Brewer has been trained in cognitive behavioral therapy, has used it clinically, and still refers some patients to C.B.T. specialists. But, he told me, he has come to believe that the therapy’s emphasis on rationality can be limiting. “Maybe you’ve heard this characterization of C.B.T.—‘Catch it, check it, change it,’ ” he said. “It’s about thinking your way out of your situation. You’re literally changing your cognition.”
But thinking differently, in his view, isn’t always the right approach. The idea that we can challenge and adjust our automatic thoughts “makes us feel like we’re in control,” Brewer went on, but constantly wrestling with our thinking can itself become a bad mental habit: if you feel anxious, the best approach might not be to interrogate your anxious feelings or mount a rational counterattack, but simply to notice the anxiety and then let it pass.
“It’ll go away on its own,” Brewer said. “If you push it away, or engage with it, or tussle with it, it’ll grow.”
As you might begin to guess, Brewer's own theory is "mindfulness-inflected" with "roots in what he calls Buddhist psychology." (Here's his book, "Unwinding Anxiety.")
“With mindfulness, it’s about changing the relationship to cognition,” he said. “The thought is already there. It’s not something we have a lot of control over. It’s going to come up. But you can observe it, and, by observing it, you can change your relationship to it.”
Or just stop it.
ADDED: As to where Jonathan Rothman stands in all of this. His article ends:
In the years leading up to my panic attack, I wanted to be the sort of person who dealt with his problems through roundabout, artistic means. I didn’t particularly want to be a rational person. C.B.T. helped me notice this, and ask, Why not?
CORRECTION: As several commenters are pointing out, that sketch isn't from the Bob Newhart sitcom, where it really wouldn't make sense, I've got to admit! It's a MadTV spoof of Bob's old show.
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58 comments:
I think therapists liked CBT because they could use it to shut down endless talk therapy. Who wants to listen to people's complaints all day. Unless they're rich and famous like Woody Allen.
Now it's CBT and pills. And things are so much better now right?
Right?
Shocking thing is, professionally the entire ball of wax is one giant months or years long process involving millions of words that really just boils down to "stop it". Humans are a piece of work.
"mindfulness-inflected" with "roots in what he calls Buddhist psychology."
They are careful not to mention Christianity. All think Buddhist are cool, and Christians are icky.
Or every faith base society EVER.
It gets down to the nub of it. YOU are not the most powerful person on the planet.
Grant me the serenity to accept those things I cannot change, the courage to change the the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.
Bob Newhart still walks the face of the earth — not yet buried in a box. He's 93.
I don't expect I shall be the first to point out that this is not a clip "from the old Bob Newhart show," but rather from a sketch on the old Mad TV show.
This is not from the old Bob Newhart show. It is making fun of something that character would never have said. Forget what it is from - some sketch comedy show.
Hi Bob!
*finishes coffee*
That's not the old Bob Newhart show.
This reminds me of the age-old cure for depression: Snap out of it. It really does work. I told that to a “friend” once back in college who was walking around at 3:00 AM like a zombie demanding to be noticed and tended to. Made him really angry. Depression cured, problem solved.
That clip is a MADTV sketch from 2001.
Nice clip. That shows why the Bob Newhart show, from the '70s, can still amuse an audience. Overall, it can get a little thin, but its dopeyness is so much better than most of today's dopeyness that I watch an episode every few weeks to escape.
Example of current dopeyness -- the New Yorker article, from a guy you have posted before, and like the other one I can dimly recall, this definitely comes under the heading More Mush from the Wimp.
I liked that he thought CBT must be rubbish because he had read two books by Freud. (Maybe! Or he recalled their titles.) That is someone whose other thoughts the world needs to study more deeply.
This clip is from 'Mad Tv' I believe, not the 'Newhart Show'.
This clip is from 'Mad TV' I believe, not the 'Newhart Show'.
This clip is from 'Mad TV' I believe, not the 'Newhart Show'.
Thank you for posting that sketch. Probably never would have seen it again, otherwise.
FWIW, not the "Bob Newhart Show." It's from "Mad TV," the best sketch comedy show ever (except maybe for very early SNL). Bob was doing a guest spot.
That also was one of the best sketches on the show. I've used the "Stop it" line a lot since then.
I believe in the "Stop It!". approach.
IIRC that clip was from SNL.
