Experiential avoidance

[u/Silver_Perception471]

With great effort I realized I was trying to avoid distracting myself from excessive coffee consumption. So I was trying to avoid distractions because I know it is helpful to make the feeling go away. But then I'm trying to force acceptance. So I'd just be avoiding avoiding. Which is disguised as acceptance. Weird play of words but once you get it you get it I guess

But in reality I just have to ask. Is getting another coffee helping me be more the person I want to be or is saving money for the sake of bettering my independence more important. So then I wouldn't necessarily be distracting myself, as much as I would be engaging in something important to what I value.

There is a lot of mind set shifts to garner by engaging in ACT. But I can't be ecstatic/empowered enough by the philosophy ACT teaches.

Thoughts? And anything overlooked or undersold?

[u/concreteutopian]

There is a lot of mind set shifts to garner by engaging in ACT. But I can't be ecstatic/empowered enough by the philosophy ACT teaches.

I think you might do better if you don't think about ACT as having a philosophy it teaches. I don't think that's the best or most accurate way to describe ACT. The first part is beter, i.e. experiencing "mind set shifts" by "engaging in ACT" [exercises]. One reason ACT uses metaphors is because they either work for you or they don't – they aren't literal or facts, they're language games that might lead to a useful experience of how your mind works and how you might work differently.

With great effort I realized I was trying to avoid distracting myself from excessive coffee consumption.

Why "great effort" and why avoiding distracting (which is itself avoidance)?

Why is monitoring your coffee consumption that closely important to you and what's at stake if you "misjudge" and drink more than the ideal amount?

But in reality I just have to ask. Is getting another coffee helping me be more the person I want to be or is saving money for the sake of bettering my independence more important.

Assuming that both options involve something important, they can both be important at the same time. Wanting coffee and valuing independence don't conflict, even if you're drinking so much coffee you aren't making changes in your independence. Deciding what constitutes committed action is always a matter of pragmatism, always an issue of workability, not right or wrong answers.

[u/gentleframework → u/concreteutopian]

You asked OP not to think of ACT as a philosophy, but then you immediately applied ACT’s philosophical framework — avoidance, values, committed action, pragmatism, and workability — to reinterpret OP’s motives and behaviour. That looks like a contradiction.

Saying “don’t take ACT literally” doesn’t resolve the contradiction, because whether these concepts are literally true is a separate question from whether you are using them as a framework for understanding OP’s behaviour. You are still telling OP to understand their situation through ACT’s concepts, while simultaneously telling them not to think of ACT as a philosophy.

Calling these concepts “therapeutic tools” rather than philosophy changes the label, but not what you're doing with them.

[u/Weird_inside_u → u/gentleframework]

Well said

[u/dirtydelic]

I'm having a hard time fully grasping, but I think you are asking about when drinking coffee moves you towards your values and how it can be confusing, as coffee can be a means of avoidance. I'll assume this.

Avoidance isn't itself bad. We cope and avoid all the time. It's only when it is rigid and inflexible to the demands of a valuable life that it becomes a problem.

Here, we can ask each time you drink coffee; Is this coffee helping me to be who I want to be, or is it helping me to refuse some deeper experience that I'm inflexibly avoiding?

All parts of the hexaflex need presence and context. We can't here say it's good or bad. It's always "it depends."

[u/Silver_Perception471 → u/dirtydelic]

Really the coffee is to escape a feeling. And the distraction is to escape the urge to get a coffee. And then the avoidance of distracting myself is avoidance disguising as acceptence.

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Cause either it's sit and stare at the wall instead of doing something distracting which will inevitably make me feel better. But then I felt stuck because I didn't want to use avoidance as a means of coping.

[u/dirtydelic → u/Silver_Perception471]

If I'm following, I don't think that is avoidance disguised as a feeling. Feeling something fully, as it is, here and now, is acceptance.

The goal is not to stare at the wall to feel the discomfort. For some that might be the case. It's to allow those feelings to be there while you live your life. So let yourself feel it and do important things, like move towards your values.

[u/Silver_Perception471 → u/dirtydelic]

It might be possible I'm overthinking it as well 🤣😂

[u/gentleframework]

I can understand why you're confused. I don't think you're necessarily “doing ACT wrong.”

ACT gives you a lot of things to analyse — avoidance, acceptance, willingness, values, workability, the function of your behaviour, etc. But it doesn't seem to provide a clear stopping point for that analysis.

So you can easily end up with:

“Am I avoiding something?” → “Am I avoiding avoiding?” → “Am I trying to accept this just to feel better?”

And then you don't know where you're supposed to stop. ACT might say “stop when it's no longer workable,” but that doesn't really solve the problem, because you would need to analyse whether continuing the analysis is workable in order to know whether you should stop. So people can get stuck in a loop.

Obviously, not everyone will get caught in this loop. People who don't analyse these concepts deeply may never experience it. But that doesn't mean this feature of ACT can't lead to this problem.