About this exercise
The Life Line is an experiential metaphor from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. It helps you see how important events in your life and the ways you coped with them relate to a direction you truly care about.
It is usually done with a therapist, laying out events along a rope on the floor. This is a self-guided version: you describe your valued direction and your events, and the page builds a line from them.
Step 1
Your valued direction
Imagine that at one end of the life line lies the direction you want to move in: how you want to live and what kind of person you want to be. Describe it.
My valued direction
Not a goal that can be achieved, but how you want to live.
Step 2
Events
Recall events from four categories: significant losses; things going wrong; times you went off track; times you hung on to good feelings. For each event, describe what happened and when, how you felt, and how you reacted or coped.
If possible, put the events in chronological order: you can reorder them with the arrows.
Step 3
Your life line
The green line is the path of living in your chosen direction. When you coped by avoiding what you felt, you “stepped off” the line — moving away from what matters to you.
Step 4
What do you notice
Look at your line and answer a few questions.
What do you notice when you look at your line?
Where did avoiding difficult experiences take you — closer to what matters to you, or further from it?
Are you willing to keep moving in your chosen direction now? What small step could you take?
Done
Save your life line to a file — you can bring it to a session and talk it through.
Your answers stay on this page in your browser and are not sent anywhere. The file is saved as .txt.