So a lot of clients come to me and they say that they just feel stuck and they may be stuck because they feel like they're suffering from just some chronic depression or maybe anxiety has been getting them down.

Maybe they're a little bit frustrated in their marriage or they don't feel like they're doing all that they can as a parent.

And their relationship might be stumbling. They're wondering why, why, why them,

or does anything really even matter? And it might be that you've been in and out of therapy,

you're trying to cope with this inner turmoil, or just you don't feel like you are engaged in

life, and you feel more distant or deadened or numbed or overwhelmed and so if you've been

struggling for some time you know you've probably done a lot of the questioning of why you know

why can't I get over this or why can't I feel better why is life so hard maybe why

hasn't therapy worked or why can't they just be a normal person like everybody else why

why can't I be happy and you might feel victimized somehow by questions that seem to not really have any ready answers. And you're looking, trust me, you're looking for the answers. You're reading everything you can. You're talking to people. People are just telling you, here's how you need to do it. Just do this or just do that. So sometimes cornered by your own emotional pain, you struggle with it,

you feel as if your life is narrowing in around you. Well, according to Dr. Stephen Hayes,

the founder of acceptance and commitment therapy, and he's got a wonderful book called Get Out of

Your Mind and Into Your Life. He says that if you've been fighting a war inside your head,

what would it be like if instead of trying to win that war, you knew a way to step out of it?

And this doesn't mean that the war would stop. It's probably going to continue. Life's going to continue to happen around you.

But rather, it means that you would no longer try to live inside that war zone with your psychological survival seemingly dependent on the outcome of the war. And he says,

what if that were possible? So today on the virtual couch, I'm going to dig a little bit deeper

into my friend act, acceptance and commitment therapy. And we're going to talk a little bit about

why is human suffering universal? What do you do with it? And is there something different with you? Or are we all kind of going through it in a different way? We're just kind of not aware that everybody else around us is walking around going through some of the same struggles. And even if they are, what does that do for me? How does that apply to me? So today we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about a little bit more of how to get unstuck. And it's not the traditional way that you think about. It's not going to be the just pick yourself up by your bootstraps, rub a little dirt in it, and just be happy because if you've been trying to do that for a little while. And if it works for you great. But if not, if you're kind of like most humans, and that works in fits and starts

or bits and pieces, then today, this episode's

for you. We're going to cover that and so much more coming up on this episode of the virtual

couch.

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