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?
Monday, October 8, 2007
Can you teach it to a rat?
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One might counter these explanations by saying that most people are more complicated than a rat – but are we?
Yes. And no. We clearly are more capable than rats of thinking--of ruminating and worrying and things. Freud argued that neurosis was a distinctly human "privilege," and he was really onto something there. We alone in the animal kingdom are capable of tormenting ourselves with imagined fantasies about terrible futures, or horrifying memories of dumb things we've done in the past. That said, one can still ask the question: how do we change our behavior?, and that can bring us a bit less flatteringly back to the difference between us and rats. There is a great deal of evidence that our behavior changes before we know it does, and that our thinking--our ruminations--spin stories about why we've done things rather than helping us decide whether to, and on what grounds. In other words, we are often moved by emotions--themselves largely governed by environmental contingencies--and tell ourselves stories that rationalize our behavior afterward.
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