O'Grady Psychology Associates

Psychotherapy, Marriage Counseling, Neuropsychological Assessment

By Leave a Comment

Powering off to reboot your internal drive

When your iPad or smartphone is having issues—unresponsive, randomly crashing, or just running sluggishly—it’s time to power off and reboot the system. When do you power off so that you can reboot your drive?

Irritability, Fatigue, Lack of Enthusiasm?  Time to Power Off

When you are having issues such as irritability, fatigue, or lack of enthusiasm, it’s time to power off. In a previous post, I mentioned that relaxation is one of the eight therapeutic lifestyle changes that help people cope with depression, anxiety, and sleep problems. Taking time to relax is often the last thing on a long to-do list for most people. And being last on the list, it’s often neglected. People might think they’re powering off by surfing the web, watching TV, attending to email, or having a bowl of ice cream while talking to a friend on the phone. These things will give you a break but won’t provide the restorative stillness we need to feel replenished.

When you reset your iPad by shutting it down, the apps that have been causing problems are cleared, giving a new start—a clean slate that will clear up the system so it can function the way it’s designed to. You, too, can reboot your internal drive by practicing deep relaxation. Listen to the audio at the end of this post to taste a few minutes of relaxation.

Ten Minute Lying Down Meditation

By 2 Comments

Do Opposites Attract? How what once attracted us can begin to repel

We Seek Wholeness in Ourselves When we Choose our Mate

The adage “opposites attract” is often true before marriage and well into the first few years of a relationship. However, as I have seen in many years of providing marriage counseling, the powerful attraction that once drew you to your mate can fade over time. If personality differences are misunderstood, then the initial attraction will turn to ”opposites repel,” leading to negative feelings for the person you were deeply drawn to when dating.

 Using the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory in Couples Counseling

I sometimes have my couple clients take a True-False test called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a questionnaire based on the work of Carl Jung that assesses different psychological types according to four pairs of preferences: extraversion vs. introversion, sensing vs. intuition, thinking vs. feeling, and judging vs. perception. We all use all four functions, but some are more dominant than others.

The MBTI is used by, for example, vocational counselors to help people select occupations that best suit their temperaments. It has also been widely used by employers and managers to appreciate differences in workers with the aim of functioning better in teams, thus avoiding misunderstanding and increasing efficiency by reducing personality conflicts.

Decision making in marriage can be challenging when partners are opposite on some personality traits. When I was ready to buy my new car I decided what I wanted, test drove it and did some quick online research to see what the inventory was, and at what price. I went to our local dealership and was quoted a price that seemed fair. I was prepared to purchase the car then and there, but since we believe that big purchases should always be discussed and agreed on, I took my decision to my partner for the final green light. He immediately jumped into the decision-making by polling every dealer within 100 miles of us and reading every consumer report written on the car.

My psychological preference is Feeling and my husband is Thinking. Both approaches have to do with decision making, and each is valid. Feeling types seek harmony with people. Thinking types seek objective clarity. Because I felt that the car salesman was honest and nice, I trusted his price quote. I didn’t want there to be discomfort or tension.

When all was said and done, he came to me with the exact price I was quoted, saying it was a good price, giving his approval. Because we respected each other’s differences, we came to an agreement.

When Jeff and Lynn came to marriage therapy they were stuck in gridlock about how to spend time in their retirement. Jeff wanted to spend time at home, tinkering with projects in the garage and watching old home movies—something he wasn’t able to do when he worked six days a week. Jeff is a typical Introvert, someone who needs alone time to recharge his batteries and who is drained by too much socializing. Lynn, in contrast, was bored with staying home and wanted to travel and see the many sights that they hadn’t had time or money for before retirement. Lynn is an Extrovert, someone who gains energy from social contact and feels drained without it. These differences made even smaller decisions difficult for Lynn and Jeff. For instance, Lynn wanted to entertain friends and loved putting on big dinner parties, but that made Jeff uncomfortable. He much preferred to have one couple over and play Pictionary. Lynn was furious at Jeff for what she considered to be thwarting her dreams. Jeff felt overwhelmed and withdrew from her when their discussions turned to these issues.

We seek what we want to complete us when we choose a mate. This is largely unconscious. When Jeff first met Lynn he was mesmerized by her vitality and adventurous spirit. He loved how she could talk to anyone. He was invigorated by her constant energy. Lynn was in love with Jeff’s calm and his ability to love the simple things in life. They were attracted to the very traits that were undeveloped in themselves.

Life transitions such as retirement often bring out differences in how a couple will make decisions. When life is routine, these personality difference can be dealt with, even masked. But with challenges such as the birth of a child or a move, the traits that you loved in your partner become the very things that drive you crazy.

The MBTI is a valuable test to help couples understand why they sometimes fight about the same things over and over again. I like it because unlike many psychological tests, the MBTI is non-pathologizing. There are no good or bad traits. Every one of the sixteen types indicates a difference in how one gathers information, organizes their life, how they like to spend their time, and how they think (or feel) through the various decisions that confront them.

After giving Jeff and Lynn the MBTI I was able to help them understand Jeff’s introversion and Lynn’s extroversion. Neither of them was wrong; they just needed to understand and appreciate their differences. We worked with ways they could get their individual needs met, and still find things to do together in retirement. They began to keep a list of activities they each wanted to do and then found ways to compromise about how to going about doing them together, honoring each other’s interests and dreams. This was immensely reassuring. Once you realize that your partner is not wrong, or odd, you can start talking compromise.

Despite my husband and I having opposite types for Feeling and Thinking, we can come to the exact same decision, as with buying the car, but we do it differently. Understanding each other saves a lot of time in the long run!

By Leave a Comment

Psychotherapy and Choice: The Journey to the Self

I often hike the trails below Mt. Diablo and am not a stranger to seeing snakes on the path, and have been told that in stretches of certain trails, rattlesnakes peer out from under the rocks. But on a recent hike, I was startled to actually make eye contact with a rattler! It was hiding in the hole underneath this gnarled tree trunk.

While snakes themselves have a rich symbolic history, today I want to talk more about the scary underground place it comes from.

I was reminded of a story I read to my daughters when they were young. The fable inspired lots of discussion in our home, and I believe it was formative for them.

The story was originally told to Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet.

A caravan of men and camels crossed a desert and reached a place where they expected to find water. Instead they found only a hole going deep into the earth. They lowered bucket after bucket into the hole, but the rope each time came back empty—no bucket and no water. They then began to lower men into the hole but the men, too, disappeared from the end of the rope. Finally a wise man among the party volunteered to go down into the hole in search of water.

When the wise man reached the bottom of the hole, he found himself face to face with a horrible monster. The wise man thought to himself, “I can’t hope to escape from this place, but I can at least remain aware of everything I am experiencing.”

The monster said to him, “I will let you go only if you answer my question.”

The wise man replied, “Ask your question.”The monster said, “Where is the best place to be?”

The wise man thought to himself, “I don’t want to hurt his feelings. If I name some beautiful city, he may think I’m disparaging his hometown. Or maybe his hole is the place he thinks is best.”

So he said to the monster, “The best place to be is wherever you feel at home—even if it’s a hole in the ground.”

The monster said, “You are so wise that I will not only let you go, but I will also free the foolish men who came down before you. And I will release the water in this well.”

Wisdom and Choice

What made the wise man wise? He had a choice. He could go down into the darkness or not. He chose to descend into the hole even though it was doubtful that he would come back up again. He also chose to remain aware. He said, “I can at least remain aware of everything I am experiencing.” He showed kindness and compassion, without an agenda to beat the monster at his riddle. Through awareness and courtesy, he sets free his companions and releases the water.

Healing Comes from Confronting our Difficult, Dark Sides

Symbolically, this story illustrates a path to healing. In psychotherapy, we are often confronted with feelings that come from deep in the unconscious. By taking the difficult route into the darker places within, we can come back with deeper self-knowledge. When people begin individual therapy, they are often hesitant to look at the dark, secret places they keep tucked away. Psychotherapy is an opportunity to dig deeper and to face the darkness within, to remain aware and open to experience in the search for insight.

