Counseling Philippines – Page 11 – One Life Only Counseling Services

Goals of Counseling: What is it all about anyway?

by Nathan Chua

I remember a person who shared with me that she had been with her therapist for several years. She felt it helped her in terms of managing her anxieties and anger issues. She went on to share that she needed her weekly sessions to get some relief from all the emotional struggles that go on during the week. This type of counseling is called supportive counseling which certainly has its place in the field. In my graduate studies, I can certainly attest to the fact that I used to do this type of work in dealing with my test cases to begin my training in listening or counseling skills. With this person who shared her experience though, the weekly sessions have become a psychological crutch, just like taking a break from her cares for at least an hour a week. *

Counseling work is more than just being supportive. The goal is more about having clients learn, as experientially as possible, skills that can be brought to their everyday lives. The counseling room becomes the lab where these skills are introduced and tested.

I don’t really mean to be simplistic here but I thought the title can help us focus on knowing what goes on inside the work I do and its ultimate goals. If we come up with something that would make it simpler and more understandable, then we would have done a better job in assisting people in appreciating what all these working sessions are for.

If you wish to change the way things are in your relationship with your partner, then you need to try different things. In ACT or Acceptance and Commitment Therapy linggo, we call that expanding behavioral repertoire. It is also referred to as flexibility skills. If you start a conversation with your spouse with a criticism or a “You” statement every time, you are more than likely to get defensiveness in return. And so on and on you go with the circular arguments that often lead you to ultimately just avoid each other or get into a massive shouting match.

Unfortunately, we are the creatures who think that we can do the same things over and over again and come up with the results we want, even if the evidence clearly shows the contrary. We like to follow rules and rule-following becomes the dominant reinforcer of our behaviors, and not the actual contingencies that show up. We can see this if we break down the process of how people get hooked to the slot machine or some form of gambling addiction. Although it is true that there is a one in a billion chance that you might hit pay dirt, the addicted person is not aware of the consequences happening as they continue this obsessive behavior.

Taken in these terms, we in this helping profession are after you getting out of your comfort zones. Comfort zones are places where we want to end up that give us the short term feel-good moments. Being able to analyze your spouse and find out what’s wrong with them, can give you that sense of accomplishment that you know something they don’t. Getting that high in front of a slot machine when you win a small pot can be intensely rewarding at the moment. However, the long term consequences eventually show up. You no longer become the spouse you want to be. The more you criticize your partner, the more they snap back. Slowly eating away at the relationship you once thought will go smoothly through the years. The more you gamble, the more you end up piling up debts and spending countless hours unable to do anything else that could have otherwise been spent more productively and meaningfully.

I’d like to borrow a phrase from a book to help you, my readers, understand how counseling works. The work is about being comfortable with the uncomfortable. Maybe it’s time you tried another approach to your spouse, even if it feels embarrassing or extremely “so not you.” Maybe you need to sit with those urges to gamble and find out what really is behind the pull towards the addiction so that you can find alternatives to spend all that energy on. To paraphrase a well-known ACT therapist, Kirk Strosahl, maybe there’s something more important here than what you feel.

If you are like the person I discussed in the first paragraph of this post, then be wary. That’s because the counseling work is making you feel comfortable! If you start to do things that are uncomfortable with the help of your counselor, then you might be on the road to being comfortable with being uncomfortable. That’s also when you know that your work with your counselor is worth all that time and energy. Maybe you’re on to trying something different that moves you towards what I regularly use in my discussions with my clients: being the person you want to be, and living the life you want to live.

*The example here is an amalgam of different cases that do not refer to any person in reality.

Running Towards the Vaccine: Overcoming Vaccine Hesitancy Revised Version

by Nathan Chua

I recently came upon an article on my newsfeed that someone had a really bad reaction to the vaccine. I can’t remember if she had either died or gone through some really frightful and horrific struggle to survive. Asked whether she regretted taking the vaccine, she had an interesting response. No.

Now I am not here to talk about every single reason as to why some people are either hesitant or completely opposed to having the shot, but I am here to share with you some way that those of us who are willing to take the vaccine can encourage those who have yet to decide.

First, there is really little use to argue about how safe the vaccine is. We all have that confirmation bias in which we tend to believe what we want to believe. Secondly, it is true that one could die not because of the virus but the vaccine, just as the lady I talked about in the beginning of this blogpost.

