What is “Psychological Distance” and why is it helpful to understand?
Psychological distance is a powerful and useful concept that, when understood and practiced, can improve your mental health. To understand the concept, it’s helpful to define it. From there, we can explore why it’s powerful and identify some of the tools that can be used to achieve psychological distance.
Psychological distance refers to how closely we identify with a feeling, thought, sensation, or memory. In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), it is the ability to step back from your feelings, thoughts, or memories; to experience them as mental events or internal experiences rather than literal truths or direct commands. That is, without psychological distance we identify with a feeling, thought, or memory and experience it as a fact or literal truth. For example, when we remember a difficult loss or failure, without psychological distance, we would feel and think we are a failure. Whereas, with psychological distance, when we remember a difficult loss or failure, we notice the thought or the feeling without directly identifying with it. This can be as simple as “I’m a failure” (no distance) vs. “I’m having the thought that I am a failure” (with distance).
This concept is addressed in many forms of meditation. When meditating, one instruction is to notice thoughts, feelings, and sensations as they arise into consciousness. Not to identify with them, but rather to let them pass. You might imagine the thoughts or feelings as cars passing by on the highway while you (the observer) simply notice them passing by. In this practice, we start to observe how our mind offers up a variety of thoughts, feelings, and sensations into consciousness spontaneously, some pleasant and some unpleasant.
In ACT, two selves are identified: thinking self and observing self. The thinking self is made up of the thoughts, feelings, and sensations and the observing self (also called pure awareness) is the aspect of our conscious experience that notices the thought, feeling, or sensation and can shift our focus from a sensation in our body to a thought in our head. Moreover, the observing self notices the sensations and sees the images in our mind. It is from this observing self that we have the ability to gain psychological distance.
In Internal Family Systems (IFS), there are many parts or aspects of our psyche, as well as the capital S, Self. When we are acting from a part, we are considered to be blended with that part and therefore do not have psychological distance. When we are connected to Self or in Self, we have distance and we notice the thought, feeling, or sensation as coming from a part or distinct aspect of our psyche. For those more scientifically minded, it is useful to think of these aspects of psyche emerging from distinct neural networks.
As described above, there is language about gaining psychological distance in many therapeutic styles. In ACT, there is fusion (no distance; identifying with a thought, emotion, or memory) vs. defusion (gaining distance; observing a thought, emotion, or memory). In IFS, there is blending (being blended means experiencing yourself as the emotion or state you are in) vs. unblending (seeing that what you’re experiencing is a part of you rather than the core of who you are). In meditation, you attempt to be the observer and watch thoughts, emotions, sensations, memories arise and pass.
All of these theories describe the same idea with different language: fusion and defusion, blending and unblending, or simply noticing rather than getting lost. There is no right or wrong way to speak about this concept and there is no right or wrong way of achieving psychological distance, there is simply the way that works for you. Moreover, there are certainly other ways that this concept has been described and there are many more tools and techniques to practice it. The many theories describing this concept and the many tools to practice it add credibility to the idea of psychological distance and the usefulness of working to achieve it for improved mental and emotional health.
-Robbie
