Pushing the Ball Under Water Metaphor

 | Positive Psychology Toolkit

Pushing the Ball Under Water Metaphor

Coping

Metaphor

5 min

Client

No

A core component of mindfulness is acceptance. Many people deal with negative

experiences using control (Hayes, Follette, & Linehan, 2004). Control-based strategies,

like suppression, aim to decrease the frequency and intensity of unwanted experiences.

Deliberate avoidance of internal states is conceptualized as experiential avoidance (Hayes,

Strosahl, & Wilson, 1999), and it has been linked to a great diversity of negative outcomes.

For instance, in clinical and non-clinical samples, experiential avoidance is strongly

correlated with measures of general psychopathology (Hayes et al., 2004) and specific

measures of anxiety and depression (Forsyth, Parker, & Finlay, 2003; Marx & Sloan, 2005;

Roemer, Salters, Raffa, & Orsillo, 2005; Tull, Gratz, Salters, & Roemer, 2004).

Although negative experiences are inevitable, clients often try to fight and avoid them.

Paradoxically, research has repeatedly demonstrated that trying to control and to avoid

negative experiences often increases their intensity. This is called the paradox of control

(see, for instance, Wegner, 1994). A different way of dealing with emotions is through

acceptance. Acceptance can be defined as the willingness to fully experience difficult

emotions and experiences.

In contrast to control-based strategies, the individual accepts and experiences the emotion

fully, without attempting to alter, avoid, or control it (Hayes, Strosahl, & Wilson, 1999).

Acceptance, however, is a complex construct. It can be incredibly challenging to explain

what it means to clients. This tool describes a metaphor that aims to clarify the distinction

between acceptance and suppression.

Author

This tool was created by Hugo Alberts (Ph.D.).

Goal

The goal of this tool is to clarify the distinction between suppression and acceptance

of experiences.

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Advice

¡ö

After explaining this metaphor, clients can be invited to reflect on their ways of dealing

with negative experiences. The following questions may be asked:

¡ö

What are your thoughts on this metaphor?

¡ö

Are there times when you ¡°push the ball under water?¡± If so, when does this

happen? What kinds of feelings or emotions are being pushed away?

¡ö

If you are often pushing balls under water, what is your most important reason for

doing so?

¡ö

Have you ever tried to let go of control and allow the ball to reach the surface of

the water? If so, how did this go?

¡ö

What would be needed/helpful to let go of the ball more frequently?

¡ö

The last part of the metaphor is important because it explains a common problem with

acceptance. The client may start to use acceptance as another way of gaining control.

Moreover, acceptance can cause some clients to become hyper-focused on feelings

and thoughts because they believe they must do everything to accept them. After all,

suppression is ¡°bad.¡± This rigid and unnatural focus on inner experiences is in sharp

contrast with the open, naturally floating attention that is needed for acceptance. It

is important to stress that acceptance requires willingness, not force, and that it is

applied in moments, not continuously.

¡ö

This metaphor can be combined with the ¡°acceptance of emotions meditation.¡± This

meditation offers a concrete way of dealing with emotions by acceptance.

¡ö

Suppression can become a default coping style. When suppression becomes a default

strategy for coping with negative events, this is referred to as habitual suppression.

Habitual suppressors experience less positive and more negative emotions compared

to other people and have lower self-esteem and a less optimistic outlook (John &

Gross, 2004). Changing habitual patterns of suppression is a process that is likely to

take a considerable amount of time. Moreover, when traumatic experiences underlie

the tendency to avoid certain thoughts, feelings, or memories, the practitioner should

be qualified to address these issues (have a background in psychology or psychiatry).

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References

¡ö

Forsyth, J. P., Parker, J. D., & Finlay, C. G. (2003). Anxiety sensitivity, controllability,

and experiential avoidance and their relation to drug of choice and addiction severity

in a residential sample of substance-abusing veterans. Addictive Behaviors, 28,

851-870.

¡ö

Garssen, B. (2007). Repression: Finding our way in the maze of concepts. Journal of

behavioral medicine, 30, 471-481.

¡ö

Hayes, S. C., Follette, V. M., & Linehan, M. (Eds.). (2004). Mindfulness and acceptance:

Expanding the cognitive-behavioral tradition. Guilford Press.

¡ö

Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D., & Wilson, K. G. (1999). Acceptance and commitment

therapy: An experiential approach to behavior change. Guilford Press.

¡ö

John, O. P., & Gross, J. J. (2004). Healthy and unhealthy emotion regulation:

Personality processes, individual differences, and life span development. Journal of

Personality, 72, 1301-1333.

