From Avoidance to Acceptance: A New Way to Live with Anxiety with Kelly Wilson

In this episode, Kelly Wilson explains how to move from avoidance to acceptance: a new way to live with anxiety. He delves into how our vulnerabilities show us what matters to us, and that the goal isn’t to win a war inside. It’s to keep coming back to the next honest action that moves you towards what matters. That is at the core of acceptance and commitment therapy. Not chasing perfect feelings, but choosing the next right move towards your values, again and again.

Key Takeaways:

• Exploration of psychological struggles, particularly anxiety, and their impact on life.
• Introduction to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and its core principles.
• Discussion of the six core processes of ACT: present moment awareness, cognitive defusion, acceptance, values, committed action, and self as context.
• Examination of the relationship between vulnerability and personal growth.
• Critique of traditional diagnostic labels and their limitations in understanding psychological experiences.
• Emphasis on the importance of values in guiding meaningful actions and decisions.
• Insights into the nature of human suffering and the commonality of psychological pain.
• The concept of redemption and its role in personal development and therapy.
• Reframing commitment as a moment-to-moment process rather than a rigid promise.
• Encouragement of compassion and understanding in the face of psychological challenges.d understanding.

Kelly Wilson, Ph.D., is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Mississippi. He is Past President of the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science and has won the University of Mississipi’s prestigious Elsie M. Hood Outstanding Teacher Award.  Dr. Wilson is one of the co-developers of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and has written several books, including Things Might Go Terribly, Horribly Wrong:  A Guide to Life Liberated from Anxiety.

Connect with Kelly Wilson: Website | Instagram

If you enjoyed this conversation with Kelly Wilson, check out these other episodes:

Steven C. Hayes

Russ Harris (Part 1)

Russ Harris (Part 2)

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Episode Transcript:

Kelly Wilson 00:00:00  My vulnerability seemed to me to be the enemy, and I tried ever so hard to make it go away. And when I made peace with it, it ended up being the center of my career.

Chris Forbes 00:00:20  Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:05  When I was younger, I thought my weakest traits were the enemy. Maybe you felt that way, too. The tenderness that makes you easy to hurt.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:13  The anxiety that won’t let go. Kelly Wilson, co-developer of Acceptance and commitment therapy, said something in our conversation that I think about often our values and our vulnerabilities are poured from the same vessel. Our vulnerabilities show us what matters to us, and the goal isn’t to win a war inside. It’s to keep coming back to the next honest action that moves you towards what matters. And that’s the spirit of acceptance and commitment therapy. Not chasing perfect feelings, but choosing the next right move towards your values. Again and again I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi Kelly. Welcome to the show.

Kelly Wilson 00:01:54  Well, it’s good to be here.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:55  I am glad to have you on. We’re going to talk a little bit about your book, which I love. The title of called Things Might Go Terribly, Horribly Wrong A Guide to Life Liberated from Anxiety. And we certainly will be spending a fair amount of time talking about acceptance and commitment therapy, also known as Act, for which you are a significant contributor.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:16  But we’ll start, like we always do, with a parable. There is a grandfather who’s talking with his grandson. He says, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always a battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about this for a second. He looks up at his grandfather. He says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Kelly Wilson 00:02:52  I’m not personally a super enamored of the idea of a war inside, although it’s not incomprehensible to me. You know, I know what it is like, you know, to feel as though I have a war inside of me. And I certainly remember a time in my own life when I was sure that, you know, the worst of the players were winning.

Kelly Wilson 00:03:15  You know, for me, I got peace, a measure of it when I let go of the war. I do know the piece of that parable that strikes me is that we’re always practicing in life, and what we practice gets stronger, and I practice running away for a very, very, very long time and have been practicing sitting still and moving towards things. And, and it’s gotten stronger, you know, so I suppose that that is what it means to me.

Eric Zimmer 00:03:42  Excellent. Well, I agree with you that the parable has its value and certainly its limitations. Let’s talk a little bit about problems in life. And so you say that through the lens of of act problems in life, such as anxiety. Look a little different than we might be used to. Instead of seeing a problem like anxiety is something we have. Like a virus or a broken bone. Act describes these problems in terms of our ability to function in six process areas. So before we go into the process areas, let’s talk about that view as a whole.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:19  Not that I have anxiety, but that some certain ways of functioning, let’s say mentally or psychologically, I may need a little tweak in a couple areas versus having, like you said, like a virus.

