My Therapists

As a psychiatrist, I spend all my working hours evaluating how people see their worlds. If they see their worlds through an depressive lens, I try to encourage them to put on a corrective lens, via medications or psychotherapy. Whatever they tell me, I take with a grain of salt, because well, they see the world through the-lens-that-is-at-times-maladaptive.

Not that my lens is always so adaptive at all!

I have my own therapists, they are available to me pretty much all the time! For now, there are two, but I suspect, soon and very soon, I will have three.

There is Aidan, who is actually quite good at cognitive behavioral therapy. The idea of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is that your thoughts, mood, and behaviors are all inter-related. By changing one, you can have effects on the other two. For instance, if your mood is anxious, then your thoughts will be of the anxious kind and your behaviors will reflect such. By teasing apart one's thoughts, one can discover various fallacies in one's thinking and once corrected, the mood and behaviors can have drastic improvements. CBT has been all the rage in recent years, partly because it is a form of therapy that can be done in groups, and therefore, much less expensive than one on one therapy. Also, there is good research data that this works.

Aidan is now on summer break, and so he is going to various camps, and our schedules shift as such. I had thought it would be so much fun to enroll him at a science camp with a friend, in a DIFFERENT TOWN. What was I thinking?! On Thursday, it was our turn to drive his little friend to camp. Of course, it was hard to get Aidan and Zoe up (I don't know why, they are sleeping in until 8 these days.) By the time I drove out of our street, it was 8:38, and the boys need to be at camp at 9:05. I was annoyed, peeved, and irritated. I was becoming increasingly hostile because I actually didn't know how to get to our friend's house! In my agitated state, what did I do? I launched into a discussion about our lateness. "Aidan, why are we always late? You know, so and so's dad said that he always sees us running, because we are always late! WHY!?" To that, Aidan responded in his matter of fact way, "But mom, we are not always late." Ah HA! I was using my overgeneralization fallacy! He is absolutely right. We are hardly late to school. In the 180 days of kindergarten, he was late twice. Once because the car battery died and I had gone to work already, and Hubby had to wait for me to come home to jump the car. The other time was also of a similar situation, something completely unrelated to our efforts. While we have been late to our friends' houses and soccer games, to say 'never' is grossly overgeneralized. Once I realized I was, in fact, thinking incorrectly, I found my mood changed drastically, and behavior was much, much calmer. Thanks Aidan! For helping me to see my lens of overgeneralization!

On Tuesday, it was also hard to get Aidan and Zoe going, it was also hard to get Hubby going that morning. As I rushed out, I hissed at Hubby, "You need to get up earlier!" When we got home that evening and talked about it, it was a very interesting conversation. Whereas I see a hectic morning, and I think that every morning from here on out will be equally hectic and if I don't nip it in the bud, my life will be ruined. That, friends, would be catastrophizing, another thought fallacy. Instead, Hubby sees that such a hectic morning is an outlier: we were coming back from a long weekend, we have not perfected our morning routine to accommodate this science camp, and there is no reason to think that our lives are spinning out of control, forever. We were just having hectic morning. (Of course, it helps Hubby's case that we all got to work/school/camp on time.) In his view, if we were to be sure that no mornings are hectic, we would have to get up at least 1/2 hour earlier, and that, just won't be worth the loss of sleep. Hubby is probably right, he usually is.

I am blessed to have such good CBT therapists who live in my house!

To take it a step further, if we apply psychodynamic formulation to the above situations, it would be clear that one of my neuroses is to be on time. (I know, totally obvious.) This neurosis has worked really well for me, it really helps to be on time for medical training. However, with kids, it can cause a significant amount of stress and friction. I can go on and on about how this neurosis developed, another story, for another time. The most important thing, though, is that despite my neuroses, I am loved, by the One who created me, and loved by Hubby, Aidan, and Zoe. He who created me will continue to work in me, so that I can uses my desire to be on time to serve Him well, but not let my promptness become an idol.

As for Zoe, I am sure, in the next year or so, she is going to be quite the dissector of my thought fallacies.