Its Memorial Day and I just finished reading Scott Lilienfeld's chilling article, Psychological Treatments that Cause Harm, in the March issue of Psychological Science. He writes about psychotherapies that have the potential to harm people, if not everyone treated, enough people to warrant our calling them "dangerous." Beginning with "Do no harm" Lilienfeld takes us through the dangerous waters of psychotherapies out there today. I am sorry to say that many contemporary therapies hover on the edge of those pointed out as dangerous. We have a day to respect our soldiers, many of whom have died in what they hoped or believed was for the sake of their country, their families and loved ones. We need a day to honor the patients and clients who have been victimized by the professionals from whom they sought help for psychological and physiological disturbances. It is bad enough to suffer from a disorder that causes adverse changes in our thinking, and to suffer from the stigma that comes upon anyone with a mental disorder.
I have seen students riddled with anxiety, after falling into the hands of psychotherapists..
We may have lost more than we realize. I have seen it. I have seen students fall into the hands of therapists who convinced them that their families were "toxic" when their parents were ordinary parents, with good and bad attributes, but nothing extraordinary. I have seen students lapse into unbearable anxiety, as they lost their ties to their major supporters, friends and parents. I hear students speak with enthusiasm of treatments they're learning at the feet of their professors, that come close to making it onto Lilienfeld's lists of potentially harmful therapies (PHT) and I am powerless to do anything about it.
The "Trauma Trap" and "Remembering Trauma
Some hours earlier, late last evening, I reread an older (2004) article by Frederick Crews, "The Trauma Trap" published in the New York Review of Books. He was reviewing a magnificent book by Richard McNally, "Remembering Trauma." McNally brought out all the science, and it all makes it clear that people don't forget traumatic experiences, in fact they remember it better than ordinary life events. Crews wrote a brilliant review of McNally's book, and made clear the pathetically weak position taken by our "professional" organizations, the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association. These two article together were chilling, and more so because I hear the echos of bad psychology in my students and I don't know what to do about it. It is impossible to tell students that most of what they are learning is simply wrong. Sometimes I actually say that, and I can see them almost rolling their eyes, thinking that I am a "fringe thinker" because I don't endorse the idea of repression, I don't endorse the theory of childhood trauma, I am sacrilegious. I want to fight for my discipline and at the moment I'm not sure how to do that. People don't repress trauma, they can't forget trauma. People don't get horrific mental disorders because of childhood trauma, but because of genetics and physical environmental insults, viral and bacterial infections, combinations of neurotoxins, and other environmental assaults as yet unknown to us.
It is not the fault of the students..its not the fault of the teachers
We are all the products of our teachers. We are wired to comply with our authorities, all the more so if they are kind to us. Babies imitate at 43 minutes out of the womb, and we all continue imitating. If our teachers tell us that the cure for psychological distress is "catharsis" or breaking through "repression" and remembering trauma, we try to believe it. There was a time earlier in my career, when I, in compliance with my mentor, wrote about repression. I think I didn't believe it even then. But I said and wrote the words. Lilienfeld names some treatments that have been shown in repeated empirical studies to cause harm to some people. He speaks of "recovered memory techniques." But isn't all psychodynamic psychotherapy one form or another of recovered memory treatment? Where is the psychodynamic psychotherapist who doesn't work to help patients "uncover" their long forgotten traumas? No matter that the memories uncovered are false. This remains the goal of psychodynamic therapy. Practitioners in our field believe in repression, and no mounting evidence makes a dent in their belief. Even Cognitive Behavior therapists have caved in to the myth of childhood trauma, and given it the name "core schema's" derived from experiences in childhood. Where is the therapist today who will stand up and say "I don't believe in repression and I don't believe psychopathology is connected to childhood trauma?"
It takes enormous courage
After spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for many years of treatment, it takes great courage to stand up and say "I don't believe in the theory of childhood trauma, I don't believe in repression." It takes even more courage for the therapist who has been treating people for "ghosts in the nursery" to stand up and say "I misled all my patients, I led them into a dead end street and kept them there walking in circles." Lilienfeld and Crews have courage, but what about their colleagues. How many of them are ready to confess to years of misleading people who came to them for their expertise? This is not just a problem for therapists and patients in treatment, its a problem for all of us. This is a massive social problem that affects us behind our backs. The pop culture endorses repression and the myth of childhood trauma. Patients with serious mental illness have to endure the results of their illness, the ramifications of social stigma, and the attitudes of their treatment providers. People in therapy are told they are sick, when many of them are, as Adler said so long ago, simply discouraged. People are told they are in the grip of a maladaptive and antisocial unconscious, they can't trust their own perceptions and their own emotions. Therapists believe they know more about their patients' minds, than do the patients themselves.
We have to change psychology
This is a cruel system of treatment, and this is a cruel culture of pop psychology.
Do no harm seems like an oxymoron in our current psychotherapy culture. We have to change psychology in the culture and in the treatment room.
Monday, May 28, 2007
Monday, May 21, 2007
GTD Implementation: The third dumpster: The Etiology of Mental Disorders
The third (?) or is it the fourth dumpster?
We are now filling up the third/fourth dumpster. I have gone through numerous piles of papers stuck on bookshelves, and for the next three days I'll be careening through file cabinets, trying to weed out all the "out of date" or "duplicates" files. Its a boring job and not one I'm likely to take seriously enough. I still have too much extra room, not yet filled in other words, in the newer cabinets. But the end point is in sight, I think June 1 might mark the end of our first serious "GTD Implementation" which began in earnest on March 1, 2007. I like having such an exact date from which to track everything that followed. I love doing work in the broad field known as "evaluation" and this marker has allowed me to keep a running evaluation component going on my own GTD process. I did a "review" yesterday, the first time I actually made it to the Sunday Review on time. I can't claim it was a complete review, but it was closer. Practice and more practice is how this is going for me, its all still in a phase I have to consider "practice." Three months and three dumpsters full of "stuff" from our house, while keeping up my regular work load, the heaviest of trimesters as this is the trimester with my large class, the period in which I will have had three presentations at conferences, the presentation to the self-help court (it went very well by the way) and still we are moving ahead with GTD implementation.
