The Goal Of Willingness – Get Out Of Your Mind And Into Your Life (Extract Chapter 9) By Stephen Hayes

The goal of willingness is flexibility. When you are able to be fully present in the here and now without being judgmental or without pushing away experiences (thoughts, feelings, emotions, bodily sensations, and so on) you have much more freedom to take needed steps to action. If you are willing to have an emotion, feeling, thought, or memory instead of attempting to control it, then the agenda of control is undermined, and you are free from the inevitable by-products of this agenda. These by-products are fairly predictable. First, you lose the war with your own internal content. If you refuse to have that internal content, you’ve got it. If you aren’t willing to lose it, you’ve lost it. Next, you lose the ability to control your own behavior in a flexible and effective way.

What Willingness Is Not

It’s not easy to be willing. That doesn’t mean it takes a lot of effort. Willingness is hard in the sense of “tricky,” not in the sense of “effortful.” It’s tricky because it’s an action that humans can learn but minds cannot. Our minds cannot fully understand willingness, because willingness is nonjudgmental and exists in the present, while the way that minds work is based on temporal relations and evaluations. For that reason, to begin willingness work, it seems to help by becoming clear about what it isn’t. That way, when your mind tells you that willingness is something that it isn’t, the message can be taken with a grain of salt.

Willingness Is Not Wanting

The first few times people are asked whether they are willing to have a particular private experience (for example, a negative feeling), the most common response is “No, I don’t want it.” But that answer is quite revealing. Willingness is not a matter of wanting.

“Wants” are desired things we miss not having. (Originally, the word “want” meant “missing,” and it is still occasionally used that way, as in “he starved for want of food.”). If you look at the items you wrote down a few minutes ago—the memories, images, bodily sensations, emotions, and thoughts to be avoided—you weren’t saying you “missed” them. If willingness meant wanting, no one would be willing to have pain. Someone with an anxiety disorder will never leap out of bed in the morning, saying, “Hey, I’m missing my panic attack!”

You can think of willingness in the same way you would think of welcoming a guest. Suppose you wanted to invite your entire extended family to come to your home for a feast. Everyone decides to come: your favorite Uncle Milton, your second cousin Jacques, your dear sister Sue. Dozens of relatives arrive at your house and everybody, including you, appears to be having a great time. As you look around, you’re overjoyed to see that everyone came and they all seem to be getting along so well. Then, when you see a certain car pull up in front of your house, your heart sinks. It’s your cranky old Aunt Ida. She rarely bathes. She doesn’t have any kind words for anyone, but especially not for you. She likes to wolf down your food but will rarely say so much as a thank-you. But you told your whole family, “Everyone’s welcome!”

The question is this: Is it possible truly to welcome Aunt Ida, even though you actually didn’t want her to be there? Most of us have been in this situation and we know the answer: Welcoming is not the same as wanting. At its most basic level, you would welcome Aunt Ida by allowing her into your home, acknowledging her presence, asking her how she’s been, and letting her join the party. You do so because you care about the family, and Aunt Ida is family. None of that requires you to first decide, “This party is missing Aunt Ida.” Wanting her to come to your party is not the issue. Being willing to have her come is.

Now, suppose you decide, “Hell no! I’m not letting her in!” You slam the door shut in her face, and when she knocks, you grip the doorknob and yell, “Go away!” Several things would be likely to happen. First, this is no longer much of a party. You aren’t doing fun things anymore. You’re just trying to keep Aunt Ida out. Second, the other guests are affected by all of the commotion. They might become agitated, argue with you about your course of action, leave entirely, or withdraw into a distant part of the house. As they begin to leave the living room, Aunt Ida becomes more and more the center of attention. Third, you are no longer able to move. You are stuck to that door. For you, at least, the party is over.

Suppose that instead of trying to keep Aunt Ida out, you decide to let go of your attachment to your wants. You hold to your original decision to welcome all your guests. You show Aunt Ida where the punch bowl is. You offer her a few tasty appetizers. Now, even though you still don’t want Aunt Ida to be there, you and your other guests can have a good party. You can mingle. You are free to come and go. So is Aunt Ida.

Willingness is exactly like that. Here is a quote that expresses this idea succinctly:

A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all!—Jelaluddin Rumi, translation by Coleman Barks (1997) Full Poem – The Guest House

What this metaphor is about, of course, is all the feelings and memories and thoughts that show up that you don’t like. There are many Aunt Idas at your door. If you wait for them to go away before the party begins, it will not begin. The issue is the stance you take with regard to your own experiences.

