Secret #60: There is No Normal with Dr. Steven C. Hayes [REPLAY]
In this thought-provoking conversation, Dr. Steven C. Hayes challenges the idea that mental health care should follow rigid, one-size-fits-all models. He explores why our obsession with efficiency, like the standard “8 session” treatment plan, can miss the mark and even harm those it is meant to help. Instead, Steven invites us to sit with uncertainty, discomfort, and even panic, recognizing that true healing is rarely linear.
If you have ever felt like therapy or support systems were trying to “fix” you rather than understand you, this episode will resonate deeply. Dr. Hayes’ insights remind us that progress takes time, flexibility, and the courage to question the systems we have built.
Highlights:
Why one-size-fits-all therapy models fail clients
The hidden flaws of the “8 session” treatment plan
How the obsession with efficiency harms mental health care
The importance of sitting with uncertainty in therapy
Shifting from “fixing” clients to truly understanding them
TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Chris McCurry introduces esteemed guest Steve Hayes, psychologist.
03:57 People view stars, value mean over individuals.
06:41 Eugenics has a dark and hidden history.
12:41 Smart person suggests renorming pilot requirements for inclusivity.
15:17 Individual over group, idiomic stats, paradigm shift.
19:50 Struggle with self-help book while developing apps.
20:36 Complex system model needed for mental health.
24:40 Embrace humanity, change cultural conversation, empower community.
27:51 Wisdom traditions and science complement each other.
31:11 Geek stat, boosting variability and individual differences.
34:21 Selfish mindfulness and self-compassion lead to harm.
40:19 Listening, measuring, and modeling lead to improvement.
43:07 Personality testing validation through reflective questioning process.
47:25 Liberated feeling from self-discovery in therapy.
48:56 Maintain health, relationships, and adaptable processes.
About Dr. Steven C. Hayes
Check out Dr. Hayes Youtube Channel
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Visit Institute For Better health
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Visit Dr. Hayes website and get his free newsletter
Dr. Steven C. Hayes is an Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Nevada, Reno and President of the Institute for Better Health, a nearly 50-year old charitable organization dedicated to better mental and behavioral health. He is also the author of 48 books and over 700 scientific articles, originator of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Relational Frame Theory, and co-founder of Process-Based Therapy and of PsychFlex.
Dr. Hayes has been President of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies and the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science, among other scientific groups. His work has been recognized by several awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies and the Impact of Science on Application Award from the Society for the Advancement of Behavior Analysis. A Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he is one of the most cited psychologists in the world.
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[00:00:00] We are all very human and fallible, and yet we live in a society that rewards pretending we're not fallible. Or the range of acceptable fallibility is narrow. We are constantly comparing our insides to other people's outsides, and feeling inadequate and guilty, even ashamed. Trying to blend in means parts of ourselves must disappear, and we must then live in fear that we will be found out.
Here, together, we will create a space where we can laugh. We cry and carry our suffering and hurts lightly in the service of being deeply human. This is Life's Dirty Little Secrets.
Emma Waddington: Welcome to Life's Dirty Little Secrets. I'm Emma Waddington. It's
Chris McCurry: And I'm Chris McCurry. And today we are privileged to have as our guest, Dr. Steve Hayes. Steve is an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of [00:01:00] Nevada, Reno. I had the great privilege of working with him as a student, 37 years ago, back in, in the early days of acceptance and commitment therapy.
Chris McCurry: Steve, is a prolific author. He has authored 47 books and nearly 700 scientific articles, which is extraordinary. As such, he is one of the most cited psychologists in the world as he continues to innovate in the field of psychology. the originator of acceptance and commitment therapy, which many of you who listen to this podcast have heard us.
Chris McCurry: talk about before, and he's developed a model of human suffering and prosperity called the psychological flexibility model. And you can find All about that in one of his more recent books, A Liberated Mind. I should mention one other thing. Steve is a songwriter of considerable wit, and you [00:02:00] can go on YouTube and find a video of Steve singing one of his songs, which is, pertinent to today's topic. I encourage you to do that.
Chris McCurry: we are very happy to have him here today and please welcome Steve Hayes.
Steven C Hayes: I'm happy to be with you, Chris and Emma. Looking forward to the conversation.
Steven C Hayes: Let's see what kind
Chris McCurry: should,
Steven C Hayes: we can get into.
Chris McCurry: that. The end of normal. So what is the end of normal, Steve?
Steven C Hayes: Well, we've been living inside a set of assumptions for 150 years that's put upon us by biostatisticians. And it turns out that the model's wrong, but too late because it's gone into kitchen table conversations around the world. Most people don't realize that the word normal wasn't even an English language until about the 1840s, and then it really got its push up in the 1860s and so forth, and in part for dirty reasons that we'll explore, but.
Steven C Hayes: It became to be [00:03:00] a kind of a central idea in our entire world culture. And we've built our systems of education, of mental health, treatment and of illness and, and medical treatment around it. And it turns out that it's false. It's mathematically provably false. We've known that it's false for a hundred years, but we only realized it in the last 15.