Kelly Wilson 00:04:33  You know, I suppose the idea that people with psychological struggles, in order to be legitimately understood as having struggles, you know, have to have some kind of disease label that troubles me. You know, kind of it starts with this sort of metaphor that, you know, your problem in life is that you’re somehow broken inside. I don’t mean at all to discount That human experience is extraordinarily varied, and you know that we don’t all carry certain kinds of vulnerabilities, some of which are very hard to carry, very poorly understood by people around us. And it’s very easy to make an enemy of them. That is the piece that I object to. In all of that.

Eric Zimmer 00:05:12  I think this is an interesting topic because sometimes a diagnosis can be liberating, right? A diagnosis can be liberating, like, oh, okay, there’s this thing and it provides me some context and it gives me a frame of reference.

Eric Zimmer 00:05:27  And maybe now that we know what the problem is, we can work on it. And yet diagnoses are ultimately then depending on how they’re interpreted, become limiting.

Kelly Wilson 00:05:38  I wouldn’t take anything away from that. And I know that there are communities out there like my good friend Lisa Coyne does work and, OCD. And there’s a whole kind of community around people supporting one another. You know, when I look at when people get a diagnosis and they get it kind of an experience of relief, usually, you know, what I hear in that is I’m not alone. Yes. It’s not just me. Yes. And, you know, I want to say to people like, say, you’re somebody who’s suffering, but you don’t have a diagnosable disorder. Well, you’re also not alone. Like a diagnosis can be an instrument. It can be sometimes use usefully engaged in people do community building around. I don’t have a problem with that. And more and more people, I think, are thinking of this kind of more in terms of things like neurodiversity and that kind of language, which I’m much more at home, you know, I’m much more at home with.

Kelly Wilson 00:06:39  Yeah, yeah, like me, I’m not the anxious sort. You know, I always sort of half joke with people that, you know, I’m the more moody, depressive sort of myself. Me too anxious or afraid? Bad things are going to happen. You know, people like me. You know, they’ve already happened, you know.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:57  And. And even if they do. Who cares? You know. Well.

Kelly Wilson 00:07:02  You know, I know for myself that, I’m like. I’m extraordinarily easy to hurt. I mean, especially, like, in a social exchange. You can send me to tears with a word, you know? And as a boy growing up in the, you know, 1950s and 1960s. Oh my goodness. I, I’m small. I got a girl’s name and I cry, you know, at the drop of a hat. You know, my vulnerability seemed to me to be the enemy. And I tried ever so hard to make it go away. And when I made peace with it, it ended up being the center of my career.

Kelly Wilson 00:07:46  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:47  Yeah. You say this in the book. You say that when we look at problems with living this way, we start to see that there’s actually some really common threads that run through the whole cloth of human suffering, of human experience on the whole. And I think there’s a couple of values there. Right? What I find interesting about that, I agree, I see that too, and I find it so interesting that we will say that one potential intervention, let’s just take exercise, right. Exercise helps like a ton of different things, which tells you there’s some degree of commonality running around here. The other thing that you said there that I really relate with is, you know, I’m a recovering alcoholic and heroin addict. I don’t really go to 12 step a whole lot. It saved my life and it meant so much to me. But I eventually got tired of dividing the world into us. And then what they used to say all the time, normies and I went. I think that’s a false distinction.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:42  I think the problems that plague me as an alcoholic, whether they be over sensitivity or selfishness or various things. They plague everyone, and I think it helped me to feel more a part of the human community when I saw that. And one of the things you do in the book so well is you paint the idea without being gloomy. How ubiquitous human suffering is, and how that by certain measures, one out of every two people will have suffered some degree of deep psychological pain at some point. And that’s a really interesting way. You have an exercise in the book you like, just go out to the next party, be like one, two, one, two, one, two, and you all of a sudden realize that, like these barriers that we put up to distinguish ourselves from different people. Oh, I have anxiety. Oh, I have depression. Oh, I have alcoholism. These things start to break down a little bit. Yeah. I just find it a helpful way to look at life.

Kelly Wilson 00:09:41  They’re useful when and where they’re useful. Yeah. I mean, alcoholism and heroin addiction. Like Jack. Jack. I’m there, you know. One of the things that I’ve heard people talk about coming out of 12 step meetings sometimes and they’ll say, well, you know, that’s alcoholic thinking or that’s addictive thinking. And I have a theory on why people think that it’s because they go into these rooms and the people in the meetings, they say the stuff that’s going through their heads, you know, and people hear it and they think, oh, man, that’s how I think, you know. And then they leave the meeting and nobody’s talking about that.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:20  Yes.

