actions to commit to. Finally, I asked the painful question about times you’ve fallen short and how that affected your life, because we have much to learn from the pain we inevitably experience.

OK, now read what you wrote and see if you can distill out of it a few examples of things you want to do in this area. Actual behavior. Next look for mentions of the qualities you want to manifest in your actions. You might want to do things genuinely, lovingly, carefully, creatively, curiously, compassionately, respectfully, openly, joyously, industriously, healthfully, adventurously, thoughtfully, justly, supportively, learnedly, peacefully, humorously, simply, honestly, spiritually, fairly, charitably, traditionally, dependably, and so on and so on. We are not used to writing about the qualities of action, so don’t expect these exact words to show up—I’m trying to give you a set to help you see what I mean by qualities. It’s hardly a complete list . . . just use it as a rough guide.

With this first set of actions you’d like to take, you might want to move now to the next chapter, to gain guidance about how to commit to them. Or you might want to do the other two starter exercises here first. If you decide to move on now, be sure to come back to do at least these next two exercises. They have proven very powerful for people in developing a deeper awareness of their values and continuing to chart a course of more meaningful living.

Drawing Out Sweetness

Pick a values area you want to work on—say family, education, or work—and allow yourself to recall an event, a day, a moment in that domain that was especially sweet. See if you can find an actual moment when you felt especially connected, vital, or alive; when you felt in flow, or supported, or empowered. Who else was there? What were you doing? What were you feeling or thinking? Notice how consciously in the now you were. Relive that moment as fully as you can.

Now, as you reflect on that special moment, consider what it suggests about the qualities of being or doing that you want to put into the world. But don’t formulate an answer in words, not yet. Allow the question to hang in your mind; now pull out a piece of paper. Draw any picture that comes to mind that somehow speaks to you about that value. Allow your picture to form without forcing words on it. This is not an art class, so let go of any self-criticism or self-praise about the quality of the drawing. The point is to break out of a verbal evaluative mode of mind and to envision that sweet moment and what it suggests about how you want to live. Now, sit back and reflect on what you drew.

What does the picture tell you about what you care about in this domain? What would you have to do to manifest that value in your actions? See if you can connect in a gut way with what you are yearning to stand for in your life moments, starting even in this moment, now. Awareness is the first step. See if you can put what you are feeling and sensing into a few words. If you have a sense that they resonate, write them down under the picture.

I call this process of awareness, recognition, and remembrance driving a nail into the wall. That last part, connecting with what you yearn to manifest, is metaphorically like the support of a nail that helps you keep this picture in place in your awareness. By linking that picture to a verbal statement of what matters to you, you affix the awareness more securely in your mind. I like to display these pictures on my phone or desk, or actually hang them on my wall, to even more firmly anchor them in my mind.

Flipping Pain into Purpose

Recall that one of the gifts of acceptance is the guidance we receive from feeling our pain. This exercise helps you see the values that are hiding in plain sight inside your pain, so that you can identify ways to live more in alignment with them.

I had a client once who had been verbally abused and neglected as a child. She was constantly told she was dumb, and she believed it. Her mother would also leave for weeks at a time, even when she was very young. She’d been passed around among relatives like a sack of potatoes. As an adult she worked as a low-paid secretary; her relationships were a mess.

ACT work helped her see that the pain of feeling worthless, lonely, and helpless revealed how strong she’d actually been and how much she cared about living a life that fulfilled her values. Even with her sense of helplessness, she had in essence raised herself. She put herself through community college. And she had sought therapy, diving into ACT headfirst. After only about six sessions she joined a women’s group, and a few weeks later she applied to college. She began advocating for candidates who embraced women’s issues and became a community leader. In college, she was an honors student and went on to get a full scholarship for graduate training at an Ivy League school.

She found her motivation to change her life trajectory right inside her pain. Inside worthlessness was a value of being kind and accepting of others and standing up for those who were downtrodden. Inside helplessness was a value of being competent and knowledgeable. Inside loneliness was a value of connecting with others and caring for their suffering.

Now it’s your turn. Take a values domain that’s of high importance to you but where there’s a large discrepancy between its importance to you and how much you’re living in accordance with that value. See if you can identify painful thoughts, feelings, memories, urges, or sensations that function as barriers to living as you’d like in this area. Write them down. Then take each barrier and flip it to uncover the purpose that the pain it causes you has to reveal, and write that down. Ask yourself, what would you have to not care about for that not to hurt?

The client I wrote about might have selected the domain of citizenship and identified her sense of worthlessness as a barrier to advocating for women’s rights. This exercise would help her see that she would have to not care about fairness and opportunity for women. She would also realize that she’d have to not care about her mother’s disparagements of her. The first was unacceptable to this woman, while the second proved more possible than she had imagined.

Next, for each of the barriers, write the following statement: If in [situation] I [feel, think, remember, sense X], let it be a reminder that I care about [value]. For example, my client might have written this down: If in a social situation I start to feel worthless, let it be a reminder that I care deeply about making a difference in the world, and that I want to do that by supporting women’s rights. Don’t expect it to remove the pain—expect it to help you live more as a whole person.

Additional Methods

Writing Your Story

This is a slight modification of the values writing task. Before I ask you to write, though, I want you to think. Imagine that the next year is going to be a key year in defining who you are in your life. If you were to become more fully you during this year, while at the same time still supporting those you care about, what would your process of “becoming more fully you” look like over this next year? Where do you wish to grow? What kind of person are you yearning to be? If you were writing the chapter of the next year of your life, what would the theme be?

Now that you have the set, do ten minutes of writing about the next year and what you hope to become.

I’ve Got a Secret

The purpose of this exercise is to strengthen your awareness of how meaningful it is to act in accord with your authentic values in contrast to acting in the service of getting social approval or an ego boost.

Pick an action that manifests a deeply held value, and see if you can plan a way to do it in total secrecy. For example, do a favor for a friend without disclosing you’re the one who has done it, make a large contribution to a charity you love without telling anyone you know that you did so, or show compassion for a stranger in need but anonymously.

At some point that same day, do ten minutes of values writing about what that experience was like for you and what it suggests about how you might build more values-based actions into your day-to-day life. Make sure not to talk to others about what you’ve learned from this exercise. This is about you doing things you care about doing only because you care.

If this exercise is hard, that is important to reflect on. You may find yourself letting your plan leak out to a friend, or telling her about your good deed later. Dig into why. If that dig-in is emotionally upsetting to you, I suspect that the need for social approval may be overshadowing your capacity to find your own sense of meaning. In that case, do a very small version of this exercise almost every day until it is easy and you can maintain your secrecy about your actions 100 percent. Then you can gradually increase the importance of the actions you take.

Many more ACT exercises have been developed for connecting with values, and I highly recommend you seek them out (follow the search strategy I listed in the Author’s Note, before Chapter One). Building your connection with your values is a journey that can last the rest of your life, and every step will make your life more meaningful.