Everyone loves a good story. In the land of the Prosocial Matrix, there are two kinds of stories. One is a flexible story, a story you tell that leads to you have options, choices, and satisfaction.

Then there are stuck stories. They are the ones that limit people young and old because individuals will spend lots of time listening to them and they limit what they can do to keep moving.

We tell ourselves and others both kinds of stories all of the time. The ACT Matrix is based on a theory of language and cognition known as Relational Frame Theory (RFT). You do not need to know RFT to use the Matrix but I want to share how the Matrix uses RFT to help keep people moving.

From the time we are very young, we use language to make sense of our world. Words get attached to experiences. When I say or you read the word "Mom", your mind immediately generates your experiences which are attached to the word "mom". All of us carry these experiences around and we can recall all of the experiences we had with the person we come to connect with that word. Some of those experiences are warm and fuzzy. Others may be sad or difficult. We cannot stop ourselves from relating experiences to words. It is what all language-able humans do.

What RFT tells us is that language is how we get stuck. This happens because as time goes on we pay more and more attention to our mental experiences and less to what our senses bring to us. We can end up spending so much time in our heads that we fail to notice what is going around us.

This is what happens to students all of the time. They get stuck on difficult and troubling thoughts and feelings and try to avoid and escape from them. They get stuck in their heads and then in their actions. They do less of what matters and struggle more. The very cool thing about RFT is that it also points to the way out of this trap. We can add experience to the sticky words and feelings. We add noticing and do some sorting and then students can also be aware of who and what is important to them. They are less stuck and more able to keep moving and coming up with actions that will help them keep going. We call this workability which I will cover in the final lesson.

We use the matrix to help learners apply to notice and sort out stuck stories. Telling stuck stories into the matrix adds psychological flexibility, choices, and noticing that works.