Kelly Wilson 00:10:21  In their out loud voice. And they assume that it’s only those people in those meetings. Yes. You know, it wasn’t, you know, until I’d spent a few years in clinical psychology when I, you know, and I started to listen to people who were, you know, not addicts, but they were depressed or they were anxious or they were whatever they were.

Kelly Wilson 00:10:39  And it’s sort of like, oh, no. And you know, that number you pointed to? Kirk Strassel cites in his book on suicidality years back, where he talked about, in some community samples, something like 40 to 50% of the people surveyed at some point in their life experience such a level of just hopelessness that they seriously considered ending their own life not as a fleeting thing, but spent a couple of weeks where they thought about it. Maybe with a plan, maybe not, but serious. And that’s where that exercise, that one, two and I have literally sat with clients on a bench in a public place and just said, you know, leaned over and said, you know, like, look into these people’s faces, you know, and like, which one, you know, one, two, one, two, one, two, that one. And it changes you, you know, you sit on a park bench and you count those faces and you just wonder what the flavor of that hardship that they’ve known and they won’t show it.

Kelly Wilson 00:11:42  I’ve asked people that in big, big workshops, you know, and I asked him, how many people did you tell? And far and away, the most common number of people that anyone has told about their own suicidality is zero.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:58  That’s a really great point about AA. And that’s one of the beautiful things about 12 step programs, is that you walk in and you’re like, Holy mackerel. Like people are talking about the real stuff, you know? And your point is exactly right, because you go back out into the world and nobody’s talking about it and you. And then it’s easy to assume, like, well, it’s only the people in there that, that, that have that. And but I think that in a way of feeling less alone in the world and of having greater compassion in the world, it’s important to broaden beyond our diagnosis. I think, again, our diagnosis can help build community. It can help join us together. It can help us not feel so alone. But in the longer run, I find it more empowering to realize most people suffer to some degree or other.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:42  Life is life. It just delivers the blows.

Kelly Wilson 00:12:44  You know, many years ago I worked in a place for intellectual disabilities, and there was a guy there who was part of an organization called People First, and it was an organization for folks with intellectual disabilities. And I remember him explaining it to me. You know, it was just this plaintive kind of were people first. And to bring home that the people in this group were more like you than, we’re not like you. And I remember at the time, and still it moved me that these labels can sometimes stand in for people, and they don’t tell us how rich those people are. You know, sometimes the label almost obscures the person.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:49  I don’t know if we’ll get through all of them, but I’d like to explore the six process areas that make up acceptance and commitment therapy, and I’m just going to read what they are. Real quick just to put them all out there. And then we’ll just kind of see how our discussion goes. One of the things that’s important to know is, you know, you guys just say that, you know, each of these process areas is sort of like the facets of a gem.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:11  If you peer in through one, you’ll see the other five reflected. So it’s not like we’re going to go in order because they’re not in order, and we’re just going to see as we start talking about one, it’s going to lead us into the other. And and who knows where that will take us. But at least I’ll get them out there and then we’ll go from there. So the first one is just contact with the present moment. The other one is diffusion. And we’ve talked about diffusion on this show. But the ability to get a little bit of distance from our thoughts. The third is acceptance, the ability to sort of accept the aspects of our life as they are. The fourth is values being able to choose what matters and what’s important to us. The fifth is committed action, the ability to actually take positive action towards what our values are. And then the six, which is perhaps the most mysterious is self as context, the ability to see ourselves as a dynamic and evolving setting in which our life unfolds.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:05  So we’ll go into those. But I’d like to start with something that act often talks about, and it’s something that I agree with 100% when I hear it in principle, and then when I look at it in my own life and I look at it in others lives, I go, I don’t know, right? And it’s this idea that the goal isn’t symptom reduction the goal or so in this case. The goal is not the overcoming of anxiety. The purpose of this work is to make more room in which to live a life that matters to you. And I get that at a basic level. Right? And I get the idea that the goal is that I decide what’s important to me, and I live that way, and that these symptoms don’t stop me from doing that. So, for example, if anxiety is the thing I’m mostly concerned with, right? My anxiety doesn’t stand in the way of me doing things that matter to me, like going to spend time with family, or getting on a plane to go to an event that I love.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:04  We don’t go into experiential avoidance, we don’t avoid things. So again, in principle, I’m 100% on board. What I’ve seen in practice is yes. And boy, when we’re deep in symptoms like I’ve got a client, you know, God bless him, he works hard and he does not let his issues stop him from going. So he’ll describe it like, I got myself to jiu jitsu class and then the entire time I was there, I was so anxious and miserable that, like, I might as well not have gone. So I just be interested. Your initial thoughts on that little riff I did there.