So how can we encourage a friend who’s afraid of needles, even more so a needle with a newly-developed drug, to go out there and take something that we can’t really guarantee to be 100 percent safe and effective? What can our knowledge of the human mind tell us about what motivates people to do some things and not others? Well, we can start with knowing how our minds can trick us into believing that some things, like taking a risk to get vaccinated, are beyond our capacity to do. Ever woke up one day with your mind telling you that you’re too tired to get up? Stay a few more minutes, don’t worry you’ll wake up with no time lost for work. Well, you know what comes after. There’s a good chance that you’d end up being late for work or just waking up with just enough time to call in sick.

However, what if we were to say that this urge to stay in bed happened while your bed had just caught fire? Wouldn’t you jump out of it faster than a rabbit being chased by a cat? Or if I were to say that you should get up at exactly six o’clock this morning otherwise I would kidnap your loved one and you’d never see him or her again, would you still follow the rule your mind is giving you that you’re too tired to get up? So if it were important enough, we can certainly break such rules for the sake of saving our own life as well as a loved one.

So what other things can someone tell a vaccine hesitant friend about why it is beneficial to them that they take it? If you look at the example above, it tells you that you and I are capable of doing things out of the ordinary when faced with something that connects us with our values.

Guess what the girl in the article said when asked why she didn’t regret taking the vaccine? She said she was willing to do her part to end the pandemic that cost the lives and livelihoods of billions of people around the world, including her loved ones. As human beings, we are capable of doing things beyond what logic can explain. We are the most successful species on the planet because we cooperate to a degree that not even the ants and bees can match. The more we do things that may not be good for ourselves but good for this and future generations, the more we thrive and extend our existence on this finite planet. It’s part of our evolutionary DNA. They’ve done studies that have found that societies where people are more cooperative end up becoming more successful in promoting social well-being.

Is it true that the vaccine can have lethal side effects? Yes, of course! But it is also true that we are unique in our ability to do things as crazy as sacrificing our own safety to save another human being, our pets, and our planet.

So if you have a friend who is still hesitant to take the vaccine, ask them if deep inside they see that in their own small way, they can be part of a story that ended the pandemic and brought us back to what life used to be regardless of the end results.

You can also ask your friend, “If you had a dear friend or loved one who lived in another country and was very ill, wouldn’t you take the next plane out to have just a few moments with them even if it would cost you some? And by doing so, is there a likelihood, albeit slim, that your plane may crash and you’d die in the process of wanting to say a few last words to this person?” If the answer is, “Yes, you’d go,” then what’s stopping you from getting the shot!

In action movies (and we love them, don’t we?), we’d see the hero fighting the enemy in that one last fateful battle. We’d see the hero lose their weapons one by one and sometimes even get severely wounded by a lethal strike from the enemy, and yet keep fighting on with whatever is left in their arsenal.

The science is still imperfect, but it’s all we have left to fight this pandemic. You and I can ask our hesitant friends, “Like that hero we pay to see in those movies, would you be willing to join in the fight with whatever is left in our arsenal?”

Grief Counseling Module with Russ Harris

Nathan just finished another training module with renowned author and ACT therapist from Australia, Dr. Russ Harris!

What is in your “born-again experience” and how can you make your newfound spirituality last?

by Nathan Chua

Growing up exposed to faith traditions, I remember always looking forward to spiritual retreats. Not only do I get to have time off from school or work for free or at a discounted rate, I also get to meet new people or have more bonding opportunities with friends or schoolmates. However, it is often a big question among retreat-goers as regards how long the effects of such a religious experience will last into their mundane lives. Of course, being in a situation where everybody is smiling and having a break from the usual busyness of life, provides an idyllic setting that makes it easier to be kinder and more loving. No doubt there are doubts if there is an actual spiritual side to any one of us. Maybe we are just ordinary folks not really destined to consummate lives that are anything close to the clergy who facilitate these events.

Well, what my fellow retreat-goers and I couldn’t figure out in those days, I think some good ol’ science has posed an answer to. In most other approaches I have encountered in my more than a decade’s long journey into counseling, I think ACT or Acceptance and Commitment Therapy stands out as unique in its inclusion of values into what I thought was supposed to be a valueless undertaking. Before 2019, I used to think that my job was confined to helping people find a way out of their mental miseries and the rest was up to them. In ACT though, there is that very powerful component of pursuing a values-based life.