Steven C Hayes: So it's a remarkable story. About how scientists can distort the arc of culture in such a way that hurts people instead of helps people and it needs to be undone but it's going to be a hard left and it's going to take a generation.
Chris McCurry: So how did this whole concept of normal come about? You said it's, it's really a. You know, a product of, geez, the 19th century,
Steven C Hayes: Yeah, well, you know, there's something really important to it. I mean, if you had to. You know, pick some major, major advances in science, you might pick statistics. And [00:04:00] Cadillac was the first one to actually do it. His first one to measure a human property was actually the the, the wastes and arm lengths of Scottish soldiers and calculate an average and say, by golly, that's the norm.
Steven C Hayes: And he thought that if anything deviated from the norm, it was disorder. You know, he had a background in astronomy and when you would do observations of the planets and the stars and so forth, the way you do that is a bunch of people do observations and you'd believe the average more than anyone because you knew the stars couldn't be jumping around like that, but people can jump around in their viewing of it.
Steven C Hayes: And so the individual was error and the mean was true. And so he kind of works with that and actually said in writing that anything deviated from the norm was, was wrong. And actually we went through a part of our culture. People don't know this, but did you know that way? I mean, in the Saturday evening review, you know, the the magazine that everybody [00:05:00] read there'd be competitions to who's the most normal.
Steven C Hayes: And it's a little creepy, but the one that was. Especially focused on is who is the most normal woman in the United States and they have competitions and they had measurements of bus size, waist size et cetera. And you would try to compete to be the most normal woman because that was what was worshipped.
Steven C Hayes: And anything that deviated from the norm is something wrong with you.
Chris McCurry: so normal became ideal, which
Steven C Hayes: Yeah, actually. Literally, and there were statues made, and they named the statues Norma. Literally. Isn't that crazy? Well, yeah, but you know Galton had a different idea. Galton had the idea, he was the first person to invent the standard deviation.
Steven C Hayes: The bell curve was known, but it didn't have a metric for it. And he didn't worship the average, he worshipped the tips of the distribution and thought that, you know, some people are better than others [00:06:00] and the way we'd know that by looking at the differences between people, put them on a bell curve, he was Erasmus Grandson and Charles Darwin's cousin, they both had the same grandfather, different mothers.
Steven C Hayes: But, , his first book is called Hereditary Genius in which he argued that, there's this thing called G of intelligence and that it's genetic and not nature and nurture, that's Galton. Raw G, that's Galton. Intelligence tests, we didn't have the tests yet, we soon got them.
Steven C Hayes: That's Galton. What else has Galton known for? Well, here's the, how did we get there issue. He was the father of eugenics. , he invented the field and all of the early biostatisticians, every single one were eugenicists, including people who would quote quite comfortably Fisher's Z in your stats.
Steven C Hayes: Carl Pearson with Pearson's R, your correlation and stats. If anybody listening to me has taken a stat class or math class, you've [00:07:00] probably heard it. Every single one re eugenicists because that's what the tools were for and what he had argued was we were de evolving as a species because we're allowing the unworthy people to breed and what we need to do is measure.
Steven C Hayes: These attributes and make sure that we have policies up to and including sterilization and eventually when the laws that are written here in the United States were taken to Germany, eventually extermination of those who are unworthy and different. So it has a dirty history and psychology is deep into it.
Steven C Hayes: But when you sit at the kitchen table and you say, Oh, I'm so glad my kid was, you know, put into gifted and talented. And, Oh, yeah, well, my kid's in special ed or, you know, but my achievement test is so good. There's a cackling in the background, if you listen hard and it's. The dead and buried bodies of [00:08:00] the eugenicists who created these tools.
Chris McCurry: But,
Steven C Hayes: It is horrifying, isn't it? And I've dug into the history of it, which I'm doing. I'm probably going to write a book called the end of normal. I'm realizing how deep it goes and how little we know. I'll give you a few stats. What percentage of presidents of the American Psychological Association from 1892 to 1947? I was born in 48. That's not too long ago. We're card carrying to Genesis, and the answer is two thirds. Okay, well who are some of the famous ones? You'd say, surely, you know, some of these people like Terman, the IQ test, etc. Yeah, yeah, he was. Very racist, very much a eugenicist. Do you know that John B.
Steven C Hayes: Watson was on the three person committee of the American Eugenic Society of the Hereditary Basis of IQ. John B. Watson. The one who says, give me a, a baker and [00:09:00] a, you know, 3 kids in a boat and I'll make them a baker and a candlestick maker. At least I'd like to be able to, you know, eugenics was so deep inside our intellectual traditions and it was considered progressive.
Steven C Hayes: And the great experiment in Germany was considered progressive at the time that, you know, even people that you'd just be shocked what genetic base of it tells us. I thought you're all about learning and and behavioral principles now on the very committee that encouraged that. For example, we not.
Steven C Hayes: Have education for black and brown people. We teach them how to be waiters and maids and gardeners and, you know, on and on it goes. It's so deep and so dirty that you just have to take a breath in, even before you get to Germany and what they did with it. So it's time to push the reset button for reasons that we'll get into.
