Verbal Discriminations

 It can be enormously difficult to unlearn ways of viewing things. Once we have verbally rehearsed a situation or symbolised an object through language, it is virtually impossible to “unsee” it again in the future. 

A good metaphor of this is the optical illusion that appears above. If you have not seen it before, it may take a while to see a Dalmatian dog sniffing the ground.  Now try not to see it, it’s impossible. In fact if you’ve seen it before and you’ve seen the dog then you will indeed see it again. It becomes impossible not to see it and if you see this group of dots again in a month, in a year, or within ten years you will not help being able to see the Dalmatian dog. 

In ACT this is known as a making a verbal discrimination and is the basis of inflexible ways of viewing the world. Your “Dalmatian” may be “people aren’t to be trusted”. Like the picture, you can’t unlearn that way of thinking, the verbal discrimination will always be there available to influence upon your behaviour once it has been created. But we can learn to create distance between ourselves and such rigid thought patterns.

 

We can’t stop them from happening any more than you can stop seeing the Dalmatian dog, but through compassion and mindfulness practice we can learn to accept ourselves and understand why we perceive the world as we do.