When we start down the path of self-understanding, we must choose to look at the discarded parts of ourselves. In this process, we can free ourselves from the things that hold us back from being truly alive. No one is without stain—without what seems like a monster inside. It is by entering the darkness that we can release the water, the substance of life, thereby slaking our thirst for wholeness.

By 3 Comments

The fullest experience of the adventure of life: Eleanor Roosevelt, Blogging, and Mindfulness

I just returned from Rhinebeck, NY, where I took an intensive professional training course in Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) for the Prevention of Depression Relapse. The five-day course was developed for health-care professionals who already have experience with mindfulness-based approaches.

Many years ago, I studied Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction with its developer, Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn. Since that time, research has continued to demonstrate the effectiveness of mindfulness training in treating many forms of emotional difficulties. Offspring treatments that involve mindfulness as a major component to their treatment protocol include Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT).

Taking a course in MBCT  gave me the opportunity to study with one of the major researchers and writers in the field. It was given by Zindel Segal, PhD, and Susan Wood, MSW, LCSW. Dr. Segal is the author of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression: A New Approach to Preventing Relapse, 2002, The Guilford Press.

While the course was valuable and added to my skills in teaching this treatment approach, the highlight of the trip was my excursion to Val-Kill, the unpretentious, comfortable home of Eleanor Roosevelt. Just down the road in Hyde Park, NY, stands the opulent estate of her husband, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Ms. Roosevelt created her separate home in a style that reflected her sensibilities, not those of her husband. Set among trees and brooks, the house contains simple furniture and cozy, intimate rooms.

I was fascinated to learn that Eleanor Roosevelt was a kind of pioneering blogger extraordinaire. She wrote a daily letter to Americans that came to be called “My Day,” one of the most popular syndicated columns of the time. She wrote her column six days a week, often dictated in any free moment she found. She published over five hundred words per column, at least six days a week for 26 years from 1936-1962. Personal as well as socially relevant, her work communicated her thoughts, joys, and intimate concerns.

As a beginning blogger, I have wondered about my urge to write. In a previous post, I talked about how this form of writing allows me to take my many years as a psychologist and put words to this experience that can go beyond the confines of my confidential private office. Social media has provided a means for anyone to make his or her thoughts and opinions public, taking journaling to a new level—but not an unprecedented one, as I saw by Eleanor’s example.

Pleasant and Unpleasant Events Calendar

I often suggest that my clients journal. Collecting thoughts and feelings by observing them and taking the extra step to write them down allows insights to emerge. In MBCT, one of the first homework exercises is to write a daily note about a pleasant and an unpleasant experience that occurred during the day. By noting the thoughts, feelings, and sensations associated with such experiences, we bring mindful awareness to daily life. This can allow us to experience and appreciate the moment simply as it is, without adding further elaboration in the form of wishing, dreading, or judging. It is often our mental elaboration that triggers rumination, a common symptom in depression. We can begin to realize that even unpleasant events can be tolerated. Bringing awareness to each situation, whether we label it good or bad, is an important step in learning to relate differently to them. This takes practice. And curiosity.

The Fullest Experience of the Adventure of Life

As Eleanor Roosevelt writes in You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys For a More Fulfilling Life, “There is no experience from which you can’t learn something. When you stop learning you stop living in any vital and meaningful sense. And the purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience. . . . The experience can have meaning only if you understand it. You can understand it only if you have arrived at some knowledge of yourself, a knowledge based on a deliberately and usually painfully acquired self-discipline, which teaches you to cast out fear and frees you for the fullest experience of the adventure of life.”

Being attentive to thoughts and writing them down takes discipline. When keeping a journal (or a thought record of daily events, or writing a blog) our life experience is enlarged and enriched. For people struggling with depression, being able to notice even slightly positive things during the day allows them to see that such events are already there for them. For some, it may be noticing the song of a bird, or the stars on a clear night—these simple experiences are always within reach, but for someone who struggles with depression, they go unattended. Writing is a vehicle of self-expression.

References:

Roosevelt, E. (2001). My Day: The best of Eleanor Roosevelt’s acclaimed newspaper columns, 1936-1962. D. Emblidge (Ed.) Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press.

