DIY Therapy is Not Good Enough by Dr. Deb Hirschhorn

How DIY Therapy is Good but Not Good Enough

by Deb Hirschhorn, Ph.D.

real 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

without focusing on emotion, and healing from emotional injuries, it is unlikely that behavior change will be sustained. 3. Behavior changes won’t sustain themselves without that feedback from the environment that it depends on – the positive reinforcement of new behaviors.

However, in a marriage, that’s not likely because each person is looking to the other for that positive reinforcement. This creates a standoff. Each one is waiting for the other. 4. Without the support of a therapist with a well-trained eye and sensitive ear, the nuances will be missed. That is, if you want to make changes, it’s not enough to read a book that speaks about people “like” you; you need a spotlight on yourself. 5. Finally, patience is sorely lacking in our rushed society, yet when it comes to healing emotions caused within the marriage and before it, patience is exactly what is needed.

So what are the traits that will make DIY work anyway?

In spite of this, a person can learn a great deal from weekends and books – and even therapy that is not emotion-focused – if he or she has fewer risk factors. Here they are: • Trauma history.

Trauma, even little “t” trauma, such as parents’ divorce, or a depressed parent, or even frequent moves, can adversely affect a child.

Often, but not always, when the child grows up, that wound remains and pops through all the protections we have put in place. This wound needs direct healing, outside of the therapy for, say, a marriage.

Healing trauma wounds can’t happen with pure reason, logic, and “getting it.” You can get it, but your behavior won’t change, much as you wish it would, until the original trauma is healed. And that, itself, requires tools which directly address it. • Sensitivity

People who are naturally sensitive will feel pain more and may not be able to handle it as well as those who are a bit more removed from it. As in the case of trauma, they require a therapy that is focused on emotions more than reasoning. • In denial

The flip side of the coin is people who have had a trauma history – go back to the first bullet – but are in denial that they were affected. Those people will not make significant changes without getting the emotion-

In fact, the most courageous person will often get to a place where they don’t want to see any more.

al help that they need to uncover the sores that lie underneath their calm exterior. So, on the one hand, they appear to not have that over-sensitivity that is a risk factor, but yet, if the unemotional demeanor is hiding serious emotional childhood wounds, cognitive type therapies in the form of books and weekends will not work.

Why would that be?

The answer is that their cover-up of pain not only assists them to not be in pain, but unfortunately, keeps them from “getting” other people. To understand others, you need to feel. How can someone have empathy for others when they’re kind of numb, themselves?

So, if you’re a more rational person, and although kindly and sensitive, not extraordinarily so, without a trauma history, you may be in luck and can work out small-ish emotional problems on your own or in a quick weekend program. • There’s one more: luck

Some people just got lucky and married someone with whom they get along in spite of all the baggage they carry. This is possible, too. Then no one will need to go to therapy or read a self-help book.

Another source of good luck is to be brought up in a healthy and wholesome, loving family in which methods of handling adversity are taught from an early age.

I do think I have met about ten such people in my lifetime. Rare, indeed.

Dr. Deb Hirschhorn is a Marriage and Family Therapist. If you want help with your marriage, begin by signing up to watch her Masterclass at https://drdeb.com/myw-masterclass.