The Present Moment in Parts

The present moment is fleeting. This site was created through a countless number of present moments. In the present moment as I am typing this sentence it is 8:54AM on September 18th 2019. I’m half-dressed and getting ready for work where I’m going to do a presentation to my colleagues on the ACT Matrix (they have never seen it before). Your present moment is different from mine. Just slowing down to type this out has changed the way I’m experiencing this moment. I’m here, and at the same time, I’m also here witnessing that I’m here. The matrix is a tool that fosters this sense of witnessing.

The matrix diagram as we typically draw it is a single snapshot of a vast and dynamic system. It’s a point of view of the self, from the self, through the self. When we slow down or freeze things into this point of view we can zoom in and out of our experience in a variety of ways.

Take this moment of your life for instance. Right now presumably you are reading these words, and if we were to freeze you in this moment and take a look at everything that is really going on we could spend hours taking it all in. You are here now holding a book or handling an electronic device. You are here now in an environment (a room or outdoors). You are here now with your eyes on this page while the rest of your body is engaging in something else entirely. You are here now with your eyes on this page while the microbiome that is all of the bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and viruses that live on and in your body are going about their daily business. You see, like Superman, we can take a kind of X-Ray vision to our own present moment experience and each layer reveals something. Clinically we use this same approach to examine layers of a client’s present moment experience.

The matrix is divided into four quadrants, two lines, and a circle, and each piece of this diagram is a part of the present moment. Therefore, we can shift seamlessly from one aspect of experience in the present moment to another. As clients are reporting the content of their lives we can step in and ask them to sort it out on the matrix, instructing them to point at which box or line what they’re talking about best fits into. In order to do this it forces clients to think about their own experience from outside the experience. A single mother talking about the struggles of paying the bills and her abusive ex-husband could split this experience into every part of the matrix.

For our clients (and ourselves) our emotional and cognitive experience doesn’t come to us in a nice and tidy package, it comes to us in a jumbled, tangled mess. Sorting out our present moment experience into the matrix is a way of breaking it into more manageable chunks, and also a way of seeing our experience for what it is, rather than what it tells us it is.

The Value of Slowing Down

Imagine a bullet fired from a gun at a watermelon. Now imagine that you take the lead of a bullet, hammer it out on a blacksmith’s anvil until it’s a wide sheet of lead foil. This sheet of foil might be a good meter by meter wide. What would happen if this sheet of lead foil was shot at a watermelon? You see it’s the speed that is deadly. A lead bullet and a sheet of lead foil can contain the same number of atoms but the impact is different depending not on the content but on how quickly and how acutely the impact is.

What if we could take an experience of our own and hammer it out enough that the impact enveloped us gently instead of overwhelmed us? We can do such a thing, functionally at least if not literally. We’ve talked about how the matrix is a snapshot of a current experience, a kind of cross-section of your life. When we sort out our experience onto the matrix we are placing it on that anvil and hammering it out into a wide plane safe enough to look at directly, safe enough to touch and interact with, safe enough to stand in front of, and safe enough to take ownership of.

The standard matrix that we use when we first introduce it to clients is broad. It’s designed to encompass a wide sampling of life. In order to focus on the present moment we only need to modify the matrix slightly. There are three main ways we can use the matrix itself to foster contact with the present moment: Lingering in the quadrants, sorting in vivo, and working along the vertical line.

Lingering In the Quadrants

When it comes to mindful observation practice I can’t think of a better tool to help with it than a filled out ACT Matrix. The four quadrants combine to form a little slice of life which can be explored over and over again. To promote present moment contact all we need to do is pick a quadrant to start in and ask questions that guide a client to notice what’s happening right here and now across multiple levels. As we ask these questions we can reinforce a stronger sense of noticing what’s going on in the present moment, noticing how we react to it, and practicing different stances or ways of holding onto our experience.

Clients typically come into therapy with a predisposition to noticing what is going wrong in their lives. The first quadrant of the matrix turns their reasoning for seeking therapy on its side. They are not, in fact, here to see us because they want their depression to get better, their anxiety to go away, their trauma to be processed, or any other clinical reason. They are here because they want to be more connected to something in their life. Just as we train noticing, describing, and learning from our cognitive and emotional content, we too must train our clients to come into contact fully with what matters to them.