Dinner with my TAs led me back to "The etiology of mental disorders"
I know I have touched upon this before in prior blog entries, but it is such a serious topic and so misunderstood, that here I go again. Almost everyone connected to clinical psychology, particularly practitioners, holds on for dear life to the belief that mental illness is the result of childhood trauma. This is one of those beloved fantasies, rather like the old belief that the earth is flat, an error maintained for thousands of year. It is simply wrong, incorrect, a false belief that has clinicians and patients alike chasing after dragons from their past, in hot pursuit of an explanation for mental illness that makes little sense. Mental illnesses are not caused by childhood trauma. What is childhood trauma anyway? The myth of childhood has gained the status of king of the mountain in today's pop psych culture as well as in the hearts of clinicians. But getting realistic, we have to face the obvious. For centuries the going belief was "spare the rod and spoil the child." Children were routinely swatted, hit, the victims of what today we regard as child abuse and trauma. But those unspoiled children didn't grow up to suffer from major mental disorders. We have in our hearts a myth of the perfect childhood, and anything deviating from this ideal is considered detrimental to a child's developmental pathway.
The myth of the "good-enough childhood"
Lets get real. No one has a perfect childhood, never has and never will. We are barely out of an era in which it was considered not only appropriate to beat your children, but to beat your wife as well. Have to keep those women in line, while you are busy not spoiling your children. Our grandparents --or many of them anyway-- saw their moms beat up by their fathers, and got hit quite a bit themselves. And yet they did not arrive at adulthood suffering from serious mental illnesses. Our view of childhood is a fantasy. Our view of what causes mental illness is simply wrong. We don't have the answer, we don't know exactly what throws someone over the edge and into the terrifying world of mental illness. And we can't stand admitting we don't know. The unknown is simply unacceptable.
Bottom line, mental illnesses are genetic
Many severe mental illnesses are genetic, bottom line. Heritability rates are high, from 60 to 90%. But something more is needed, because not everyone with the genetic make up for a mental illness actually shows up with the illness. Or is that also just a fable? Is it not possible that its a matter of quantity, and not quality at all. Suppose there are polygenetic "causes" for bipolar disorder. Meaning, there are many genes contributing to the development of biopolar illnesses. Lets imagine there are 10 genes that, should you be unfortunate enough to have the "wrong" allele on any of the ten, you have an increased chance of coming out in the end, bipolar. Suppose you inherit an allele on each of these genes, from each parent. Suppose there are instructions about turning these genes on and off in the "junk DNA." Supposing each gene has a different "on and off" switch in the junk DNA. We're beginning to see lots of possible variations now. Bob can inherit maybe 5 of the 10 alleles that put him on the bipolar path. Then perhaps four of the ten junk DNA areas are instructing the DNA to go to "On" and six are pointing to "Off." Perhaps the precise conditions in uteri --not exactly the same even for identical twins-- lead to the "on and off" situation of the relevant junk DNA areas. We see even more variation possible. So Bob has 5 alleles that might contribute to frank bipolar disorder, and four areas that instruct these 5 alleles to the "On" position. So Bob appears in the world with a dark mood on most days, on and off suicidality, an occasional hypomanic period, never anything remotely like a true manic episode, and in the end Bob is a very unhappy adult with what is now known as Bipolar II. Just think of all the possible outcomes might have occurred from this myriad of possibilities. But none of them were due to childhood experiences, childhood trauma or the world's most perfect childhood.
Physical environmental contributions
Is it all up to chance? Yes and No . We know that children may appear with OCD post strep infection. The strep bacteria produce something that amounts to a brain toxin, that results in inflammation in some part of the brain that ends up screaming "OCD OCD" in the child. There may be many bacteria and viruses that effect the likelihood of Bob (our character above) demonstrating or not demonstrating his propensity to bipolar disorder. There may be neurotoxins in our ordinary contemporary drinking water. There may be other factors in the physical environment that instruct the DNA to go "ON" or "OFF." But how much does the "emotional" environment contribute? We get it confused. We see an erratic parent and we think "that behavior is pathogenic for the children." But what is really pathogenic is that the erratic parent has an untreated (because it is relatively mild and therefore not diagnosed) bipolar II condition, meaning the parent inherited perhaps four of the possible 10 bipolar alleles (two from each parent, such a small number that there were no visible signs in the parent) and perhaps three junk DNA areas yelling "ON," just enough to get some of that erratic, irritable parenting. Here we are, claiming that childhood trauma, present because of that irritable erratic parent, is responsible for the later development of bipolar II in the offspring. All wrong, the parental behavior doesn't cause the illness in the child or young adult. The parental genes and areas of instructions, in combination with the genes and areas of instruction from the other parent, are responsible for the development of the illness.
Its very simple, very simple math and very simple conceptually
Its simple really, very simple math, very simple concept. Major mental disorders are inherited and sometimes brought to life from some environmental (physical) factors. We always want to run away from physical causes because we (psychologists) think we have to think that way, we have to make other people think that way, in order to make a living. Wrong. Having a serious mental disorder causes numerous psychological problems, for which people need psychological treatment. We may know that addiction is an inherited illness, but the treatment is abstinence and psychosocial treatment modalities. Addiction leaves a mess in its wake. A person who has suffered from active addiction may get into recovery and wake up and find themselves in some of the nastiest messes possible, they've done horrible things, they've stolen from their families and friends, they've burned all their bridges. They need massive amounts of psychosocial help to regain their sense of personhood, and good personhood at that. There's plenty of work for psychologists who understand that major mental disorders are physical in nature and physical in origin. Psychologists who have their patients endlessly searching for childhood trauma miss the boat. People know their parents tried, tried and failed. It does not help to have them demonize their parents. It helps a lot to have an explanation for their parents adversive behaviors, to have sympathy for their parents as well as for themselves.
Mental disorders are physiological illnesses from beginning to end. People act like this simple statement is violating the most basic beliefs about life. Its time we all said the obvious. Mental illnesses are the same as any physical illnesses. The urge to rest on the psychology of childhood is an escape into devils inhabiting people. Lets stand up and say it like it is, so we can get some decent help and respect for people with mental illnesses, and for their families.
