14 Quotes by Steven C. Hayes

We can have a large impact on the prevention and amelioration of abuse, drug problems, violence, mental health problems, and dysfunction in families.

Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life.

If you aren’t willing to have it, you will.

Almost all people suffer some form of intense inner pain at some times in their lives. The suffering might be depression, anxiety, substance abuse, or suicidal thoughts and it results from the battles we wage against our thoughts as we futilely try to get rid of our historie.

What we need to learn to do is to look at thought, rather than from thought.

The central shift is from a focus on what you think and feel to how do you relate to what you think and feel. Specifically, the new emphasis is on learning to step back from what you are thinking, notice it, and open up to what you are experiencing. These steps keep us from doing the damage to ourselves that efforts to avoid or control our thoughts or feelings inflict, allowing us to focus our energies on taking the positive actions that can alleviate our suffering.

You can say it this way: if you learn to be less reactive to stress through the cultivation of flexibility pivots, the body starts turning off those reaction systems, including genetic expression switches that may have been originally thrown not by you but by your parents and grandparents. How cool is that?

There is a tremendous irony in happiness. It comes from a root word meaning ‘by chance’ or ‘an occurrence’, which in a positive sense connotes a sense of newness, wonder, and appreciation of chance occurrences. The irony is that people not only seek it, they try to hold on to it – especially to avoid any sense of ‘unhappiness’. Unfortunately, these very control efforts can become heavy, planned, closed, rigid and fixed.

Consumers of psychological change advice should demand broadly useful methods of change that work, and that do so through change processes that have precision, scope, and depth.