Values - Beyond Right and Wrong
From an ACT perspective, there is no such thing as right values or wrong values. You know, values are simply expressing deep in your heart what do you wanna be about as a human being? How do you wanna treat yourself and others and the world around you? How do you want to live your life? It's a bit like your taste in pizza or ice cream.
It'd be crazy of me to say pepperoni is the right taste in pizza and quattro stagioni, I'm not sure that's how you pronounce it, is the wrong taste in pizza. Values are like that. It's up to you as an individual to get in touch with how you wanna behave as a human being. Our clients often get caught up in how they think they should act. I better act like this if I want to be a good person. If I want to be a good person, what are the values that I should live?
And so do you notice all the kind of fusion with rules here? I must be a good person. What should or shouldn't I do? You know, you wanna unhook from that stuff and just come back to really deep in my heart, how do I wanna behave? Now, I often get asked the question, you know, what happens if your client has really destructive values? And I gotta say, I've never actually heard of that happening.
ACT is getting into prisons, into all sorts of forensic settings, into rehabilitation programs with people who've done awful crimes. And I've never ever heard of a client that says, what I really wanna be about deep in my heart is sadism, cruelty and hatred. I've never heard of that. But if you ever did have a client and and they weren't just trying to wind you up and they weren't just trying to be difficult with you or resistant, that that was their genuine values, my recommendation would be refer them on to someone else. All of us have done things that were destructive. We've all done stuff that was destructive to ourselves and destructive to other peoples.
Right? Many times in our lives. So let me ask you, you know, when you were doing that destructive stuff, would you consider that to be yourself living your values, kind of doing towards moves, behaving like the person you want to be? Or would you consider that hooked by your thoughts and feelings, pulled into away moves, behaving unlike the person you really want to be? If our clients have been doing destructive stuff to themselves and to others, let's assume that's not their core values. Let's assume that they're hooked by thoughts and feelings and being pulled away from their values.
Because remember, if I wanna appreciate my client like a rainbow, not a roadblock, that's a good pragmatic assumption to start from. If I start from the opposite assumption that my client's destructive behavior represents their core values, that deep in their heart this is just a destructive person, it's gonna be very hard to appreciate him like a rainbow.