ACT in Practice Part 2:
Sample Lesson Material
Part 2/Module 2: Selfing and psychological flexibility
Lesson 1: Foundations for selfing
Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom
— Aristotle
Psychological flexibility involves flexibly languaging about our experiences, and that very much includes our experience of our "self"—after all, we are the context for all that we do throughout our whole lives. Skinner characterized the self as “an organized system of responses” (1953, p. 285)—that is, a repertoire—and suggested that “self-knowledge” fundamentally involves responding to one’s own responses. Skinner also emphasized that this type of self-discrimination is trained by the verbal community—it is “of social origin” (1974, p. 35). A behavior analytic (and ACT consistent) approach to the self thus suggests that self-discrimination is learned through social interactions, including answering questions about our own behavior and responding to others’ accounts of our behavior, learning both to describe our self and compare ourselves to others. As Hart and Risley put it, “Children learn through words and actions what the world means, who they are, and what is valued” (1995, p. 182). And so, we can view selfing as a particular type of languaging. Before we go on to discuss the component language repertoires that make up selfing, take a moment to consider the language that you use to describe your self, by completing the following exercise:
Exercise: Practitioner selfing
*The following exercise is adapted from an original exercise by Ciarrochi and Hayes (2020, p. 44).
Take a few moments to explore the power of your “self-view.” You will need a timer, a pen, and a piece of paper. In response to the statement below, write whatever comes to mind—the first thing that you think of, whatever that might be. There are no right or wrong answers; just notice how you complete the sentence.
I am ___________________________________________.
Think about your answer for a few moments. Was it really the first thing that came to mind? Or did you search for a different answer? Does what you wrote describe all of you (and we mean everything)? We imagine that the answer is a resounding NO. Now we invite you to create a more complete “self-portrait” in words. Set the timer for two minutes. Complete as many “I am” statements as you can within the time—write down the first words that come to mind until the time is up. When the timer goes off, put your pen down and think about what the exercise was like.
Think about your answers. What do you notice? Were you able to generate answers quickly? Were there answers that came to mind that you didn’t write down? Any that you changed? As you look at the words on the page, does anything surprise you? What relational patterns and contextual cues do you notice with respect to how you describe yourself, such as evaluations (good, bad, better, worse), distinction (not like), and hierarchy (belong to, part of)? Did you include both positive and negative evaluations of yourself, or do the words lean more heavily in one direction? Look at your self-portrait again with curiosity. Where and how did you learn these evaluations? And do you see all of yourself? Do any of these descriptions capture all of who you are? The answer is most likely no and no. Even if you continued this selfing for hours, adding more and more words, it would probably still not completely capture all of you.
As we end this exercise, take a final few moments to notice and appreciate how fluent your selfing repertoire is, how easily you can generate self-statements and evaluations about who you are.
As you consider this as an area of need for clients, you will need to identify these foundational/precursor skills (including manding, tacting private events, self-discrimination and self-monitoring) and prioritize intervention as appropriate to developmental language levels. If you are working with children or individuals with emerging language skills, consider what early foundations for self-ing might look like - what might need nurtured and taught? And for those with more complex language skills—what might have been missed? Where do you observe psychological inflexibility that may be related to these foundations?
Final Reflection: Before going onto the next lesson, take some time to consider one of your clients, with these foundations for selfing in mind—what can you identify as a need? What might you need or want to observe and assess further?
So how do we learn to describe ourselves, to tell our own stories, as you did in this exercise? Through extensive interactions with caregivers, children learn to talk not only about the physical world around them but also about their social world—their own and others’ predictable behaviors (characteristics). They learn to relate their behavior and qualities to others’ through every variety of languaging—identifying how they might be the same or different, comparing themselves to others, hierarchically relating themselves to a group (a family, class in school, or community). Hart and Risley (1995) suggest that these early learning experiences with respect to languaging about one’s self have significant implications for later achievements—that these experiences “continually add up, accumulating as a kind of lifetime batting average, ending up as the self-concept that influences expectations for success and motivation to try” (p. 183). From an RFT perspective, these early experiences of learning to language about oneself involve learning several critical repertoires: self-discrimination, tacting of private events, and deictic framing. In the next video, Siri will discuss the first two of these from the perspective of language development and language intervention programs, and we'll dive into deictic framing as we talk about perspective-taking in the next lesson.