“People suffer.” That’s the first sentence of psychologist Steven Hayes’ latest book (he’s written 26), Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. His basic premise is: Accept pain and live your life. “My work is about a loving posture: Accept your history, feel your feelings, notice your thoughts, and carry all that forward down a path that you value that’s neither indulgence nor suppression,” Hayes said in a recent interview with Salon.com.

Hayes works with a model called ACT: “accepting your feelings, disentangling yourself from your mind, connecting with your values, showing up in this moment and getting your feet moving in accordance with your values,” he told Salon. “It helps an amazingly broad array of problems, from chronic pain and epilepsy to doing well at work, anxiety, depression, substance abuse.”

The article stirred up a flurry of letters on Salon—readers accused Hayes of not acknowledging the seemingly Buddhist roots of this approach (“life is painful”) and derided its otherwise derivative nature. One reader points out that Scott M. Peck’s landmark The Road Less Traveled begins: “Life is difficult.” Another cites Dr. David Reynolds’s Constructive Living Method, which he calls a “simpler, more profound version” of ACT: “1) Accept your feelings 2) Know your purpose 3) Do what needs doing.” Hayes himself good-naturedly (for the most part) joins in the cacophony a couple of times: “ACT did not emerge from Buddhism beyond what any child of the 1960’s would have known,” he says, adding that he’s written about the incidental crossover before.

It seems to me that some of the letter-writers are missing the point. Of all the self-help books I’ve read or seminars I’ve attended, the most profound insights have come from the most unoriginal sources––words that, for whatever reason, were phrased just right for me at that time. One Salon forum writer, “Lucky Achiever,” says it like this: “The point of philosophy, psychology, and the like, is not to be original…The point, it seems to me, is to make (mental) connections, explore ideas, provoke. If Hayes was inspired by Buddhist philosophy, and wants to acknowledge that, so be it. But we can’t expect every writer to acknowledge every inspiration, or dismiss every writer or scholar whose ideas resemble ideas we have encountered elsewhere.”

Image: Salon.com