We are now filling up the third/fourth dumpster. I have gone through numerous piles of papers stuck on bookshelves, and for the next three days I'll be careening through file cabinets, trying to weed out all the "out of date" or "duplicates" files. Its a boring job and not one I'm likely to take seriously enough. I still have too much extra room, not yet filled in other words, in the newer cabinets. But the end point is in sight, I think June 1 might mark the end of our first serious "GTD Implementation" which began in earnest on March 1, 2007. I like having such an exact date from which to track everything that followed. I love doing work in the broad field known as "evaluation" and this marker has allowed me to keep a running evaluation component going on my own GTD process. I did a "review" yesterday, the first time I actually made it to the Sunday Review on time. I can't claim it was a complete review, but it was closer. Practice and more practice is how this is going for me, its all still in a phase I have to consider "practice." Three months and three dumpsters full of "stuff" from our house, while keeping up my regular work load, the heaviest of trimesters as this is the trimester with my large class, the period in which I will have had three presentations at conferences, the presentation to the self-help court (it went very well by the way) and still we are moving ahead with GTD implementation.
Dinner with my TAs led me back to "The etiology of mental disorders"
I know I have touched upon this before in prior blog entries, but it is such a serious topic and so misunderstood, that here I go again. Almost everyone connected to clinical psychology, particularly practitioners, holds on for dear life to the belief that mental illness is the result of childhood trauma. This is one of those beloved fantasies, rather like the old belief that the earth is flat, an error maintained for thousands of year. It is simply wrong, incorrect, a false belief that has clinicians and patients alike chasing after dragons from their past, in hot pursuit of an explanation for mental illness that makes little sense. Mental illnesses are not caused by childhood trauma. What is childhood trauma anyway? The myth of childhood has gained the status of king of the mountain in today's pop psych culture as well as in the hearts of clinicians. But getting realistic, we have to face the obvious. For centuries the going belief was "spare the rod and spoil the child." Children were routinely swatted, hit, the victims of what today we regard as child abuse and trauma. But those unspoiled children didn't grow up to suffer from major mental disorders. We have in our hearts a myth of the perfect childhood, and anything deviating from this ideal is considered detrimental to a child's developmental pathway.
The myth of the "good-enough childhood"
Lets get real. No one has a perfect childhood, never has and never will. We are barely out of an era in which it was considered not only appropriate to beat your children, but to beat your wife as well. Have to keep those women in line, while you are busy not spoiling your children. Our grandparents --or many of them anyway-- saw their moms beat up by their fathers, and got hit quite a bit themselves. And yet they did not arrive at adulthood suffering from serious mental illnesses. Our view of childhood is a fantasy. Our view of what causes mental illness is simply wrong. We don't have the answer, we don't know exactly what throws someone over the edge and into the terrifying world of mental illness. And we can't stand admitting we don't know. The unknown is simply unacceptable.
Bottom line, mental illnesses are genetic
Many severe mental illnesses are genetic, bottom line. Heritability rates are high, from 60 to 90%. But something more is needed, because not everyone with the genetic make up for a mental illness actually shows up with the illness. Or is that also just a fable? Is it not possible that its a matter of quantity, and not quality at all. Suppose there are polygenetic "causes" for bipolar disorder. Meaning, there are many genes contributing to the development of biopolar illnesses. Lets imagine there are 10 genes that, should you be unfortunate enough to have the "wrong" allele on any of the ten, you have an increased chance of coming out in the end, bipolar. Suppose you inherit an allele on each of these genes, from each parent. Suppose there are instructions about turning these genes on and off in the "junk DNA." Supposing each gene has a different "on and off" switch in the junk DNA. We're beginning to see lots of possible variations now. Bob can inherit maybe 5 of the 10 alleles that put him on the bipolar path. Then perhaps four of the ten junk DNA areas are instructing the DNA to go to "On" and six are pointing to "Off." Perhaps the precise conditions in uteri --not exactly the same even for identical twins-- lead to the "on and off" situation of the relevant junk DNA areas. We see even more variation possible. So Bob has 5 alleles that might contribute to frank bipolar disorder, and four areas that instruct these 5 alleles to the "On" position. So Bob appears in the world with a dark mood on most days, on and off suicidality, an occasional hypomanic period, never anything remotely like a true manic episode, and in the end Bob is a very unhappy adult with what is now known as Bipolar II. Just think of all the possible outcomes might have occurred from this myriad of possibilities. But none of them were due to childhood experiences, childhood trauma or the world's most perfect childhood.
Physical environmental contributions
Is it all up to chance? Yes and No . We know that children may appear with OCD post strep infection. The strep bacteria produce something that amounts to a brain toxin, that results in inflammation in some part of the brain that ends up screaming "OCD OCD" in the child. There may be many bacteria and viruses that effect the likelihood of Bob (our character above) demonstrating or not demonstrating his propensity to bipolar disorder. There may be neurotoxins in our ordinary contemporary drinking water. There may be other factors in the physical environment that instruct the DNA to go "ON" or "OFF." But how much does the "emotional" environment contribute? We get it confused. We see an erratic parent and we think "that behavior is pathogenic for the children." But what is really pathogenic is that the erratic parent has an untreated (because it is relatively mild and therefore not diagnosed) bipolar II condition, meaning the parent inherited perhaps four of the possible 10 bipolar alleles (two from each parent, such a small number that there were no visible signs in the parent) and perhaps three junk DNA areas yelling "ON," just enough to get some of that erratic, irritable parenting. Here we are, claiming that childhood trauma, present because of that irritable erratic parent, is responsible for the later development of bipolar II in the offspring. All wrong, the parental behavior doesn't cause the illness in the child or young adult. The parental genes and areas of instructions, in combination with the genes and areas of instruction from the other parent, are responsible for the development of the illness.