That skit is from the MadTV show, not Newhart.
I believe that this was a MAD TV sketch.
When I first read the post headline, my brain went from "buried in a box" to "CBT" to "BTK."
!!!!! Aaaugh!!
“It’ll go away on its own,” Brewer said. “If you push it away, or engage with it, or tussle with it, it’ll grow.”
I buried something in a box for 18yrs. A conversation w/my Mom unearthed it.
So I’ve been struggling w/it for almost a yr now- it’s not an awful thing(we’ll, to me it is)- an I feel diminished and pained by it something awful. I’m used to it, now- if I could just find a way to incorporate it back inside me- back where it was. I’ve talked to 2therapists &a priest. They say: let it go. It’s time. It was a long time ago…
I say- it just surfaced. I never looked it in the face until now. The feelings are fresh and open-wounded.
Now, I think I’ll try harder to “stop it”. Or, as a friend told me: don’t go down that road.
I have claustrophobia, which I never had until a 1992 car accident in which I was knocked out cold. I didn't discover until the MRI that small spaces set me off. I couldn't watch the Kill Bill scene in which Uma is in the coffin; gave me vicarious terror. I also live in fear of being grounded in airplanes. I'm fine as long as they're heading to their destination. But if it's a ground hold, I very well may insist that they let me off.
It has evolved, or maybe it was sudden onset, to not being able to be trussed, as I call it, for injuries--as when I broke my ankle in a bicycle accident. If the bandages or wrapping feel too constrictive, I freak out. I do. And I cannot be reasoned with. You cannot tell me anything that will restore me to sanity or perspective.
So I'm highly skeptical of any therapy intended/purported to cure me. This thing feels way bigger than I and my usually decent mind are.
This sketch was actually from MAD TV from 2001, not the old Bob Newhart Show from the 70s. If anything it is a spoof of his earlier role as psychiatrist Bob Hartley.
Thanks. Bob is truly a gift to us all.
Within the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, all three approaches can be applied. Logical mind is used to see through the empty, self-contradictory nature of obsessive mental formations. Meditative awareness exposes the way such formations depend on a certain mindlessness in the face of their repetitive absurdity, like constantly changing channels among boring soap operas. And "cutting through" is the method similar to Newhart's approach: just stop it!
I loved watching that. Laughed out loud a number of times. His delivery was classic.
- Krumhorn
Gee, what I'm hearing in these comments is this clip was from MadTV..
"I don't expect I shall be the first to point out that this is not a clip "from the old Bob Newhart show," but rather from a sketch on the old Mad TV show."
Thank you. Didn't know. Thought the date was odd. Will correct.
>> [CBT], in his view, isn’t always the right approach. <<
Notice the weasel words "isn't always the right approach."
Reframe this to the logically equivalent: "CBT is sometimes the right approach and sometimes not the right approach," and the best approach just jumps out at you. "Try CBT and if it works, great, and if it doesn't, try mindfulness. Better yet, try both and use the one that works best, or use both if that works best." Both CBT and mindfulness are pretty cheap, so there is no reason to exclude one or the other right out of the gate.
"The theory...rests on the unlikely idea that we can be rational after all."
You know, editors usually write the titles based on their own notions of wit and cogency. From the standpoint of someone working as an editor of The New Yorker in the 21st century the quality of rationality must seem scarce, like Pauline Kael being dumbfounded by the election of Richard Nixon.* It's irrational to expect everyone to agree with you, and when they don't, it's irrational to fear and loathe them for it. Reason gives us tools to resolve reasonable disagreements, this is why so many laws pivot on the test of the rational person. However, in New York and many other places supply of rationality is quite strained, twice cursing the loony and the lucid. Wood-fired pizza ovens are a crisis, human feces peppering the sidewalks like landmines on an enemy beach, hardly an annoyance. Psychotic murderers tossing children in front of subway trains? Just the price of admission, like the strange and mysterious shadows that make racial discrimination both forbidden and compulsory at the same time. New York and many other places could use a Portia.**
*They, the Nixon voters were beyond her ken, but she could "feel them" in the dark. Ken is a rarely used word these days. It comes to modern English from Scots, as in Do ye ken Rabbie Burns, and often translated inadequately as know. It's more than that, to ken Robert Burns is to understand his work on a philosophical and emotional level, which puts Kael's notorious confession into a profound and very troubling light.
