Getting the “Penthouse”: Experimentation vs. Success
As I’ve been preparing for the next series of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression (MBCT) classes (see below), my thoughts have gone to the subject of “taking action” within the context of a class which stresses heavily acceptance and non-resistance of the experience of depression. It’s an important issues, especially for a therapist like myself who stresses the aspect of mindfulness as a general principle of effective therapy (not the sole cause, maybe not even the most important, but pretty useful at least…).
Cognitive therapy and MBCT
The “CT” part of MBCT differs a great deal from conventional cognitive therapy in that MBCT stresses the attitude or relationship to thoughts, rather than the analysis and change of thoughts. In other words, in traditional cognitive therapy, you may be plagued by a thought that says, “I’m worthless.” The way you would be encouraged to deal with it would be to write down the thought, it’s intensity, refutations of the thought (“Well, I do valuable work, I try to live with integrity”), and then replace them with more rational thought (such as, “I believe value comes from how one treats others, and I honestly try to treat others with kindness, though I’m not always successful”).
MBCT has instead not focused on defining and isolating “negative” thoughts, but instead looks at thoughts of any type as mere thoughts, as expressions of a process of mind whether the result is positive, negative or neutral. It also suggests that the value of even conventional cognitive therapy may come more from the inherent distancing and dis-identification that happens in the slow act of writing down thoughts and chewing on them, than from the act of isolating and extracting the negative thought.
The “action” that MBCT teaches is to respond to thought with an attitude of curious observation, which itself is a radical departure from an attitude of struggle. The insight, which I agree with, is that the attempt to control our experience is a huge reason why we feel stuck and suffer.
The Question…
So. Be that as it may, the question still stands: what is the usefulness of taking action in relation to our, especially difficult, experience?
I remember from a meditation retreat, many years back, a student approaching the teacher to ask her question. “Can you both be a meditator and still want that pent house apartment?” The teacher, a very senior person within his tradition, said, “Oh, yes, go ahead and take action to get that apartment. Just practice not being attached to the results.”
Taking actions without being attached to results. The same is true for working with depression and anxiety, and the “attachment to results” part accounts for a lot of the suffering in trying to manage these moods.
Experimentation and Fear
In the MBCT class, experimentation is strongly encouraged as a base, or principle, out of which the techniques or practices of the class should come. Why? Because when you are in an experimental mode, you are generally not attached to the outcome. It’s more like, “Huh, when I add the blue and the red dyes, they don’t make yellow. Ok, so now I know if I want yellow, I have to mix different colors.” In other words, experimentation preceded learning.
The other approach, clinging to results, puts one less in a learning mode, and much more in a survival mode. Experimentation is taking action (mixing up dyes in a lab) towards learning new information. Survival is about not being destroyed. And the “protocols” of these different modes are very, well, different.
There was an experiment done with college students (referred to by the MBCT writers on their audio book) which went like this: two sets of students were given pieces of paper on which was printed a maze. In the center of the maze was a mouse, and their task was to trace the path for their mouse to get to the exit of the maze. However, one group had a chunk of cheese at the exit, the other group had a hawk.
What the researchers found was that, even though this was an exercise without any real world results (it was a paper maze, with a doodle of a mouse and cheese and hawk), nonetheless the “hawk” group performed poorer. Why? Their conclusion was that the students anticipating a dangerous finale to their task were working out of a survival mode rather than a pleasure-based. That is, out of fear.
So if you engage in practices or techniques that are crafted to lessen depression, but you take action from a fear mode or attitude of “the results determine whether I survive,” then it is very difficult to learn what actually works for you because you cannot risk experimentation, and not experimenting means you’re going to really struggle to learn.
Where, then, you derive the sense of safety in order to take these risks is for another newsletter (short answer: allowing yourself to trust selected people), but my main point here is that taking action is not in conflict with the observational mode of mindfulness, and that in fact mindfulness teaches a stance of curiosity which is the base of effective action-taking.
As applied to depression and anxiety, I think what the meditation teacher would say is: You can take active steps towards peace and joy, but that peace and joy is more a product of experimentation than of “success.”