Steven C Hayes: But the, the biggest, baddest reason in the block wasn't just the dirty history, but it's mathematically provably false and it will never, ever be recovered. The [00:10:00] methods that we use in standard biostatistics can't tell you what to do as a person. They cannot. It will always fail and the physicists have known it for a hundred years and the psychologists woke up about 15 years ago and it's just now getting into the conversation.
Steven C Hayes: Normal has to be killed, died, put a wooden stake through that vampire's heart
Steven C Hayes: it's hurting people everywhere you look.
Chris McCurry: but isn't that why we cling to these things, is because they tell us what to do? I mean, it's kind of like stereotypes and,
Chris McCurry: and
Steven C Hayes: exactly right. There's a cognitive bias towards it. It simplifies and you can show that, you know, that's built into the human psyche. You know, that little kind of central tendency of a few things organizing a lot of things because, you know, you can relate anything to anything else in any possible way do exercises and workshops, showing that pick two objects on your desk, say, how did one produce the other?
Steven C Hayes: You'll come up with an answer because that's how [00:11:00] flexible we are. And living in that world of infinite possibilities that are symbolic reasoning abilities give us is wonderful for creating tools like the ones we're using right now that our parents couldn't have done. Heck, we couldn't have done earlier.
Steven C Hayes: We're old enough. But here we are talking across how many miles we don't care where we are. We don't care. And who's going to listen to it around the world. And that's wonderful. That's great. Yeah, but that same little tool of cognition can create those stereotypes. And when it's fed by voices that say, this is the real true score, just like Ketele looking at the stars.
Steven C Hayes: This is what's really real because underneath all that variability is this latent thing like the disease inside depression or this latent thing like the, the real source of your intelligence. Yeah. Put that into the world culture. And it's a train wreck everywhere we look. It limits human lives instead of [00:12:00] empowering them.
Chris McCurry: And this well, before we get into that one of the stories that I've heard you tell that I think is quite dramatic is about the pilots.
Steven C Hayes: Yeah. Well, this is Todd Rose tells a story in his book, the end of average. Yeah. When he tells the story of it, because when a planes got fast enough with jet planes and so forth, they went from being very reliable planes and back when they were prop driven planes to being unreliable in the sense that people were crashing over and over and over and over again.
Steven C Hayes: And, you know, yeah. Thought, shoot, something might've happened to the, and it looks like it's not mechanical error. It's pilot error. And so somebody had the intelligence to think out of the box and say, you know what, we should really look to see whether or not the instruments fit the people. They were doing a project to re norm all the pilots because you don't get to be a pilot unless you're normal.
Steven C Hayes: If you're seven feet tall, the air force doesn't want you. If you're four [00:13:00] foot five and 400 pounds, you're not going to be a pilot. So they were already squeezing it down, you know? But this particular smart person said, I wonder how many people are normal defined by within plus or minus one standard deviation of all the things you need to be able to operate a plane, like reach the, pedals or to be able to, you know, pull on the on the wheel, et cetera.
Steven C Hayes: Well, they, they looked at all of the pilots at the time is about 3000. How many people were within plus or minus 1 standard aviation, all the critical things that you need to fly a plane? The answer was none. Well, then, okay. Of those 12 things, how many had at least 3? The answer is like 4%, you know, so what they did brilliantly and you know about it because you live it in your own life.
Steven C Hayes: They made everything adjustable. You can move the seat forward and back. You can pull the pedals for you if you want. Then suddenly the crashless stopped. [00:14:00] Well, you wouldn't buy a car that didn't have an adjustable front seat. An adjustable steering wheel, etc. You just wouldn't buy it because it wouldn't fit you.
Steven C Hayes: Yeah, but you're going to buy medications. You're going to buy programs. You're going to buy psychotherapy methods. You're going to go, you're going to, around what? Randomized trials, organized around central tendency. That's the norm. Or whatever, maybe not literally the mean could be a medium, whatever it is, harmonic mean, I don't care arranged against what variability between people.
Steven C Hayes: That's what a standard deviation is. And so you are being sold one size fits all solutions everywhere from buying a blouse to, you know, picking up your Eloquist prescription and Those statistics that are in the randomized trials, that are in the FDA, that are in the businesses that sell you goods and services, et cetera, have awakened to the fact [00:15:00] that we need adjustable pedals, you know, adjustable throttles on everything.
Steven C Hayes: Why? Because there is no such thing as normal. And when we. apply what we had to create a new name for it. We call them idionomic stats instead of normative stats. Stats in which you look within the person over time, you model it, then you look at other people, and if you see something you might have missed with just one person, you conditionally add it.
Steven C Hayes: And you keep it if and only if it explains more of the individuals. So you take stats and you turn it on its head. Instead of the average is true and differences between people are error, the individual is true and the group is a source of error. When you do that, you better be ready to take a breath in.
