Tag Archives: writing

Set-Ups, Near Occasions & Solution-Focused Brief Therapy

Haven’t we all had times we felt set up for failure?

Near occasions. Think of them as set-ups. Human beings are spectacularly good at setting ourselves up, for good choices and for the not-so-good, too.

We Catholics refer to near-occasions of sin – the people, places, things and behaviors that we might see as “set ups” for us to make poor choices. There’s nothing inherently “bad” about gathering at a bar and grill with friends, but if you are trying hard to maintain your recovery as an alcoholic, it is a “near occasion.” It’s a set-up to make good choices even tougher. Likewise, the trip to the mall to “just walk around” when you’re trying to work your way out of debt. Why set yourself up for failure?

In the same way, there are what may be called “near occasions of Grace,” the people, places, things and behaviors that increase our odds of making good choices. The friends who are uplifting and don’t gossip; the entertainment that doesn’t feed envy or anger; the activities that make the rest of the day better. We “set up” the likelihood of good choices, too.

Solution Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) similarly looks at people, places, things and behaviors. You may be thinking, well, duh, what sort of therapy does NOT focus on solutions? Different forms of therapy have different emphases in terms of finding solutions. For example, psychodynamic therapy emphasizes developing insight that leads to new choices; behavior modification focuses on step-by-step actions to guide the client towards reaching goals. In SFBT, there is a particular emphasis on the clues (factors that set up outcomes) in people’s lives and using these clues and the client’s strengths to develop solutions. In many ways, it is looking for near occasions of the goals the client has for therapy. When has the goal in question already happened, or part of it happened?  What was going on then? What was happening right before that? What were you doing? What were others doing? As a team, we investigate the near occasions of success so the client can use the clues to develop solutions that make sense for that client’s life.

Just as a quick example, let’s consider the person who realizes that getting the morning off on the right foot tends to lead to a better day, all-around. We look at examples of those “better days.” What did happen in the morning? What happened the day before that might have contributed to that morning? There are usually plenty of clues and examples of times when the person has been successful in doing things that either led to a “better day” or set the stage to some degree.  Some clues might be eating a reasonably healthy dinner, getting to bed “on time” and not using the phone or other screened device, getting up on time and getting out of bed right away instead of starting the phone-scroll. The person identifies the factors and then we look at how to increase the incidence or likelihood of those recurring. Breaking it down further, let’s take the dilemma of the phone next to the bed and its appeal as a way to deal with insomnia, or its interference with just getting out of bed on time. “I can’t leave it in the kitchen. It’s my alarm clock,” people will assert. Yes, I understand- and I understand that I bought a little travel alarm clock – a couple of AA batteries that have thus far worked for years – that wakes me reliably every morning whether there’s a power outage or not, and I do not have my phone over there, flashing lights and buzzing every time an artist friend posts a painting. It seems many other artists are night owls. The solution, if what is wanted is actually a reliable alarm clock function, can be had for less than fifteen dollars.  If the phone is off in another room, you’ll have to get out of bed to get to it. And by then you will probably have done something besides scroll – brushed your teeth or started the coffee or fed the dog. You will be vertical, approximately on time, and therefore have “set up” a more likely success story about getting into your day “on time.” The phone by the bed is a “near occasion” of extra time awake during the night, more time in bed, and then being rushed, grumpy and unprepared for the day. Nothing is inherently bad about the phone – but it might be part of a “set up.”

We all have “near occasions” – of sin, grace, good choices, bad choices. The negative ones have less power when we know what they are, and the good ones can exert their power when we focus on them.

What are they thinking?

What are they thinking, we wonder. It’s a question we toss about in conversation. It frequently comes up with someone is doing something that seems self-destructive, or bizarre, or just unexpected.  For psychotherapists, like myself, a lot of people seem to believe we have a secret insight into what some particular person is thinking. Of course, I don’t. I have theories, sometimes, based on study and thirty-plus years of experience in mental health and sixty-plus years of experience being human, most of that as a voracious reader. But even with all that, I am often stymied and stumped as to what someone is thinking.

I recently dropped off art for a show and met another artist. We were introduced, we shook hands. He is a tall man with big, baseball mitt-sized hands. At least, compared to mine. And my small hands are twisted up and deformed with arthritis, with many joints completely failed, such that my ability to hold a brush or a pastel stick is pretty much a miracle. What was this man, a visual artist whose attention to detail is apparent in his work, thinking when he squeezed my hand as if I were a big man with whom he was about to enter an arm-wrestling contest? I don’t know, but what comes to mind is unkind. So, I try to assure myself it was a moment of oblivion.