So how do spiritual retreats work? Why do they have such an impact on us? How do we keep that spiritual revival going in real world settings? To answer the first two, these retreats function as a way to help us get back in touch with our values. These values are chosen patterns of behaving that are consistent with our deepest aspirations for ourselves. These values never actually leave us, they just become obscured when life as we know it, gives us the challenges of work and the important but difficult relationships we have.

Our minds have evolved into an evaluative, problem-solving tool that takes over when challenges to these values are present. Your kid starts to act nastily towards you. Your boss makes a comment that you found offensive. Your spouse forgets your birthday. How are we supposed to still be kind and loving in these situations?

Dr. Steven Hayes mentioned in one of his talks, that the problem-solving mode of mind can be described as analytical and predictive. In other words, it wants to find out how we got into such a situation and how we can get out of it quickly and painlessly. And these modes of mind are focused on the past and the future; unable to recognize what’s going on in the present. Our minds pretty much work in a way that suggests we take the fastest way out of troublesome thoughts and feelings that come along at work and in relationships. For example, the recalcitrant child is making us feel angry and frustrated. The problem-solving mode of mind figures out how we got to this point by thinking that the child has been spoiled, and then suggests the quickest way to solve the spoiled child and get out of our frustrated feelings is to just try to control the child by yelling and screaming at them. Goodbye sweet, kind, and loving us that came out of the retreat! It is easy to see how these spiritual revivals are only as good as the few days or the few weeks after. Simply said, it is more likely that we live out or become aware of our values or what is truly meaningful and important to us, when the situation is well-protected from the challenges of life outside these exclusive retreat enclaves.

And how do we keep the spiritual fire burning when like all good things, the retreat must come to an end? In ACT, I have learned quite a few ways to do it. The first step however is to get out of the mindset that all good things are about good feelings. A good way to challenge this “good feelings equals good life” idea is to notice the not-so-good feelings that come with living our values. Anything important to us usually comes with a price. If it were easy then we wouldn’t really care about it. We hurt because we care. Our sadness from a loss is because we loved. We get angry because something has violated our sense of justice. We experience anxiety because there’s something worth our trouble that we want to accomplish.

As we keep our final destinations in sight, committing to something also involves taking small steps towards them. After having been able to return to these values, we can take action no matter how small in that direction we go. Make it a point today to call a friend you haven’t reached out to in a while. Go buy ice cream for your kid just because. Stand up for yourself and don’t take a sip of alcohol in your weekly gathering with your alcoholic friends. Small steps to break your patterns can put you back in touch with those values you cherish and also understand that situations, thoughts, and feelings have no control over you, but you do. Start doing the uncomfortable stuff and then take time to savor the results as a reward. It will likely be worth all the struggle!

Every so often I do get some calls inquiring about whether I do a faith-based approach in my practice or not. I welcome anyone and everyone from all faith traditions to come see me. I’d rather spread the word that I am inclusive, not exclusive. Why? Because while we may be subject to different rules of faith, we are all subject to the same rules of science. For me, there is no conflict. In fact, what I am learning now from ACT as an evidence-based approach to therapy, just showed me how much traditional faith-based practices have been affirmed by the science behind ACT, albeit thousands of years late.

I always feel a sense of sadness when people turn away from what ACT science can do for them, without first investigating if it is in sync with their faith. I hope, if you’re one who is looking for a faith-based approach to therapy reading this post, that you give me and this science I use, a chance to help you because it has tremendously helped me. Call or better yet, text me. I’d love to go on a journey with you towards a more meaningful and purposeful life you may have yet to experience!

A Life Worthy of Your Suffering

by Nathan Chua

“There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.”

Fyodor Dostoevsky

I recently heard a podcast interview of Kelly Wilson, one of the developers of ACT or Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. He had a well-known quote that the interviewer eagerly mentioned at the beginning of the program, which went something like this, “Values and vulnerabilities are poured from the same vessel.”

One thing that really drew me to ACT is it’s probably the only type of therapy I know of that blends values into a practice which used to be for me, more about symptom-reduction. Much of my work before ACT was focused on this. Getting clients to get over their problems or to understand the roots of their symptoms for them to finally start moving forward. For example, my goals were more about helping an angry person be less angry, or a depressed person become more engaged and alive, or a shy person to be more assertive. It was more of that feel-good about one’s self type of approach.