Its very simple, very simple math and very simple conceptually
Its simple really, very simple math, very simple concept. Major mental disorders are inherited and sometimes brought to life from some environmental (physical) factors. We always want to run away from physical causes because we (psychologists) think we have to think that way, we have to make other people think that way, in order to make a living. Wrong. Having a serious mental disorder causes numerous psychological problems, for which people need psychological treatment. We may know that addiction is an inherited illness, but the treatment is abstinence and psychosocial treatment modalities. Addiction leaves a mess in its wake. A person who has suffered from active addiction may get into recovery and wake up and find themselves in some of the nastiest messes possible, they've done horrible things, they've stolen from their families and friends, they've burned all their bridges. They need massive amounts of psychosocial help to regain their sense of personhood, and good personhood at that. There's plenty of work for psychologists who understand that major mental disorders are physical in nature and physical in origin. Psychologists who have their patients endlessly searching for childhood trauma miss the boat. People know their parents tried, tried and failed. It does not help to have them demonize their parents. It helps a lot to have an explanation for their parents adversive behaviors, to have sympathy for their parents as well as for themselves.
Mental disorders are physiological illnesses from beginning to end. People act like this simple statement is violating the most basic beliefs about life. Its time we all said the obvious. Mental illnesses are the same as any physical illnesses. The urge to rest on the psychology of childhood is an escape into devils inhabiting people. Lets stand up and say it like it is, so we can get some decent help and respect for people with mental illnesses, and for their families.
Saturday, May 12, 2007
GTD: The next phase of implementation
I'm so glad I'm here but not here..
Yesterday I lay around until 3PM, reading on the Internet, spending time with Netvibes, resting, and starting my own wiki. I finally found an online source for my wiki, and laid out a plan for the day in greater detail than I allow myself to do here in this medium. I might bring it over here, but I might not, its too detailed. Having constructed the plan, I lepta into action. I spent hours throwing out books that weren't classics, weren't loved, and had no place being here. Old diet books, old exercise books, old sociology books. I kept most of the anthropology because it was mainly ethnographies from the 40's, 50's, and 60's when there were still hunter-gatherer groups of people around the planet who had not been touched by global industrialization and culture. These are real classics and going through them I thought about how much I wanted to take a year off and study my "topic," that is survivor guilt broadly defined, in multiple cultures around the world. I would love to read all these ethnographies again with my aging brain, I know so much now that I didn't know when I read them. I would read with a different perspective and a different world view. I threw out lots of the economics books, the lefty analysis of this and that, though I held on to Lenin and Mao, it might be interesting to reread them at some point. I am not finished even with books in our bed room which has bookcases up to the ceiling on three of four walls. I'm throwing out piles of papers as I run into them, stacked and disordered on the shelves.
"Times they are a-changing..."
After almost three hours of this, I settled into preparing for my second review by clearing out my inbox. Things were acted upon immediately, filed with real brother's created labels (or at least sections of the files cabinets are formally labeled), thrown out, or put in a "deal with this when I speak to my husband" place. Things I have to take to my academic institution were put in the "To Office" folder in my brief case. I have one more place to collect pieces of papers, and two notebooks from which to gather and integrate information, and then I am ready for the thinking part of my Sunday morning review, or should I saw the "review." One thing I did differently yesterday was to put things that I was not going to do immediately into an appropriate list on Vitalist, the online GTD-driven listmaking program I'm using at the moment. http://www.vitalist.com/ I am also dallying with Nozbe www.nozbe.com/ but for the moment, Vitalist feeds into Google Calendar easily and seems the most efficient. It also prints out everything by context sequentially, and not one context per page, so it is easier to carry around with me. The way this was so different for me. In pre-GTD days, I would throw things I wasn't going to immediately process (either by filing or do at some later time) into a pile, or just back into the inbox so to speak, and forget about it as the piles grew larger and larger. My piles began to show up everywhere, on every surface and then on the floor, taking over rooms I was working in.
Its a good thing, because I discovered a talk I'm going to be giving
This new procedure I'm learning means that the undone items are not in my inbox but in another "to be processed" place, and the activity itself is on the appropriate list, which I look at thoroughly at least once a day. Its a good thing too because yesterday I noticed that I was going to be speaking to a group of lawyers and judges who work in the self-help courts this coming week. The obvious conclusion: I have to spend much of this weekend preparing my talk, in accord with the kinds of questions the audience has, and the reason they have asked me to come and speak to them and with them.
The Self-Help Court: How to work with clients with mental disorders
I did this last year, went to speak at the conference for lawyers and judges working in the self-help courts around California. I have rarely had such a receptive audience; this group were not out to be critical, to be judgemental, they wanted help with the serious problems they face on a daily basis, working with people who suffer from serious mental disorders and who come to them for help, in being their own lawyers so to speak, in court situations. What is an attorney to do when a client comes in to the self-help legal clinic and wants to file a restraining order against someone who she says is coming through the walls of her apartment and raping her every night? Or what is an attorney to do when someone says her neighbors are systematically spying on her, and slipping poison into her food? Or what are they to do in the self-help clinics when some clients come in every day, even when they have no legal business to tend to, and won't leave until an attorney has spent an hour with them, treating the meetings like psychotherapy sessions. I have the power point talk I gave last year, but now I know the kinds of questions they are asking better, so I will revise the outline accordingly.
The beginning of a trusted system turning into action and practice
Seeing this in my Vitalist "Urgent" list section reminded me this is coming right up and I need to spend a lot of time thinking about it now, so I won't be worked up on Tuesday night, right before the conference. Moments like this, when I see all the clutter being dismantled, and I see I'm beginning to have a "trusted system" of everything I have to tend to or think about now, and what I can think about "later" (or "someday/maybe") lends credence to the idea of a "mind like water." I had no idea that the clutter and disorganized work style were creating enormous tension in my life. I think "how could I have missed that, its so obvious?" But then much of GTD is breaking things down into obvious units of organization, rather like I do when I 'm designing or working on a research project. Somehow I think I believed my life didn't deserve that kind of careful attention.
The way to learn a new skill is to engage in a tremendous amount of practice
Or I thought there were people who were born "organized" and people who weren't, and I was one who was by nature, disorganized. This makes little sense because I have always liked devising systems, and creating things dependent on systematizing and creating order out of chaos. Now I know from complexity science that the world is in fact always moving to order, that agents will work to collaborate, or coordinate, that is move to create a system in an orderly manner. So why I thought I wasn't organized may be simply that I was not trained to believe I could pay close attention to my life and organize it accordingly. A little thought goes a long way. People tend to laugh at those of us who have gone overboard with GTD, trying all the new programs and tools with which to carry out GTD principles. I am one of those people, I read the productivity blogs now with some passion, and try out ever new program, spending inordinate amounts of time on the tools. But in truth, every time I yet again make a list on a new program (and I plan to write my own review of the many tools I've tried one of these weeks), I give more detailed thought to exactly how I organize my life, what I have to do, what category all my "next actions" really belong in. So what looks like a "productivity addiction" is really just "practice" and the way to learn a new skill is to engage in a tremendous amount of practice.
