ACTing Like I Know What I’m Doing
Earlier this month, I finished a session with a person I have been working with for a while; it had been an emotional session about feelings of inadequacy. As I was reflecting on the work in the session, looking at the shorthand notes I’d taken, I realized that I was doing a version of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) without realizing I was intentionally using it in session. This struck me hard, right in the feelings.
While I’ve been a practicing clinician for about five years, I have never felt like I knew what I was doing. Not imposter syndrome, because I talk to other therapists and they feel like they don’t know what they’re doing either. I’ve been haunted by my own sense of failure and inadequacy in regard to the training I have had, and have not. I have struggled with the idea that I am a fraud, and that I don’t actually know what I’m doing. That I passed my licensing exam with a better score than necessary seemed irrelevant; that I had people I was working with tell me that I was good and helped them was not a good measure of competence. If I were competent, I’d have shut up, sucked it up and stuck out a PsyD program. If I were competent, I would have… The list goes on and on about the self-criticisms I have.
These self-criticisms don’t even include the criticisms from my early mentors. I can remember every stinging critique I accepted as fact because these people must have a better understanding of my skill and capacity, they’re professionals; I have a highlights reel with the faces of every instructor telling me my glaring inadequacies and insufficient effort on autoplay in the back of my mind with an embarrassing frequency. They are painful reminders that I can’t help but remember for myself when I start to begin to feel a little confident in my work and skills and chosen profession. The threat of thinking I’m good enough has to be aborted in a brutal way so I learn my lesson.
But back to this axis-shifting session.
I was talking about acceptance, self-acceptance in particular. The specifics aren’t necessary, just the visual that I came to with the client is relevant: our foundation is like the framing of our house; we can very rarely change the structure at its core, but we can do all kinds of things to decorate the house. If we keep hating the foundation of the house, we’ll never be satisfied with anything else because we can’t accept that it is what what we have to work with. The same goes for ourselves; if we keep hating who we are at our core, nothing we do, or achieve, or experience, will be enough. If we can accept we are essentially good enough at our core, and we can make changes and decorate, we can live more peacefully. It’ll be less challenging to look at our work and our lives and be satisfied with what we have done and obtained.
The person in session asked me how to do that, to just accept myself. It was such a loaded question to hear so early in the day that it opened a barrel of fish in the back of my mind. I mentally sat on the lid of the barrel and simplified what I thought may be an acceptable answer, that might continue to add depth to the work between this person and I.
“I don’t just accept myself a lot of the time, but I find acceptance in that act of knowing I don’t accept myself.”
Yeah, that didn’t come out as well as I’d hoped. I think the person I was working with was just trying to be nice and say it was helpful, and because we were at time for the session, they were able to end the call and wonder what the fuck kind of therapist they were working with.
Aside from the sense that I was using ACT, I’d clearly forgotten some vital part of ACT which would have answered that person’s question if I’d been a better therapist, and just needed a refresher skim of the theory to make sure I really knew what I was doing and saying. I went to my over-stuffed bookshelf full of psychotherapy books bought for aspirational and motivational reasons, and started looking for one from Hayes et. al. One of the first that I saw was “Radical acceptance: Awakening the love that heals fear and shame within us” by Tara Brach. This one has lived on the shelf for a while, I was able to tell by the dust accumulation. I’d read another one of Dr. Brach’s books a few summers ago, and I know that I didn’t appreciate it at the time. But this one had acceptance, right on the cover, and fear and shame, other themes I was working with across my caseload.
Like all good intentions lately, I put a bookmark in it and carried it around with me around my house/office because I intended to read it. But doom-scrolling, SignalGate memes, misbehaving dogs, and naughty cats always pulled my attention away from my intention. Finally, however, I was in a silent house, the schedule was clear, and I was bored. The book was right next to me, so finally I decided to crack it open, move the bookmark to chapter two and start reading.
I’m still on chapter one. Not because I read a page and picked up my phone, but because this chapter felt like a reflection of everything going on in my head. I had to put it down, and walk away from it, literally. The universality of the sense of inadequacy really shook me up. Why, and how silly is that? Everyone on my caseload is dealing with some sort of feeling of inadequacy, or shame, or guilt. I feel and experience versions of what the people I work with experience and feel because I too, am a human. Maybe I had to see it in a published book, really spelled out, for it to sink in. Maybe it was a miraculous right time, right headspace place to start. Either way, I’m grateful, and it inspired me to write this.
On page 6, Dr. Brach states: “Inherent in the trance is the belief that no matter how hard we try, we are always, in some way, falling short.” She’s referring to the trance of unworthiness here, and how we often go through life believing the story that we are somehow not enough and are going to fail. When I say ‘we’ here I’m referring to Western-based, Christianity-raised, bootstrap-mentality individuals that have always thought that if they worked hard enough, someday they would be worthy enough to deserve ‘it.’ Why throw Western and Christian in this blog post and make it even more political? It’s important, trust me.