Willingness Is Not Conditional

There are effective and ineffective ways to limit willingness. First let’s get really clear on the ineffective way. Learning to be willing is like learning to jump off of something. Jumping off of things has this quality: you put your body into space and gravity carries it down. You can jump off of a sheet of paper on the floor, or a very thick book, or an armchair, or the roof of your house, or an airplane. The action is exactly the same, only the situation is different. So, even when you are jumping off of a sheet of paper, you are learning how to jump and the same actions will be what is needed to jump from a book, chair, house, or airplane.

Now suppose you said, “Well I want to learn to jump… but it’s pretty scary, so I’ll just step down instead. That way, I’m in control at every point.” That makes good sense but it won’t work because it can’t generalize except to a few situations. You can step down from a sheet of paper, or a book, or even a chair, but you can’t step down from your rooftop or from an airplane. So when you step down from a sheet of paper, you aren’t learning how to jump, and you aren’t learning something that will apply whenever you need it. It’s just not the same thing.

When we discuss this concept, they usually can think of elements in their lives that are like that. A rock climber who was in therapy once said, “It’s like doing my climbing moves. I know if I do a move halfway, that I will come off the wall and be hanging there, dangling on the rope. If I have a move to practice, I have to practice all the way.” An ice-skater explained that if she did even a simple jump half-heartedly, she was likely to trip and fall. She had to do simple jumps and difficult ones in the same way: as full jumps requiring her full attention. A dancer talked about how he had to let go and just dance, or he would be nothing but a pair of left feet.

This is how to recognize the difference between being willing with appropriate conditions set on that willingness and not being willing at all. It is not safe to limit your willingness based on the degree or the quality of the painful private experience that might come up for you. “I am willing if it doesn’t get too intense” is not safe. It isn’t safe because basically it means “I am not willing at all.” Judging how much you will allow yourself to feel before moving ahead is more like stepping down than jumping. However, to say, “I am willing for the next five minutes” is safe. You have set a limit, but it is not one of quality, rather it is a limit of time, of duration—or situation.

Willingness Is Not “Trying”

When people are asked whether they are willing, often the response is “I will try.” This is a sure sign of being only halfway willing.

The word “try” comes from a word that originally meant “to sift through or pick out.” That’s why a legal trial is called a “trial.” “Try” and “trial” come from the same root. The problem with “trying” is that sifting through is a matter of conditional judgments and evaluations. (Note that we call the results of a legal trial a “judgment.”) But willingness is the exact opposite of a conditional judgment and evaluation. Willingness is an active leap into the unknown. “Trying” has the quality of “weighing” or of “seeing if.” It is full of passivity and judgment.

Sometimes we help clients to see the passive quality of “trying” by putting a pen on the table and saying, “Try to pick this up.” If they pick it up, we shout “No, No! That’s really picking it up. Try to pick it up.”

The other connotation of “try” is “with great effort.” This definition also does not apply because willingness, properly understood, has nothing to do with effort. You can try to move a large rock in the sense that you will use great effort, but you cannot guarantee the outcome. This doesn’t apply to willingness because willingness is simply answering yes to your actual present experience. That is not a matter of effort or of seeing whether effort will produce a result. It is a mere yes or no. If willingness is applied to a feeling, we aren’t talking about feeling what you do not feel, we are talking about feeling what you already feel. If there is any effort involved, it is in the opposite direction.

To see this clearly, take a minute to move your right hand to touch your left arm. Notice what it feels like. Now move your right hand to touch your left arm and feel absolutely nothing.

Which of these two options took more effort? Did you have to “try” to feel what it already feels like, or did you simply feel it automatically?

Willingness Is Not a Matter of Belief

When people are asked whether they are willing, at times, the answer is “I don’t think I can.” Since we’ve already spent so much time on defusion you can probably see the trap that is being laid. Willingness is not a matter of belief. Let us explain.

Let’s return to feeling what it feels like to touch your arm. Repeat these words over and over again out loud: “I cannot touch my arm. I cannot feel my touch.” Keep saying those sentences over and over again. Now, while still saying that you cannot, move your right hand to touch your left arm and notice what it feels like. Our guess is that you felt your arm, regardless of what you were saying about it. Feeling what you already feel is not a matter of belief. It’s fine to think that you cannot do it, and it’s fine to think that you can. In any given moment, the issue is the same: Will you feel what you feel when you feel it? This is a yes or no question. It can be answered in only two ways: yes or no.