We have many people in our neighborhood who walk their dogs and assiduously clean up after them. There is one person (I hope and pray it is only one because it is almost unbearable to think there are more) who very carefully picks up after their dog with proper little dark plastic bags, knots the bags carefully … and then leaves them behind. On the sidewalk, on someone’s driveway and once on the table at the end of our driveway where we had set out the abundant crop from our starfruit tree to give away. What was this person thinking as they left their little present next to the box of starfruit and the big sign announcing, Free Fruit? I hope I never figure it out. My husband, who is better-hearted person than I am, suggested that perhaps it was dark and they thought they were just adding to the trash pile. Hmmm.

What are they thinking when … we all wonder. And I am sure people wonder it about me. Certainly, my little adventures such as hiking up and down canyon walls and white-water rafting when I don’t even know how to swim generate some of that. Then there are the times when I nervously blurt out something stupid, awkward but well-intended when a friend shares difficult news, such as a scary health diagnosis. Being a professional is not a vaccine against that. And perhaps about you, too, sometimes, inspire people to wonder, what were they thinking? Reminding myself of this helps me give a little grace to other people’s weirdness or inconsideration, because I definitely have my moments of being weird, inconsiderate or just plain oblivious.  And at those times, no doubt someone is wondering, “My gosh, what is she thinking…?”

Quitter’s Day Part 3: Know Thyself

Micro? Macro? Or just bored?

Toe in the water, a cannonball dive, or just hanging out poolside?

Do you go for a haircut and, if it’s a new-to-you-stylist, ask for a half-inch trim so you can find out whether they actually listen and measure – or just grin and say, “Do whatever you want”? That’s your small vs big change preference in a nutshell. Then there’s never making any change that isn’t forced upon you by circumstances, like that little mishap when you to do layers like the stylist you follow on YouTube.

Because, if you’re a small-change person and you tried to take on too much in one step, you may become overwhelmed. Small-change people are often big-picture people: they see a small change (spend fifteen minutes a day learning a new language, for example), and immediately realize that fifteen minutes comes from … somewhere. And somewhere ought to be figured out so nothing important is accidentally left out. A small-change person will do better with a small and carefully planned step into change, and build from there.

But … if you’re a big-change person and you tried to make a small change, perhaps you got bored. It seemed hardly worthwhile. In that case, experiment with suiting your temperament.

Or maybe you just got discouraged because persistence with any change – big or small – can be difficult. Being persistent, sticking with the essentials, isn’t easy for most people. If it were, we wouldn’t marvel at the accomplishments of those who have developed outstanding skills in any particular domain. We know “outstanding” takes persistently showing up and doing the work.

Whatever the reason – too much, too little, just bored – maybe this week do a reboot that suits your temperament as an experiment, and see what happens.

So … Where Do Those Characters Come From?

Every author hears that question. Probably more so, it’s what people wonder when a therapist starts writing fiction. Friends, family and, possibly, clients and colleagues, wonder whose secrets I have mined to create the characters in my books.

Well, with the first novel in the series out there (Falling Feathers) and a second expected out before year’s end (Never Just One), two more in the queue for 2026 and one in development for 2027, I am happy to take on that question directly.

The fact of it is, unfortunately, that I am tucked into each of these characters.

I am Alex, the put-everyone-else-first person until the stress gets to critical mass and then she must say, No, that’s enough.

I am Joe, who can get so excited about a topic of interest to me, that I can turn any dialogue into an awkward monologue/college lecture.

I am Sandy, who wants to save the world, and probably needs to stop talking about how much better the organic produce is. But it really is better, that’s the thing.

I am Beth, who thinks if I just work a little harder, I can fix any situation.

I am Gloria, who thinks she knows best what everyone else should do. Period.

I am Bob, who smiles and nods at others’ advice and then wanders off to do what I please.

Even the characters I dislike have pieces of me. That’s the way it goes. Writing fiction is like a long and brutal examination of conscience, thrown out there for other people’s enjoyment.

To the extent any reader feels a flash of recognition – well, hello, friend! Looks like we have something in common. I hope you enjoy the books.

Ouch! Hey! and, Yay!

It can be hard for parents to make the changes they see would be best for their families. Every good idea seems like a Sisyphean struggle.

