Overthrow Your Inner Dictator!
“Life is a misery when we allow ourselves to be dominated by The Dictator Within. When we are freed from its grip, there is another mode of mind just a hair’s width away…a liberated mind that can help us pivot towards what matters.” Steven Hayes.
In this month’s blog we take a look at our Inner Dictator/Bully/Saboteur, who they are, where they came from and equally importantly how to topple them from their position of power, not by rising up, but by making space….
Eminent psychologist, Dr Steven Hayes discusses the Dictator Within in his Book “A Liberated Mind”. This is an essential guide to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) a therapy that he was instrumental in researching and creating.
ACT invites us to observe the processes of thinking and thought in order to disentangle ourselves from them. At the same time we can open up towards life and deal with difficult thoughts, feelings and sensations by making space around them to then act in ways that makes life worth living.
Hayes starts by discussing the internal voice in our head which responds to anxiety by telling us to avoid it or to overpower it. Just as this internal voice praises us when things are going well, (generally not a problem for us because it feels pretty good), it also turns against us when things aren’t going so well. When this happens, the voice is usually telling us we are bad, weak, stupid, defective, or incompetent, it can also tell us that we are hopeless or that life is not worth living.
It doesn’t really matter whether the Dictator Within is being positive or negative, the point is that it dominates us. This voice can hold so much power over us that in Hayes words;
“we lose contact with the fact we are even listening to a voice. It is almost constantly weaving a story about who we are, about how we compare to others, what others are thinking of us and what we must do to ensure we are OK, that we’re coping with whatever challenges are confronting us”. (P.33)
This voice is constant, and we disappear into it, this is called “fusing”. If you ask people about this voice they will describe it as my voice, my thoughts or my true self. In other words, the ego. But actually, it’s really the story of “I”. We get so entangled in it all that we take what the Dictator Within says literally. “Why can’t I get a grip on this? I’m a loser, Why can’t I solve this? I need to fix it!” Our story of “I” becomes entangled and overwhelming. We get into a tug of war with our thoughts. ACT invites us to drop the rope to see what happens.
Even more trickily, if we try and change our thoughts, for example by challenging their content, trying to “solve” them, or not thinking about them, we add even more focus and power on and to those thoughts. In turn, the Dictator Within gets ever stronger because it becomes the centre of our attention like a needy celebrity on the comeback trail. This then reinforces the idea of ourselves or our self-identity as “anxious” or “depressed” or “avoidant” or “failing”. In ACT this is referred to as the “conceptualized-self” – our overidentification with the process of thinking: “I am depressed, I am anxious, I am a failure” rather than “I am having thoughts that I am depressed/anxious/a failure”.
In “A Liberated Mind”, Hayes talks about his own experience of panic attacks and how these started to grow in frequency and intensity until one day he realised there was an alternative to being over-ruled by the Dictator Within:
“I suddenly had a clear sense of the Dictator Within almost as a foreign entity – and one that I had let become my own ruler; I had let the voice take the place of the part of me that is aware and can choose. The experience was like disappearing into a movie, only to realize that you are sitting in a chair watching it. I had disappeared for years on end into my own mind and its dictates…” (P.36)
In ACT this experience is referred to as the “perspective-taking self”. The analytical mind generates very believable stories about who we are. However, we are more than this analytical mind alone, there’s also another part of us that can observe this going on.
If we can develop the capacity to pull back and realise that we don’t have to listen to those stories, or even be defined by them, we can take a different stance towards them. In ACT this is referred to as defusion: “from taking my thoughts literally to watching the process of thinking as a process…”
“While we tend to think of our thought processes as logical, many of them are anything but. Thoughts are constantly being generated automatically and mindlessly. We cannot pick which ones pop up, but we can pick and choose which of them to focus on or to use to guide our behaviour….it takes work…but it’s a learnable skill….” (P.37)
The Film Metaphor - Taken From Hayes, A Liberated Mind
“A helpful way to think about defusion is to imagine you are sitting in a chair watching a movie. You’re quite engaged in the film, but then you notice down in the corner of the screen a tiny little window showing a parallel film. This other film is about the screenplay writer as they create the lines of dialogue in the main film. It’s a film about authoring the movie, not the story being authored. When you hear dialogue in the main movie, you can focus on that drama, but you can also turn your eyes to that small authoring film within the film and watch the writer doing the work. You can get a sense of the wheels turning in the mind of the writer as one line follows another in an attempt to construct an engrossing and consistent story that people will watch and find credible.
Learning to see our thought process in this way is the shift from fusion to defusion. When we do this, we shift away from looking at the world (or our current situation) structured by thought (the “main movie” or story) to looking with a sense of dispassionate curiosity at the process of thinking itself.
“It’s extremely liberating to calmly watch this second film. Instantly, whether the main story is true or false becomes far less important than whether it is useful. The author is neither your enemy nor your friend, it’s just a part of you creating lines of thought”. (p.38)
From Avoidance to Acceptance
So, once we are able to unhook from our thoughts and see them as thoughts that come and go amongst many other thoughts, it’s easier for us to accept this experience as part of being a human living with a glitchy brain and nervous system.
We don’t have to get into a fight with our thoughts or try to eliminate them through problem-solving. Usually when we’re having critical thoughts about ourselves, they feel unacceptable or like glaring indicators of our flaws, our weakness, our inability to handle life itself. This is why we try to get rid of them or avoid them – they feel pretty crappy to have.
But if thoughts are just thoughts, we can do anything in the presence of whatever is showing up in our heads, even turn towards the very thing that we’re avoiding and freaking out about. Hayes refers to this as “The First Pivot – Defusion: putting the mind on a leash”. There are five other “pivots” too all of which enable us to change our relationship to our Inner Dictator and the various bumps in the road that life throws at us.
If you’re currently being pushed around by your Inner Dictator and want to join us in the insurrectionary rebellion against it to improve your life, contact us at Rhizome Practice to see how ACT can help you (in the words of one of Hayes other books) get out of your mind and into your life.