ACT however, therapy does not have such goals of symptom-relief. In fact, one of the best ways to start ACT in my experience, is to have people get back in touch with their values, or qualities of being that were and are still within them, and they still aspire to demonstrate in their daily living, but have long neglected due to this overemphasis of having positive thoughts and feelings, not just most of the time but at times even all the time! We often assume that our values leave us. The reality however is that they often get relegated to the background and are far from our consciously pursuing them.

So what you may ask has vulnerability got to do with our values? It is in our values that we find the scariest parts of ourselves. As the old ACT expression goes, we care where we hurt and we hurt where we care. If one of our deepest aspirations for ourselves is being honest, it will be very scary to be honest. Loving someone means getting in touch with that part of us that’s most vulnerable or hurtable. Aiming for success means feeling those anxious moments as we pursue uncertain ends. As one of the developers of ACT once expressed, it is about learning how to feel good rather than feel good.

We can choose our suffering. We can suffer because of all the efforts we make to eradicate our difficult thoughts and emotions. Kelly Wilson has a name for this that really struck me and served as my inspiration for this piece. He calls it valueless suffering. Put in other words, we can ask ourselves, “Do we really want a life dedicated to feeling better or getting rid of depression or anxiety or what not?” Now how is that going to look on top of our tombstones? Here lies Nathan, he worked really hard to feel good about himself!

The other option is that we suffer for what we believe in and what truly matters to us when we leave nothing but our memories behind. This is when we suffer because we choose justice over injustice, love over fear, freedom over safety, etc., in other words, our values over shortcuts.

Let me leave you with this quote from Viktor Frankl:

“Dostoevski said once, “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.” These words frequently came to my mind after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in the camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost. It can be said that they were worthy of their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom — which cannot be taken away — that makes life meaningful and purposeful.” Viktor Frankl

Living our values is going to be hard, and we are bound to fail at times. But one thing I can guarantee, it will be rewarding unlike any other thing we may have experienced, and I can guarantee it will be rewarding…up to that very last breath we take

How to be OK even when everything else is not

by Nathan Chua

Multiple deadlines, challenges at home and at work, you’re about to lose your job, someone in the family has a serious ailment, pressure is coming from all sides…life happens and is coming at you like a savage beast hungry for a fight to the death! These are the times when people come to see me. The world has turned against my clients and there seems to be nothing they can do that has succeeded in changing anything. In fact, the more they try the worse the outcomes become!

It is also during these moments that our minds go on overdrive, drilling judgmental thought after judgmental thought into our consciousness. The key here is to reach a level of awareness of what is within or outside our control. If you ever wondered what it is that makes us feel that we are living ineffectual lives, it is our misdirected efforts to control that which is not subject to control.

Just be the human being that we had become through billions of years of evolution! We have an assortment of wonderful tools inside our nervous system. Turning against these evolved functions, is like working against gravity.

Ultimately, what happens to us in life is not within our control, but our responses are. The goal of psychology as a field of scientific study is to bring to bear what it is that makes us live ineffectually and then find ways to change or interrupt that process to get us moving towards a different, more effectual, and more life-enhancing direction. So it really does not matter as much what happens to us, as how we face them. How we handle ourselves in those moments is where we can bridge the gap between what we are and what we aspire to be.

The question we could keep in mind is, “Did we handle it well?” Here’s a paraphrase of Dr. Darin Cairns words reminding us that we can be okay even when everything around us tells us we’re not.

“I can’t promise you everyone’s going to like you.

I can’t promise you that people will always know you exist.

I can promise you this, if you like you at that time, if you liked how you lived it, then you’ll like that you were true to what you believed in.

That you liked how you handled yourself in terms of whatever you value, then you’re always ok.

You’re ok when you’re popular, you’re ok when you’re alone, you’re ok after a breakup, you’re ok when you’re scared to death, and you’re ok when you’re hurting.

You don’t have to stand tall but you do have to stand up. You don’t have to think that you’re better than anyone, you don’t have to have anyone praise you, but you do have to be willing to exist for you.”

So to you my friend, I can say that no matter how dire your circumstances are at this moment, take a look at yourself ahead of you by a year or so, and ask yourself, “Would your future you like how you, the present you, handled the situation?” I hope that brings you back in touch with what truly matters for you in each and every moment that comes. No matter how not okay these moments can get, you can be okay knowing you stood up for you!