Steven C Hayes: Because every single place we look, what we think, what we teach, what we train, is wrong regularly. [00:16:00] And that includes everything I'm known for, by the way, everything values acceptance. It's all wrong. Sometimes it's. The best of a bad lot for reasons I can explain, I think we have dialed in some important processes, but we are now busily. Not burning down the house, but pulling in the reins on things I've spent my life building. And instead, teach how to fit it with those adjustable throttles and seat belts and seats, metaphorically. So that, no, not everybody needs mindfulness. No, not everybody needs acceptance, at least not now. You're a first responder, you're out there in a, an ambulance driver?
Steven C Hayes: I gotta train you on how to suppress your emotions, or at least not go there while you're driving.
Emma Waddington: That's right.
Steven C Hayes: And then when you get home, I want to teach you how to open up
Steven C Hayes: and process that in a healthy way. That isn't a martini , but, everything needs to be adjusted now and personalized in the [00:17:00] area of precision psychology, personalized psychology, what we call idionomics, idiographic that then goes nomathetic.
Steven C Hayes: In other words, Generalizations across people, idiographic, meaning within the person, individualized, if and only if it helps us see the individual even clearer. And, these articles are just coming out. The stat methods are actively being developed. A number of them have been developed and deployed in apps and things we can talk about.
Steven C Hayes: So I'm spending my retirement. Happily saying it depends about everything else that I've done in my life and and maybe giving people the tools as to how to fit what we know about what empowers lives to their life.
Chris McCurry: Well, certainly we have some tools now that we didn't have before, like apps, where somebody's got, you know, their phone and it's their phone and they've got their particular set up
Steven C Hayes: and I've got my little, you know, health app and [00:18:00] it'll tell me if I look, how many steps did I take today? And I know I have an average how over the last week for me and what it was last month for me. And last year for me, and yeah, I do have health goals at age 75, you better and because you start losing it if you don't use it.
Steven C Hayes: And so you know, I want to keep those things up and I do, but now the stats that we're developing and I can give you some examples allow us to look inside those streams. Beginning with things that almost anybody could understand, if I just graphed, let's say, how open you were to your emotions, to, let's say, the quality of your relationships with your spouse, over time, you would see these things are correlated.
Steven C Hayes: You could see it, we can calculate it, but we can go way beyond that now. We can do things using artificial intelligence tools to look at, well, then what does that lead to? And then what does that lead to? [00:19:00] And you begin to see these patterns. And anybody who's curious about their own life, you've seen it.
Steven C Hayes: You know, I start withdrawing from people, next thing you know, I'm overeating. And I'm overeating, next thing you know, I'm lethargic and not sleeping well. And when I'm not sleeping well, I get grouchy and I'm not very good at work. And the next thing you know, I'm having an argument with my spouse. And, you know, you see it. Well Meanwhile, you're being told, Everybody ought to have this. No, what do you need? And so, you know, I'm trying to write a self help book right now, and it's hard, but I'm also developing apps and deploying them. So, yeah, you mentioned Cyclex, which is for clinicians, MindGrapher, which is the data collection, the case conceptualization app, but we're on a journey.
Steven C Hayes: To collect, ironically, to do this, you need a lot of data. You need data within the person, but you also need to be able to look to see similarities so that you can understand the person [00:20:00] even more because there's only so many ways to get screwed up. And so it isn't like you're brand new, different. No, you're unique in combination.
Steven C Hayes: But what's going on with you is part of a complex system. It's at biological level, social level, and psychological level. If we can model that and have enough data and enough people, and God please keep Apple and Google's dirty hands off it, I think we can do a lot better at giving people health advice, psychological advice, and really take this very thin stream of, you know, psychological help.
Steven C Hayes: You can almost not find it. If you find it, you can't pay for it. Out into the mainstream and onto the factory floor with Joe Sixpack and the rest, you know, that who, after COVID, everybody needs, knows they need help. It's not one out of five who have a mental health disorder. It's five out of five who need mental resilience.[00:21:00]
Steven C Hayes: But you can't do it as one size fits all. You can't do it as this guru, this leader, this, this brand, this church, this anything is the solution. That's not real. You're, you, you're an individual. What do you need to take the next step forward? And science ought to be able to tell you that and tell the helping professionals who work with you that.
Steven C Hayes: And that's where we're going. That's what I'm going to spend the rest of my life trying to do.
Emma Waddington: I think, I wanted to just come in and say for me listening to this, I mean, one of the things that one of the biggest pivots in my life actually was, when I came to act to acceptance and commitment therapy, a graduate student and Louise McHugh introduced me. 2005, it was, and it was. It was transformational because up [00:22:00] until then I was being taught that I should know better than my clients that I had this wisdom and this ability to reason that they didn't have because it was a very CBT sort of second wave.
Emma Waddington: Anyway, it was a different role and that I somehow was the rational one and I should. Have an answer and instead I was finding myself sitting with clients and thinking I know exactly what you're feeling
Emma Waddington: I've had what? I am you, just not right now.
Steven C Hayes: Exactly. Yeah.