Kelly Wilson 00:16:41  One thing is that, you know, like the word acceptance, I don’t even use the word acceptance with people until they really, really get to know me, you know? Because when I say acceptance, what they hear is not what I mean. It’s just not, you know, and I mean, even graduate students, it probably takes them a couple of years before they, you know, before it sort of penetrates what I mean by acceptance, you know, because they think acceptance means, you know, thoughts of acceptance or feelings of acceptance or something like that.

Kelly Wilson 00:17:11  And of course, that is not at all what I mean. You know, if we say things like, like the way that you describe that, I don’t know that it’s inaccurate. But if I sit in here and like in the middle of the deep, dark depression and you say that to me, it’s just going to feel invalidated, right? You know, I’m just going to like, say, you know, if you know what, I know, you would not say that shit to me, you know.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:37  Make me feel better. Yeah, make me feel better.

Kelly Wilson 00:17:41  Like, here’s the thing. Some kinds of things are really amenable to direct action and to try and harder, you know, like, you know, you choose the action, you try harder. And that forwards the action. And some things just aren’t like that. And I think most people can understand that, you know, usually like like I’ll ask people like, do you dance? You know, and if they dance, then I’ll ask them, what happens when you’re dancing and you start thinking about, you know, which foot you move next, and you know, you start thinking about each dance step.

Kelly Wilson 00:18:21  And and what happens is you start to look like me when I’m dancing, you know, ask like, like a guitar player or something like that. Who is playing? They cannot think about each note, because if they think about each note node and, you know, the picking pattern or something like that. You can’t do it and think about it at the same time, and you can try harder. But I had a traumatic baseball history from when I was a kid. I played a little league baseball for four years, and I hit the ball one time in four years, you know, and I asked my dad about it because he was our coach, you know, he was a good guy. And I said, you know, dad, I tell people this story that I hit the ball only once in four years. But it was a long time ago, and I’m not sure if that’s right. You know, and, and he says to me one time he says, yeah, that’s about, you know, plus or minus one.

Kelly Wilson 00:19:17  And it was because, you know, like, I’m up there and I want to hit the ball and I’m thinking, keep the bat up off your shoulder, you know, step into it. Don’t step in the bucket. Keep your eye on them. And all these rules are buzzing around in my head and the ball just goes whizzing by, you know? So some things just don’t seem to respond very well to that. People can also understand the idea of openness to experience better when you ask them questions about what they care about, what matters to them, and like in a world where they could move ahead in their life, what would they move towards? What swells their heart? See, I want to ask people those kinds of questions. People can understand sacrifice for something valuable. People can understand pain in the service of valued action. So I want to have a conversation, you know, before I ever start talking about acceptance, I want to talk to people about what they lay their life down for and from that place.

Kelly Wilson 00:20:21  Then I want to have a conversation with them about practices that we can cultivate, that we can try and see if those practices don’t make movement possible. There’s a certain informed consent at the front end of a therapy that you have to do. And so, you know, I’ll just tell people they come in. I’ve had this buzzing with difficult thoughts, and they’re buzzing with all the difficult emotions. And I’ll tell them, there are some people who do types of therapy that directly target the reduction of these. That’s not the kind of work that I do. If you want someone who does that, I know people who do that and I can make a referral. There’s another approach to therapy, and it has to do with what do you love? What do you love? How would your life move in a world you know, where you could choose a direction for it? And then we start to practice and engage with all of the different parts of you. Here’s what I found in my own life. And I’ve told a thousand clients this, that the thing that I thought was the enemy, and that drove me to all kinds of action and inaction that were incredibly destructive to me and people around me, that some of those very same things that I thought were the enemy are now a central part of my ability to hear the suffering of others.

Kelly Wilson 00:21:42  Like, what if there’s something in some of your experiences that are not refuse? Like, yes, they hurt, but maybe there’s something else in there. Maybe it’s how you’re carrying it. You know, like if I took a piece of a cactus and I’d cradled it in my hands, you know, just real gentle. Like I could roll it around. I could feel those spines, but they wouldn’t cause any damage. But if I grabbed a hold of it tight, you know, and squeezed my hands, you know, maybe some of what you’re feeling, maybe some of the suffering that you’re experiencing has to do with how it’s being carried, not that it’s being carried.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:24  I think that points to a phrase that you use a couple of times in the book that I really love, which is that our values and Vulnerabilities are poured from the same vessel. I think that’s a beautiful phrase that really says that the things that we care about the most are also the places that we can suffer the most.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:42  But I think it’s it’s helpful when we’re suffering to see that. And a lot of what you’re talking about strikes me. I often say on this show, I don’t know where this phrase came from, but that people don’t become great in spite of their difficulties, but because of them. And just like you, a lot of the things about me that caused me so much trouble turn out to be great gifts in a context of a different way of living.