So in accord with my plan for the day, I'm off to continue emptying the shelves in the bed room of papers and books that I don't need or want any longer, and after a few hours of that (I have a limit to how much time I can do this in a stretch), to tackling those very difficult questions as I prepare for the talk I'm giving on Wednesday.
Yesterday I lay around until 3PM, reading on the Internet, spending time with Netvibes, resting, and starting my own wiki. I finally found an online source for my wiki, and laid out a plan for the day in greater detail than I allow myself to do here in this medium. I might bring it over here, but I might not, its too detailed. Having constructed the plan, I lepta into action. I spent hours throwing out books that weren't classics, weren't loved, and had no place being here. Old diet books, old exercise books, old sociology books. I kept most of the anthropology because it was mainly ethnographies from the 40's, 50's, and 60's when there were still hunter-gatherer groups of people around the planet who had not been touched by global industrialization and culture. These are real classics and going through them I thought about how much I wanted to take a year off and study my "topic," that is survivor guilt broadly defined, in multiple cultures around the world. I would love to read all these ethnographies again with my aging brain, I know so much now that I didn't know when I read them. I would read with a different perspective and a different world view. I threw out lots of the economics books, the lefty analysis of this and that, though I held on to Lenin and Mao, it might be interesting to reread them at some point. I am not finished even with books in our bed room which has bookcases up to the ceiling on three of four walls. I'm throwing out piles of papers as I run into them, stacked and disordered on the shelves.
"Times they are a-changing..."
After almost three hours of this, I settled into preparing for my second review by clearing out my inbox. Things were acted upon immediately, filed with real brother's created labels (or at least sections of the files cabinets are formally labeled), thrown out, or put in a "deal with this when I speak to my husband" place. Things I have to take to my academic institution were put in the "To Office" folder in my brief case. I have one more place to collect pieces of papers, and two notebooks from which to gather and integrate information, and then I am ready for the thinking part of my Sunday morning review, or should I saw the "review." One thing I did differently yesterday was to put things that I was not going to do immediately into an appropriate list on Vitalist, the online GTD-driven listmaking program I'm using at the moment. http://www.vitalist.com/ I am also dallying with Nozbe www.nozbe.com/ but for the moment, Vitalist feeds into Google Calendar easily and seems the most efficient. It also prints out everything by context sequentially, and not one context per page, so it is easier to carry around with me. The way this was so different for me. In pre-GTD days, I would throw things I wasn't going to immediately process (either by filing or do at some later time) into a pile, or just back into the inbox so to speak, and forget about it as the piles grew larger and larger. My piles began to show up everywhere, on every surface and then on the floor, taking over rooms I was working in.
Its a good thing, because I discovered a talk I'm going to be giving
This new procedure I'm learning means that the undone items are not in my inbox but in another "to be processed" place, and the activity itself is on the appropriate list, which I look at thoroughly at least once a day. Its a good thing too because yesterday I noticed that I was going to be speaking to a group of lawyers and judges who work in the self-help courts this coming week. The obvious conclusion: I have to spend much of this weekend preparing my talk, in accord with the kinds of questions the audience has, and the reason they have asked me to come and speak to them and with them.
The Self-Help Court: How to work with clients with mental disorders
I did this last year, went to speak at the conference for lawyers and judges working in the self-help courts around California. I have rarely had such a receptive audience; this group were not out to be critical, to be judgemental, they wanted help with the serious problems they face on a daily basis, working with people who suffer from serious mental disorders and who come to them for help, in being their own lawyers so to speak, in court situations. What is an attorney to do when a client comes in to the self-help legal clinic and wants to file a restraining order against someone who she says is coming through the walls of her apartment and raping her every night? Or what is an attorney to do when someone says her neighbors are systematically spying on her, and slipping poison into her food? Or what are they to do in the self-help clinics when some clients come in every day, even when they have no legal business to tend to, and won't leave until an attorney has spent an hour with them, treating the meetings like psychotherapy sessions. I have the power point talk I gave last year, but now I know the kinds of questions they are asking better, so I will revise the outline accordingly.
The beginning of a trusted system turning into action and practice
Seeing this in my Vitalist "Urgent" list section reminded me this is coming right up and I need to spend a lot of time thinking about it now, so I won't be worked up on Tuesday night, right before the conference. Moments like this, when I see all the clutter being dismantled, and I see I'm beginning to have a "trusted system" of everything I have to tend to or think about now, and what I can think about "later" (or "someday/maybe") lends credence to the idea of a "mind like water." I had no idea that the clutter and disorganized work style were creating enormous tension in my life. I think "how could I have missed that, its so obvious?" But then much of GTD is breaking things down into obvious units of organization, rather like I do when I 'm designing or working on a research project. Somehow I think I believed my life didn't deserve that kind of careful attention.
The way to learn a new skill is to engage in a tremendous amount of practice
Or I thought there were people who were born "organized" and people who weren't, and I was one who was by nature, disorganized. This makes little sense because I have always liked devising systems, and creating things dependent on systematizing and creating order out of chaos. Now I know from complexity science that the world is in fact always moving to order, that agents will work to collaborate, or coordinate, that is move to create a system in an orderly manner. So why I thought I wasn't organized may be simply that I was not trained to believe I could pay close attention to my life and organize it accordingly. A little thought goes a long way. People tend to laugh at those of us who have gone overboard with GTD, trying all the new programs and tools with which to carry out GTD principles. I am one of those people, I read the productivity blogs now with some passion, and try out ever new program, spending inordinate amounts of time on the tools. But in truth, every time I yet again make a list on a new program (and I plan to write my own review of the many tools I've tried one of these weeks), I give more detailed thought to exactly how I organize my life, what I have to do, what category all my "next actions" really belong in. So what looks like a "productivity addiction" is really just "practice" and the way to learn a new skill is to engage in a tremendous amount of practice.
