THE TROUBLE WITH LANGUAGE - EXPERIENTIAL AVOIDANCE, RULES, AND THE NATURE OF VERBAL EVENTS

Experiential avoidance is the attempt to escape or avoid certain priva te experiences, such as particular feelings, memories, behavioral pred ispositions, or thoughts. In this article, we discuss evidence that ex periential avoidance is both pervasive and often harmful to human func tioning. We argue that experiential avoidance can be explained by two verbal processes, and we provide basic behavioral evidence on both: th e bidirectionality of derived stimulus relations in verbal humans and the insensitivity to the effects of responding produced by verbal rule s. If this analysis is correct, experiential avoidance is built into h uman language and thus can be undermined only with difficulty.