Willingness

Hello, lovely humans. Today I'm going to talk to you about the concept of willfulness versus willingness.

Willfulness is defined by Marsha in a handbook as throwing yourself into trying to control events, other people around you, etc. Trying to control an experience, sometimes by avoiding it, or trying to escape from it. Denying life or refusing to be a part of it, giving up and sitting on your hands instead of doing what is needed in the moment.

Holding back, saying no, or more commonly saying yes, but imposing your own will on reality, trying to fix everything, refusing to do what is needed. It's that opposite of doing what works. holding a grudge or bitterness.

As with all things in DBT, there are times when willfulness might be necessary, justified, warranted, etc. And just to sort of drive home the part of this last week when we were talking about radical acceptance for those of you who are in class with me, we talked about the example of me not accepting and instead protesting reality related to an accident that my partner had about a year and a half ago, for which he's been undergoing multiple surgeries throughout the last year to regain efforts to walk.

When I use the phrase protesting reality to describe how I intermittently feel about this, I am describing willfulness. Willfulness and radical acceptance, I want you to think about as two opposing ends of a dialectic. Now, there can be other sides, right, like willfulness and willingness or opposing ends of the dialectic and radical acceptance and non acceptance are opposing ends of the dialectic, but they all sort of go together and feed into each other.

Times when I have been willful, regularly with regards to what's been going on with my partner, times of when my toddler who is now three and I guess not a toddler anymore, is breaking down for the ninth time that day. Sometimes, instead of going with the flow and doing what works, I get really frustrated. And I'm like, why is this happening? Again? This is not okay.

Alternatively, like switching to telehealth, admdst this COVID pandemic was something that I had a lot of willfulness about because I really love the in person connections that I make with people.

I want you to think about times when you demonstrated a lot of willfulness, where willingness and acceptance would have been really helpful. So, willingness is per Marsha's definition, accepting what is and responding to what it is in an effective and appropriate way. It's doing what works. It's doing just what is needed. willingness is focusing on both individual and group means.

It's about throwing yourself wholeheartedly into life. So like the participant mindfully skill, it's saying yes, to the mystery of being alive, and each moment, some judgments about how that's worded. It's responding from wise mind, and it is committing yourself to participation. So there's a couple of different analogies that we use to talk about willfulness versus willingness. So, one is that life is essentially like hitting baseballs from a pitching machine.

Your job in life is to respond as best as you can to each of the balls that are getting hit in your way. If you refuse to accept that the ball is coming in your direction, it doesn't make it stop coming. willpower, defiance crying, all of that stuff does not make the ball stop coming. They keep coming only now they're likely hitting you over and over again.

Life is like that. You can get as upset as you want. ought to be, and it might be very valid for you to be upset. And life keeps coming.

We often will use the analogy that life is like a game of cards. And some hands that you get are amazing winning hands and some are wrapped in like the worst of defeat. And yet we can't control what hands were dealt, we can only respond to whatever it is in the moment.

So how do we go from willful to willing, because we know that that willfulness is going to get in the way of our ability to respond effectively in a given moment.

Step number one is to just observe that the willfulness, the non acceptance is happening. You want to notice it, observe it, label it, describe it, allow yourself to experience it, right. The goal here is not to try and bite away willfulness because chances are, that's just going to put you in a more defensive position to say, bump that I'm going to keep going in this non acceptance direction.

Step two, easier said than done is to radically accept the willfulness. Again, here. Your job is to accept that in this moment, right now, you feel might also be acting willful denying it isn't helpful.

You can't fight willfulness, willfulness some people would say that you have to love the willfulness, I would say, acknowledge that it's there is likely enough.

But if you want it to go full opposite action, loving it, absolutely. So here, I want you to think about and I'm going to ask you in group. What are some examples of being judgmental of willfulness either in yourself or other people? Do you find that it increases your willfulness? Or does it reduce it?

Step three, because willingness and radical acceptance go hand in hand, is to practice the turning the mind skill that we talked about last week. Making a choice towards acceptance and willingness, making a choice to participate, and whatever's coming your way?

Step four is actually what Paul's going to be going over in another video momentarily. practice using half smiling and willing hands or a willing posture, as sometimes changing your actual body language can change your emotional experience in a given moment, and the way that you think about things.

Finally, step behind, and arguably, I would say this is one of the really important parts to develop insight into this pattern of willfulness so that you can notice it happen more often.

And being non judgmental, when it shows up, is to ask yourself, what is the threat here? Usually, willfulness, especially willfulness, that you can't get to move with some of the other skills that we just talked about, has some type of threat involved in it.

We think that if we're willful we might lose something really important to us or have something really terrible happened to us that there's something dangerous about that. It might be true. So some examples are you're part of a team at work, and a team member is asking you, at the very last minute to help out with this really important task that they fell behind on but it's due tomorrow.

You notice some willfulness coming up, you're saying, Why me? I shouldn't have to do this extra work? You're gonna say no, but you decided to ask yourself, what's the threat here?

You realize that you might be feeling willful in this situation because you want to get home and cook a special dinner that you're planning for your family. And staying in our leader at work threatens your ability to do that.

When you notice that it gives you room to do some problem solving and planning to see if there's a way to do something different here.

So to conclude, willingness is about actively participating in reality. It's what you need to do to be able to overcome a threat.

It is not approval. It's not lying down and letting yourself get away. holdover or being a pushover it tends to help you be more effective and enable use of other skills in a difficult situation.