Listen to the podcast version of this post on Spotify! Click here!

Coming to An Acceptance of Your Partner or Loved One

by Nathan Chua

One of the things that our minds are really good at doing is judging. Our minds have developed this highly useful skill for the ultimate survival of our species that has very few qualities which can protect it from external threats. We don’t have large sharp teeth or claws and are said to be a species that has the longest gestation period among all creatures.

You might be curious to know how judgment can play any part in our survival, let alone the survival of a whole species. Isn’t it that we use judgment more to describe the ways we behave towards others? We are not used to using the term in light of its impact on our evolutionary history. Let’s do this little exercise to see how. If our minds didn’t know how to judge between a threat and a non-threat, we would be like the fish that get caught twice or more times by a fishing hook. Our minds are there to create rules that keep us out of harm’s way. If you see a line attached to a bait, that’s not dinner being presented to you, but you becoming somebody else’s dinner. Don’t cross the street without looking side to side. Stay indoors when your experience tells you that this is the time of the year when the weather can be harsh. This rule-following ability is what sets us apart from other species and gives us an edge of tremendous effect on who dominates the planet.

Unfortunately, this talent is double-edged. It can be useful to judge between a lion and a puppy but not when we use it to judge our internal processes. If our minds weren’t able to tell that the moving thing in front of us is a hungry lion, we could be its next prey! The mind applies the same rule to our feelings and thoughts, because the mind does what it does. Our difficult thoughts and feelings that naturally come by because of the life situations we face, are equated as bad, as in hungry lion-bad!

Couples and families often come to a judgment of their loved ones. Unfortunately, such judgments often get in the way of the loving relationships each party wishes to develop. One way of stepping out of these judgments is to consider your differences as they are and not as defects. Here’s one way to be more aware of this. Imagine if you had a loved one (either a romantic partner or a family member) who has suffered from a childhood impairment, let’s say, he or she is half-blind or has an injury that makes it difficult for them to walk at a normal pace. Would you demand that he or she be able to walk and do stuff as fast as you do? Probably not! You would most likely make adjustments to accommodate your loved one’s condition.

Given this, you and I can be more conscious of what our minds say are defects and begin to view them as conditions or differences around which we have to work. We can recognize our tendencies to see our loved ones as defective and therefore more like problems to solve rather than human beings who have learned a different way to tie a shoelace so to speak.

Another way of putting this into a clearer perspective is to notice the difference between describing a movie and judging it. A descriptive statement would be to say that the movie is an hour and 40 minutes long. While an evaluative statement would be that the movie was too long or too boring. Why don’t you try this at home? You can then experiment with a loved one that you have long judged to be defective. Just like a narrator for Nat Geo, see if you can objectively describe how your partner or child or parent behaves and say to yourself, “This is someone special who I would much rather choose to love with all his or her different behaviors that I have come to accept in the service of a truly honest and loving person that I wish to be in this and every moment.” That, my friends, is the key, not to feeling good, but to living well in spite of what your mind says are judgments to be made. It is up to you to look at those judgments and say, I choose not to run away from or struggle with my difficult experiences in dealing with this important person in my life, and to accept them above all. Be my guest and see peace arrive in your life.

Abandoning the Disease Model

by Nathan Chua

It pains me to see a number of people who come to me and say that they have spent so much time and resources trying to cure their “mental illness” with a handful of medications, only to find out that after years of their hard work and dedication to the treatment, they have come full circle to the same old problem. Maybe it was instinct, but in all my years in this field, I have always had an affinity to talking through rather than medicating out of psychological issues. I never thought the idea that there was some germ or biological impairment involved in psychological struggles was tenable. Contextual behavioral science seems to bear my hunch out.

I must admit, some parts of my work in the past, especially the ones that dealt with developing insight, may have sounded like there was something broken or wrong with someone’s history or biology. I can vividly remember part of my training in grad school where the class had to figure out what diagnosis/diagnoses to give a client. It was tough! Why? Because the diagnostic manual, the simplified version for that matter, was about 600 pages long, and there were so many overlapping symptoms among the hundreds of diagnoses that I frankly was amazed at how the professor was able to come up with one or two! I thought that only a genius with a freakish memory can come up with an accurate diagnosis, let alone making a diagnosis that matches that of the professor’s.