** I met a girl, an attractive girl, who said her name was Portia, but she pronounced it Por-tee-uh. I told her I always heard that name pronounced Por-sha. No, she replied with a laugh, that's a car.
Thanks for all the corrections! I know the lag with moderation causes multiple comments with the same information, and I am happy to have gotten so many. I was puzzled about Bob's attitude there, but didn't pursue an answer, as I should have and readily admit that I deserve a thousand corrections. Thank you all.
The master of the Mid-West, dead-pan, non-plussed reaction. He really had his moments as a comedian.
Let'see... There was The Bob Newhart Show, a show about the only sane man in Chicago. Turned out to be prophetic.
That show was canceled and got replaced with Newhart, a show about the only sane man in Vermont. Turned out to be prophetic.
In both sitcoms, Bob Newhart played the same person, a set of doppelgangers with different biographies but the same mind and the same set of deadpan reactions to the barmy and flipped-out doings of everyone around him. In that Mad TV sketch, he's doing that character again, but after having up to HERE!
Not completely out of place on The Bob Newhart Show: Bob would occasionally take a direct route with a patient. For instance, to a new patient who had gone several sessions without saying a word: "You may not think you're saying anything by not saying anything, but actually you are. You see, I'm a trained observer of people,
and I've learned a great deal about you. There is one piece of information that I need to complete the picture. Um...would you mind if I ask...WHAT THE HELL DO YOU WANT?"
I wonder if Google will ever get around to fixing the erroneous Blogger error message. Proably not any time soon, being too busy inventing HAL 9000, an artificial intelligence that's authentically insane.
I showed this clip to my daughter a few years ago. It's become part of our lives - now if either of us says "stop it" or even talks about how someone else needs to stop doing something, the other of us will say "or I'll bury you alive in a box". People who are driving like dummies also get a "stop it or I'll bury you alive in a box" comments. It's better than cussing at them. I get to express my frustration at them, but it also makes me laugh because it makes me recall this skit.
LOL. No, really.
That didn't seem quite Newhart show-ish, but I'm virtually ignorant of MAD TV and couldn't place it.
I'm pretty much a claustrophobe, myself. I would probably squeal or confess to a crime if posed with the prospect of being [redacted very specific non-box phobic dread; don't want anyone to know, of course].
I think CBT has been legal around here for a while but I haven't tried any. Wait, I mean CRT. No, it's something else. BLT?
The erroneous error seems to do its thing in spates. No one knows when the error is erroneous or accurate, so everyone publishes their comment a second time, or a third, assuming it survives the erroneous (or not) error.
I usually go back and delete the duplicate or the original. What puzzles me is why Althouse allows these duplicates to stand.
“The thought is already there. It’s not something we have a lot of control over. It’s going to come up. But you can observe it, and, by observing it, you can change your relationship to it.”
Observer effect, or “Schrödinger’s Therapy.”
Why is "The Merchant of Venice" so rarely performed these days? Is it because of Shylock? Seems unlikely, Shylock has one of the most profound and oft-quoted anti-defamation speeches in dramatic literature. So it can't really be fear of anti-Semitism. Besides, anti-Semitism is very fashionable. Everyone in the humanities department must denounce Isreal twice before lunch. So what is it? Is it the heroic female? Are potential producers afraid of offending Bubba? Nah, couldn't be. Offending Bubba is their mission, so it must be something else. You'd think Portia would attract feminists like bees to nectar, but it seems they'd rather do Romeo and Juliet as a pair of star-crossed lesbians.
It is a mystery.
That is an all time favorite.
A really weird thing was when Jerry Seinfeld and, I think, Brian Regan on Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee came up with basically the same bit, except it was "get over it". The bit played out and neither one let on remembering Bob Newhart's "Stop It". I find it hard to believe it didn't come to mind. Maybe it was brought up and just got cut.
Both my ex-wife and I are clinical psychologists.
I decided to go into the field due to the influence of cognitive-behaviorists such as Ellis, Bandura and a number of excellent college professors.
My ex went into the field due to the influence of Bob Hartley.
Cognitive-behavioral treatments work only if the client buys into it. That can be a really hard sell to many patients who just want to talk about their problems.
Random thoughts.