Sometimes it’s useful to start very small. Let’s begin with a short, very simplified review of behavior modification from Psych 101. We’ve got positive reinforcement (YAY), negative reinforcement (also YAY) and punishment by application – life does something to you (OUCH), or withdrawal, when life takes something away (HEY!).

Let’s say it is noonish on a pleasant day, I have a break, and decide to take a walk outside. I will enjoy the breeze, the birds singing, a chance to move and clear my head. I will come back to the desk feeling invigorated. I have been positively reinforced. I did an action, or stopped an action, that resulted in something good (my uplifted mood).

A few hours later, it will be about 3 PM and I may have the beginning of a headache. I glance at my water bottle and realize I am way behind on fluids, so I drink a few glugs of water. In short order, the headache dissipates. I have been negatively reinforced: I did a desirable action, and something bad went away.

Punishment, on the other hand, is entirely different. If, feeling a bit bored, I decide to scroll through the news of the day, I might feel depressed and then realize I have wasted my break reading bad news (HEY!).  Or, I may notice the beginnings of a headache and, instead of a drink of water, start with a few chunks of delicious, smooth dark chocolate and then (OUCH) my headache may well get worse.

The point of this little meander through intro psych lessons is that, when making changes, maybe it will progress better if you find ways to start with positive and negative reinforcement rather than what will seem like punishments.

For example, let’s say you think that at least one weekend afternoon of family time without devices would be a good start. Teens and even younger children may not agree. Wrestling their phones and tablets away is feasible, but they will consider this HEY!, and their resulting dopamine withdrawal symptoms to be OUCH for them; their miserable behavior may be a big OUCH for you.  But if a family activity inherently means no devices and then everyone has fun, we now have a big YAY in place the OUCH and HEY! What might that include?

Being outdoors in nature, where devices may not work properly anyway. A movie outing. A museum that requires devices be silent and away. Physical activities. Someplace where there is no phone or internet signal. Or just take a deep breath and impose device-off mode around a slice of a day and spend it in actively doing things that would not be improved by device distractions. Have fun. Don’t lecture about how fun it was (that’s an OUCH). If your kid mentions it was pretty fun, you can agree and take that as YAY – an invitation to repeat as possible.

It’s Just an Experiment

You know how it is. You want to make a change. Something needs to change. Maybe the kitchen needs organizing, or you need to sleep better, or be less stressed…whatever it may be. You want to get it “right.” And that’s where the freeze happens. “Right.  It has to be right.”

But what if there’s no way to know what is right for you without experimenting?

For all the chatter the past few years about science, and following science, there seems to be a misunderstanding of what science is. Science is more of a verb that a noun. It has more in common with, Hey, let’s try THIS and see what happens, than with learning a few things and deciding that’s it – that’s all there is to know.  You can see the difference in real time when SpaceX runs another experiment with the super heavy and the personnel there are excited about how much they’re learning and thus able to improve, while some people in the press call it a “failure.”  No, “failure” would be not doing or, having done, failing to study and learn. That’s failure.

At an individual level, let’s say you decide to take guitar lessons. You have no idea how to do anything with a guitar, but it’s been a long-time dream. Unless you are younger than five, you surely wouldn’t pick up the guitar, strum at it, and wonder why you didn’t sound like Carlos or Angus or Eric or Brian or whomever. You would have to spend many hours, experiment after experiment, building and reinforcing the new neural connections and fine motor skills that lead to the ability to play guitar. You would not call the outcome after the first, or tenth, or thirtieth, lesson a “failure,” properly, unless you gave up in impatient disgust and stuck the guitar in the closet, where it will peek at you through the clothes hanging in front of it and reproach your surrender until you sigh and try again or give the guitar away.

If you are looking at making a change, and feeling stuck, reframe what you are doing as experimenting.  Move the coffee mugs to that cabinet, over there, closer to the coffee maker, and see how you like it.  Buy a battery-operated alarm clock and leave your phone in the kitchen overnight for a few weeks and see what happens. Try turning screens off during meals, or leaving the audio off in the car, for a month or so.

Start the experiment, and then pay attention. That’s a critical part of an experiment. What happens in the absence of the old behavior? What seems better? What’s harder? What is your theory on why it’s better or worse? Can you build another little experiment – not a long-term commitment – on this one? It’s an experiment, for goodness’ sake, not a marriage.  That is science, and that is a way to get unstuck, make changes and work around any lurking perfectionism.

