Psychological flexibility, Cognitive fusion & Defusion

     "Psychological flexibility is defined as the capacity to persist or change behavior guided by one’s goals and values, and attuned to what situations afford, in a context of interacting cognitive processes and direct experiences. 
     Psychological flexibility includes a number of interacting processes ... such as acceptance, committed action and cognitive defusion. 
     Cognitive fusion (the opposite of defusion) is essentially a process by which people become dominated in their experience by the content of their thoughts, lose contact with experience outside of the content of their thoughts, and are restrained to feel and do only what their thoughts say. This is sometimes referred to as being lost or entangled in thoughts or stuck in one’s own mind. 
     Cognitive defusion then is the loosening of this entanglement. It is the ability to make contact with direct sensory experiences, or like the ability to have a thought without being dominated by the literal meaning of the thought."

       Lance M. McCracken, Estelle Barker, Joseph Chilcot. "Decentering, rumination, cognitive defusion, and psychological flexibility in people with chronic pain." J Behav Med 2014; 37:1215–25. 

All alone with only one's thoughts ...