IIRC, the psychiatric profession had one big criticism of The Bob Newhart Show - none of his patients got better. Maybe that Bob should have tried "Stop it." But never to Mr. Carlin; that character was comic gold.
"Stop it" is to non-attorneys as "the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race" is to Chief Justice Roberts. Seems maybe Roberts is more willing to use the short version now.
My wife and I saw Bob Newhart perform a mixture of his stand-up act and career reminiscing at a local college right in late 2019/early 2020. He still had it. Very enjoyable evening, and a packed playhouse.
I enjoyed the Newhart sketch. It built to a satisfying conclusion. I wonder if people with an inordinate fear of death live a bit longer than the average person. A coward dies a thousand deaths but a brave man takes selfies on the cliffs of Everest.....Granted, the human race is profoundly irrational, but it took quite a long time for a crazy person to come up with that Tylenol scam. Maybe it was a one off. If you want to kill random strangers, there's lots of ways to do it. You're never safe from random psychos.... Some of them, like 9/11 hijackers, are quite inventive and far more destructive...Some countries have a system of government where the most ruthless and paranoiac person in that government has a pretty good chance of becoming the leader. Some of those counties have nuclear weapons. On the plus side, I don't think a madman has any chance of causing catastrophic climate change. Still, there's a pretty good chance that someday the world will end in Nuclear Armageddon. I bet that would negatively influence people's views on Oppenheimer and hurt that movie's box office potential.
It was Brian Regan and it was "Snap out of it!".
Tens of thousands of self help books make insecure people hope there is an answer. But there is no help in them. The only self help book worth what it coasts is Boundaries by Cloud and Townsend. Its message is simply quit being used and abused by others, including family members.
"Romeo and Juliet as a pair of star-crossed lesbians."
Depending on the actresses, I'd watch.
I'm old enough to remember the scene in "Love and Death":
"There are many kinds of love. The love of a mother for her child. The love of husband and wife . . "
'Don't forget the love between two women. That's my favorite!'
"Romeo and Juliet as a pair of star-crossed lesbians."
Depending on the actresses, I'd watch.
I'm old enough to remember the scene in "Love and Death":
"There are many kinds of love. The love of a mother for her child. The love of husband and wife . . "
'Don't forget the love between two women. That's my favorite!'
There's a comparable Tracey Ullman sketch about her character's irrational fear of flying.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jg-DrRiSxms
The comparable bit of dialog comparing two sorts of therapy, one more "rational" than the other, in a strictly mathematical sense of that term, starts at about the 2:30 minute mark. (Tracey's face and dawning awareness is priceless...)
".....your gravity fails
And negativity don’t pull you through"
From Scott Alexander, Star Codex: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
"The Hair Dryer Incident was probably the biggest dispute I’ve seen in the mental hospital ... people were at each other’s throats about the Hair Dryer Incident.
[An] obsessive compulsive woman would drive to work every morning and worry she had left the hair dryer on and it was going to burn down her house. So she’d drive back home to check that the hair dryer was off, then drive back to work, then worry that maybe she hadn’t really checked well enough, then drive back, and so on ten or twenty times a day ...her career was in a downspin and she thought she would have to quit and go on disability. She wasn’t able to go out with friends, she wasn’t even able to go to restaurants because she would keep fretting she left the hair dryer on at home and have to rush back. She’d seen countless psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors, she’d done all sorts of therapy, she’d taken every medication in the book, and none of them had helped. So she came to my hospital and was seen by a colleague of mine, who told her “Hey, have you thought about just bringing the hair dryer with you?”
And it worked.
And approximately half the psychiatrists at my hospital thought this was absolutely scandalous, and This Is Not How One Treats Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and what if it got out to the broader psychiatric community that instead of giving all of these high-tech medications and sophisticated therapies we were just telling people to put their hair dryers on the front seat of their car?"
Jerry Seinfeld said he got Snap out of it! from the 1987 movie Moonstruck, which predates the 2001 Bob Newhart sketch.
@casandra lite "This thing feels way bigger than I and my usually decent mind are."
It's normally "bigger than me," where "me" refers to your present, in body, real self. "Bigger than I," refers to an ex temporal, out of body, imagined self. Stop being "I" and become "me." Your problems will go away.
If we were not rational, how did we make it this long?
Lem the misspeller said...
"If we were not rational, how did we make it this long?"
Luck.
Luck and that one guy with the cork screw.
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