The Third Wave of Therapy

Sunday, Feb. 05, 2006 By JOHN CLOUD

TIMOTHY ARCHIBALD FOR TIME

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Although he has an anti-Republican bumper sticker on his car, the car is a red-state Chevrolet Avalanche. The most prominent feature of his office is a set of gym equipment, and he has one of those Sharper Image massage chairs. His days off are spent gurgling over his fourth child, 5-month-old Steven Joseph, or--not infrequently--building additions to his house. These days Hayes is a bit embarrassed by the excesses of his youth.

Hayes' reputation as more mystagogue than scientist is reinforced partly by how he and his colleagues teach ACT workshops: they do the hard science, but they also ask the participating therapists, usually roomfuls of Ph.D.s, to do things like repeat the word milk over and over (to show how meaningless words can become--try it with I'm depressed). And although Hayes teaches mindfulness at ACT workshops around the world, he epitomizes "the absent-minded professor," according to Barlow, the psychologist who taught Hayes at Brown in the '70s. Hayes is famous at Nevada-Reno for passing students in the hall without so much as a nod. But it's worse than they think. According to Hayes' wife Jacqueline Pistorello, in December the couple went to the mall to buy Christmas gifts. They split up so they could shop for each other, but at one point Hayes literally bumped into his wife. He didn't notice her, even though she was cradling their newborn in her arms. ("I call those his black holes," says Pistorello, a clinical psychologist for the university. Hayes sheepishly explains: "I was just in my place.")

Pistorello is Hayes' third wife; his panic attacks began not long after he and his first wife separated in 1977. Hayes grew up in El Cajon, Calif., as the younger son of parents who had a loving but somewhat volatile marriage. His Irish-Catholic father was a salesman who washed out of semi-pro baseball and drank too much. Hayes says his first panic attack was "not too different from some spaces that are very old, in the sense of watching destructive things happen at home--hide under the bed while Dad throws things." Hayes' father died in the '70s; his mother is remarried and lives in Arizona. Ruth Sundgren describes the young Hayes as a sensitive kid who always said things like, "Mom, can I get you a pillow?"

It took Hayes about three years to realize that his panic disorder got worse when he tried to process it cognitively. "Unfortunately, the wrong things that you need to do to build [panic disorder] are the logical, sensible, reasonable things--focus on the situations in which it might happen, and try to control them. Well, you might as well put your finger in a wall socket."

Instead, the scientist in Hayes found a way to "square the circle" of all the wacky '70s stuff he had tried, particularly est and meditation. "Something in that mixture of Eastern thinking and the human-potential movement clicked for me," says Hayes. "It was goofy ... But what I saw in what they did in there was the possibility of really pursuing this acceptance side." Accepting that his panic would happen allowed him to be able to distance himself from it. Hayes learned to be playful with his thoughts, to hold them lightly: You feel panicky? Or depressed? Or incompetent? "Thank your mind for that thought," he likes to say.