One Life Only Counseling Services
Center for Recreating, Energizing, Activating, Transforming, and Empowering Lives! – C.R.E.A.T.E.L., Manila!
Nathaniel Chua, founder of One Life Only Counseling Services will be one of the keynote speakers in this upcoming virtual conference organized by the Association of Contextual Behavioral Science (ACBS) called LMIC (Low or Middle Income Countries) International Conference on November 17, 2023.
He will be speaking about Integrative Behavioral Couples Therapy (IBCT): An ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) Consistent Approach for Couples.
Click here to know more!
In this episode for our series, Shrinks Over Drinks, I talk with Dr. Niklas Torneke, a Swedish psychiatrist who has authored three books in English and more in Swedish. Two of his books in English have been very instrumental in my journey into ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy), RFT (Relational Frame Theory), and behaviorism. He is an authority when it comes to the uses of language and metaphors from an RFT perspective.
I have myself seen how his work has informed me inside the counseling room and how much it helps people see through the veneer of language.
Listen on Spotify!
This is the second offering of our Two Shrinks Over Drinks series. This time we have a friend, who’s also a doctor and co-author of a book entitled, “Mastering the Clinical Conversation: Language as Intervention.”
Here you get another chance to eavesdrop on two MORE shrinks caught in a casual conversation. If you have ever wondered what it is like to listen to a couple of psychologists/counselors talk over a drink, well, here’s your chance!
In this second part of the chat with Matthieu, we discuss the following:
– Matthieu’s views about the DSM
– Movies that he saw from an ACT perspective and his views about the characters in the movie Les Miserables
– How clinging to rules can lead to loneliness and sometimes even suicide
– Hierarchical thinking and its relation to our choices of behaving
– What role psychologists play in changing behavior in society for the good
by Nathan Chua
How many times have you and I been discouraged at the results of our hard work? How many times have you and I loved but failed? Have you ever taken care of a stray puppy and ended up seeing that puppy die in just a few months? Have you ever done something that you thought would benefit your organization but end up unappreciated?
Welcome to the club my friend. This is something that you share with countless others who have lived long enough to experience the pain of the human condition. Oftentimes, we get disheartened by the results of our hard work and our standing up for what we believe is important. This could be mostly because we often miss seeing the value behind the goals that we set for ourselves. Goals are guideposts that tell us that we are heading in the direction we want for our lives. Goals are benchmarks we either look forward to or look back on with much pride and sometimes with mixed feelings. Goals are also not a sure thing. They can be elusive or even unachievable in our lifetimes.
Our values on the other hand, are qualities of being that we aspire to be about. It is inexhaustible. It does not have an end point that we either look ahead to or look back on. It can be the fuel that burns the fire for our daily existence that could otherwise be meaningless or pointless.
As we live our values and pursue those goals, not all of us will end up getting the acknowledgement we want. Not all end up on the cover of Time magazine like the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky. Even in such challenging places like the Ukraine, many soldiers in the Ukrainian army or even civilians, have bravely stayed to fight for their territorial rights, but unlike their president, many of them will die unknown. At best, their names might be engraved in some memorial one day, but how many of us really take the time to get to know each one of these heroes.
Ask yourself this question, regardless of the results of your small but heroic endeavors, whatever your lot in life, would you still do what it is that you just did? If you were to dedicate most of your adult life to something you want to do, and no one would know, what would you choose to do? Maybe you can relate to these stories:
So let’s get back to the questions that I started this article with. Read them again and ask yourself, would you have still done it? Would you have still worked hard to help the group of people who toil with you everyday in the office? Would you still have loved that person the way you did? Would you still have taken that stray puppy? Would you still have done that for your company regardless of the results?
If your answer is yes to any of these questions, then welcome to the club again my friend. You are in the company of the nameless soldiers who died in war for the sake of something bigger than themselves. You may not end up a Zelensky or on the headlines of a broadsheet, but you stood for something you wanted to be for that moment.
If you ask me why we do it? Blame it on Darwinian evolution. There is a part of us that has never left us in millions of years of evolution. We are the most social of all primates. We have that gene, that social gene that tells us that we are capable of doing caring things even at the highest of costs, with little reasons for these deeds than just being the creatures that we are. That’s the kind of programming we have, fortunately or unfortunately. We can do really big things, for nothing more than love.
Listen to this post on Spotify! Click here! Or watch it on YouTube! Click here!
Hi Friends!
Here’s my version of explaining the ACT Matrix!
Hope you like it!
Perhaps we are making Philippine history here!
Here’s a video of my interview with Matthieu Villatte, PhD who is an Assistant Professor at Bastyr University in Seattle, WA in the United States.
He obtained his doctoral degree in psychology in France, where he was trained as a clinical psychologist. He moved to the US in 2010 to complete a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Nevada, Reno under the mentorship of Steven Hayes, PhD.
Matthieu Villatte is the author of numerous books and chapters on mindfulness, acceptance, experiential therapies, and contextual behavioral science, such as the first manual published in French on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Mastering the Clinical Conversation: Language as Intervention, co-authored by Jennifer Villatte and Steven Hayes.
In the video, we talked about how the principles of behavioral therapy apply to everyday lives of people, the OFW or migrant worker phenomenon prevailing in the Philippines, as well as the pandemic!
