Cognitive defusion

Fusion is what happens when a thought is experienced as the world rather than as a sentence about it. I am going to make a fool of myself arrives, and the room really does become a place where that is about to happen. Defusion is the practice of putting a half-step between the two.

The techniques are deliberately undignified, and that is the mechanism rather than a style choice. Saying the sentence in a cartoon voice, repeating one word until it comes apart into sound, prefixing the whole thing with I am having the thought that — each of them makes the sentence audible as a sentence. Nothing is argued with. Nothing has to be true or false.

This is the part people most often get wrong on first contact: defusion is not disputing the thought, and it is not replacing it with a nicer one. The thought is allowed to stay exactly as it is. What changes is how much say it gets.

Omzoe draws on it in practice cards under the act.defusion.* techniques, and it is the reason several of them ask you to write a thought down before doing anything about it. A sentence on paper is already halfway defused.