Your state of being is at the heart of how you experience yourself in life. It informs your perspective and your choices. It is your responsibility to protect and restore your state. Yet, when your state is jangled by the challenges of life, you get thrown into a variety of very human reactions — anger, sad, frustrated, scared or even wild, over the moon joy. These reactions can be like a filter for a camera lens that distorts the perspective a bit. You cannot get a clear read on a situation through a distorted lens. These distortions color your view and disrupt your state.

Our ability to adopt another person’s point of view (POV) steps us and our clients into accepting other people more completely and ultimately reveals the felt sense knowledge of the koan-like question “who is another human being?” More on that at another time ?

As our clients develop and enhance their ability to assume another’s POV….

Yesterday, I opened the back door to the porch and this guy was RIGHT THERE! With his head in the air. Yikes. I closed the door. QUICKLY.

As I caught my breath, I realized how quickly the thought, “there’s a snake on the porch,” became a story. For those few moments, that story felt REAL!

Many if not most therapists, coaches, spiritual directors would disagree on the value of the narrative in helping our clients.

Cognitive distortions may be the clearest view we can get on just how tangled up in a narrative we can all get. For those who journey with some variant of a mood disorder, these distortions can be debilitating.

The one thing most practitioners might disagree with about Acceptance and Integration Training (AAIT) is the value of our clients’ narrative. With AAIT, the narrative doesn’t serve as the primary filter, this principle does: