L.A. Therapist

Study:  Couples May Not Communicate Better Than Strangers (PsychCentral):

“Although speakers expected their spouse to understand them better than strangers, accuracy rates for spouses and strangers were statistically identical. This result is striking because speakers were more confident that they were understood by their spouse” […]

“A wife who says to her husband, ‘it’s getting hot in here,’ as a hint for her husband to turn up the air conditioning a notch, may be surprised when he interprets her statement as a coy, amorous advance instead,” said Savitsky, who is lead author of the paper, published in the January issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

psychotherapy:

Hard as it is to believe, during the early Twentieth Century, a whole school of mental health professionals decided that unconditional love was a terrible thing to give a child. The government printed pamphlets warning mothers against the dangers of holding their kids. The head of the American Psychological Association and even a mothers’ organization endorsed the position that mothers were dangerous—until psychologist Harry Harlow set out to prove them wrong, through a series of experiments with monkeys. Host Ira Glass talks with Deborah Blum, author of Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection. (9 minutes)

psychotherapy:

(via Dr. John Grohl, Psych Central)

You’ve gathered up the energy and resources to start psychotherapy. It’s a big step and you’re excited to begin. But you find yourself unable to talk in therapy. What’s the point of talk therapy without the talking? We find it so incredibly easy to open up online, but when we’re in the therapy office, we become suddenly mute.

There are many strategies to help “open up” and be able to talk more freely while in psychotherapy. Here are a few.

1. Write it down.

One of the easiest ways to help overcome your fear or inability to talk in therapy is to write down some things that are important to you to talk about before session. Jot it down on a piece of paper, or keep a “therapy journal” even of topics or areas of your life that you want to talk about, you just find it difficult. Bring it to session, open it up, and pick a topic for that session.

 

2. Let the therapist guide you.

A psychotherapist’s main job is to act as a guide in your recovery and healing process. They are not there to necessarily give you all the answers, but help you find your own way to those answers (often with specific skills and techniques they can teach to help you better understand your interconnected moods and thoughts).

3. Reset your expectations.

Some people believe you need to go into your weekly therapy session with a “topic” to discuss. While sometimes that may indeed be the case — especially if the therapist has given you “homework” on a specific topic — it may also be that each session may already be full. Therapy would be of little benefit if you go into every session and talk non-stop for 50 minutes.

Remember, you’re not there to entertain your therapist, or to tell stories to maintain their interest. You’re there to do real work, some of which is going to involve talking about the past week in your life, but not to such an extent or in so much detail it overshadows the reason you’re in therapy to begin with.

4. Prepare for each session.

Sometimes people put off preparing for each therapy session. Either it becomes too unwieldy, or it becomes too much like real work. Well, psychotherapy is real work and is often hard. If you prepare for each session beforehand, you’re more likely to be ready to have a topic to talk about.

Not preparing for a therapy session or waiting until the last minute may inadvertently make it more difficult to talk. Imagine going to a conference or big meeting where you are the main speaker, and you only prepare your speech minutes beforehand. Naturally you’re going to be more flustered and less likely to speak well. Preparation is key. Not just for speeches or meetings, but for anything worthwhile in life.

5. Think of your therapist as the closest confidante you can ever share anything with.

In childhood, we often have a best friend or two we felt like we could share anything with. Sometimes we maintain these friendships, and other times they fade away for whatever reasons.

Therapists are your adult equivalent of someone you can share almost anything with (except for some things that are illegal, like murder, or suicide). That is a part of the special joy of a psychotherapy relationship. Here is a person who can tell them anything you want about yourself, and they won’t judge, they won’t insult or berate, and they won’t just leave you unexpectedly (within their abilities, anyway). It’s such a valuable and unique relationship that’s to your benefit to take advantage of as much as possible.

6. Ask your therapist to read your online blog entry, Facebook page, or support group posting.

I would do this very rarely indeed, but it’s okay to share the occasional blog entry or support group posting, if you feel like it indeed puts into words you can’t bring yourself to verbalize in session. Keep in mind that most psychotherapists are fairly busy — as is anyone in a full-time job — so they’re not going to have time to read all of your blog entries dating back from 5 years ago.

However, if you pick out one entry or one posting that really expresses how you feel or what you’re grappling with at that moment, that’s fine. Most therapists appreciate that additional insight into their patient, especially for one who may be having trouble talking or opening up in therapy.

* * *

As I’ve written previously about, though, don’t open up just to lie to your therapist. Little benefit comes from lying about your true feelings or how well you’re actually doing (versus the mask you may put on for your therapist).

One last thing — silence is okay once in awhile too. Although for most of us, an extended silence between two people engaged in a conversation can be uncomfortable, it’s something you can learn to become comfortable with in time. Therapists often won’t rush in to fill the silence, because most are comfortable with it. Don’t feel the need to say something just to fill the void, either. Give it some time, and perhaps the words will find themselves.

psychotherapy:

This has nothing to do with nuns’ clothing. Habits are those behaviours that have become automatic, triggered by a cue in the environment rather than by conscious will. Health psychologists are interested for obvious reasons - they want to assist people in breaking unhealthy habits, while helping them adopt healthy ones. Remarkably, although there are plenty of habit-formation theories, before now, no-one had actually studied habits systematically as they are formed.

Phillippa Lally and her team recruited 96 undergrads (mean age 27) and asked them to adopt a new health-related behaviour, to be repeated once a day for the next 84 days. The new behaviour had to be linked to a daily cue. Examples chosen by the participants included going for a 15 minute run before dinner; eating a piece of fruit with lunch; and doing 50 sit-ups after morning coffee. The participants also logged onto a website each day, to report whether they’d performed the behaviour on the previous day, and to fill out a self-report measure of the behaviour’s automaticity. Example items included ‘I do it automatically’, ‘I do it without thinking’ and ‘I’d find it hard not to do’.

Of the 82 participants who saw the study through to the end, the most common pattern of habit formation was for early repetitions of the chosen behaviour to produce the largest increases in its automaticity. Over time, further increases in automaticity dwindled until a plateau was reached beyond which extra repetitions made no difference to the automaticity achieved.

The average time to reach maximum automaticity was 66 days, although this varied greatly between participants from 18 days to a predicted 254 days (assuming the still rising rate of change in automaticity at the study end were to be continued beyond the study’s 84 days). This is much longer than most previous estimates of the time taken to acquire a new habit - for example a 1988 book claimed a behaviour is habitual once it’s been performed at least twice a month, at least ten times. In fact, even after 84 days, about half of the current study participants had failed to achieve a high enough automaticity score for their new behaviour to be considered a habit.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, more complex behaviours were found to take longer to become habits. Participants who’d chosen an exercise behaviour took about one and a half times as long to reach their automaticity plateau compared with the participants who adopted new eating or drinking behaviours.

What about the effect of having a day off from the behaviour? Writing in 1890, William James said that a behaviour must be repeated without omission for it to become a habit. The new results found that a single missed day had little impact on later automaticity gains, either early in the study or later on, suggesting James may have overestimated the effect of a missed repetition. However, there was some evidence that too many missed repeats of the behaviour, even if spread out over time, had a cumulative effect, reducing the maximum automaticity level that was ultimately reached.

It seems the message of this research for those seeking to establish a new habit is to repeat the behaviour every day if you can, but don’t worry excessively if you miss a day or two. Also be prepared for the long haul - remember the average time to reach peak automaticity was 66 days.

This research has a serious shortcoming, acknowledged by the researchers, which is that it depended entirely on participants’ ability to report the automaticity of their own behaviour. Also, the amount of data made it hard to form clear conclusions about the need for consistency in building a habit. However, the study provides an exciting new approach for exploring habit formation and future research could easily remedy these shortcomings.