One important distinction that we want to allow clients to experience is what it is like to come into contact with their struggling compared to what it’s like to come into contact with the things that have the most value in their lives. It may sound unnecessary to practice coming into contact with what makes life vibrant and beautiful (I mean shouldn’t we be good at that by default?), but the truth is we often lose touch with the reasons we get up in the morning, the reasons we choose to be who we are as opposed to anybody else, the people we choose to hold lovingly, and why. Luckily, that deep meaningful sense of connection can be activated on command for most of us, and for those who can’t quite get there we can always learn to become more in tune with what matters.

To foster present moment contact with the matrix in this way you need only ask clients to linger in any of the quadrants before moving on. For example, as they mention who and what is important to them, we can ask them to gently stay with that content for a moment and notice what shows up as they focus on it. We can use questions to probe for a variety of types of experiences:

As you think about this person who means so much to you, are there any memories that come to mind?

What else do you notice showing up as you’re talking about this?

Can you take a second and just be with the importance here?

What does it feel like to have these things in your life?

What kind of person have you been to the people you love?

What kind of person would you like to be?

Can you describe the physical setting of this experience?

As clients answer these questions always bring them back to the present moment, what are they experiencing in the here and now, and how are they holding onto it?

The other quadrants lend themselves just as easily to this process of coming into contact with the present moment. The lower left quadrant—inner stuff that shows up that can get in the way—is often highly familiar to your clients. They may think that they know all there is to know about this content, but if they linger with it and ask the right questions they may surprise themselves.

When clients discuss what shows up to get in the way slow them down and have them intentionally face these thoughts, these memories, these feelings, these images. Explore what else comes along with them, the urges that are there to do something or not do something, the desire that is there, the sense of struggle. When you’ve pinpointed that stay with it, and notice the typical ways of responding, try to disrupt them by introducing alternatives as experiments, and repeat the process all over again.

In the top two quadrants we can shift perspective into the past or future yet still stay with the present moment:

Can you bring to mind the last time you shut down and cut yourself off? What is showing up right now as you think about that?

Imagine that you were enrolling back in school right now. What thoughts or feelings would be there? And what is here now?

The possibilities are endless when it comes to what you can do. As you do more matrix work and get to know your clients better the questions that would be most helpful for you and your client will begin to present themselves. For now, take some time to come up with questions that could promote contact with the present moment related to the main questions from each quadrant. See if you can think of at least three questions for each, and write them down.

• Who & what is important to you?

• What inner stuff shows up that can get in the way?

• What do you tend to do on the outside when that inner stuff shows up?

• What is something you could actually do that would move you toward what matters to you?
  

Sorting In Vivo

To sort in vivo, your client will need to be holding onto a matrix diagram on their lap. It can either be a filled-in matrix that they have completed sometime previously, or it can be a completely blank matrix.

As you and your clients engage in a typical clinical conversation your job is to prompt your client to point to the spot on the matrix where their current experience would go. For example, if your client is discussing something a loved one did over the weekend you may gently pause or otherwise indicate that you’d like the client to sort out what they’re talking about. The client then might simply place a finger on the lower right-hand square as they continue talking. As the story continues if their loved one provoked some uncomfortable inner stuff for your client they might move their finger over to the lower left-hand square. As they discuss how they responded to that uncomfortable inner stuff they might move their finger over to one of the two upper squares of the matrix.

Live sorting like this may seem unnatural at first, but that is precisely the point. We don’t typically engage with our own experience in this way, so by definition we are expanding our behavioral repertoire just by doing this. This kind of live sorting activity can be done for an entire session or just for a few minutes within a session. As clients engage in more practice the action becomes natural. What is occurring here is clients are not just having experiences, they are having, noticing, and thinking about where their experiences “go” in their life.

As you work with clients doing live sorts, you can always prompt the client to return to the center circle of the matrix which represents the self, that place from which we can observe mindfully and take control. Sorting out experience live is happening in the present moment, but if we want to slow down the experience we have to ask clients to linger in the different parts of the matrix intentionally.

