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The Jewish Home | APRIL 7, 2022
Dr. Deb
How DIY Therapy is Good but Not Good Enough by Deb Hirschhorn, Ph.D.
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OctOber 29, 2015 | the Jewish Home
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eal therapy is not skin deep. It’s a behavior change but that’s only what everyone sees on the surface. To get there requires reflection, awareness of feelings, and – most importantly – discovering the why of your feelings. The introspection that is required for plunging the depths of you requires two things that are kind of hard to come by sometimes: *Courage *Objectivity You need courage to look inside. It’s hard. It is. I may believe in you. I may believe that you are good through and through, solid. But you may not. And I can’t argue with you because it will not change how you feel about yourself. So how in the world will you have the courage to look inside when you already believe (and even think you “know”) that you’re not so pretty to look at inside? That’s the courage part. The objectivity part is that even when you have courage and you want to look, how
can you see past all your own blind spots? What kind of blind spot warning system have you got, there, anyway? I don’t think anybody has. And if they say they do, it really means they don’t have the courage to look. Because the people that do want to look, will. They work on themselves and marvel at what they realize, their “aha moments.” There’s a lot of good in that. A lot of it. The problem is that it isn’t enough. There will always be blind spots. That’s just human nature. In fact, the most courageous person will often get to a place where they don’t want to see any more. That’s also human nature. There’s another piece of this, too: People who want to fix things and make things right will nevertheless gravitate toward the behavioral methods of therapy because they don’t want to encounter their feelings. After all, it’s a whole lot easier to swallow, “Just change your behavior! Say ‘hello’ to me when you walk in the door, for Pete’s sake” than to go deep inside and wonder,
“Well, why don’t I feel like saying ‘hello’ to him/her when I walk in the door?” Those behavioral methods are so easy to cull from a book. Or a weekend. Just make changes. Forget the feelings, because once you’ve changed how you act, you’ll get responded to differently. And that will make you feel better. It’s a good theory. I bought into it for many years. It just doesn’t work. Don’t get me wrong. They teach great skills. But who follows up their New Year’s resolutions? How many people can and will change the habits of a lifetime because they learned it in a weekend or a book? For this article, I did a Google Scholar search to find research showing these programs work – or don’t. There was one article that sounded good. There was a follow up eleven years after a relationship education course. It showed that, indeed, the course brought down the divorce rate by half and increased the marital satisfaction rate.
However, only the abstract was given so we don’t know how long the program was, how much support was given, and what the content was. And what about the other half of people that it didn’t work for? So, as this title says, “Do It Yourself” can be good. But is it good enough? In college, my then-boyfriend was all into behavior modification, and I found it interesting so I went to a Master’s program in it in Des Moines. I found it soul-less; I knew there was something serious missing in it. The Cognitive Behavioral approach is more of the same: Develop better habits of thinking and the circumstances of your life will reinforce them. And let’s cram them down in a weekend. Here are the problems with these sorts of DIY programs and books: 1. Changing behavior is easy to grasp but hard to maintain. 2. Behavior training leaves out emotion – which is the key to how we are; therefore
