December 1, 2016
Interview with David Bedrick, author of the book Talking Back to Dr. Phil
Mike Carruthers: Making a major change in your life can be difficult and a lot of the psychological advice you hear may not help.
David Bedrick: Mainstream psychology points of view say this, “What are you thinking, why don’t you do the different thing that you ought to do?” And those kind of messages usually don’t work and often make people feel ashamed and worse about themselves than better.
David Bedrick, author of the book Talking Back to Dr. Phil…
So you say, “ I shouldn’t eat that ice cream at night, I shouldn’t be depressed, I shouldn’t be mad.” These are more like moral concerns, objections, than they are psychological. Psychologically all these things are interesting and deep and have interesting reasons that need to be explored if we want to address them.
The “swift kick,” “get your act together” kind of advice can work for about 5-10% of people, says David, but for most of us it’s counterproductive. So instead…
Be really careful and even censor if you can the internal attitude of, “I’m screwed up, there’s something wrong with me.” Because those attitudes almost never help and they make people internally shamed, they put their difficulties further away; they just come out in other ways.
So take the problem you have…
Whether that’s a depression, whether that’s smoking cigarettes and rather than trying to figure out why it’s happening ask yourself what’s it like to be me in that circumstance. And a lot of times when people do that they’ll get insights about it that they didn’t have to begin with.
