Values are the Social Bedrock of Our Emotional Assessments
Values are the Social Bedrock of Our Emotional Assessments
Part one of exploring Relational-ACT, a model of human psychology.
This is the first of a three-part series looking into the essential characteristics of what I call Relational-ACT, comprised of Values, Narrative, and Behavior. This forms the cornerstone of a broader psychological and therapeutic model that I’ve developed over the course of the last twenty years, which I will get into in the future. Here, we’ll start with the foundation and all such posts will be found in their own sub-section of the substack.
Initially, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), created by Steven Hayes, provided a great foundation for counseling/therapy and, based as it is on Behaviorism and Social Contextualism, also served as a personal philosophy. Fundamentally, I still don’t have any major disagreements with ACT, hence why I’m calling this model simply Relational-ACT. The core parts are still there, but the focus is shifted to relationship or connection.
Relationship is far more than a descriptive of human connection, instead being seen as a fundamental way of looking at our lives and effecting change. Relationship is a recognition that nothing, absolutely nothing, exists on its own disconnected from one or more other objects of some form or another. Rather than a philosophy built on individualism, as if each and every object or person is a unique manifestation of nature, a perspective beginning with relationship sees individuality as embedded in connections of various kinds and strengths. For instance, often I will write of consciousness as being embedded and embodied, echoing the thoughts of Mark Johnson, George Lakoff, Owen Flanagan, and Anil Seth, to name-drop a few.
I will begin with an exploration of the importance of values.
Values are the cognitive flip-side of an emotional state, the socially embedded verbalized meaning we share. No feeling exists unattached from a particular situation or object (person, place, or thing). This is because feelings are an initial evaluative tool. They're an immediate way for us to start the path, an internal impetus, of our response to a situation or object. The way we describe our relationship between an emotion and what is being evaluated is through the use of a Value.
Two important points here about Values: one, they are not synonymous with behavior and two, they are an intrinsic part of humanity. Let's unpack both.
Values are Not Behavior
Consider the value of Community. How many ways can that Value manifest? School? Family reunion? Work? Church? Online group? Public interest gathering? Now think of a person from one of those types of communities, like a school, coming to your online group and declaring that the Value of Community can only be found at their school, and how dare you believe that you hold that Value as important because you believe you’ve found it at a church or at work.
Sound ridiculous? That's because it is. Values do not necessitate a particular behavior, as if there are 'true' and 'false' versions. This is because Values exist as a universal verbalized evaluative device to direct our attention to what's important to us. They are the thinking side of our emotional identification, a cognitive shorthand to display our interests to ourselves and others.
Think of Values as a form of Daniel Kahneman’s System-2, where System-1 is the automatic and non-deliberative part of our overall evaluative rational system of thinking. System-2, not to be confused with a separate form of thinking or somehow perpetuating the false notion of a demarcation between emotion and reason, is simply the more deliberative and slower aspect of our rational process. I’m simply emphasizing the social embeddedness of System-2 and Values. Which leads to why they’re universal.
Values are Universal
The particular linguistic forms (e.g. language) people use for Values are culturally derived, as is how they are manifested in behavior. Culture includes family, social environment, local community, and country. While these all distinguish us at the group level, our shared humanity is not removed. In many ways, culture and its various components provide a structure for the second part of the Relational-ACT model, that of Narrative, but that will be gotten to later.
Remember that Values are not synonymous with particular behavior, in that a singular action encompasses the whole of what a Value means or captures the entirety of its potential. Values are not behavior in themselves, they are the label of meaning we place on particular behavior to be able to identify its importance to ourselves and discuss its importance with others. There are multiple ways to show how one considers a Value to be important in one's life. Further, if a person doesn't show a Value in a particular situation, it does not mean they don't care about it. Do you Value honesty? I'm sure you do. Would you be honest if it led to the harm of another? Likely not. Does that mean you no longer care about telling the truth? Of course not!
Values are Context Bound
This seeming disconnect of one Value in order to express another is because our focus on Values are situationally driven. Remember that they're evaluative tools, not behavioral directives. Situations or social context come first; we use Values as a means to identify what is important for us in them, therefore determining whether what we care about is being supported or violated within the ways we either appreciate or disapprove of.
Values aren't being removed from us when we make an evaluation and identify what’s important. They're just being selected within a context to help us determine how we will respond to a particular situation or object. Those responses will seek to either support one or more Values that we care about, or attempt to realign the situation to be consistent with how we think the particular Values should be shown (more on this when we discuss Behavior).
Relational-ACT
The grounding principle of Relational-ACT is an appreciation for our shared humanity, a recognition of the universal characteristics allowing us to connect to one another. No problem is so bizarre that it divorces a person from this shared existence. By identifying the importance of our Values, we can understand why we get triggered by some things and not others and start building healthier dialogue and personal healing.
Part two:
