I know I am a few months behind in writing a reaction piece to the much-anticipated release of Wicked: For Good, but it’s never too late to gush about our favorite witches from Oz, right? As I sat in the theatre in November (because, yes, I saw it the weekend it came out) listening to Ariana Grande’s beautiful rendition of “Thank Goodness/ I Couldn’t Be Happier” I couldn’t help but think about how this relates to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). Yup – counsellor nerd alert.
If you read through counsellor’s bio pages, many of them likely say they use an ACT approach, including myself. ACT includes many helpful approaches, tools, and ways of thinking that help clients navigate their lives, and if I wrote about them all, well, you’d be here a while. Therefore, I want to focus on one specific element of ACT that I find particularly present in the character of Glinda, known previously in the films as Galinda.
One important element of ACT is that it distinguishes between values and goals. Russ Harris writes in “The Happiness Trap” that “a value is a quality we desire to bring to our behavior; a quality that guides the words we use and how we say them, and the actions we take and how we do them. In contrast, a goal describes what we want to have, get, achieve, or complete” (Harris, 2022, p. 210).
So let’s go back to our favorite bubble-travelling “good” witch. In the song “Thank Goodness/I Couldn’t Be Happier” Glinda is singing about how she got everything she wanted – essentially, she achieved her goals. She got the job, the man, the reputation. However, as she is singing, we can tell something is bothering her. There’s a nagging question of how she got to where she is. Did she follow her values? Was she loyal to her friend and honest with her fiancé? (In a memorable moment, he finds out they are engaged as she is singing.) We can sense the mental strain of this duplicity. I don’t want to ruin the end but let me just say her journey is very ACT – living into her values eventually brings her peace and value-aligned action.
In the counselling room, I see this play out in many ways. A client might have a goal of getting a job. Great! There are certainly things that can increase the likelihood of getting a job. But perhaps more importantly, from an ACT perspective, what values is one going to live into in the job-searching journey? Take a moment, think about the values that drive your life, and perhaps while you do, hum a tune from Wicked.
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Harris, Russ. 2022. The Happiness Trap. How to Stop Struggling and Start Living. Second Ed. Shambhala Publications. Boulder, Colorado.