The Docsplainer

I taught a lot of basic skills

Don’t know that I could pick just one.

One of my top goals as a therapist was to get people to where they didn’t need me any more. And I conceptualized that as them leaving with a portable toolbox chock full of stuff that, if they ever had a question or an issue or a problem to solve, all they had to do was ask themselves, “What would Doc say?”

Same goal applies here:

Woman On a Mission

Not surprisingly, one of the early signs that someone was getting close to ready to end therapy was when they would proudly announce at the beginning of the session that something had come up, and instead of thinking, “I’ll have to bring that up at the next session,” they asked themselves what they thought I would say next week, and then did that. Voilà. Problem solved.

So I couldn’t really pick one. It wasn’t one of those already-stocked all-purpose toolboxes that you buy off the shelf to throw in the trunk of your car. (And yes, some therapists are like that–one solution fits all–but that’s another rant for another day.)

Although everyone had some combination of standard wrenches, screwdrivers, and a hammer, the combinations were different. Some people left therapy with a toolbox full of self-care skills that you might consider basic but that they’d never been taught or had permission to use; others left with your basic assortment of assertiveness skills, ditto. “Most” people probably actually do have these skills, but then most people are not presenting themselves to me for consultation: By definition, my clients were there because they needed them.

The same was true with my pedagogy: I am well aware that, teaching a gen ed course on an engineering campus, I was the first and only psychologist most of my students would ever meet. So, while obviously this wasn’t therapy, I did want people to leave with skills. Students (one can only hope) left my class with critical thinking skills, study skills, work skills, parenting skills even, and the tools to find a good therapist if they ever did need one. And most of them did not have at least one of these when they walked into class the first day.

docwood
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3 responses to “I taught a lot of basic skills”

  1. ZeroSpace Avatar
    ZeroSpace

    It’s sad the situations that people come from. I’ve seen therapists on and off for short periods over the years, especially when young. I can never forget how foreign the concept of “self compassion” was when first presented to me. And I’m not kidding you when I say that, for whatever reason (and you would probably have theories on why), I was actually hostile to the idea. As if these therapists were trying to put one over on me or something. And it’s because I wasn’t raised with any concept of self compassion or anything even similar. And I wasn’t the first or last and it’s a sad reflection of people’s upbringings… which ultimately in and of itself shows the value of therapy even if some young person tends not to stick with it for more than a month or 2 at a time because they don’t trust all these therapists, but nevertheless they are listening and learning in some cases.

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    1. docwood Avatar
      docwood

      I wanted kids to leave my course with more compassion, too. Thank you for bringing that into the conversation!

      I think you are right, that people are hostile to the idea generally, not just you back then, and maybe it’s because our whole culture is hostile to it. We’re all into this self-reliance thing, and compassion is seen as weak. That has actually come out overtly in the manosphere and in right-wing politics in recent years.

      So you, and therapists/professors like me, are paddling upstream.

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  2. ZeroSpace Avatar
    ZeroSpace

    Ah, so not just doing therapy but teaching the methods to students, which of course is also very important. You bring up a good point that it’s not just a familial issue but the outer society at large. That puts it in more perspective. The hostility was basically a reaction to the affront of bring accused (in my mind) of being weak or something. Or that they were encouraging weakness and that was an affront. And I definitely see the manosphere and right wing connectio n

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