Original Sin. Christians know the origin story of Adam and Eve, and how they were cast out from the Garden. Ever since, Christians have had to work harder, sacrifice more, accept less, and remain humble to receive their eternal reward. Christians don’t deserve any goodness, because they are unworthy from birth and must prove they’ve overcome that original sin and can finally be loved, and rested, and satisfied. I’m a recovering Catholic; I live and breathe in sin. When I say recovering, I mean I’m trying to deconstruct my religious up-bringing and undo the damage that shamed and blamed me for existing. It had never occurred to me that the message of the original sin story was more than a way to shame Eve and start misogyny even before they had clothes on. Like many Catholicism survivors, I’ve swung toward the other end of the spectrum toward atheism, so I’ve tried to repel religion and faith and spirituality because of the deep, unresolved feelings I have toward ‘The Church.’
Dr. Brach, on page 12, offers an enlightening perspective: “Buddhism offers a basic challenge to this cultural worldview. The Buddha taught that this human birth is a precious gift because it gives us the opportunity to realize the love and awareness that are our true nature. As the Dalai Lama pointed out so poignantly, we all have Buddha nature. Spiritual awakening is the process of recognizing our essential goodness, our natural wisdom and compassion.” Here, Brach references a conversation Western folks had with the Dalai Lama about self-hatred and the Dalai Lama’s complete and utter confusion about how self-hatred could exist. Brach goes on to blow my mind: “The message of ‘original sin’ is unequivocal: Because of our basically flawed nature, we do not deserve to be happy, loved by others, at ease with life. We are outcasts, and if we are to reenter the garden, we must redeem our sinful selves. We must overcome our flaws by controlling our bodies, controlling our emotions, controlling our natural surroundings, controlling other people. … And we must strive tirelessly — … in a never-ending quest to prove ourselves once and for all.”
My view of my perpetual inadequacy and unworthiness has become my generational inheritance. Did I ever have a chance to think that I was adequate and worthy, just as I was? It wasn’t modeled for me; everything was about trying harder and living with self-loathing for not being good enough. If I got an “A-“ on an assignment, I failed; that wasn’t my parents telling me that, it was my culture unconsciously impressing the idea that because I could do better, I should have and anything less is inadequate. Perfectionist has never been my label, but talented or clever could have been if I’d thought it wasn’t bragging, to call myself either descriptor. Couple that in with a natural competitiveness with an identical twin, and my fragile self-esteem stood no chance of making it out of grade school intact. I have 26 years of life and education to support my perceived inadequacy, and only about four years where I have a slight suspicion that maybe I’m not that bad after all.
How does this all work together, and make the time you’ve spent reading this worthwhile? What was my point, exactly? Is this an anti-religious stance? Is this a political agenda? Is it the sympathy-gaining self-help article that reads like humble-bragging?
Maybe.
I’m now the owner and operator of my own private practice. I don’t have a single person telling me I’m inadequate, or that I’ve made the wrong treatment choice, except the asshole in the mirror. As my therapist put it, hopefully I’ll never do a job interview ever again. Which translates, in my head, to “I’ll never have to try to prove I’m enough ever again.” I think this career decision has given me the self-permission necessary to accept that I am enough, and the space to start healing the trance of unworthiness and inadequacy. This has not been an easy task, and I’m reminded of that every time I have a session and end it with the question: ‘what the fuck did I just do?’
Accepting myself looks like accepting inadequacy for what it is; a myth I sometimes get trapped in. I accept the fictional worlds I escape to where dragons and dwarves exist. If I can accept that, I can accept the idea that maybe I do know what I’m talking about, and that feeling of maybe having figured something out and done the job well is acceptable. I can accept a compliment from someone, because what is the harm in being told I had a good session? I can accept that I am good enough as is, and recalibrate my standards. Can I ever feel like I’ve made my younger self worthy? I’m living and breathing, so yeah, check off that accomplishment.
Maybe the take away from this long-ass article is a potential shift in perspective to learn from. Do you look at the spring plants slowly pushing up through the earth, and tell them that actually they’re not trying hard enough, you find their effort unacceptable based on factors entirely outside of their control, and therefore they don’t deserve to grow and develop? No, that’s ridiculous; you admire the determination of the little plants surviving their second or third fake winter of the month and accept them as is. Do they have to be the best little plants you’ve ever seen to be worthy? No, they’re doing just fine being themselves. Do you have to be the best human in the history of humanity to be worthy? Nope, if you’re existing, you’re acceptable and worthy regardless of what you’ve done.