Roosevelt, E. (2011). You learn by living: Eleven keys for a more fulfilling life. New York: Harper Perennial.

Segal, Z. V., Williams, J. M. G., & Teasdale, J. D. (2002). Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for depression: A new approach to preventing relapse. New York: Guilford.

 

By 1 Comment

The College Transition: Things to Talk About

 College is a rite of passage, a transition into adulthood. It’s a transition for parents, too, who can no longer sleep in the room down the hall with ears half-cocked and one eye open. It’s all the more important, then, for parents to have conversations with their kids about how to deal with the common, normal changes and stresses likely to arise in these early years of living away from home.

As high-school friendships shift and fade, college students must forge new social connections or risk social isolation. Kids who have poor coping and social skills before starting college might seek unhealthy solutions, like partying, playing computer games, or holing up in their dorm rooms with their laptops

If these solutions, healthy or unhealthy, don’t work, college kids often isolate, deny, pretend, and find all sorts of other ways to conceal their loneliness. To be lonely is shameful. Instead, many tend to brood over stressful experiences and feelings, a process called rumination. The lonely, anxious person ruminates on negative thoughts: reliving past injuries, flubs, or missed opportunities; feeling apprehension about social events, and anticipating distressing outcomes.

Anxiety, Rumination, and Depression in College

Rumination and anxiety create a cycle where each promotes and prolongs the other. The effect of this is that a stressful experience (such as, say, being snubbed at a party) does not end when the stressful situation ends, but can continue on in one’s thoughts and moods. So it is not only the exposure to the initial stress but also exposure to the recurring representation of that event in the mind that results in a depressed mood. Over time, this anxious rumination leads to negative self-esteem and depression.

Apart from such dangers, loneliness doesn’t just feel bad; lonely people are at greater risk for poor health. Social support mediates health: It is well known that when someone has close family and friends, they will be encouraged to seek medical attention when needed, and they will take better care of themselves in general.

One simple thing to look at when considering college students, loneliness, anxiety, and stress is the role of sleep. Good sleep is the cornerstone of mental health. Most of the clients I see—college students or otherwise—suffer from some form of sleep disturbance. Difficulties getting to sleep or staying asleep are common in both depression and anxiety. (Oversleeping, too, can be a problem when it’s used to avoid situations that may provoke difficult feelings.)

In the recent issue of Health Psychology, researchers examined the mechanisms that underlie the relationship found between depressed mood and poor sleep quality in college students. They found that found that rumination and anxiety are strongly connected to loneliness and depressed mood as well as poor sleep quality.  The authors conclude that psychotherapists and college counselors need to assess loneliness in kids at school.  It is not enough to look at depression and anxiety.  Parents, teachers, college counselors need to look at sleep quality and social isolation, in addition to symptoms of anxiety and depression.

(Zawadzki, M. J., Graham, J. E., & Gerin, W. (2012, July 23). Rumination and Anxiety Mediate the Effect of Loneliness on Depressed Mood and Sleep Quality in College Students. Health Psychology. )

Of course, the image of a college student pulling an all-nighter, or partying until dawn, is a common one, and it’s true that college-aged kids need less sleep than adults. For vulnerable kids, however, poor sleep can lead to severe psychological problems. And as we’ve seen, college can be a vulnerable experience in itself. Add to this that students trying to solve their sleep problems don’t always choose healthy options. Some college kids I’ve worked with use combinations of stimulants and caffeine to stay awake, and anti-anxiety medications to sleep. This leads to drug dependence, and in vulnerable kids, will cause emotional problems ranging from depression to delusional thinking.

Whether problems are caused by too much social media, partying, or are the result of depression and anxiety, we need to pay attention to how these activities are affecting emotional well-being.  Find time to talk with your college-bound kid about some of these issues.  Enjoy the fun of shopping for dorm room stuff, but don’t neglect the crucial conversations about what to expect during this first year away from home. Some basic topics to discuss could include: how to deal with being lonely, how to contact the college counseling center if they feel anxious or depressed, limiting social media, how to get sleep when distractions inevitably occur, and of course, “call us when you feel down.”

Originally published here.