Kelly Wilson 00:23:07  Yeah, yeah, no doubt about it. I’ll often ask people, you know, when I’m out teaching and to think about the people in their life who they most admire, you know, people in their own families, friends, public figures who they most admire and try to look are those people who have not had a drop of rainfall in their life. It’s never true, right? They’re always people who, in fact have suffered tremendously and and persevered, you know, and persevered with purpose. That’s why we admire them. Yeah. It’s not very admirable.

Kelly Wilson 00:23:42  You know, if at all, you know, just came easily. Well, it’s sort of like, well, great for you.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:49  Yeah.

Kelly Wilson 00:23:49  I think your album tells a story about two soldiers, and I think it’s World War one. And the Jewish guy is, you know, down in the trench and the bombs are flying. And the German general says this proves the superiority of the German aristocracy. Look how brave I am. And the other guy goes, no, no, it proves our superiority. Because if you were half as afraid as me, you would have run away long ago. It is in the face of these things that we understand what courage and sacrifice looks like.

Eric Zimmer 00:24:51  Check in for a moment. Is your jaw tight? Breath shallow? Are your shoulders creeping up? Those little signals are invitations to slow down and listen. Every Wednesday, I send weekly bites of wisdom. A short email that turns the big ideas we explore here in each show. Things like mental health, anxiety, relationships, purpose into bite size practices you can use the same day it’s free.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:20  It takes about a minute to read and thousands already swear by it. If you’d like extra fuel for the weekend, you also get a weekend podcast playlist. Join us at One Coffee Letter. That’s one you get letter and start receiving your next bite of wisdom. All right. Back to the show. It sounds like you like to start. Or at least an initial place to focus is with values. What do we value?

Kelly Wilson 00:25:51  Yeah, I mean, I am facile with the model and so I can start anywhere in the model, but I’m kind of known in act circles. I’m the one who wrote the original values, protocols and the 99 book. I wrote them back when I was a graduate student. I am kind of known as the guy who starts with values. When I start a therapy, it’s the values and vulnerabilities that interest me. So people will very often present their vulnerability. And I want to hear, you know, what is the other side of that? You know, where they would move if they could.

Kelly Wilson 00:26:25  When I start to teach, including sometimes in therapy, I start with my own vulnerability. Like, I just take my heart out and I lay it on the table and they know this is going to be like one of those places. So I like to start with values with a sort of light hand. You know, I don’t want to force people to it, but, you know, I mean, you know, what I’ll say to people? It’s like, look, we’re going to do hard things in here. That’s no surprise to you that therapy is hard work. But I want to make sure that we don’t do any hard work that isn’t in the direction of something you care about, and it will help me to be helpful to you if you can kind of give me the taste of, you know, what would just make the hardest thing worthwhile? I want to hear it not just like a checked box, but sort of like if I were to tell you I had a conversation with my daughter this morning who has made this sort of move where she’s letting go of a very certain job and kind of stepping off into uncertainty for the next thing that she’s going to do.

Kelly Wilson 00:27:30  And she’s done it in the most extraordinarily adult way. And I admire her so deeply for why she’s 25 years old. My goodness. You know, see, I want to hear it like that. Like, my guess is you’re just hearing that from me. Like, you can hear how important, you know, being a father is to her. I love to have a client or a student if they can sort of ring that bell for me so that I can hear it, you know, just as a clear tone, like what they love. Now, sometimes people don’t know. They don’t know. They’ve been so upside down for so long. And there were times in my own life when I would have said, I believe in nothing, I believe in nothing. I want nothing but oblivion. But then I’ll ask them, would you like to know? Did you know once you know. Tell me what that was.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:22  Yeah. So let’s talk about this process of digging into values, because I know that in the work that I do with coaching clients, I often simplify the work we’re doing.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:33  This is a vast oversimplification, but to be to think about what matters to us and then be able to bring that into the world, like if we can do those two things, we’ve got a pretty good life, right? And so I’m interested in the ways in which you lead people into that work, because I know a lot of our listeners, they hear it and they really resonate. They go, yes, I want to start with my values, you know? And so I’d like to explore in general ways of doing that. And then I think it’s also helpful to maybe talk a little bit about what you just said, which is that people that go, well, I don’t know, I’m not sure how do I explore this topic in a useful way?