So in accord with my plan for the day, I'm off to continue emptying the shelves in the bed room of papers and books that I don't need or want any longer, and after a few hours of that (I have a limit to how much time I can do this in a stretch), to tackling those very difficult questions as I prepare for the talk I'm giving on Wednesday.
Friday, May 11, 2007
I'm supposed to be somewhere else but I'm here
I was supposed to be at a conference this weekend, but instead I am peacefully at home. I slept nonstop for 12 hours, all I can think is that I must have seriously needed it. Its unlike me to sleep for long periods. This morning I've been "relaxing" and feeding my netvibes habit. After hours of "relaxing" I began to do a literature search for one of the two articles that I'm now ready to write. This is a study of a new measure, "Neurotransmitter Attributes Questionnaire (NAQ)" that indicates whether a person tends to be low in dopamine (and therefore might feel better with a dopamine enhancer) or low in serotonin (and therefore might feel better with a serotonin enhancer). I hate to sound like an advertisement working for big pharma, but better living through chemistry is still just about all we have to effect those kinds of changes. If you're depressed, get help. If you're irritable all the time, get help. This has turned out to be a great measure, I created it almost four years ago with a psychiatrist who is a colleague, and my closest collaborator, a statistician and methods specialist. I've presented it at scientific meetings, but held off publishing it until I had over 900 subjects, and now I do. If anyone is interested in trying out the measure, they can do so anonymously at www.eparg.org which is our lab's web site. Once there go to the study "Emotions and Personality" and voila, there is the study with the NAQ. We don't have any responses for people who complete the study, we don't know who participates, and we don't have any indicators of when someone is "normal" or "above normal" on these subscales. We only have indicators of groups of people. That makes it safe to participate in the study, but less rewarding since there's no feedback. Nevertheless we are now over 900, and I'm getting ready to write it up for publication, only three years later than I should be.
All I need now, to finish the article, is the literature review, the hardest part of research and possibly the most fun, once I really get into it. I think I should create some "special" forms for psychologists and psychology students, using Seah's PCEO forms, or the ones that make it possible to revise them for specific activities. If you haven't yet checked out Seah and his brilliant beat procrastination forms, go right to: http://davidseah.com/archives/2005/11/12/the-printable-ceo-series/
and then pick and choose the forms that you think will be most useful. I think I'll schedule creating some industry-specific forms this weekend, when I'm not supposed to be here but I'm here. So this will go into my plan, the one I am writing up today, and maybe it will be helpful to others. Before I do anything else however, I'm finishing up a major phase of my GTD implementation, and emptying out yet one more room of "stuff" that I can throw away permanently, into the dumpster that is still in front of our house. Three weeks of a dumpster should make it clear exactly how much stuff there is overloading us. If we were really finished I'd be putting the "after" picture up on this blog site.
All I need now, to finish the article, is the literature review, the hardest part of research and possibly the most fun, once I really get into it. I think I should create some "special" forms for psychologists and psychology students, using Seah's PCEO forms, or the ones that make it possible to revise them for specific activities. If you haven't yet checked out Seah and his brilliant beat procrastination forms, go right to: http://davidseah.com/archives/2005/11/12/the-printable-ceo-series/
and then pick and choose the forms that you think will be most useful. I think I'll schedule creating some industry-specific forms this weekend, when I'm not supposed to be here but I'm here. So this will go into my plan, the one I am writing up today, and maybe it will be helpful to others. Before I do anything else however, I'm finishing up a major phase of my GTD implementation, and emptying out yet one more room of "stuff" that I can throw away permanently, into the dumpster that is still in front of our house. Three weeks of a dumpster should make it clear exactly how much stuff there is overloading us. If we were really finished I'd be putting the "after" picture up on this blog site.
Friday, May 4, 2007
GTD: Still implementing and procrastination
Answering a comment:
Cindy wrote to me "It sounds like you live my dream, and are functioning about the same way I do. I am a Psych student in clnical Psyc ... I have so much to do I can't get moving. I browse so much about GTD, but can't seem to implement it. I would like to hear about your online class."
I started to answer this as a comment, then thought its been so long since I've written here, I might get started by writing my response as a new entry. I remember my days as a graduate student with fondness, I could actually read then, in fact I was supposed to be reading. Now I feel as if I steal time from work in order to read, although reading is presumably a part of my work as a professor and a researcher. But I remember when as a student, I thought I had too much to do and often felt stuck and had trouble deciding what of the numerous things I had to do, would I actually do. My advice is to use a "time-blocking" method to get started. What this means is deciding to do some piece of assigned work for ten or fifteen minutes, and tell yourself you can stop after the alloted time you've assigned. Usually after the ten or fifteen minutes, I'm ready to go on. Another way to do this which I read about on 43 folders, is to plan to work for ten minutes, then break and do something else for two minutes, then back to the job at hand for ten minutes, and so it goes. Before you know it you will have the job done. Merlin Mann has some variations on time-blocking, the Procratination Dask:
http://www.43folders.com/2005/09/08/kick-procrastinations-ass-run-a-dash/ Steve Pavlina writes about overcoming procrastination http://www.stevepavlina.com/articles/overcoming-procrastination.htm
and time boxing http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2004/10/timeboxing/
David Seah's productivity forms, the Printable CEO, are great additions to a time-blocking, time-boxing methods because every time you complete a fifteen minute session doing something you've had trouble getting started with, you fil in the "bubble" he's created for these briefs spells of productivity. http://davidseah.com/archives/2007/01/01/concrete-goals-tracker-2007-updates/
I have been on overload ever since this trimester began, with my huge class on "Cognition, Emotion and Personality" taking a lot of my time and energy --to say nothing of the second dumpster sitting outside of my house, as we slowly go through one room after the other, throwing things out. On top of this, I have been preparing for a poster presentation at the Western Psychological Association meeting in Vancouver, which is where I am right now. This morning, hiding away in a hotel room, I actually slept in until 11AM, ate breakfast with my husband, had an hour appointment with a patient (on the phone) and finally registered for the meetings at 2PM. I stopped in to a few meetings and since none of the presentations during the afternoon grabbed my attention, I returned to our room where I've been ever since, screwing around with my computer and doing more or less nothing ever since.