Emma Waddington: place for me. And then I'd have to go in to my supervisor and sort of pretend that I knew what I was doing when I knew full well, that that was just not real.
Emma Waddington: And I remember I went to a workshop with Kelly Wilson in 2005, and it was like, I [00:23:00] come home. Thank goodness, thank goodness we can start to talk about what I'm experiencing and this common humanity that is sort of woven into act. And the reality is that we're all in the same soup and that we don't have an answer.
Emma Waddington: And the words it depends is like an elixir to me as a clinician, but as a human, actually. Because it does depend and not having an answer is both. Both in my, sort of, when I sit in the clinic, but also as a human when I'm talking to my children, when I'm talking to my friends. Like, I don't have the answer.
Emma Waddington: And there's a warmth and a beauty about that. And that's okay.
Steven C Hayes: Yeah. I think there's a leveling process there that happens. And I understand why sometimes people step up into the expertise role because it can have [00:24:00] Benefits and it, it does sometimes feel more comfortable. The thing that drove me out of it was also feeling deep down as though I was being a fraud
Steven C Hayes: because I would tell people to do things that when I had the challenges, they didn't work for me.
Emma Waddington: That's right.
Steven C Hayes: And eventually the, the, the contradiction there between my behavior therapy training, the CBT training and my actual life became so great. Plus I had the wonderful, wonderful experience of developing a panic disorder, which. You know, really humbles you when you have something happen like that, where you don't know what the next step forward is and you feel like you're hitting bottom. So I think if we can instead, embrace our humanity is helping professionals if you're doing that, but just as a friend or as a parent or as a coworker or whatever, and meet people where they are, but then let's change the cultural conversation so that we're not [00:25:00] in the back of our head thinking. Deep down there's something wrong, not that you're not thinking it, but that you're not buying into the idea that deep down there's something wrong with you and people need to be fixed.
Steven C Hayes: And this neighbor over here is, you know, crazy and on and on it goes. And instead, let's find a way in community, in connection to empower our, our lives to individually and in community. You know, who knows how much we can do, you know, whether it's climate change or economic disparities or Immigration or prejudice who knows how far we can go, but I pretty much know how far we'll go if we stay inside this false narrative That there's like normal people and broken people and you secretly believe you're in one category, but you pretend that you're in the other
Emma Waddington: Mm hmm. So true.
Emma Waddington: That's
Steven C Hayes: where everybody's walking around that secret, [00:26:00] and it's all the same secrets.
Emma Waddington: right. Yeah. So true.
Chris McCurry: that's something we've talked about here is that we're always comparing our insides to other people's outsides.
Steven C Hayes: You betcha. And you know, it's, I love the title of your podcast, and it's deeply true, isn't it? But I don't think it means running out and just screaming to the hills what our secrets are. I think it's a matter of noting what the processes are that have led us into this place where we think that we get to be part of the group only by pretending and putting on a false face, a persona.
Steven C Hayes: You know the greek word for mask and that when you do that you'll be loved and included Or if you don't know how to do that Then play the pathetic card and just say help me help me i'm so broken, you know, like let me in you know the uh, uh Because otherwise i'm out in the cold Both of those are false You are not broken You're not [00:27:00] God's gift to the world either, in the sense of you're great and grand and you'll make the group better, great again, whatever group you're in.
Steven C Hayes: No, you're a human being.
Emma Waddington: Yeah.
Steven C Hayes: you are on a journey of growth and development that's shared with everybody around you there on that same journey. And so let's, you know, hold each other's hands and get going on our journey, but, and find out how best, you know, I think our wisdom traditions, our literature.
Steven C Hayes: Our, our, you know, the best of us, the best musicians and artists and novelists and therapists and spiritual leaders have been saying things that are true for a long time. But science can weed out some of the ones that are not so important or even wrong and some of the ones that are helpful. So can we also take this wonderful tool that led to us our ability to have these conversations across space, for [00:28:00] example, and be able to step out and say, you know, Here's some of the things that have been in our deepest, most wise cultural traditions that are of special use.
Steven C Hayes: If you can learn how to, try them out and apply them to what you want to do in your life. And I, I don't think when you do that, it's, well, it looks like it's going to be a cacophony because every individual is different. In fact, it'll be. A lot easier because somebody did the calculations. There's more than a million combinations of the signs and symptoms in the DSM.
Steven C Hayes: Does that sound simple to you? You know, but there's only so many processes that really, really matter regularly, their combined combination and how to fit them to your culture, your context, your purpose, your goal. Yeah, that's idiographic that that has to be looked at and updated constantly. You might walk out of the door after listening to this podcast and a truck hits you and you lose [00:29:00] the functioning of your legs.
Steven C Hayes: I just broke my elbow on a hike, hike, and uh, Uh, in Death Valley, and I, I can guarantee it was like an instant glimpse into what it might be like to be 90. And it's going to take a lot of adjustments for me to not be able to open a jar or turn a doorknob. You know, and then when I get there I'll see how good I am at being able to deal with it.
