Take a moment and think about the following: Imagine that you live in a relatively populated neighborhood –or if you already do, think about your home. When cars drive by your house, how much attention do you pay them? Do you know how many cars pass your house every day? You are likely not paying much attention to the various vehicles passing by; you may not even notice their make or color.
Now imagine yourself walking down a crowded city street, how many of the people passing do you spend time focused on for any significant length of time? Some are probably more interesting than others and if you ran into someone you knew, they would probably be interested in stopping to spend time talking with you but most people don’t command that much attention.
Why am I asking you to consider these things? I’m setting the stage for you to consider a core philosophy in counseling & psychology. The concepts are “cognitive fusion” and “cognitive defusion” (fusion and defusion, for short).
Thoughts, if you were to describe them, are words and pictures in our minds yet we give them tremendous power. When we fuse with thoughts they grow to incredible size and they become “the truth” while we’re looking at them. The trouble is that when we’re locked in to those thoughts we have trouble seeing anything else: “I’m a total failure” transforms from just words and pictures in the mind to a “truth” about your every being. It becomes the lens with which you see the world during that period of time. Unfortunately, that eliminates us from seeing other things going on in the world at the same time — much of which is good!
An example that I used in a therapy session recently (taken from a book entitled “ACT Made Simple”) will illuminate this point. Take your hands and put them side-by-side, palms up as if you were mimic-ing an open book. Now bring that book up to your face so that it’s right up against your nose. How much of the world around you can you see? Do you think you’d be able to do other things that are important to you while you were like this? Probably not.
The act of cognitive defusion in counseling is the act of lowering this book so that you can live the entirety of your experience. We do this with many exercises in therapy to help you reframe thinking as a “doing process” rather than a firm definition of who you are or how you exist.
One last run down of fusion and defusion in counseling language:
Fusion – Getting overly-absorbed in a thought or thoughts that exist in your private experience limiting your ability to see other thoughts or experiences.
Defusion – Using various exercises to reframe difficult thoughts as part of the whole existance and making space for them amongst all other experiences.
So why the metaphors about cars and people on the street? Those cars and people are a lot like your thoughts. The aren’t all equally meaningful and they don’t all need to be attended to. It is okay for them to just come and go without any more weight behind them.
Hopefully this post will give you a little more information about what happens and what you can expect to learn about during the counseling process.
Until we meet again, be well out there!
The post Counseling Therapy Now: Defusion and Fusion | Loveland Counseling appeared first on Riverpath Counseling Colorado.
