ACT, Part Two: Your Mind Is Always Making Suggestions

Cognitive Defusion, and Learning Not to Obey Every Thought You Have

The mind can speak, and we have the freedom to choose our paths. However, sometimes, these choices can lead us down confusing directions.

In Part One, we looked at psychological flexibility—the ability to retain more of our choices when life becomes difficult. One of the quickest ways those choices disappear is when a thought stops feeling like a thought and begins feeling like reality.

There is a peculiar thing the human mind can do that we rarely notice while it's happening. It can produce a sentence and then immediately behave as though the sentence came from somewhere else.

The words appear inside our own heads, but they arrive with authority. They don't introduce themselves as guesses, interpretations, memories, fears, or predictions. They simply announce themselves. Before long, we're responding not only to what is happening around us but to what our minds have said about what is happening.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy calls this cognitive fusion. The term sounds considerably more technical than the experience itself. Fusion simply means becoming so entangled with a thought that we have difficulty seeing the difference between the thought and the thing the thought is describing.

We aren't looking at the thought anymore.

We're looking through it.

The Mind Hates an Unfinished Story

Suppose your adult son hasn't returned your call. That's what you actually know. But

human beings aren't particularly fond of leaving things there. Within minutes the mind begins supplying possibilities: He’s upset with me. I said something wrong. Something happened to him. He’s avoiding me.

Depending on your history, temperament, and current anxiety level, one explanation may begin feeling much more convincing than the others.

Soon you aren't responding to an unanswered phone call anymore. You're responding to a story about an unanswered phone call.

So you call again. Then you send a text. Then another one explaining why you called. Perhaps you send one saying you don't want to bother her—which, by this point, is the fourth attempt not to bother him.

Eventually he calls.

He was driving.

Nothing about this makes you irrational or defective. It makes you human. The human brain is an astonishing meaning-making machine. Give it three facts and a little uncertainty and it will happily manufacture the missing seven.

Usually we don't experience those seven as fabricated.

That's the important part.

We experience them as reality.

Thoughts Are Very Good at Wearing Disguises

Some thoughts clearly feel like thoughts. I wonder what we should have for dinner.

We aren't particularly fused with that. We can consider pizza, reject it, think about Thai food, forget the whole thing for twenty minutes, and eventually eat leftovers.

Other thoughts arrive wearing uniforms.

I can't trust people.

I always screw things up.

I have to get this right.

You shouldn't feel that way.

You never notice me.

Those sentences don't feel like possibilities. They feel like instructions, facts, warnings, sometimes even laws.

That's where the trouble begins.

A person who thinks I might embarrass myself still has choices. A person for whom I will embarrass myself has become reality and has considerably fewer.

Don't volunteer.

Don't speak.

Don't go.

Don't risk being noticed.

The thought hasn't physically prevented anything. It has simply narrowed the world.

This takes us back to Part One. Psychological flexibility isn't having a mind that produces only sensible thoughts. I've never met anyone with one of those.

Freedom is retaining enough room around our thoughts that we can decide whether to follow them.

Your Mind Has Been Taking Notes for Years

There is another reason our thoughts can be so persuasive: many of them have history behind them. A child learns early what brings closeness and what creates trouble. Maybe anger frightened people in his family, so he learned to disappear when conflict began. Maybe achievement brought attention and mistakes brought criticism. Perhaps vulnerability was welcomed. Perhaps it was used against him.

Nobody necessarily taught him any of this directly.

Families teach enormous amounts without ever holding a class.

Life continues the education. Relationships, embarrassment, rejection, success, trauma, friendship, culture, school, work, and thousands of ordinary encounters gradually teach us what to expect. The mind remembers patterns because remembering patterns has survival value.

Unfortunately, it sometimes keeps using an old map after we've entered new territory.

The forty-five-year-old man who can't tolerate disappointing his supervisor may be responding partly to something learned at fifteen. The woman who assumes disagreement means rejection may have learned that equation long before her present relationship existed. Someone who constantly anticipates disaster may have discovered somewhere along the way that vigilance occasionally prevented unpleasant surprises.

Their minds learned.

But learning something doesn't make it permanently true.

Yesterday's protection can become today's limitation.

The Problem Isn't Having the Thought

People sometimes misunderstand ACT and assume the goal is to stop negative thinking.

That would be convenient. It would also leave most of us with a rather frustrating lifelong project.

Try ordering yourself not to think about something important and see how cooperative your mind becomes.

The deeper problem isn't that difficult thoughts occur. It's what happens when our behavior becomes organized around them.

Consider the thought I can't stand feeling this way.

Perhaps you're anxious, lonely, ashamed, angry, or hurt. If I can't stand this becomes an unquestioned fact, getting rid of the feeling becomes an emergency.