During a live sort you can ask your client to pause and stay with what is showing up wherever their finger is pointing. The following dialogue illustrates this process in action:

Client: I found myself thinking about when my wife left me. [Points at lower left-hand square]. It was like she picked just the absolute worst time. Like if she had just done it a few weeks earlier, or a few weeks later I know I wouldn’t be in such a mess right now.

Therapist: You were focused on other things during that time, or should have been at least?

Client: Yes! I was just about to start school again and I was nervous as all hell about it.

Therapist: Where is that on your matrix?

Client: Nervous is here [lower left], and school is here [lower right].

Therapist: Can I ask you to hang out there in that box for a bit before you go on? Just stay with that idea of school, everything that it represented for you at that time. Stay with it.

Client: [Fidgeting, beginning to tear-up]

Therapist: Stay with it, don’t try to fight it. What’s showing up for you right now?

Client: [Sobbing] . . . I was ready. I was ready to be somebody. To do something with my life. 

Therapist: Yes. And keep going, stay with it, I know it’s difficult, but stay with it. Tell me more about this person. The person you were ready to become. He had hopes and dreams?

Client: I was going to do what I had put off for so long. I had been thinking about that day since I was a kid in third grade for Christ’s sake!

Therapist: Don’t leave that square yet, tell me what was important to you in that moment.

Client: Helping animals. Getting a job as a vet. 

Therapist: Keep going.

Client: I wanted to be there for people. I wouldn’t have minded even working overnight in one of those 24-hour emergency veterinary clinics.

Therapist: You wanted to be a sense of hope for people, especially during a frightening time.

Client: [Sobbing] Yes.

Therapist: And here with me right now in this room, do you still feel the importance of that desire?

Client: . . . yes. . .

Therapist: Stay with just that piece of it. Just the importance of being there, slow it down so you can grab onto it.

Client: I feel it.

Therapist: Is this something that can still be useful to you in your life?

Client: I want it to be. . .

In this dialogue, the therapist encourages the client to stay in an aspect of a hurtful memory rather than blow by it. The client lands on the quadrant of who and what are important and the therapist probes the client to keep following along this path of importance until something of use emerges. If the therapy were to continue the therapist and client might explore how to reconnect to this source of passion even though in the mind of the client it has been tainted by the aversive experience of his wife leaving him. The anger and hatred wrapped up in this memory has been hitting the client like a bullet for who knows how long. By hammering it out just a bit with the matrix we can explore new avenues.

Any quadrant of the matrix can lend itself to slowing down and staying with the content within. And since each quadrant has a built-in question we can use them as a guide to help us get to the heart of what’s going on. Once you’ve come into contact with one quadrant you can make the switch to another with ease. The conversation about the importance of being a help to animals can lead right into the question of what can you actually do to move toward what matters to you? Just as easily it can extend to what inner stuff has been showing up inside you to get in the way of your passion? How have you been responding to it? It is in this way that each element of the matrix supports the other.

Live sorting can be extended and modified in many ways. An easy alternate method is to give your client a pad of sticky notes and prompt them to jot down content as the conversation goes on. The sticky notes are then placed on the quadrant where they best fit, and at the end of the session you can process this together by taking a look at which quadrants have the most sticky notes, which have the least, etc., and tying this back to an analysis of behavior. Seeing the sticky notes in the quadrants serves as an added visual cue to help identify patterns of behavior out in the wild.

The Vertical Line

If we strip away the horizontal line of the matrix we’re left with something that looks like this:

The vertical line represents the relationship between the self and experiencing along a continuum of outer experiencing to inner experiencing. The circle in the center which represents the self is not static, it has the ability to float up and down the line. Through matrix work we help clients purposefully shift their perspective along the vertical line in order to more effectively contact the present moment. When we are unable to move purposefully along the line we risk becoming stuck and overwhelmed by only a portion of what we’re currently experiencing.

Let’s imagine a person who perpetually ruminates about some past event to the point that they spend more and more time in their home. If you could see them as they are ruminating you’d see a person alone in their basement, a glazed look on their face, unmoving for hours at a time. Using the matrix to conceptualize this, would this person be stuck on the outer experiencing end of the vertical line or the inner experiencing end?

