Short form
Notes
Here I collect fragments of experience, snapshots of ideas in motion, and evidence that there may be sentient life on earth.
Open records
Newest first
Nice to see some old friends back on the shelf
Tools became obstacles
I let my Whoop strap subscription expire, and instead of jumping right to a new tracker I decided to recalibrate and just pay attention to my body.
Paradoxically, I ended up feeling more motivated to exercise and care for my sleep. It got me thinking about how easily our tools become obstacles:
Social media replaces socializing.
Fitness trackers replace somatic connection.
Dating apps replace romantic connection.
Entertainment replaces creation.
Access to information replaces actual learning.
Discussion of MI in Suicide Prevention
When we give in to our anxiety about our clients’ suicidal ideation, we make it more — not less — likely that they will kill themselves.
From the great Talking to Change podcast, here’s a frank discussion about the best ways we can actually help people find their motivation to live:
attcnetwork.org
Talking to Change: An MI Podcast. Episode 24: MI for Suicide Prevention, with Emma Braconier - Addiction Technology Transfer Center (ATTC) Network
Daniel P. Brown Sacred Sundays
I had the pleasure of sharing a meal with the late Dan Brown, Ph.D. when he came to Chicago to present on hypnosis in the treatment of attachment disorders.
In addition to being a very important writer and researcher in the field of clinical hypnosis, he was also a highly accomplished practitioner and translator of Tibetan Buddhist texts.
This 2-hour talk is one of the best nutshell descriptions of several thousand years of Buddhist empirical wisdom, through a lens deeply informed by modern psychology, and with a very powerful guided practice.
Listening for transference
When we listen for transference, we listen for the poetry in the patient’s words.
— Jon Frederickson, Psychodynamic Psychotherapy: Learning to listen from multiple perspectives
Our crisis of the soul
“Are we so spiritually diminished, so enervated, to suffer our crisis of the soul in such trivializing fashion?”
— James Hollis, What Matters Most
Interpersonal Boundaries
Interpersonal boundaries are not something that can be imposed on others. They can only be upheld for oneself. The only power I have over anyone else is their access to me.
Seinfeld on the Cheapness of Life
On an episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, Jerry Seinfeld talked about how in the old days nobody wore helmets. “Nobody cared. Remember when life was kind of a cheap, throwaway thing? Was it more fun? Of course it was!”
This hit me, actually. He’s right. For ages life was nothing special, you expected to die at any moment, and seeing other people die wasn’t considered traumatic – it was actually a popular form of entertainment.
What does this mean? We’ve come to agree that “life is precious,” and this prevents us from really being able to play with it. It’s an age of anxiety because it feels like there’s so much at stake, “You only live once!”
But this is all a flash in the pan. We’re only here for a moment. It doesn’t really change anything or mean anything. We should be able to play with it. Why not?
Max Planck on Matter & Consciousness
“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”
-Max Planck
Meeting destiny
Things that keep me awake at night…
“A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.” - Jean de La Fontaine
Treatment planning with the VA
The chief of psychology at a local VA medical center asked me the discharge plan for a patient who is still symptomatic. I said the plan is to treat them until they’re better.
Incredulously, she exclaimed “We can’t just keep treating everyone until all the symptoms are gone!”
Moralizing
Nancy McWilliams wrote:
“Moralization is a close relative of [the defense of] rationalization… rationalization converts what the person already wants into reasonable language; moralization puts it in the realm of the justified or morally obligatory”
Moralizing is the way you defend yourself against the scary reality that you are selfish and that the fulfillment of your desires will often lead to someone else’s pain.
The Diderot Effect
The Diderot Effect: obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption which leads you to acquire more new things. As a result, we end up buying things that our previous selves never needed to feel happy or fulfilled.
jamesclear.com
The Diderot Effect: Why We Want Things We Don’t Need
The Diderot Effect helps explain why we buy things we don't need.
Explaining psychotherapy to trainees
How I feel explaining client-centered, psychoanalytic, and mindfulness-based intervention to psychotherapy trainees:
What really works in psychotherapy
Here’s a great keynote presentation by Bruce Wampold, who has been one of the key researchers comparing the efficacy of different psychotherapies and identifying common factors shared between psychotherapy approaches:
(For the curious, here are his slides from that presentation)
Main takeaway: Better THERAPISTS get better results, not better treatment modalities.
Things that barely have any effect on treatment outcome:
Certainty betrays a rejection of ambiguity
Certainty betrays a rejection of ambiguity.
BMJ Antidepressants Should Not Be Used
Wow!
BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine:
“Antidepressants should not be used for adults with major depressive disorder…. Based on current evidence, antidepressants seem to offer more harms than benefits."
Psychotherapy is the biological treatment
Psychotherapy is the only treatment that addresses the brain in the same way it develops, operates, grows, and heals.
medscape.com
Psychotherapy Is 'The' Biological Treatment
Dr Robert Berezin on the biology behind psychotherapy's effectiveness.