In exactly the same way, willingness is not something you hope to do, wish you could do, will try to do later, and so on. Willingness is a yes or no question in the moment.

Willingness Cannot Be Self-Deceptive

Sometimes people secretly don’t answer yes to the willingness question, but they go through the motions of saying yes in their efforts to deceive themselves. The sure sign of their secret unwillingness is that after they say the word yes, they say the word “if,” and what follows the “if” is not something that can be voluntarily controlled. Such efforts at self-deception are doomed to failure.

This situation is like having a child who throws temper tantrums to get his way. Suppose you have a rule in your house that no video games can be played until all homework is done. Your child screams and cries and calls you a terrible parent. Now suppose you think to yourself, “I’m willing to let him have a tantrum without giving in… unless he uses foul language.” Now, suppose your mind was like an open book, that your child can, in fact, hear your thoughts just as if you had said them aloud. Guess what you would get? You’d get swearing that would make a sailor blush. Now suppose you think to yourself, “I’m willing to let him have a tantrum without giving in… unless he has a tantrum for more than five minutes.” If he could read your mind, guess what you would get? You’d get a tantrum that lasted just over five minutes. Making deals with thoughts, feelings, sensations, and so on isn’t workable because your mind has plenty of room for both the avoided event and the deception. It’s exactly like the tantrum situation. Suppose you are willing to experience anxiety but you exempt one of these unsafe conditions in your willingness answer. You don’t answer “yes” but “yes if,” and the “if” isn’t anything you can control. Let’s say your answer is “yes, if the anxiety doesn’t go over 60 on a scale of 1 to 100.” Guess how high the anxiety will go?

Willingness as a Manipulation Is Not Willingness at All

This is the concept that minds can never get. According to your mind, the content of your pain is the source of your suffering because the pain is bad. Thus, you can measure suffering by the amount of the (bad) pain. For someone struggling with anxiety, a “good day” is a day with less anxiety. For someone struggling with depression, a “good day” is a day with less depression. And so on.

Willingness means abandoning that measurement. Suffering is no longer synonymous with the content of your pain. It is now synonymous with the postponement of living your life in the service of winning the struggle.

When you truly answer yes to the willingness question, it becomes a new game altogether, and the old measurements like “how anxious or depressed are you?” are no longer relevant. It’s like a person who’s been losing game after game of football suddenly sitting down in the middle of the football field, still in full football regalia, and painting a picture instead. Questions like, “How many points are there?” or “Are you winning?” would simply be no longer relevant.

In a real sense, willingness means shifting your agenda from the content of your pain to the content of your life. If that is true, willingness as a method of self-manipulation is not willingness at all. Minds can never learn this. Fortunately, people can.

One person who had struggled for years with panic disorder and who had transformed his life as a result of therapy put it this way:

“I mainly notice when I’m in situations where I used to be locked into struggle, that the choice to struggle is almost gone. I’ve done that and know how that works. In a situation where I used to struggle, run away, or whatever, I still feel the lure to go ahead and struggle. I just try and get back to a more spiritual level, and kind of see it for what it is, and then just go with that.”

The agenda itself has actually shifted. It used to be about anxiety. The new deal is that it is about the struggle, and even the struggle with struggle. I look at it more as just a philosophy, or as a way of life. I don’t really see it as just a therapy for a phobia. So, I see it more as just a life philosophy. It’s like I’ve been given color. I was seeing black and white my whole life, and it’s like I see rainbows now and stuff. A lot of the emotions I thought I couldn’t have and wasn’t willing to have… I can get as much enjoyment out of those now as anything else.

Sadness was one, embarrassment was another, and then anxiety. And the anxiety is one that I still focus on the most, because it does have that life-threatening quality sometimes. I’m very in touch now with mortality, and like I said, you get a stabbing chest pain, numbness, and can’t breathe, and you know that catches your attention. But in one sense I enjoy it all. So sadness, sadness used to be a thing that was awful… It was so overwhelming in some areas that it almost felt life-threatening in itself. I would come up against issues in my life, and it was so sad that I thought if I was to have that or feel that fully, that I really wasn’t sure what would happen. I couldn’t conceive of being that sad.

