A room of seven, and a promise first

The afternoon began with the group reading, together, a promise of confidentiality and the ethical rules of the room. Seven people were there, under a professor’s lead. The write-up is dated 15 November, and the hours are given as 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. The year is not stated.

Acceptance and commitment therapy — ACT — is treated here as a way of sitting with a painful feeling or thought instead of pushing it down or trying to steer it, and of living in the direction of what a person actually values. The afternoon was built so that those pieces could be felt, not only named: the paradox of trying to suppress a thought, a different relation between feeling and thought, some distance between an inner event and the next action, a choice guided by values, and the seat of a mindful observer — what is sometimes called self-as-context.

From there the work moved, in order, through eight pieces. The first was only the promise. The rest asked the body, and the afternoon, to do the explaining.

A white bear, a bin, and what will not be steered

The white-bear exercise came early. It is used here to let people feel the paradox of thought suppression: the more tightly you try not to think of something, the more it returns. The point is not a trick. It is a first taste of how control, when it is aimed at an inner event, can thicken the very thing it wants to thin.

Then came a bin, and a question: will you throw the feeling away, or take it with you? The activity puts that choice in the hands, not only in a sentence. Beside it sat a sorting of what can be controlled and what cannot — a core distinction in this approach. The work is not to win a fight with every inner weather, but to see where effort still has a place, and where it does not.

Mindfulness followed, and with it a clarification of values: a here-and-now way of looking, used to find a direction in a life. The professor’s image, later in the afternoon, was of a small lighthouse still offering a heading in rough water. Values, in that telling, are already there to lean on, even when the rest of a life feels unsorted.

A bus, a stone, and a balloon you hold

The metaphor of a bus and its passengers was used to show that a feeling can be riding along, and the bus can still move in the direction a person has chosen. Passengers may be loud. They do not have to take the wheel.

Near the end came a funeral meditation, and the writing of an epitaph. The professor asked: if you left in this moment, what sentence would you want people to leave on your stone? The writing was treated as one of the usual ways, in this approach, of making values visible. Lines that were written include “I left warmth behind.” “I did not give up on the self who wanted to grow.” “You did your best; rest in peace.” For the person who wrote the second line, that sentence made growth visible as a value they had already been living by, not as a new slogan. It was less a composition exercise than a chance to look again at the stance they wanted to keep.

Last came the balloons. Each person chose one, blew it up, and wrote on it a feeling or a thought that had been hard to carry. Instead of popping it or throwing it away, they were asked to hold it for a while. The slight awkwardness, the odd weight of it against the body, felt close to the way a feeling sits in an ordinary day. Talk continued; other work continued. A feeling could be there, and a chosen action could still go on. Before that, the professor had already shown the same idea with a pen: gripping it tightly in one hand, as if it were an uncomfortable feeling, and writing with the other. The balloon was the same point, moved into the body. The close of the afternoon was not a fight with feeling, but a practice of staying with it, and of commitment — of moving, still, toward what matters.

What the afternoon left

The way the room was led stayed with the writer as a measure of what good group counseling can feel like, and as a model to carry into later work as a counselor. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. Practice report of a group-counseling session using acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), dated 15 November, 1 p.m. to 6 p.m., with seven participants under a professor’s lead (Korean source page).
2. Session sequence: a promise of confidentiality; a white-bear exercise on the paradox of thought suppression; a bin activity on whether to throw a feeling away or carry it; a sorting of what can and cannot be controlled; mindfulness and the clarification of values; the metaphor of a bus and its passengers; a funeral meditation and the writing of an epitaph; a balloon held rather than popped.
3. Epitaph lines as written: “I left warmth behind.” “I did not give up on the self who wanted to grow.” “You did your best; rest in peace.” A demonstration with a pen gripped in one hand and writing in the other.

Last updated: 14 November 2026