Now imagine someone who has a hair-trigger temper. They get in physical fights with anyone who looks at them the wrong way. When asked about their thoughts and feelings they have only one answer, they’re pissed and they’re angry. Other than anger they are unable to identify, name, or describe any other emotional or cognitive experience. If pressed, they lash out violently. Would this person be stuck primarily on the outer experiencing end or the inner experiencing end?

Finally, imagine a person sitting on an airplane. Some minor turbulence occurs and their stomach drops. Immediately all of their attention goes to their stomach, and then their heart which is racing quickly. A flash of thoughts and images comes into their mind, “We’re going to crash!”, fiery wreckage littering the countryside. A clanging in the cabin makes them startle, it’s the drink cart being pushed by the flight attendant. Then the sound of the person next to them putting up their tray table nearly makes them jump out of their seat. Soon this person is having a full on panic attack. In this scenario is the center circle stuck on either end of the vertical line? Or is it jumping back and forth frantically? The wild whiplash between inner and outer mirrors the frenetic energy of the panic attack, in reality it is the panic attack.

These three hypothetical people are not able to come into contact with and shift between their own inner and outer experiencing in a workable way. There’s no one to blame for this, no need to trek back into their past to find a fault in their upbringing, it’s a skill that can be learned and practiced at any time, and no better time than in the here and now.

Practicing this skill can be incorporated throughout the therapy by regularly asking clients to check in with what’s going on in terms of thoughts, feelings, memories, urges, in this moment, as well as asking them to check in with what’s going on externally in terms of where they are and what they’re doing in a literal sense. At any given time we are always somewhere, doing something, thinking something, feeling something, desiring something, and on, and on, all at once. We can collapse or expand our attention to what’s happening like an accordion.

To better facilitate this ability, I use a specific matrix that I call the Presence Tracker, because it helps me and my clients track what’s going on in the present moment.

Using the presence tracker involves two additional steps as compared to the standard matrix. First I hand the presence tracker sheet to my client along with something to write with. They begin at the top by checking in with their current outer experience. Here we are looking for literal answers. So if they are filling this out in my office they say “I’m in therapy, sitting on a couch. I can hear the soft noise of the sound machine.” The presence tracker includes a space to write down this information which I encourage rather than just answering out loud.

After they are finished instruct them to move to the bottom box and check in with their inner experience. Here they have to identify and label any one thought, any one feeling, and any one urge they notice showing up in the present moment. Any answers they put in here are valid.

From here they begin in the matrix itself in the lower right-hand quadrant. The question in this quadrant refers to the present moment and context. Practicing this presence tracker matrix in session is exactly that, practice. Ideally we would want our clients to utilize this presence tracker out in their daily life at least once a day. Practicing live across various moments and contexts promotes increased ability to connect with the present moment, assess workability on the fly, and take committed action. So if a client is using this matrix when they are at work sure their family may be important to them, but right here in this very moment while the project is due and the meeting at 2:00 is looming, who and what are important? That’s what we want to capture in the lower right-hand box.

Ditto for the rest of the quadrants. What inner stuff is showing up right now in this present moment to get in the way? How would I typically respond to this stuff? And what can I do right here and now that matters to me?

This specific matrix can be utilized anytime during any session, though it will be best utilized outside of the context of the therapy room where the variability of life provokes every kind of human experience.

The point of interest here is how this external experiencing and internal experiencing are happening simultaneously. We want to highlight this for clients. When they are in the depths of despair and hopelessness they are at the same time in a physical space, in a physical world, in a physical body, and are participants in these spaces. They have the ability to not only witness their pain but the rest of the context too. If we zoom into only the suffering and never take a step back we miss the context of the suffering. If we zoom out we can see our own suffering as it is, a part of a whole and a whole that we are a part of.

Getting in the rhythm of noticing our external and our internal world, then moving along the matrix strengthens our ability to connect to what’s happening here and now in a non-judgmental way. Matrix work is all about moving from a state of not noticing (clients come into session unaware of large swaths of their own experience, unaware of loops, etc.), to noticing, then from a state of noticing to “just noticing” in a mindful and open way, and finally to a state of noticing with intention and purpose.

As practice, walk yourself through a presence tracker matrix once a day for the next few days. Do it at any time or place, try to vary when and where and see how that changes things.