Kelly Wilson 00:29:11  Somewhat paradoxically, I suppose, you know, I said mindfulness for two and in wisdom a couple of places. I’ve said that values and vulnerabilities are poured from the same vessel when people don’t know or they know and say, you know when I say.

Kelly Wilson 00:29:28  You know, tell me what’s really important to you. And you get like a not very engaged answer to that. Like it might be kind of, you know, like textbook. True. But not, you know, a witnessed, felt, experienced, connection to a value. I’ll ask them where they hurt. I’ll ask them about their vulnerability like I asked him about. Tell me when it hurts. And and they’ll usually give me abstract things about how they hurt. And then I’ll ask them if they can tell me a specific moment. You know, that they can remember, you know, carry in that weight kind of slow motion, like a meditation. Help me see the inside of that particular moment. You know, if they can carry me into that, and then I can start to ask a question like, and if this burden could be lifted in some way, what would you move towards? You know, what would you allow? What second chance would you give yourself? People can understand that.

Kelly Wilson 00:30:36  It’s not technical language. Sometimes I’ll use, you know, figures and things like that that have things like family. Which ones of these, you know, matter to you, and then not just like, oh, family matters or, you know, parenting matters or, you know, work matters with each one of those things that I ask them about that they value, then I want that same kind of thing, you know, like Eric, are you a brother or do you have siblings? And does being a a brother is not an important thing to you? I see, I might ask you, can you think of a moment when you, like, knew yourself as the brother that you want to be like a time in your history with your sibs when it was like. That’s it. That moment I was the brother I want to be. See? And then I want you that same process. I want you to help me see it. Like. Like, let’s close our eyes for a minute and tell me who you’re seeing there.

Kelly Wilson 00:31:36  And tell me what the. You know, describe the context. And then. And then like that moment, you know, watch slow walk up to the moment, you know, when you behave like the brother that you would be. Now, see if you can help me connect with those things. Now we have something we can kind of put our hand on. So when we approach suffering, we can put our hand on that value and remember, okay, what are we doing here? What is this about? You know, it’s about being that brother. Remember that day, you know, and I’ll I’ll get a few of the details of it so that we can use it as a sort of a touchstone when things get hard. It’s such a great conversation. I love this conversation. Just working through the different areas of a person’s life. some of them, they’re they’re lost to them, but I still want to hear about it. I want to hear about them, because there may be a way that those values can live in their current life.

Kelly Wilson 00:32:34  Even though sometimes there are bells you can’t unring.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:37  And can you go in the other direction you went in from the positive? Tell me a moment that you remember being the brother you want to be. Tell me a moment where you didn’t. Sure. And what that brings up. Or a moment that you weren’t the partner you wanted to be?

Kelly Wilson 00:32:52  Yes, but not in the kind of ruminative, categorical kind of flavor. I want to see it moment by moment. I want to know the.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:01  The.

Kelly Wilson 00:33:01  Right grit and grain of that experience, the phenomenology of that experience.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:06  As a way to touch the emotion.

Kelly Wilson 00:33:08  Those conversations almost always spawn one another. You know, if I talk about you being a brother, you’ll also remember the times that you weren’t. And I don’t touch those as things to ruminate over. But like I myself, you were asking me when we were chatting before the show. If there are things that I’ve been thinking about and one and it’s a long time theme for me, I’m not a religious guy at all, but the concept of redemption is a marvelous and underexplored in psychology.

Kelly Wilson 00:33:39  A friend of mine, Pat Freeman, I saw a film that was done a documentary thing the other day, and he was talking to this roomful of brand new, fresh faced interns, you know, and Pat says, I have done bad things. I’ve done bad things, and so have you. And this work that we do is redemptive. You know, and I just thought I knew exactly what he was talking about because he’s right. I have done bad things. You know, I don’t mean it except in the most plain way, you know, like, if I mean to my wife. Well what next? What will I do now if I’ve broken things? You know, how might I mend those? Or at least act like someone who recognizes that they broke those things. I think people can understand those kinds of conversations. Not a lot of fancy language around it. It’s in some ways quite common sense.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:36  My siblings don’t listen to this show. Well, actually, one of them does.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:39  She does. She’ll probably hear this. the other one. I don’t think he does. If he does, give me a call. But, you know, she could probably pull up better than me. I’ve got a terrible memory. She could probably pull up for me some memory of me not being the brother I wanted to be. So go ahead, let me know. let’s say that that brings something up. And you said, you know, not in a ruminative way. Right. So rumination is not is not useful. You know, there’s a phrase that people use a lot. Like, don’t beat yourself up over that. Right. Which. Okay. And how do you balance that with, I’ll say, guilt in the useful sense of the word, which is when you act outside your values. You know, I think there’s lots of ways guilt gets twisted, but I think a useful use of guilt, at least in my own life, is I go, I feel guilty. Why? Oh, because I value this and I didn’t act that way.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:28  Okay. That leads me to want redemption of some sort. So how do we balance using this sort of thing in a useful way, but not a ruminative way? What’s the distinction to you there?

