Who’s driving your bus?

Who is really in control of your life? You’ll probably answer, ‘Well me of course’, but is that really the case. Is it you, or is it all the passengers you’ve picked up along the way?

Humour me for a minute and follow me in a thought experiment. Sometimes, when we’re struggling to see something clearly a metaphor can be really helpful. This one from ACT, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, aims to do just that – give you a different perspective on a really common issue.

So, you’re the driver of a bus and over the years you’ve picked up a lot of passengers. Most of them are fine, some of them you even like, but some of them you’d rather hadn’t come along for the ride. They’re the bad events and memories, difficult feelings and emotions or unhelpful patterns of behaviour. And sadly, they’re often the loudest passengers.

You spend a lot of time trying to placate these passengers: you don’t want them getting out of control. You’ve tried drowning them out with music (they got louder and louder), you’ve tried kicking them off the bus (they wouldn’t go), you’ve tried fighting them (but some of them are quite scary) and you’ve even tried colluding with some of the ‘nice’ passengers against them (well, power goes to anyone’s head) - nothing worked. Eventually they would become so loud and overwhelming that you would give in to them and just keep driving the same old route, in the same old way, to keep them under some type of control.

But you don’t have to do that. Once you know where you want to take your bus you can do it anyway – despite the passengers. What are they actually going to do? Think about our buses; the driver is protected behind a nice big screen, they can’t actually harm you, no matter how much fuss they kick up. The passengers can come along with you if they want to, that’s up to them, but you are the driver of your bus and where you take that bus is up to you. What road do you really want to travel down?