It's Not Me, It's You.

Three weeks ago, I reluctantly dropped my dog, a Siberian Husky/German Shepherd mix named Cal, off at the local SPCA. Standing at the intake desk with Cal on a leash, I answered various questions regarding Cal’s habits and tendencies. Cal happily sniffed and engaged passers-by and occasionally put his paws up on the counter to peek at the lady behind the desk while I explained how he was a happy, energetic dog, but very complex, very emotional. I had spent the past six months with Cal, and despite his very happy daily attitude, we had gotten in a couple tiffs over food. Dogs can sometimes get very possessive of their resources, to the point where they will growl at you when you bring your hand near their food bowl. Cal had this problem. This was not why I was giving him up, however. I was giving him up because I’m a selfish 24 year old who likes to travel a lot and can’t afford a dog, financially or emotionally. Anyway, when I say “tiffs over food,” what I mean is that Cal would growl when I fed him, at which point I had no choice but to take the bowl away (I had to win the argument), and being that he is about my size, this was a challenge - a couple times, it got quite ugly - but I always won. After I took the bowl, he would be very upset. He wouldn’t continue growling, but he was noticeably angry. He would sulk. He would give me dirty looks. If he could walk and talk, I know he would have probably cussed me out and slammed the door behind him on his way to bed. It would take him about 24 hours to start treating me normal again. He was incredibly joyful and friendly, but he was also the deepest, most complex dog I have ever encountered. I was trying to explain all of this to the lady behind the counter, but could tell by the rate of head nods and “uh huh’s” that she displayed, that maybe I wasn’t getting through. She had probably heard owners being grandiose about their dogs' abilities and quirks before, and I was just one more person ranting on about how "special" their pet is.

Well, it circled back around. This morning, I got a call from the SPCA. They’ve tried breaking him of his “resource guarding,” and it isn’t working. They had tried feeding him with a bowl and he reacted violently – to the point where she did not feel comfortable letting anyone at the SPCA interact with him: he was too scary. My heart sank, to say the least. In my head I was thinking that they should have been hand-feeding him, like I did everyday. I was thinking they should let him interact with dogs and people, like I did everyday, and they should never give him treats, unless he does something amazing, and even then, it can’t be an awesome treat, it has to be lame, because he has to constantly be in need. Feeding him in a bowl was the easy way, and Cal wants it the hard way—he wants to work for everything, and he loves a challenge. But as soon as he gets that sense of entitlement that comes with a neatly packaged bowl of food at his disposal, he says “to hell with the relationship!” and starts growling so you’ll bug off. He has to be trained to need you, all the time, everyday.

In the last two months that I had Cal, he never growled. He sat and laid down on command. He trotted next to me while I went for a run, without the aid of a leash. He can learn, he can be obedient, and he is smart. Too smart, in a way.

But things are not going well at the SPCA. They think he’s part wolf. They say he’s not adoptable. They do not feel comfortable handing him over to anybody. He does not fit in society as-is. He belongs in the wild.

I think of him isolated behind the chain-link walls of a dog run, and sigh.

To me, this situation screams the points in Coyne (1999), and Kendler, Kuhn & Prescott (2004). Cal has an optimal flourishing environment, and a non-optimal one. Regardless of whether his optimal environment is feasible for the typical SPCA adopter to provide, he does have the possibility of flourishing. Everybody does.

Removing the computer from your bedroom gains you 10 points.

Both the model for relapse prevention (Witkiewitz & Marlatt, 2004) and the behavioral approach to insomnia (Bootzin & Epstein, 2000) are about cues. Each approach teaches a client to identify the cues that lead to a certain behavior, and then either embrace or avoid them, depending on the circumstance. They both also address the training of some sort of inner animal, separate from the client’s personal mental experience.

I adore the notion of separating the current experience of the body from the long term goals of the mind. Doing so might reduce the occurrence of attributing uncontrollable thoughts and sensations to one’s own personal faults or actions (e.g., I drank too much and feel guilty about it), possibly preventing a worse cascade of bad behavior (e.g., well, I might as well drink again tonight!). The separation of the two thought processes is mighty powerful as well, helping one to think of Person “A” with a brain as trying to regulate Thing “B,” a headless body, might help one disconnect emotional ties more easily, or at least re-label them with physical labels (e.g., changing “I’m so frustrated about not being able to sleep!” to “My body is a bit over-aroused. I should get up and read a book until my arousal level diminishes.”).

