The 3 types of I (self) in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

The self as concept, the self as process, and the observing self.

Hello friends!

All psychotherapy, therapy of the psyche (of the soul), aims to enable the patient to live better and manage to transform their symptoms – “I feel bad” – into a greater understanding of themselves, in order to have more autonomy to act and be.

A while ago, I read a sentence from humanistic psychotherapy that said that the objective was to change the way a person sees himself, understands himself. Through Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, ACT, we can also find this meaning: when realizing that the I (or Self, in the original) is bigger and broader than what is commonly thought, there is a great change about oneself and, consequently, a big change in life.

1) The self as a concept (conceptualized Self)

The word concept comes from the Latin conseptus, of the verb conceive which has the meaning of forming within itself. When we are going to analyze the I, we will see that a concept about the I will emerge, a form, an idea formed inside our head. A person can say:

“I am a good person. Pure. Caste. Altruistic”.

These are concepts (goodness, purity, chastity, altruism) that will guide that person’s life. As they are positive concepts, in principle, there would be nothing bad about this type of self. However, the problem arises when there is a conflict between these concepts and the need for reality – or the body.

Let’s say that in a situation it is necessary to be tough, firm, angry. Perhaps, due to the concept of the self, the person will not be able to act as he should act. And by not being able to act, it will become – that moment – a mean and selfish person.

Furthermore, the self as a concept will exclude many, many moments in life and will be placed in the unconscious (in what Jung calls the shadow, Schatten) many aspects that are also part of the personality. The two major complexes are, as we know, the power complex and the sexuality complex.

So, as is common, a person who defines himself as a good, pure, chaste and altruistic person will be able to see the evil, impurity, sexuality and selfishness in other people. But he will not know that these traits are also within himself.

If you come to realize that it is that, but it can also be the opposite, that it can be one way in one circumstance and another way at another time, you will come close to the second type of self.

According to Steven Hayes, in the book Get out of your mind and into your life:

“When you let go of the attachment to the self as a concept, you are like a child, open to every possibility, willing to discover what is.”

2) Self as a Process of ongoing Self-Awareness

Hayes says, “The self as an ongoing process of self-awareness is fluid knowledge of your own experience in the present moment. It is like the self as a concept, insofar as we apply language categories. But it’s different because, instead of using fixed, value-judgmental categories, the categories are descriptive, non-evaluative, present, and flexible:

‘Now I’m feeling it’.

‘Now I’m feeling it’.

‘Now I’m remembering it.’

‘Now I’m seeing that’.

The difference between the first type of self and the second consists in fixity, more or less. The self as a concept tends and wants to be fixed, immutable, rigid. The self as a process is naturally fluid, impermanent, inconstant.

If the I as a concept evaluates and judges the I as a process, it will think that this is not a good way to live: every hour being one way. However, as we can clearly see in reality, everything is in a continuous process of change.

I like to think of the example of impressionism. Before the Impressionist movement, artists painted their pictures in studios with controlled lighting. When (from Kant onwards) they began to look at the world as a process, they saw that an object transforms with the change of light over the course of a day. It is something obvious, but this was excluded from art until then, because a tree is one way in the morning and at sunset.

See below a photo and a painting of Monet:

Evidently, the I as a process gives us much more freedom and even peace of mind since we know that a difficult emotional state or a feeling like pain will pass. It also encourages greater understanding of other people. If we deal with the other as a concept, for example, “that person is unfriendly”, we will be dealing not with the person-himself, but with the idea we have of him.

3) The self as an observer (Observing Self)

The biggest resistance to accepting the idea of ​​the self as a process is the following thought: “if I am constantly changing, if I do not identify with my thoughts, feelings and emotions as being me, then who am I?”

The third type of self is a little more complicated to understand, not because it is complex, but because it is extremely simple. The third type of self in ACT is the self as the observer. According to Hayes, there are several names: “the self as context, the transcendent self, the spiritual sense, the self as nothing (no-thing)”.

In some Eastern traditions, there is the notion of the self as nothing or as empty (shunyata🇧🇷 For the self as a concept, this is simply inconceivable… or at the very least a depreciation of its value. “As? I’m nothing?!”

But it is easy to understand that this is not nihilism. The idea of ​​the self as nothing (no-thing) can be understood by the English word, nothing, i.e. as “nothing.”

Let me explain: throughout the day we come into contact with hundreds, thousands, who knows millions of stimuli: what we see, hear, smell, taste, touch. Not only outside, in our environment, but also inside: internal sensations, on the skin, images, sounds (thoughts), emotions, etc.

Now, if we begin to understand that the I is like a process of constant transformation from one thing to another, from an idea that arises to the next idea, from a sensation that is born to then die, from an emotion that changes, in short, we will see what we are all that but also that we are none of these, nothing (nothing) of phenomena. Rather, we are the observing consciousness: the self, therefore, as an observer of everything. Which allows all phenomena to be perceived, while there is no permanent identification with anything.

To conclude, I would like to leave here a fantastic song by the Beatles, called Tomorrow never knows, tomorrow never knows:

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