Steven C Hayes: Shockingly being put there was like, Oh dear, I don't know if I like this. A lot of adjustments need to be made on the same way. You know, life is not promising you that you're going to be able to use the same. Skills and tools and strengths that you have now. over time. So you better learn how to be resilient
Emma Waddington: Yeah.
Steven C Hayes: And if you look backwards in your life, you can see them. If you look forwards, you can't see them, but you will when you [00:30:00] get there. So let's, you know, build our resilience skills and one step at a time. And as my mother used to say, our own stunken away, Yiddish for stinking, learn how to do better. I think science can help us.
Steven C Hayes: And that's what I'm up to with these apps, PsychFlex, Minecrafter, and these articles about how wrong, how much we've been on a false journey driven by racism and classism that has been lying, not just to us, but to the statisticians and the scientists so thoroughly that We don't even know we're being lied to, which is pretty sad.
Chris McCurry: Or the people lying to us don't know they're lying to us.
Steven C Hayes: Yeah, that's the point. That's the point. You know, I can, I can say this in geek stat, but it'll lose most of the folks, but I'm going to do it anyway, but really close a quick way. You know, all these means and [00:31:00] variations and all that and all that stuff used and learn and staff class when I give this talk and I, I point out that.
Steven C Hayes: You know, Galton had this idea that we would just variability between people and it would tell you about variability within the person over time. In other words, if you knew how to sort in the psychology of individual differences is what it was called, but it really wasn't about individuals is about differences.
Steven C Hayes: Would help us with individuals because we, we would know who are the good ones and who are the bad ones. And we'd be able to sort of evolve as a human species eugenics, but maybe also by selecting people who are really good. You know, the army and, you know, be test and, and which by the way, if almost always the officers were white and the soldiers were black.
Steven C Hayes: I mean, that wasn't by accident, et cetera. No, but if we can, if you take some of those statistical tools recently, recently, I mean the last 20, 30 years, statisticians said, [00:32:00] okay, I understand that the mean doesn't represent the individual. I get it. So we'll do multi level modeling and we'll model the individual and we'll put it in as the beginning.
Steven C Hayes: And if you don't know what multi level modeling is, it's okay. I'm just saying. The Geek Statisticians have a way of modeling the individual growth curves of everybody first before they get to the differences between the groups when they do these big studies. Okay, great. We tested our methods, which, which we look just at the individual first and then at other individuals, if and only if it helps us understand most individuals versus What stats does now to model the individuals and I'll give you a horrifying kind of picture of it.
Steven C Hayes: One, you can have something like this. Let me give you an example. If you're kind to yourself, you're kind to other people. Very strong normative effect. Everybody knows it. Self compassion is great for compassion for others. You can [00:33:00] hardly find a study that doesn't, that disagrees. Now you model people one at a time, one at a time, one at a time, one at a time.
Steven C Hayes: Then you put those data into multi level modeling that models the individual. Everybody. The kinder they are to themselves, the nicer they are to others. With maybe like one or two exceptions, like one percent. Then you do it individually, the way I think it needs to be done. One out of ten people. The nicer they are to themselves, the meaner and nastier they are to others.
Steven C Hayes: And you know, these people, you've met them. You hang out with them. If you go to a mindfulness class, they're sitting next to you. They're the ones who say, you take care of the kids. I'm going to go meditate. What? Really? Yes, really. Now, if we're the wisdom traditions from which that came, you get hit over the head with a stick or they make you do the dishes, but you get it in, in, you know, red book.
Steven C Hayes: It tells you to do it. Oprah tells you or whatever. All right. And next thing you know, we've got [00:34:00] selfish mindfulness, selfish self compassion, it's a train wreck. And it's because the stats are lying to us. Because the, when you, well, I'll tell you the secret on it. When you model the individual in multilevel modeling, you do it in comparison to the average.
Steven C Hayes: What that does is it squeezes people down. And the trajectories that are in other directions almost disappear. Well, if you're a clinician, you want to know, is this helpful or hurtful? I don't want it squeezed down and for everybody it's helpful, when 1 out of 10 it's hurtful. I don't want that. But that's what the stats will do.
Steven C Hayes: That's what the studies will say. Almost everyone. And the statisticians will say, we are modeling the individuals. No, you're not. You're living inside Galton's eugenic dreams. Still! Wake up! You want to model the individual? [00:35:00] Model the individual. Then start looking at others. And the stats to do that are available, but almost invisible, almost never used.
Steven C Hayes: We're finding them in weird places, like in computer science with big data AI. And we're ripping them off, pulling them in, putting them in this therapy app that will help clinicians, you know, model, let's say what's going on within the life of time of the individual, the way YouTube models, how to sell your films. You can do it.
Chris McCurry: there was a, an article in I think the New York Times just a couple of days ago about somebody working with one of these AI programs and trying to get the program to create pictures of normal.
Steven C Hayes: Hmm.
Chris McCurry: And at some point the, the chat bot started like pushing back saying like, there, there isn't any such thing. [00:36:00] And finally the, the human kept pushing and Chat bot finally came up with just a blank canvas.
Steven C Hayes: love it. I love it. We've looked inside some of our studies and, and we see that some of the things we're saying are the norm, the average, the usual, the median, whatever. When we go in this idionomic way, when we model each individual, we're down to things like 2 percent of the population show that pattern.
Emma Waddington: Wow.
Steven C Hayes: It's just ridiculous how much we're being lied to. But people need to know, I think, that the help is on the way, but also that when we really care about what uplifts or pushes down individual lives, new answers are showing up. They're not incoherent. It kind of makes sense. They build. It's not like we have to burn down the house.
Steven C Hayes: We just have to push the reset [00:37:00] button and say, okay, what if every voice matters. And if you're not listening, measuring and modeling, you're, you're essentially not listening to that voice. And it's an old idea out of behavior therapy and stuff, but in the therapy world, in physical medicine, same thing. You got a cancer diagnosis, you know, get, if you can get the full genomic and epigenomic and analyses and cutting edge science that's on how to treat cancer, you're probably going to survive better if it's one size fits all.
Steven C Hayes: Here's what the norm and then randomized trials say almost certainly. We already know that. There's some extraordinary answers medically sometimes that apply to a small percentage of people, but it's not chaos. It's not, we're not talking about woo woo. We're talking about you and learning how to do that and change the cultural conversations.
Steven C Hayes: A lot of our cultures out there know how to do it. It's [00:38:00] Western industrialized, rich. Democratic and white ones that don't the 12 percent of the world's population that's producing 88 percent of the world's site science and 95 percent of the world's citations. You know, we've just. Not listened. So we don't know, you know, that indigenous peoples in Canada have a completely different view of values works very, very well.
Steven C Hayes: And by the way, protects the land and some things that we're struggling with and you just go down the road, you know, just go down the line. We have so much to learn from the diversity in the world and the diversity, just in the sense of the people probably working with you right around you, but we're not listening.
Steven C Hayes: And therapists have to be part of the
Emma Waddington: uh, um, uh, um, uh, yeah. Um, uh, um, uh,
Emma Waddington: um, uh,
Chris McCurry: Well, again, I think it comes back to this idea of, you [00:39:00] know, we worship efficiency and, you know, having a 8 session modulized treatment plan that just everybody gets, you know, and if it doesn't work, there's something wrong with the patient. You know, we're gonna have to fix it. Make room for sit with the, uncertainty and even the panic that comes with like, what do you mean?
Chris McCurry: Everything I've known is wrong. I have to
Steven C Hayes: Well, I think a lot, a lot of the stuff will apply, but it just depends. And we learn, need to learn how to, we can hold on to efficiency, but can we hold on to the kind of efficiency that gives you what you need now for your goals? After we listen, and the job of listening does mean, I think, measuring and modeling.
Steven C Hayes: I mean, it's good to just listen if you're a practitioner or a clinician. The problem is, is that in every area of functioning, when you're able to make that quantitative and [00:40:00] empirical, we do a little better. That's always been true. There's like no examples of, and here's another thing. If you want to just listen and be like an intuitive clinician, et cetera.
Steven C Hayes: You should understand that if we do trials of if you just let the person who you're working with pick what to do, and even how to question it and measure it, you do as good or a better job than you. So, are you going to import all of your clinical experience into that person's? So, clinical experience, period, end of story.
Steven C Hayes: Unguided, by theory, means something you can't give away except by doing it. Yeah, but the client, we already know, personal preferences of the client and their choices does as well or better, and on meta analyses does better, than the opinions of the therapists. I'll show you the studies on it if you want to look at them.
Steven C Hayes: Well, so let's be a little more humble. We're in here to listen and [00:41:00] empower. We can bring our science knowledge to it. We can absolutely say, actually, here's what we know about doing that, or here's what we know about doing this. But, I think we can give science a way, in a way, that says, just to the average Joe, you know, looking at just what you've been saying over the last two or three weeks, I've been pinging you, you've answered a few questions.
Steven C Hayes: Here's what the, the AI tools are telling me. When you do this, you start to do that. And you're telling me there that that then leads to that, and you don't want that. Okay, why don't we just back up? What do you think? What should we target? And I think people will say, in a more efficient way, a more effective way, and I do admit that the tailoring studies that I'm talking about are mostly done with apps, and they're mostly not done in process, but we do know that individual choice and tailoring ups [00:42:00] the outcomes from One Size Fits All.
Steven C Hayes: We know that well you know, meta-analysis are pretty effect clear. You know, can we take the next step of actually giving away what we know about how one things lead to the other geographically? Well, when you do that and we have tools that will allow you to do this, clients look at it and say, yeah, that's what's going on.
Steven C Hayes: Well, of course it's what's going on. That's what you, you said to me. You're not old enough to know, but when the MMPI, one of the early personality tests, et cetera, was being validated, people used to feel like, wow, you know, you must have a radar into my mind and stuff. It was all just empirical algorithms.