As I have learned now from the philosophy behind Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), such a practice may not necessarily come up with the best results. Far be it for me to make an indictment on the whole diagnostic and classification system. There certainly is a place for such, but I guess the bottom line here is, finding out what works best for the client. In certain cases, such diagnoses can, for many clients, become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy or a crutch that is liable to be used in gaining the attention of others.

What attracted me to ACT is its pragmatism. If I was to join this field of work, I want it first of all to work for my own issues and struggles. Secondly, I want to see results that are meaningful and effective to my clients, which is precisely what pragmatism is after.

Moreover, seeing the world through ACT eyes means espousing not just the alleviation of human suffering but also the promotion of human prosperity. As Maslow had proposed with the coming of the humanistic approaches in psychology, humans have certain aspirations that no other creatures on this planet share with them…self-actualization.

My first nine years of work primarily was devoted to alleviating suffering, which is how the disease model “works.” Get rid of your difficult thoughts and feelings or learn to manage them, then all will be okay. One can just go back to the same tired old life that got them into therapy in the first place.

So why have I devoted my last two years of continuing education to ACT? Well it is a matter of asking myself if just managing my emotions was good enough to make me realize that I have lived a full and purposeful life. But life would be so much more fun and challenging if I went for not just managing my inner thought processes, but also being gungho to what for me means doing something out of my limited time on earth.

As of now, I think this is the best science we have for attending to our problems of living. The science has yet to determine that there is a certain biological cause to the effect of mental wellness. Otherwise, don’t you think that the world’s geniuses in the field would have come up with a drug that takes care of all of that?

Who knows? We might end up finding it in the future. But I go only as far as what the scientific evidence shows me to be useful in helping others better their lives, now! So I have chosen this route, until a better science proves this to be inadequate.

Why do people get hooked on gambling?

by Nathan Chua

It is quite often that people come to me to hear what my “expert” opinion is about their struggles or a significant other’s struggles. This usually has a judgmental quality to it, like whether what they are doing or intend to do, is considered good or bad. I am supposedly some shaman who has all the deeper insights into as many aspects of living as one could think of.

In functional contextualism (FC), the philosophy behind the science of contextual behaviorism however, no behavior whether overt or covert is judged as good or bad. This would no longer be consistent with the focus on process and would rather be a familiar mechanistic approach that has become the dominant approach in mental health care today as seen in the DSM, or Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, that has turned up several editions that have become thicker and thicker through the years.

As a philosophy of science, FC deems that all behaviors as just behaviors. Please note that behaviors here cover not just visible actions, but internal processes as well, such as our thoughts and feelings. Thinking here is just another form of behaving, which in turn creates feelings. The focus in FC is whether these behaviors lead to workable outcomes and not whether they are determined to be individually dysfunctional or not. For example, I still remember in graduate school, there was considerable discourse about feelings like guilt or shame. Some argue that neither is good while some posit that guilt is good and shame is bad. In FC though, emotions are just emotions; behaviors, just behaviors. What matters is how these behaviors function which is seen in what we overtly or even covertly do with these internal processes. Do these internal processes get in the way of a vital and meaningful life?

Sorry for the long intro. Perhaps you are wondering what this has to do with the topic of gambling. This may be a bit jolting to some of you but since FC doesn’t really involve labels of dysfunction, there is nothing wrong with gambling as a behavior if it is done in certain contexts. You may play a card game for fun with your loved ones. A few tries at the slot machine for a few laughs with a visiting friend, does not make the act of gambling unworkable.

Gambling is a behavioral urge that people develop from past learning or socializing. Like anger, nobody ever got into trouble with urges. It’s what we do with such urges that gets us into trouble. Having these internal urges dictate what we do with our lives is what gets us stuck.

One way to get into what is behind such urges, is to start determining the reasons for these thoughts. Why is it that your mind suggests that you gamble? In my experience, asking these questions can bring us to a deeper yearning for something that is “good.” When I say “good” here, I mean it not in the sense of a moral judgment, but rather seeing them as motivated by prosocial reasons. If I dig into the why’s of this behavior from a client rigidly stuck in a pattern of addiction, he or she inevitably ends up with something that is life enhancing or enriching, and of course, prosocial.