Kelly Wilson 00:35:42  To own a regret is different, you know, to to acknowledge and own a regret. Like like right now. Here’s a very contemporary example. We are watching our country in incredible turmoil in the midst of the Black Lives Matter protests. I was academic for a career in academia, and I think that I was, you know, what I would consider generally on the right side of, you know, history and this kind of thing. But at the same time, I’ve got students, you know, a whole bunch of them who were educating me, or they’re trying patiently to educate me over the years. And I’ve seen them write things, you know, on Facebook about, you know, like, if you see me and you don’t see color, you don’t really see me. And it caused me to sort of reflect on my own action and inaction, and it’s caused me to move into trying to best I can to understand that I have been a participant in a system, you know, because I have not demanded that it and I’ve complained about it, but I have not insisted, you know, that at the end.

Kelly Wilson 00:37:04  Now, here’s one thing I could do is I could sit around and feel bad about all of my inaction over the years. But, you know, how is the black community served by me sitting around feeling bad about myself or going over the times I said stupid, racist things, you know, and I’m old enough that, you know, pre quote, you know, Holy heavens, you know, I know where the bodies are buried. No one is served. No one is served by me. You know, sort of grinding over and over again all of the things that I didn’t do or that I did do. There is something valuable about me acknowledging those things for me to say, you know, I could have done more. Or my heavens, how did I not see that? So the ladder of how did I not see that? And what can I do this day? What is in my power to do this day? That’s a redemptive act in the way that I’m talking about. You know, it’s where I reclaim what I valued all along.

Kelly Wilson 00:38:08  You know, when it hit me is I have a graduate student. She’s got a daughter who’s nine years old. Who? That child was just stated in an Act seminar at my house. You know, she was my graduate student. And when she was a baby, there are all kinds of pictures of me out on Facebook. When she was a baby, there were pictures of me lecturing with her sitting on my lap. You know, in lectures. We took her to lab meetings. I mean, she was just, like, everywhere, all the time. You know, and her mama is an African American from Mississippi Delta, you know. And I was listening. And Nadia, my student, had pointed me to the numbers of, you know, there’s 38% of the of the population of Mississippi is African-American. Something like 70% of the deaths have been African American. And I listened to the governor of the state of Mississippi talking about it and the interviewer asked him a question about that. You know, just incredible disparity in mortality.

Kelly Wilson 00:39:17  And he says, that’s just the way it is. It was right before we went to bed, and I thought about this little girl who calls me grandpa, you know? And I thought, am I going to tell her that, you know, I’m going to go to Little Eight and I’m and say, well, that’s just how it is. No, no. You know, in that way I didn’t get it. And no amount of sitting around feeling guilty changes that for her. And that’s what’s important, how I feel. That is not the most important thing. Not even close.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:49  Yeah. Yeah, I love that. I love that idea of redemption, because redemption points to going back to our six process areas, right? The value, the guilt tells you what you value. Redemption is committed action towards that value. It’s now what’s the next thing that I do? And I always say, you know, when I look at guilt in my own life is like it’s useful to the extent it moves me back towards the value that I, for lack of a better word, transgressed against.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:20  When it doesn’t do that, it’s not a particularly useful emotion.

Kelly Wilson 00:40:24  You want to know what is the next right thing. No matter how small. Acknowledging where you’ve been wrong. If you’ve been, you know, in the business of denying it, it’s probably a good start, you know? Yeah. But, you know, and I’m talking about this in terms of systemic racism and white privilege and how we play a part in it. But I don’t think this is different than psychological difficulties like addiction or like anxiety or like depression. It’s not different. You know, we get oriented away from the things that we care about, that we value. And when we do, it makes us sick and it makes us hurt. Now moving back towards what we value that also hurts.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:08  Yeah. Yeah. And, we’re already out of time, but I don’t want to leave it there. I’m going to go a little bit long here. because you just said something I think is really important. And you said do the next right thing, the next little thing.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:22  And that’s one of my favorite phrases of all time that I got from AA, do the next right thing. And but I want to talk about committed action for a second because committed action sounds like, okay, I commit now and forever forth that I will act to stamp out systemic racism. Right? I’ve got I mean, you gave your story. I’ve got my own, right? I’ve got my own awakenings that come up where I go, well, no, I okay, I know more now. I didn’t do enough. I could have done more, need to do more. I think that and I see this happen a lot with coaching clients. And this is why I want to bring it up, because a lot of times when we think about committed action, we look at like, okay, I am I’m not going to do that again. Yeah. And so we cast ourselves and we look out into the future and we go, oh, boy. I’m not going to live up to that.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:13  Holy mackerel. I’m not going to live up to that. So I’m not sure I even want to start because I don’t think I can keep going. So let’s talk about what we mean by committed action in Act, because we don’t mean a commitment for now and forever.