Now it’s a whole new light. It’s like I said—it’s colors with better vision. I mean I see things in my past and the present so differently than I did just a few months ago, it just never ceases to amaze me. So, I feel like I’m still growing all the time. My life is not just about agoraphobia. It’s about living and people and myself and understanding.

What Willingness Is and Is Not

Willingness is:

Holding your pain as you would hold a delicate flower in your hand

Embracing your pain as you would embrace a crying child

Sitting with your pain the way you would sit with a person who has a serious illness

Looking at your pain the way you would look at an incredible painting

Walking with your pain the way you would walk while carrying a sobbing infant

Honoring your pain the way you would honor a friend by listening

Inhaling your pain the way you would take a deep breath

Abandoning the war with pain like a soldier who puts down his weapons to walk home

Getting with your pain like drinking a glass of pure water

Carrying your pain the way you carry a picture in your wallet

Willingness is not:

Resisting your pain

Ignoring your pain

Forgetting your pain

Burying your pain

Doing what pain says

Not doing what pain says

Believing your pain

Not believing your pain

Given that willingness is not something minds can understand, those words are unlikely to have had much impact in and of themselves. To get you started doing willingness as an action, we will have to sneak up on it with a combination of metaphors and exercises in the chapters that follow.

Let’s say that the image of the head that follows is yours. Inside this head, write down a single troublesome emotion, memory, thought, sensation, or behavioral urge that you’ve been struggling with. Now look at what you’ve written. Does it evoke other strong and difficult feelings, thoughts, or other experiences that are themselves the targets of struggle? If so, write them down inside the head, too, because they are “fellow travelers” with your initial pain. Continue doing this until you have everything written down. If you can’t fit everything you would like to on this sheet of paper, you can photocopy the blank form and fill in as many “empty heads” as you would like. When you have all the pain and chatter written down, make a copy of the page with all the pain you have floating around in your head.

As we said at the beginning of this chapter, acknowledging that you are struggling with a head full of these issues is itself a kind of willingness. Willingness is the answer “yes” to the question “Will you take me in as I am?” Metaphorically, willingness is like taking the copy you made of the image of your head with all the pain in it, and putting it into your pocket to carry as a gesture that states, “I can and will carry this with me, not because I have to, but because I choose to.” Before you actually do that, however, let’s see if it is clearer now what willingness is not by answering the questions that follow.

Must you want to have this head full of all your issues in order to put it into your pocket? Hopefully, it is clear that the answer is no. Willingness is not wanting.

Must you first change what you’ve drawn in order to put it in your pocket? Hopefully, it is clear that the answer is no. Willingness is not conditional, except that you can choose to limit it by time and situation (for example, you could put the picture into your pocket for a single minute or a full week, or you could carry it with you at work or only at home).

Is putting what you’ve drawn into your pocket something that takes a lot of effort, so that you will have to try to see whether you can do it? Hopefully, it is clear that the answer is no. Willingness is not a matter of trying. Must you believe something about this drawing in order to put it into your pocket? Hopefully, it is clear that the answer is no. Willingness is not a matter of belief. Beliefs are just more issues that could be drawn inside the head.

Is pretending to put the paper into your pocket the same as putting it into your pocket? Hopefully, it is clear that the answer is no. Willingness is not self-deceptive.

If you spent some time on it, you might end up with a head that looks something like figure 9.2.

The head looks very busy. But must it be your enemy?

As a physical metaphor for a real change in direction in your life, are you willing to put your head on paper into your pocket and carry it for a while? We suggest carrying it one hour or more a day, but if that is too much for you right now, specify the amount of time you will carry it and commit to doing so.

If the answer is “yes, if…” and the “if” is something you do not control, try again. If the answer is no, dig into what that answer is in the service of, and see whether it is really in your best interests. If your answer is a good, clean yes, then put it into your pocket.

Go back to the bulleted list of things that willingness is, and see if you can carry this paper that way. During the time you choose to carry it, pat your pocket periodically to remind yourself of what you are carrying. In this physical metaphor, see whether it is okay to have all that stuff on the paper and still do whatever you need to do in your life as you go about day-to-day living. Let carrying the picture of your head stuffed with your issues be a way of asking yourself whether the stuff on that paper really stands between you and living a powerful, vital life, or whether you can, in fact, carry it gently, lovingly, and willingly, as it is and not as it says it is.