Steven C Hayes: You already answered the questions. Of course, I'm just reflecting back very much like that. I think if we ask the right questions and reflect them back, clients will see themselves there and maybe we can do it in such a way that we don't. [00:43:00] You know, say it's not just one size fits all, but also that, you know, indigenous peoples with their own ideas, even down to their ways of thinking about how to measure it might be a better way forward or ethnic minorities or religious minorities or sexual minorities, or you go on and on, you know. Um, I don't, I don't know that you would want to buy the car that doesn't have adjustable pedals. And some of us are learning not to want to buy the clothes that you can't get in smaller, you know, individually, especially if you have an odd body shape, you learn to buy those ones that you can give the measurements and give you things that fit you perfectly. why can't we do that with mental and behavioral health and mental resilience? Let's see.
Chris McCurry: So, we should wrap up, anything that our listeners might do in their own lives, you know, tomorrow, that would help further this way of thinking or to get more information about it,
Steven C Hayes: well, [00:44:00] 1 thing I would say just generally, when I say if, if you're not measuring and monitoring, you're not listening that includes to yourself,
Emma Waddington: yeah.
Steven C Hayes: know, and there's all that work. I'm just diary and health writings and things like that. Some of that I think is you see a different perspective. So if I had to just.
Steven C Hayes: Recommend one thing, learn to be more curious about your life and what, how one thing leads to another. If you want to follow the more analytic tools that are coming along, and if you're a mental health professional, for sure. Well, one person who sings that song a lot is me. And you can go to stephensayhays.
Steven C Hayes: com and I'll put you on that monthly newsletter list. I don't spam people and it's a one click opt out. If these apps interest you at all, PsychFlex. That's just put in P S Y C H F L E X dot com, you'll find it, and the data analytic tools are from a [00:45:00] charitable organization that is almost a half a century old that I'm president of called the Institute for Better Health, and if you put in I B H dot com, you'll find that, but I would say also just kind of keep your eyes wide for terms like psychological flexibility, precision psychology, and, The process based therapy work, because there's some big changes coming, I think.
Steven C Hayes: Not just from that little corner, but I see it all around because the AI tools and the more precision statistical methods are happening in physical medicine. They're starting to happen in resilience and psychological stuff, too. And it's going to land all the way down to kitchen table conversations, I'm convinced. In a pretty fast way, keep your eyes wide and if you want to be on the cutting edge, I've given you [00:46:00] some ways to do that, but if anything I'm saying in here resonates and you don't want to just do that right now, look out for how psychology is beginning to move in a more precision and personalized way that is humbler in a way, because we don't get to say this is the solution, but is more relevant in a way, because they say.
Steven C Hayes: What do you really want and what's going on in your life and
Emma Waddington: Yeah. and for
Steven C Hayes: that journey?
Emma Waddington: me listening today, I think the big takeaway is how much more liberated I feel as an individual and as a clinician. The reality is that, only I know with the right guidance, with the right support, with somebody who helps me look carefully and effectively, but that I can have the answers inside of me.
Emma Waddington: I don't need somebody else to tell me. And that is. Incredibly empowering [00:47:00] as a clinician. It's liberating and scary because I don't get to have all the answers and be the one that sort of liberates people. But the reality is that it feels a lot better, a lot more aligned to what I experience in my day to day and what I see in the room.
Emma Waddington: Like I always think, who am I to say what you should do?
Steven C Hayes: yeah.
Emma Waddington: dare I think that I have an answer in a way?
Steven C Hayes: Yeah, I think it is empowering. You mentioned kindly a liberated mind I walked through the science of it, but what's not fully an elaborated mind is how to Individualize that but once you know the processes and keep your eyes wide for it in your own life, you can begin to see it and people kind of know it.
Steven C Hayes: They can tell you, yeah, when I shut down, when I withdraw, when I avoid, when I just follow the rules without thoughtlessly, when I don't focus on the horizon and what's of importance just to me, when I don't care, take care of my health and my [00:48:00] relationships, things go cattywampus. And yeah, that's because we are evolving systems, and you need certain processes, processes meaning just certain steps that you take regularly, that are healthy in different contexts.
Steven C Hayes: So you're going to have to not just always do the same thing, you're going to have to fit what you're doing to the situation. But it's not such a large set that you can't learn it, and it's not such a complex thing that we can't model it. So, let's work together and learn. How to bring the modern, modern minds into the modern world.
Steven C Hayes: Because the world's getting more complex. It's not getting easier. It's getting harder. Our young people show it.
Emma Waddington: Yeah,
Steven C Hayes: I think we all know it.
Emma Waddington: yeah,
Steven C Hayes: that's okay. We've been through things like this before in worldwide culture. It's just up our game.
Emma Waddington: that's right. I'm in.
Steven C Hayes: Me too. [00:49:00]
Chris McCurry: Thank you very much, Steve Hayes, many resources to check out, and, thanks for being with us.
Steven C Hayes: Thank you for the opportunity, Christina.
Emma Waddington: Yes. Thank you. This has been a huge honor and privilege. Thank you for all you do.
Steven C Hayes: Peace, love, and life.
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