Kelly Wilson 00:42:29  Commitment. People seem to think that it has something to do with the future. And there may be some definitions of the word commitment that have to do with the future. But in fact, I would say commitment has nothing to do with the future at all, zero to do with the future. The best way, I think, kind of common sense way to understand what committed action is, is take the metaphor of a breathing meditation. You sit down for a breathing meditation with the intention of putting your awareness on your rise and fall of breath. And if you’re like me, you can get about a breath and a half in and your mind starts wandering to the groceries and to all these other kinds of things. And then there’s a moment when you notice that you know you’re not on your breath.

Kelly Wilson 00:43:13  You know that you’re distracted. Maybe you’re browbeating yourself about what a lousy meditator you are or something, but you’re not on your breath. Right? And so there’s that moment, and then you can return to breath. It’s in that return, in the very return, not what comes later, but in that return. That’s where commitment lives in act. So if I have a value of like being a dad or being a husband or being a teacher, it’s not a matter of if, but when I find myself engaged in a patterned behavior that is off that, you know, I’m talking to my daughter and I find myself being sarcastic or something, and I stop and I think really, you know, is that the dad I want to be, you know. Does she need more sarcasm in her world? So there’s that moment of recognizing I’m off that value. and then, you know, there’s coming back and it’s in the return. So tell a story sometimes about the same daughter who is magnificent. when she was maybe 16, she came into the day room where I was working with a fella for just frustrated, and she says, can’t find my car keys.

Kelly Wilson 00:44:22  You know, I’m taking the spare keys to the Honda. And I says to her, I said, well, I won’t say anything about how if, you put him on the hook in the kitchen, you’d know exactly where they are. And she’s just like, thanks, dad. You know, you just did. And she storms out of the house, you know, and it was even kind of worse than that, my friend. I got a little laugh at her expense, you know, he was kind of like, oh, you know, kids, you know? And I just thought, God, really? Is that it? You know? And so I sent her this text message, you know, dear Sarah, God, you know, I don’t know what possessed me to speak to you in that way. Please give me another chance. You know, a couple of minutes later, I get a message back from her. That is. I love you to the moon and back.

Kelly Wilson 00:45:10  Now, it’s not the message I got back. It’s that I went from being off who I want to be as a dad. And in that moment when I came back, that’s where commitment lives. In fact, it’s in the next action that brings you back into the pattern. That’s where commitment lives. Each one there’s there is no such thing as an action that doesn’t count. It’s all about direction, not distance.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:37  Before you check out, pick one insight from today and ask, how will I practice this before bedtime? Need help turning ideas into action? My free weekly Bites of Wisdom email lands every Wednesday with simple practices, reflection and links to former guests who can guide you even on the tough stuff like anxiety, purpose and habit change. Feed your good wolf at one you feed. Net newsletter again. One you feed your net letter. I love the meditation example because in meditation we have generally the good sense. We do it a few times. We go. There’s no way I’m sticking with this breath, right? And so we just go when I forget I’m going to come back.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:20  Some of us do actually often give up because we think we can’t do it. But the people who succeed go, well. It’s the next breath that matters. And in life, sometimes what we do is I sometimes see this hesitancy to start because we’re like, well, I just know I won’t be successful. And I just love coming back to that’s why I love the next right thing. It’s not like the next six right things, it’s just the next one. And I think that’s so important. We’ve gone long here. You and I are going to spend a couple minutes in the post-show conversation talking about self as context, whether in acceptance and commitment therapy, selfies, context bears much resemblance to the idea of no self in Buddhism. So one of my favorite topics. So yeah, we’re going to wander around for a while and come up with no answers. But listeners, if you’re interested in the post-show conversation and they’re good and other benefits, like a mini episode with me, go to when you join and you can become a member and support the show.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:17  Kelly, thank you so much for taking the time to come on. I’ve really enjoyed talking with you.

Kelly Wilson 00:47:22  It’s my pleasure. Eric. Thank you.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:24  Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity. But we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community.