I wasted at least an hour trying out some new GTD list keeper, something I regard as my major "vege out" activity these days. I'm waiting for one of my students to show up with an older computer that can run SPSS (my main statistical package) since my Mac Intel won't run it. Now SPSS is a huge statistical software company, most psychologists use it. So I can't understand why they arn't planning to release a new Mac program that works on the Intel until the fall, 2007. Meanwhile I heard from a graduated student of mine who is here presenting her research and I'm meeting up with her in less than an hour. This may end up a day in which I do nothing, i.e. make no progress on my next action lists. When I have the SPSS running computer this evening I have to prepare for another presentation, the social neuroscience meetings in Austin next weekend. The moral of this story is don't do what I do, waste a whole lot of time trying to make technology work instead of working.
I finally did a review this past week, really it was my first review and I didn't get through all of it. At least it forced me to do the work definition piece of things in that I had to get my inbox to empty. I did the same (almost) for my email inbox in the S.F. airport, and I read through emails I had saved on the airplane. I think I have to go back to Dave Seah's time tracking form in order to revisit where my time is going. http://davidseah.com/archives/2006/12/29/emergent-task-timer-2007-form-updates/ Wednesday I spent three hours at Apple, trying to figure out why I was being disconnected from the Internet constantly. The net result of all of this is to make clear I spend most of my time dealing with technical problems around things that aren't working. After I meet with my student, and have my hands on the computer that will work with SPSS, I'm returning to my hotel room to analyze data and prepare for next weekend. None of this is focusing on what I should be doing, to move my bigger projects forward although all of it relates to my projects. Are my projects the right projects for me to be doing? Is it time for a complete review of everything, from the higher levels that Allen describes. Maybe I need to reread parts of "Getting things done" to be clear on what the higher levels are in the first place. On the plane here, along with going through saved email, I also began a thorough brain dump which I haven't done since I went to Allen's seminar in February.
Writing the brain-dump felt like my mind had moved to empty, somewhere between the seminar, the initiation of the full implementation, the arrival of the dumpsters, and now. I got distracted by dirt on molding in the house, dust on the top of the cabinets, housewife kinds of things that I never pay attention to. I think, in full honesty, that all of it is running away from the big project I have in my mind, writing a book about survivor guilt, the kind of guilt we feel when we are successful but our friend is failing at work, or when we see a beggar on the street and think "There but the grace of God go I." I've been planning this as a "Someday/Maybe" for months, for over a year even, and I suspect my full GTD implementation has been part of preparing for serious, structured writing. I have on the backburner --also ready to spring to the front-- two articles as well. I have two articles based on data that's been sitting around for 4 years, ready to be written.
The presentations I'm doing right now and next weekend, were set up to force me to get everything ready to go on the articles. The emptying our house of many years of piles of papers was designed to create a wonderful work space instead of a crowded scene of disorganized books and papers weighing more and more on me as the years went by. I needed a new canvas on which to develop ideas, on which to draw out the picture described by the data I've been collecting for years. And by data I mean data in the classic sense of the word, numbers representing people's responses to questions, first collected in huge Psych 1 classes, and later from the Internet although that too depends on people, one at a time, being willing to take 20 to 40 minutes, filling out questionnaires or responding to narratives and questions. All these people and all these studies end up a zillion numbers that fall into fabulous patterns. The buck stops with me, and I have been slow moving, weighted down by a mess of my own making.
Writing this here, making public what has been probably two, three, or even four years of procrastination, may reflect me coming out from under. I want to make this process public, maybe psych students can benefit from watching someone quite like themselves, trying to implement GTD to the academic/researcher/clinician life style. What is most useful, what doesn't apply, what is absolutely crucial to fire that inner combustible fuel needed for scientific creativity, turning the numbers of long ago designed studies into publishable text? What is the source of procrastination in the first place?
I study survivor guilt so of course I think it lies at the heart of everything. Or is it that survivor guilt is in fact the source of so many problems that made me want to study it in the first place? But I think it really has been a contributor to my procrastination. My mentor who was with me as a coach and supporter for 37 years, died in November, 2004 after a long and horrible illness. Despite being aware of survivor guilt, since I had been studying it for a decade, before his illness, it hit me and as usual with survivor guilt, it was silent, hidden, not quite outside of conscious awareness, but not obvious either. Watching a parent or mentor get old, fragile, is awful. I knew I felt guilty but I still didn't exactly know it. Suffice it to say, it was very difficult and painful to flex my muscles as his were withering. It is still difficult to think about, let alone write about. The only reason to mention it is that I am trying to deal with forces that is any way block my productivity. If I didn't love my work I wouldn't worry about it, but whenever I am working hard at "creating" I feel truely happy and therefore its necessary to talk about it. Tomorrw I'm heading out early to meetings that should be interesting, knowing that whenever I have a "break" in the interesting sessions, I know what to do with my time and this should be helpful.
Cindy, the courses are on BackPack, and I made some of them "public." You can find the first one at: http://lynnoc.backpackit.com/pub/927514
Cindy wrote to me "It sounds like you live my dream, and are functioning about the same way I do. I am a Psych student in clnical Psyc ... I have so much to do I can't get moving. I browse so much about GTD, but can't seem to implement it. I would like to hear about your online class."