Not another horrible day

A different day, another awful situation. 

A child, or teen, or young adult has been struggling with emotional turmoil and is tumbling into danger. They confide in a friend, or maybe a few friends.

They may have “met” someone in an online chat and now this person is their “boyfriend” or “girlfriend,” and they are planning to run way to meet this person.

Perhaps the young person has been “sexting” with someone they know personally, or “met” online, and now are being threatened with “sextortion,” that the images of them will be spread around, unless they meet some demand. This has recently led to many teen and young adult suicides.

Perhaps the young person shares that they are a victim of abuse.

Or, perhaps they stumbled upon, or were led to, the terrible misinformation that hurting oneself is a useful way to cope with painful feelings. The young person proceeds to experiment with self-harm, and posts online about it.

So-called friends hear the plan, listen to the horrible stories, or see the images of scratches, cuts or burns, and fail to turn to an adult for guidance.

Every parent I’ve ever spoken to is under the impression that their child would, of course, come to them if a friend were in grave danger. And sometimes that is true, but an awful lot of the time – in almost any of these kinds of incidents I’ve ever encountered in clinical practice or consulted on, as it happens – that was not the case. The case was, almost every time, that other young people knew about the plan to run away, or the abuse, or the self-harm, and did not seek the guidance of an adult.

Sometimes these “friends” have an unflagging alliance, suddenly, to keeping promises (unlike the promises they have made to you, dear parent, about everything from cleaning their room to homework being done well to treating your automobile with respect). Sometimes they believe they are better equipped to help than an adult would be, although they cannot arrest an abuser, drive someone to the emergency room or help them connect with a mental health professional for counseling, and their capacity to manage extreme distress is probably not much better than the troubled friend’s skills. Sometimes they dread social disapproval for breaking the rule that you keep adults out of it, whether the “it” is someone self-harming, or sharing that they are a victim of abuse, or are planning to run away from home to meet up with the “boyfriend” they “met” online.

I urge you to have frequent, open conversations about these topics with your young people. Make them age appropriate; be calm and encouraging. If you are too stressed out, you may be misread as “angry.” Remember that adolescents go through a stage where their brain interprets almost every non-happy facial expression as “angry.” If that happens, the conversation will probably be a complete failure.

Be calm, be matter-of-fact, and be sincere. Ask questions, too:

How do the people you know handle things like a friend telling them this kind of stuff?

If this was your friend, what would you do?

If it were (fill in the blank for some close friend or family member), what would you want their friends to do in this type of situation?

Why do you think people are reluctant to ask adults for help with this?

What would make an adult seem safe to go to with this problem?

Don’t lecture; have the conversation. It may be a conversation that occurs for a few minutes at a time over an extended period. That’s okay; sometimes a few sentence and letting it simmer is what’s necessary.  

You may, without knowing it, be setting the groundwork to save a life.

Loneliness can kill you…part 3

This is the third of three posts. This one focuses on the art of conversation:  being better at conversation will help you overcome loneliness.  As noted in part 2 of this series, a lot of people struggle with reflection and/or asking questions that elicit a deeper conversation.

So, here are two strategies to help with these.

Reflection:  reflection has to do with being able to identify how someone else feels, and mirror that back to them with your expression and your words.  Laughing when someone tells you something sad (it happens, trust me) is not good. Identifying all negative emotions as some form of “mad” or “angry” is not helpful, either.  Sometimes, when you are watching a show, put it on mute and try to verbalize the emotions that characters are experiencing. Then go back and watch with the sound on. See how you did. Experiment with mimicking their facial expressions and see what feelings you experience; the imitated expression can trigger a shadow of the other person’s emotion via our mirror neurons.  If your emotional vocabulary is lacking, do an online search for Dr. Gloria Wilcox’ “The Feeling Wheel” for a research-based set of some of the many emotion words.

Asking questions:  there are plenty of sources for “conversation starters.” I have used Gary Chapman’s conversation starter cards for couples and for families with clients, as well as a discount store’s set of conversation starters for couples, families, and general-use conversation. Basically, at this writing, for about $1.25, you can get about 100 sample conversation starters. Here’s how to practice by yourself: pull a random card, look at the question, make up an answer someone might give, and see how many questions you can come up with related to that answer.

Random example:

Who was your favorite teacher?

