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Gabriel comments on A Less Mysterious Mindfulness Exercise - Less Wrong
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Fair enough; it's possible I pattern-matched a bit on what ACT advocates have said to me in the past (which was them pattern-matching me talking about eliminating emotions as being equivalent to fighting or suppressing them), and what was written in the ACT books that I've read.
However...
This actually isn't how you presented it in the post. You said:
Not, "an alternative", but "the alternative", implying a dichotomy. So even if it was too strong to say that "ACT" claimed a dichotomy (and AFAICT, it does), it certainly appears to me that your post strongly implies such a dichotomy.
Nope. You can work on identifying the source of a state while it's here, and it's often the best time to do so. Also, in the context of arguing a case for ACT, the strong implication is that the listener should select one or more of ACT's strategies for dealing with states arising in the future, and in fact resign themselves to using only such methods in the future, because everything else "doesn't work".
IOW, ACT advocacy arguments look a lot like slaying a list of straw men. Sure suppression and avoidance don't work, duh. How does ACT compare to things that don't suck?
Without that information, it's like saying "you know, when it comes to open wounds, you can either try to keep them clean, or you can use our band-aids and change the dressings regularly", without ever mentioning that maybe you should go to a hospital and get some stitches.
Don't get me wrong: ACT actually has a cool toolbox of techniques. But AFAICT its advocates always seem to talk about how the horror of open wounds compares with their bandages, and imply that you should get used to a lifetime of bandage-replacing, even if there's a hospital right up the street.
(And some have even gone so far as to imply that the wounds being bandaged are a virtue - i.e., that we should be happy to have them, and that attempts to get rid of them -- like attempts to eliminate death -- are foolish and misguided.)
Fair enough. I failed at precisely communicating what I think. FWIW, I don't think that 'acceptance' means that you're forbidden from working to feel better in the future.
I didn't see the criticism of suppression and avoidance as a diss against other theories but rather against something that people naively tend to do by default. And even if you know some other things that don't suck, until you become an Ultimate Master of Cognitive Restructuring, acceptance can still be useful.
Also, I kind of feel like I am being strawmanned here a bit, when you fluidly move from denying a point I made to talking about those pesky ACT advocates, right up to
which is just stupid. Unfortunately, I have an idea where that might be coming from. One of the ideas there was that your mind's primary job isn't to make you happy, but to protect you from danger. So when you have an unpleasant experience, one thing you can do is to thank your mind for looking out for you (shudder). I can see how someone who doesn't know the real, non-dumbed-down story of evolutionary psychology could get silly ideas from that.
Not my intention; I was just trying to clarify the context in which I was interpreting your post.
Yeah, I've had ACT advocates email to me to warn me that eliminating bad feelings is harmful and I shouldn't promote such a thing. So that might be why I see it differently. ;-)
Point is, I wanted to reply here so that people know there's more to life than the false dichotomy of suppress or accept. A lot of people seem to not realize that other options are available.