I started to answer this as a comment, then thought its been so long since I've written here, I might get started by writing my response as a new entry. I remember my days as a graduate student with fondness, I could actually read then, in fact I was supposed to be reading. Now I feel as if I steal time from work in order to read, although reading is presumably a part of my work as a professor and a researcher. But I remember when as a student, I thought I had too much to do and often felt stuck and had trouble deciding what of the numerous things I had to do, would I actually do. My advice is to use a "time-blocking" method to get started. What this means is deciding to do some piece of assigned work for ten or fifteen minutes, and tell yourself you can stop after the alloted time you've assigned. Usually after the ten or fifteen minutes, I'm ready to go on. Another way to do this which I read about on 43 folders, is to plan to work for ten minutes, then break and do something else for two minutes, then back to the job at hand for ten minutes, and so it goes. Before you know it you will have the job done. Merlin Mann has some variations on time-blocking, the Procratination Dask:
http://www.43folders.com/2005/09/08/kick-procrastinations-ass-run-a-dash/ Steve Pavlina writes about overcoming procrastination http://www.stevepavlina.com/articles/overcoming-procrastination.htm
and time boxing http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2004/10/timeboxing/
David Seah's productivity forms, the Printable CEO, are great additions to a time-blocking, time-boxing methods because every time you complete a fifteen minute session doing something you've had trouble getting started with, you fil in the "bubble" he's created for these briefs spells of productivity. http://davidseah.com/archives/2007/01/01/concrete-goals-tracker-2007-updates/
I have been on overload ever since this trimester began, with my huge class on "Cognition, Emotion and Personality" taking a lot of my time and energy --to say nothing of the second dumpster sitting outside of my house, as we slowly go through one room after the other, throwing things out. On top of this, I have been preparing for a poster presentation at the Western Psychological Association meeting in Vancouver, which is where I am right now. This morning, hiding away in a hotel room, I actually slept in until 11AM, ate breakfast with my husband, had an hour appointment with a patient (on the phone) and finally registered for the meetings at 2PM. I stopped in to a few meetings and since none of the presentations during the afternoon grabbed my attention, I returned to our room where I've been ever since, screwing around with my computer and doing more or less nothing ever since.
I wasted at least an hour trying out some new GTD list keeper, something I regard as my major "vege out" activity these days. I'm waiting for one of my students to show up with an older computer that can run SPSS (my main statistical package) since my Mac Intel won't run it. Now SPSS is a huge statistical software company, most psychologists use it. So I can't understand why they arn't planning to release a new Mac program that works on the Intel until the fall, 2007. Meanwhile I heard from a graduated student of mine who is here presenting her research and I'm meeting up with her in less than an hour. This may end up a day in which I do nothing, i.e. make no progress on my next action lists. When I have the SPSS running computer this evening I have to prepare for another presentation, the social neuroscience meetings in Austin next weekend. The moral of this story is don't do what I do, waste a whole lot of time trying to make technology work instead of working.
I finally did a review this past week, really it was my first review and I didn't get through all of it. At least it forced me to do the work definition piece of things in that I had to get my inbox to empty. I did the same (almost) for my email inbox in the S.F. airport, and I read through emails I had saved on the airplane. I think I have to go back to Dave Seah's time tracking form in order to revisit where my time is going. http://davidseah.com/archives/2006/12/29/emergent-task-timer-2007-form-updates/ Wednesday I spent three hours at Apple, trying to figure out why I was being disconnected from the Internet constantly. The net result of all of this is to make clear I spend most of my time dealing with technical problems around things that aren't working. After I meet with my student, and have my hands on the computer that will work with SPSS, I'm returning to my hotel room to analyze data and prepare for next weekend. None of this is focusing on what I should be doing, to move my bigger projects forward although all of it relates to my projects. Are my projects the right projects for me to be doing? Is it time for a complete review of everything, from the higher levels that Allen describes. Maybe I need to reread parts of "Getting things done" to be clear on what the higher levels are in the first place. On the plane here, along with going through saved email, I also began a thorough brain dump which I haven't done since I went to Allen's seminar in February.
Writing the brain-dump felt like my mind had moved to empty, somewhere between the seminar, the initiation of the full implementation, the arrival of the dumpsters, and now. I got distracted by dirt on molding in the house, dust on the top of the cabinets, housewife kinds of things that I never pay attention to. I think, in full honesty, that all of it is running away from the big project I have in my mind, writing a book about survivor guilt, the kind of guilt we feel when we are successful but our friend is failing at work, or when we see a beggar on the street and think "There but the grace of God go I." I've been planning this as a "Someday/Maybe" for months, for over a year even, and I suspect my full GTD implementation has been part of preparing for serious, structured writing. I have on the backburner --also ready to spring to the front-- two articles as well. I have two articles based on data that's been sitting around for 4 years, ready to be written.
The presentations I'm doing right now and next weekend, were set up to force me to get everything ready to go on the articles. The emptying our house of many years of piles of papers was designed to create a wonderful work space instead of a crowded scene of disorganized books and papers weighing more and more on me as the years went by. I needed a new canvas on which to develop ideas, on which to draw out the picture described by the data I've been collecting for years. And by data I mean data in the classic sense of the word, numbers representing people's responses to questions, first collected in huge Psych 1 classes, and later from the Internet although that too depends on people, one at a time, being willing to take 20 to 40 minutes, filling out questionnaires or responding to narratives and questions. All these people and all these studies end up a zillion numbers that fall into fabulous patterns. The buck stops with me, and I have been slow moving, weighted down by a mess of my own making.
Writing this here, making public what has been probably two, three, or even four years of procrastination, may reflect me coming out from under. I want to make this process public, maybe psych students can benefit from watching someone quite like themselves, trying to implement GTD to the academic/researcher/clinician life style. What is most useful, what doesn't apply, what is absolutely crucial to fire that inner combustible fuel needed for scientific creativity, turning the numbers of long ago designed studies into publishable text? What is the source of procrastination in the first place?
I study survivor guilt so of course I think it lies at the heart of everything. Or is it that survivor guilt is in fact the source of so many problems that made me want to study it in the first place? But I think it really has been a contributor to my procrastination. My mentor who was with me as a coach and supporter for 37 years, died in November, 2004 after a long and horrible illness. Despite being aware of survivor guilt, since I had been studying it for a decade, before his illness, it hit me and as usual with survivor guilt, it was silent, hidden, not quite outside of conscious awareness, but not obvious either. Watching a parent or mentor get old, fragile, is awful. I knew I felt guilty but I still didn't exactly know it. Suffice it to say, it was very difficult and painful to flex my muscles as his were withering. It is still difficult to think about, let alone write about. The only reason to mention it is that I am trying to deal with forces that is any way block my productivity. If I didn't love my work I wouldn't worry about it, but whenever I am working hard at "creating" I feel truely happy and therefore its necessary to talk about it. Tomorrw I'm heading out early to meetings that should be interesting, knowing that whenever I have a "break" in the interesting sessions, I know what to do with my time and this should be helpful.
Cindy, the courses are on BackPack, and I made some of them "public." You can find the first one at: http://lynnoc.backpackit.com/pub/927514
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