Some of the reasons I get for a gambling habit are being able to help significant people in one’s circles, or becoming a positive influence on others through financial success, or finding a place to belong and feel special (in order to belong!). Unfortunately, all these entail some short term costs to achieve long term payoffs. Gambling has the appearance of achieving such prosocial goals but has it the other way around. It provides short term rewards of pleasant feelings of belonging, being recognized for winning, or for the appearance of financial success, but prove ineffective in the long term. As you might already have guessed, gambling inevitably leads to “bad” or unworkable longer term outcomes, like ending up in debt due to the need to recover previous losses.

Next time you find yourself doing stuff that is making your life miserable in the long run, remember to ask yourself or your mind, what prosocial or self-protective survival reasons are behind these urges. It might surprise you that the cause is to accomplish a yearning to belong, to find one’s life direction, or to experience competency through your achievements. The means might seem to alleviate human suffering and promote human prosperity, but they ultimately end up achieving the opposite. Look from inside your deeper sense of awareness; you’ll see it.

Twelve Years of One Life Only, Twelve Years of Trust and Hope in Our Humanity!

by Nathan Chua

As I write this post, there is trepidation about the future given the situation we find ourselves in, as we are mired in a brutal, endless pandemic, and a perpetual and rigid lockdown response; and to add to that, certain groups wanting to take advantage of the weakness of others as they occupy territories that deprive small fisher folks of their sole livelihood, while simultaneously putting the region on the precipice of war, just because one group cannot stand the independence of another; I must admit that sometimes I begin to lose hope that change for a better human race and planet can ever be attainable.

I thought maybe it would be good to write about why One Life Only exists and why we should even care about change, given the bleak nature of our current circumstances. My optimism comes from a firm belief that humans are capable of making the hard choices in the service of the greater good. Given the right circumstances, we are able to do acts that our very pragmatic, my-personal-survival-first minds cannot comprehend.

I was neither skeptical nor exuberant about finding the best means for change in my life through psychology. I took an undergraduate degree in psychology plainly for the reason that I wanted to understand why I was who I was. I then turned to several other paths that for me, ultimately proved ineffectual. I thought then that I would find the answers in my mind, and that a logical and mathematical mind would save me from my problems in living. If I could figure it out then I can see the change sooner rather than later. Maybe I needed to be smarter and more informed. But all that knowledge of how to accomplish my material and culturally-acceptable goals, actually made me even worse!

The next step in my life was to turn towards the divine. I saw how people in church seemed to have it all together as I met them in the course of my young career as a businessman. Alas, it had a ceiling. Change was for the most part, superficially based on a hope that I found something that had held life’s truths, and the most plausible explanations for my existence.

I never thought that science would have a path for me towards improving who I can become. Science seemed to have this cold calculating aura for me. Further still, I never thought that psychology would ever be a true science. I pursued the path left by Freud and existential philosophy to find the answers. I never gave behaviorism a second look. I didn’t want to associate myself with a group of people who think that humans are just as trainable as animals!

But lo and behold, I found the answers in precisely this last option. Who knows? There could be better answers out there in the future, but for now, the science of behavior has given me fresh wind. So I have come full circle to psychology, but this time not the artsy type, but the sciency type.

I must add though that throughout the course of my search for the truths of our existence, I had one thing undergirding all of my efforts. I always had that instinct that most of it had to do with love. In my twenties and thirties, I thought that I should love my business and the people who helped me build it. In my journey through religion, I said love trumps doctrine. In my study of psychology, I loved the artsy parts, but never loved science, until I found it in a lesser known approach in behavioral science called, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT.

Here’s how the developer of ACT has framed it, or here’s how science can be an exercise in love.

“Humanity is in a race, a race to create a kinder, more flexible and values-based world–to say it another way, a more loving world…Either we will learn how to create modern minds for this modern world of ours, or we will loom ever closer to disaster.

None of us knows how it will turn out, but based on human history, I put my bet on the human community evolving to meet the challenge. I put my bet on our capacity to choose love over fear…Deep down, we all know that love isn’t everything, it’s the only thing,” Steven C. Hayes.

If there is one thing that can save the world, at the moment, it is science. And it happens to be a science of love that can ensure that the human species will continue to prosper and preserve the wonders of this planet.

Perhaps that is what truly brought me to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. For in love, there has to be genuine acceptance and a stubborn commitment to do what our logical minds would never understand. In ACT, I think I found the science behind love, the only thing that matters, which I just found out, not just for me, but for everybody else.

Happy 12th One Life Only!