Good Things Friday (142) and Link Love
November 12, 2021
1. What I can do in under 2 hours while Smol naps (weekend edition): make breakfast for JB and me, eat, clear up dishes and mix up 18 ounces of formula and separate into bottles for Smol, direct and QC JB’s chores, do a handful of the W2 work, update my spending spreadsheet, update the Lakota Giving spreadsheet, sew more practice seams and remember that what I was doing wrong was a deliberate choice from a while back.
2. The other weekend version of what I can during during an almost 2 hour Smol nap: collapse on the bed and stay curled up for 2 hours, reading. I might doze if the tired is too much though I try not to because I don’t want to make my insomnia worse.
Challenges this week: I keep forgetting words. Words I’ve known for ages and still can’t surface in my brain. What’s this soft fabric that looks like mesh? What’s the well known weird puzzley art with all the twists and turns?
Scheduling feels like pushing a boulder uphill. There’s always some consequence to setting an appointment for such and such a day or more appointments than I can handle in a week. I don’t ever want more than one appointment per week because of the disruption to my work hours but as the end of the year approaches, it gets harder to fit everything in.
Having decided to drop our HDHP/HSA this year, I was looking into where to transfer our funds because I don’t like the company used by our employer. Turns out Jonathan came to the same conclusions and wrote it up already but basically: Fidelity and Lively.
I grew up in a family that spanked and it didn’t rise to the level of the kinds of abuse we read about but we also very much choose not to do that at all in our parenting. Still, that stuff sits DEEP.
A NorCal butterfly sanctuary didn’t see a single monarch in 2020. This year, there’s thousands.
Morning Cake with Pumpkin, & Pistachio Streusel
The secret court case 50 years ago that has robbed transgender people of their rights ever since
A lot of this article echoes experiences I’ve had in seeking help for my chronic pain (and grief and underlying traumas): How CBT Harmed Me: The Interview That the New York Times Erased
I think this is very wrong of those therapists, though. I’m still living in chronic pain and working on trauma work actively, effectively: “I’ve been unable to successfully do trauma work because therapists tell me we can’t work on past traumas while I’m living in trauma.”
Blood Memory at PBS: For Sandy White Hawk, the story of America’s Indian Adoption Era is not one of saving children but of destroying families and tribes. As an adoption survivor, Sandy sets out to reclaim the missing pieces of her stolen past only to discover that her’s was not an isolated case. BLOOD MEMORY explores the communal healing that is sparked by the return of this stolen generation.
I feel like I have to defend CBT a little bit. I did CBT from one of the top research centers in the world when I was in graduate school and one of the BIG basic things was that you NEVER say anything that isn’t true. It very specifically isn’t Stuart Smalley. And the therapist doesn’t decide what is true, the person decides what is true. It sounds like the guy writing the article was working with someone who wasn’t well-trained in CBT, and unfortunately there are a lot of practitioners who say they do CBT but have never actually been formally trained in it.
As for whether or not CBT can help with chronic pain– I have not seen any studies on that topic but it has also been 20 years since I did in depth research on the topic. CBT CAN help with certain types of pain, but they’re specifically the kind of pain that comes from not being able to relax. So a lot of the pain techniques in natural childbirthing classes are directly taken from CBT (deep breathing, progressive muscle relaxation, etc.). I can’t imagine how CBT would help with other types of pain that aren’t caused by clenching or forgetting to breathe. But also I don’t understand acupuncture, so if there are researchers doing randomized controlled trials and finding promising results, that’s great. If there are therapists who are using it off-label for something unproven, that’s less great. CBT is really amazing because it has so much research base compared to many other therapies. There are lots of high quality RCT, which means they know a lot about what is most effective for what. When I did it for specific anxiety, they started with what was most effective in the literature and moved down the list of techniques to things that were less effective but worked for some people.
So… that is to say, don’t throw out CBT. Do throw out its use on unproven things. Also if a therapist tells you to say things that you know aren’t true, throw out the therapist. Research on Stuart Smalley techniques shows that they don’t work.
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It can be so complicated, particularly because of lack of access.
Your observations plus how CBT doesn’t work or serve certain conditions and populations, and how people don’t practice CBT right, is super relevant info.
It’d also be good if it was easier for the layperson without any experience or access to the best places to know what CBT is (and when you’ve got a hack). My personal experience in seeking CBT therapy in past years was pretty disheartening and that was before the gaslighting about chronic pain.
I expect there are TONS of therapists who claim to practice CBT or other therapies who don’t really and are just terrible practitioners and that can cloud the issue as well. 🙁
I know that in what little experience I had with it, it was definitely not the right fit for my chronic pain, but could have been good for some of my anxiety issues. But my therapists weren’t so good so they failed to explore where their help would be effective.
I wish for better comprehensive mental health access and resources for all.
There are so many bad practitioners out there.
I was extremely lucky to have been able to do CBT from a top research center. I don’t know if there are any in the SF Bay area though.
#2 on our blog didn’t get much out of CBT herself but she still recommends it for people who have specific anxiety or a first depressive episode. It isn’t a cure-all for everything, but it is really great for the limited things that it does work for, which is calming the physical symptoms of anxiety so the rational mind has a chance to take over.
I finally finished the CBT post that’s been sitting in our drafts for years and that should go out one of these Wednesdays.
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I’m looking forward to the post!