Reading the article on sleep was so beautiful in its self-nurturing applications that it made me want to go buy a massive terry-cloth robe and slippers just so I can look forward to putting them on when I wake up in the morning. Maybe I could buy some candles and take a bubble bath every night before bed as my sleep cue. How nice!

Can you teach it to a rat?

Jacobson et al (2001) and I may or may not have had the same mother. After putting down this article, I had a flashback to a few moments in my growing years, when my mom would follow me around the house as I dashed in between an after-school meeting and crew practice. I would stand there, pulling up a pair of short trou, wolfing down a bowl of cereal, and asking her for a note to skip AP history, while she, not having spoken to me in days due to my busy schedule and getting frustrated that various half-started projects of mine were littering the entryway of the house, would say “Cath, one thing at a time. One. Thing. At. A. Time.” She said this knowing that I had been sleeping four hours a night, that I lived out of my car to save time between meetings and sports, and knowing that when I’m sleep-deprived I get crabby and snap at people (or, snap at her).

Jacobson seems to have come up with the “get your ass up!” method for people that do too much, think too hard, and are also in the midst of major depression. Their methods of emphasizing positive reinforcement, easy, one-step-at-a-time goals, and client-based situational analyzation (or, functional analysis) strike me as major life-lessons and extremely cognitive. However, their behavioral approach is right-on, because it avoids the volatile cognition market of the internalized and distraught.

It’s especially mind-blowing to see the redirection of our readings from looking at higher-order cognitions to more animalistic explanations of mental illness. One might counter these explanations by saying that most people are more complicated than a rat – but are we?

I wanted happiness to be a by-product of a large effect size, but it wasn't.

Reading Engels, Garnefski & Diekstra (1993) was like yawning to even out the air pressure behind one’s eardrums during an assent: after previous readings frustrated and tore at our scientific souls, Engels came along and eased the empirical tension, in a way. They painstakingly ripped apart studies of rational-emotive therapy until their hands bled with the lines they drew between the “masking of [an] experimenter” and “masking with data collection” (p. 1084). And their conclusion? Yes, rational-emotive therapy seems to be more effective than sitting on one’s couch and crying, but this difference is not statistically significant (p. 1086). The climax of the story came when, despite seeming to want to have their article support RET as something worth researching, they were frank about the results of their meta-analysis: “The methodologically more rigorous studies tended to produce moderate-to-low treatment effects," and “Concerning age, social class, and seriousness of disturbance, generalizations from this meta-analysis to clinical practice do not seem to be permitted,” and “no superiority over alternative treatments was found. However…methodological rigor…indeed had a decreasing influence on magnitude of ES" (p. 1088). They have more or less come out to say that, by manipulating the studies to find the good data, they found that the data was significant when the results were not applicable to real life, and the data were not significant when the studies were well-executed.

I believe Engels, and at the same time believe that we have it all wrong. Why are we not studying individual, successful therapists? I won’t go as far as to say that I believe in the dodo effect, but all of these articles have me skeptical of whatever it is we are measuring through therapy research.

But then, after reading Butler, Chapman, Forman & Beck (2006), their meta-analytic support for cognitive-behavioral therapy seemed show most of its strength in the follow-up periods after therapy ceased. Rarely, however, did those follow-up assessments take place after one year post-treatment. But then again, what is the goal? Is the goal concrete, such as a reduction in recidivism (p. 27)? Is the goal happiness in the abstract? I thought about these questions when brainstorming of what to write in this blog entry, and penned down the phrase “Happiness is a by-product of ordered thinking.” Then I crossed out “of ordered thinking,” leaving just “Happiness is a by-product.” Then I realized—there’s no way I came up with this phrase…it seems too familiar. So I googled it—turns out, according to some random, unreliable source called thinkexist.com, two people have said this: Sam Levenson, who said, “Happiness is a by-product. You cannot pursue it by itself,” and William S. Burroughs, who said “Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.” This is humorous to me, as William S. Burroughs was completely off his rocker and accidentally shot his wife by having her put an apple on her head and trying to pull a William Tell stunt while high. My guess is that Sam Levenson was equally kooky. But still, the phrase makes total sense.

My point is that psychological stability seems too complicated to address in brief treatments and expect some sort of definitive change to take place in a measurable time period. Therapy is not a pill, and that’s why it works in the long term, for the long term. But works at what - flattening the personality, or accepting a bumpy one?