And, here are just a few of the many possible questions to take the conversation further:

  1. What was special about this teacher?
  2. What is one of your favorite memories about being in that teacher’s class?
  3. Did other students feel the same way? Why or why not?
  4. How did having this teacher help you out in future classes with other, not-so-great teachers?
  5. If you could meet this teacher now, what would you want to say?
  6. Have you had any opportunities to help others the way this teacher helped you? What was that like for you?
  7. If you were going to encapsulate what you learned from this teacher as a “life lesson,” what would it be? How has that lesson reverberated for you since those days?
  8. Did you ever have a teacher who was sort of the evil opposite of this teacher? Who helped you get through that school year?

Practice making up questions. You won’t be peppering people with multiple questions; the goal isn’t to overwhelm people with an endless interrogation. The idea is to develop confidence that you can invite someone to have a richer conversation by asking a thoughtful question or two, and have the kind of dialogue that helps heal the loneliness that you, and perhaps they, are experiencing.

Because loneliness can kill you.

Random Life Lessons

Here, on a beautiful autumn day, are a few life lessons I’ve picked up on the way…perhaps one will be useful to you.

Walking in the morning, before sunrise, can lead to being stopped by law enforcement, who, upon getting a look at me from the front (wrinkles and rosary beads) say things like, “Oh. I thought you were a kid out breaking into cars.”  Wearing a reflective vest and a skort, instead of baggy gym shorts, has solved that problem. Either that or I have succeeded in looking old from behind. The lessons: be reflective and dress appropriately to the task at hand.

Don’t save special stuff for special occasions.  Eventually someone else will just throw your treasure away or it will end up, sad and dusty, on a thrift store shelf. Use it up, whether it’s that fancy cocoa mix someone gave you at Christmas or your grandmother’s crystal. Drink sweet tea out of a fancy goblet.

Not from personal experience (see a prior post about this issue) If you change your hairstyle and/or color on a regular basis, you might not be the best candidate for a tattoo. The same goes if you try to destroy or at least hide any photos of you from five or more years ago because you can’t believe you left the house looking like that.

If there is something you really want to do, and it’s realistic for you, then pick a reasonable time frame (say, one year) and reverse engineer backwards all the way to tomorrow. If you want to achieve “X” – your G.E.D., your master’s degree, a marathon, writing your first book – there will be something specific that you do and/or don’t do tomorrow that is different than yesterday. Then the next day, you will, again, do/not do something different because you have this goal. If it’s your G.E.D., and you want to pass by one year from now, then the first thing to do is look up where to go for information. Then call the place. Then go. Then decide what you will give up to make time to study. Then do that: give up some of that time to study. Learn how to study (a lot of people get to college without knowing how to study; no shaming). And study again and again. Enlist people who will encourage you because it will be hard and discouraging and there will be people who try to pull you off course.

Don’t spend time around people who discourage you when you are trying to become a better person. If you have thought things through, and realized you must change some habit or adopt a new plan for life, and wise people agree it is a good move, then be very skeptical about the motivation of people who try to interfere.

Unless you have doctor’s orders to the contrary, odds are that alcohol is not your friend. Remember when Pinot told you what a great dancer you were at your cousin’s wedding?  Or how some kind of brown liquor helped you straighten out that miscommunication with your in-laws? Yeah, not your friend. Besides, alcohol is eager to share bad things: disrupted sleep, increased risk of cancer (it’s a major factor in a number of types of cancer), dementia, prematurely aging skin and who knows what else. Disclaimer: I don’t drink and I’m not in recovery, which means this one comes from 1) observing life and 2) reading the medical research.

Be wary of people who think it is funny to scare animals. A guest who tries to frighten your cat because it’s “funny” when the cat’s fur stands on end needs to go away and not visit again. This is a red flag, no matter how “nice” you thought this person was. They exert power by terrifying others; is that nice? No. If a five-year-old could easily explain it, I shouldn’t have to say another word.

The above does not include the person who is willing to make an absolute ass of themselves trying to scare a squirrel, bunny, rat, lizard, etc., out from under their parked car so they can leave without killing it. 

Try, if you can, to be patient with people who act as if they didn’t need to let you know about something they wanted you to know about because they put it on social media. Give yourself permission to explain that you don’t spend time looking for something you ought to know on social media. Unless you do, in which case you have bigger problems, perhaps, than missing one person’s newscast.

And, in closing, bear in mind that one person’s life lesson is not necessarily yours…but then again, maybe it could be.