And emergencies justify things.

Escape. Attack. Avoid. Check one more time. Send the text you know you shouldn't send. Demand reassurance. Stay home. Drink too much.

The immediate goal becomes changing the internal experience rather than choosing the life you actually want.

ACT makes a surprisingly modest proposal: What if the feeling could remain uncomfortable without becoming an emergency?

And what if I can't stand this could simply be something your mind is saying while you… stand it?

Now something has changed.

Put a Little Grammar Around It

One of the simplest ACT exercises sounds almost too easy to matter.

Instead of: I'm going to fail.

Try:

I'm having the thought that I'm going to fail.

Nothing magical happened. You haven't disproven anything. You might fail. The exercise isn't intended to sneak positive thinking in through the back door.

What changed is your position in relation to the thought.

There is also a difference between I'm a terrible mother and I'm noticing that I'm having the thought that I'm a terrible mother.

The second sentence creates just enough room to become curious. Remember, psychological flexibility? Make enough space to tolerate ambiguity.

What happened? Did you make a mistake? Is there something you need to repair? Is this guilt? Shame? An old standard you can never satisfy? What would being the mother you want to be require of you now?

Those questions are difficult to ask while standing inside the original sentence.

Defusion allows us to stand somewhere else.

You Don't Have to Win an Argument With Your Brain

There is a temptation to turn defusion into another argument with ourselves. Suppose you're lying awake before an important presentation and your mind says, You're going to make a fool of yourself.

You could spend the next hour assembling evidence for the defense.

I've given presentations before. People generally think I'm competent. I know the material.

Your mind, being an experienced critic, may respond:

Yes, but remember what happened in 2014?

Now you're holding court at 2:17 in the morning.

ACT offers another possibility.

There's my mind predicting humiliation again.

And perhaps:

Of course it is. Tomorrow matters to me.

You haven't surrendered to the thought. You aren't agreeing that disaster is coming. You simply aren't required to defeat the prediction before you can sleep, get up tomorrow, walk into the room, and give the presentation.

Sometimes peace comes not from winning the argument but from realizing you don't have to keep arguing.

The Question Behind the Question

This eventually brings us somewhere more useful than asking whether every thought is completely true or false. What does this thought invite me to do?

She doesn't care about me may invite withdrawal.

I have to make him understand may invite another hour of an argument that stopped being productive forty-five minutes ago.

I'm too anxious may invite avoidance.

I don't deserve forgiveness may invite a lifetime of punishment long after responsibility, repair, and restitution have done everything useful they can do.

A thought can contain some truth and still lead us somewhere we don't want to go.

Conversely, a thought can remain frightening while we choose something larger than it.

I'm afraid I'll be rejected—and I want intimacy.

I feel like running—and I want to become someone who stays present.

My mind says I can't handle this—and this matters enough to try.

That small word and can carry an astonishing amount of psychological freedom.

Two things can be true at once.

The mind can speak, and we can choose.

Let the Mind Come Along

I sometimes think we give our minds an impossible job. We expect them to keep us safe, predict the future, explain other people, prevent regret, eliminate uncertainty, settle every question, and make sure we never again experience anything resembling the pain we've experienced before.

No wonder our minds are noisy.

Perhaps the goal isn't finally getting the mind under control. Perhaps it's understanding what kind of companion it is.

The mind remembers things worth remembering and things we would happily forget. It warns us about genuine dangers and imaginary ones. It can solve a complicated problem and then spend half the night wondering whether someone's tone sounded slightly different at dinner.

It is brilliant, frightened, creative, repetitive, protective, and occasionally ridiculous.

And it will probably keep talking.

ACT doesn't ask us to throw the mind out of the car. We need it. It knows things. Sometimes it sees danger before we do. Sometimes it remembers the way home.

We simply don't have to hand it the keys every time it gets nervous.

A thought can sit beside us. Fear can come too. Uncertainty can complain from the back seat.

And we can still decide where we're going.

What to Carry Forward

Part Two adds three things to what we learned in Part One. Thoughts are real events, but they aren't automatically reality. Defusion creates enough room to see what a thought is doing. And psychological flexibility grows when our minds can speak without everything they say becoming an instruction.

Part One gave us room to make choices.

Part Two gives us room around our thoughts.

But thoughts rarely travel alone. Something terrible is going to happen may arrive with a tight chest and racing heart. She doesn't love me may bring sadness or panic. I've failed may arrive carrying shame.

Then another struggle begins.

We don't merely dislike what we're feeling. We start trying to make it disappear.

And sometimes our lives begin shrinking around that effort.

Part Three asks what may be the next unavoidable ACT question: What do we do with the feelings we don't want?

© 2026 Thomas Kurtz. All rights reserved.

Published by Thomas Kurtz Counseling, LLC.