¡ö

Marx, B. P., & Sloan, D. M. (2005). Peritraumatic dissociation and experiential

avoidance as predictors of posttraumatic stress symptomatology. Behavior Research

and Therapy, 43, 569-583.

¡ö

Roemer, L., Salters, K., Raffa, S. D., & Orsillo, S. M. (2005). Fear and avoidance of

internal experiences in GAD: Preliminary tests of a conceptual model. Cognitive

Therapy and Research, 29, 71-88.

¡ö

Tull, M. T., Gratz, K. L., Salters, K., & Roemer, L. (2004). The role of experiential

avoidance in posttraumatic stress symptoms and symptoms of depression, anxiety,

and somatization. The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 192, 754-761.

¡ö

Wegner, D. M. (1994). Ironic processes of mental control. Psychological Review, 101,

34-52.

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Pushing the Ball Under Water Metaphor

Instructions

Trying to push a ball under water is a strenuous activity. It requires continuous force and energy. Even when

you succeed, it is not easy to keep it in one place; it wants to move and go up again.

One could say that the same process is at work when we try to push away thoughts and feelings. The

thoughts and feelings can be compared to the ball. Suppressing them can be compared to pushing the ball

under water, where the water represents our consciousness.

Just like it is possible to push the ball under water, it is possible to suppress thoughts and feelings. However,

doing so can have serious negative effects on our well-being. The process of suppression is difficult and

requires a great amount of energy. Just like we are unlikely to be able to push the ball under water all the

time, we often fail to continuously suppress our experiences, thoughts, and feelings. Even despite our best

efforts, we then still get confronted with our anxious thoughts or painful feelings.

The deeper you try to push the ball under water, the more energy it takes, and the higher it will rise above

the water once control over the ball is lost. Similarly, trying hard to push away thoughts can cause you to

think even more about them. This is called a ¡°rebound effect¡± in science.

Suppression may look like a good solution to problems, but it is not. Even if it causes you to avoid confrontation

with a negative experience, it is only temporary. As long as you try to suppress something, it will continue

to exist. After all, the suppressed can only exist if there is a suppressor: you. In other words, the ball will

continue to exist as long as you hold it and try to control it.

Another way of dealing with negative thoughts or feelings is by accepting them. Acceptance means that you

allow experiences to be present without trying to control or to modify them. In terms of the ball metaphor,

this means that you give up your effort to push the ball under water and allow the ball to reach the surface

of the water (your consciousness). Now that the ball is in front of you, it may look scary, and perhaps you feel

a strong urge to push the ball under water again. Acceptance means that you allow the ball to be where it is,

right in front of you. You take your hands off the ball and see what happens. Maybe the ball will stay close

for a while. Maybe it will float away for good. Maybe it will float away and return after a while. Acceptance

means that we allow feelings to be present and to take, just like a floating ball, their natural course, whatever

that course maybe.

Often, when we practice letting go of control, and we allow the ball to take its natural course, we notice

that the ball drifts away automatically. Although this may be exactly what we want (we finally got rid of that

negative thought or feeling), it can also cause us to start using acceptance to get rid of feelings. Because

we have learned that not pushing the ball under water can help us to get rid of it, we now start to use this

strategy consistently. In other words, once we have learned that allowing feelings to be present can cause

them to fade away, we now start to use acceptance to get of them. We expect that when we no longer push

them away, we will automatically feel good again. This is one of the biggest pitfalls of acceptance: when we

start to ¡°use¡± acceptance to get rid of experiences, it becomes a strategy that is close to suppression. Just

like suppression, the goal is no longer to allow feelings to take their natural course (let the ball float wherever

it goes), but to make them go away (make the ball appear out of sight as soon as possible).

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It is also especially important to understand that acceptance does not mean that we constantly need to

focus on feelings and thoughts. Based on the previously described metaphor, one might think that because

suppression is analogous to pushing the ball under water, acceptance means picking up the ball and holding

it in front of us. After all, the opposite of pushing a ball under water is holding the ball above the water. When

we deal with thoughts by continuously paying attention to them and focusing on them, they are likely to

become bigger and bigger. Holding the ball in front of you and continuously looking at it will not allow the

ball to be released. Just like you were holding and controlling the ball when you were suppressing it, you are

now doing a similar thing.

Acceptance means that you take your hands off the ball. When the ball naturally asks for your attention

(because it is close to you), you allow the ball to be present. Notice that it is there, allow it to be there, and

then continue with whatever you were doing. In other words, acceptance does not require a continuous

focus on your feelings or thoughts. Acceptance comes in moments. When feelings and thoughts naturally

arise, you provide room for them to be present, but trying hard to stay in contact with them all the time and

telling yourself to accept them is not acceptance.

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