Author: Elaine

Note: I’ve had this in my drafts for almost two weeks. It’s a terrible rough draft, and yet I’m publishing now anyway, mostly because I want to clear my head after the first run and give it another shot.

I’ve taken at least two runs at this blog post and gotten NOWHERE. I wonder if I should write it a bit more like the morning glory essay: intersperse personal anecdote and science.

What is CBT

All the therapists I’ve seen: the horrible behavioralist; the older woman in Arcadia (I think she was actually a freudian/psychodynamic); three therapists at UPS (guy, white lady, black lady); the one who didn’t work out in Tacoma; the city councilman; the woman who did EMDR (?); Holly. (why am I so bad at remembering therapist names! and I can see all of their faces, too.)

I didn’t originally realize that it was my history in therapy that was giving me the tools for usability studies & whatever the hell this is that we do in the work sessions.

I think I read somewhere about the most effective talk therapy being a mix of techniques and schools. Sort of like the way I’m trying different things with different groups of people, adjusting & experimenting.

The work sessions: are they content strategy? Content development?

(Is there a content strategy equivalent to medication? To short-term therapy plus re-reading CBT books & doing the exercises? Is that why I got so excited about Relly’s online class? The potential to be the Feeling Good of content strategy/development?)

Damn, I think I’ve found a new professional ambition: to write the Feeling Good of content strategy. A workbook for people “in the trenches” of content development, the ordinary site editors, people who would never think of themselves as content strategists. Something with some theory for people who go that way, but with a strong focus on practical advice, building a practice of creating better content. Do “this” once a day, once a week, once a month, once a year.

Of course, that doesn’t get me any closer to writing this damn blog post. I feel like I need some help getting focused on what I want to say, what I have to share. Hm.

“I’ve had a lot of therapy”

Active Listening

Why Behind The Why

Caveats

When we first started doing usability testing at Evergreen, I led the first couple of session mostly because I’d done it before. But then they said that I seemed to have a knack for it, and I’ve been the primary tester ever since.

I’ve explained it a few times with the throwaway line “I’ve had a lot of therapy,” but recently a few things have prompted me to think about that in more depth.

We did usability testing on a section of the site, and I was telling someone else about it. Notably, that the stakeholders watching had come to realize that they had too much text, and that it was difficult for visitors to get the right information. The person I was talking to said something about a therapist not being able to tell you when you have a problem, but to guide you to where you can see it yourself. (Paraphrasing badly.)

And then we have these “work sessions” where we help stakeholders with their audiences and goals, then work through their content. I missed the start of a meeting, because I got caught in a conversation elsewhere, and they were totally at sea. Which kinda bothers me, but I guess that’s ok. And it turns out that this part, pushing gently, redirecting, reframing, is something that I’m actually good at.

Which: therapy.

My father died when I was eight years old, although I think even without that I might have ended up in the ranks of the depressives. (There’s a lot in the family.) But because of that, we did a lot of family therapy, some of which was genuinely terrible. Pure behavioral therapy: not great in a household with …. anyway.

In the years since, I’ve done a lot of talk therapy, lots of kinds of talk therapy.

What about therapy?

Good therapists are good at active listening. At being there and helpful, redirecting, reflecting, but not being at all a focus of conversation. My therapists have had different personalities, different lives, but I honestly can’t say I know much about them beyond the theraputic context. (I was genuinely surprised when a former therapist ran for city council.)

When I (the patient) ask a question, it helps me if they (the therapist) put it back to me for how to answer it.

Let you talk, wait for the pause, “how does that relate to X?”

And CBT, in particular, has given me tools for finding the why behind the why. I’ve spent a lot of time doing exercises of figuring out feeling->thought->thought BEHIND that. “the audience member wants to…” “but in order to do what, exactly?” so that experience of knowing that the first answer isn’t exactly the answer.

 

I am, no joke, procrastinating writing about psychotherapy & web development by writing instead about the early 90s X-Men cartoon and its formative role in my young adulthood. Yup.

In the fall of 1993, I was 19 years old, a sophomore in college, living with my high school sweetheart and another friend, neither of whom were college students, and a rotating cast of characters, in a somewhat rundown house in a somewhat sketchy part of town.

And on Friday nights there was X Files, and on Saturday morning there was X-Men, and whomever happened to be around crashed on the couch or paired up with whomever would watch with us.

I’ve been listening to Rachel & Miles X-plain the X-men, and the last episode was all about the various cartoon TV series. Rachel and her guest Chris were in agreement that Jean Grey was, well, boring, and that the love triangle with her & Cyclops & Wolverine in the early 90s cartoon was weird and implausible.

But for me, then, it was not at all.

I guess Jean Grey’s superpower is being really brainy and having long red hair. In 1993, those were pretty much my superpowers, too. Being smart and allegedly competent yet always swooning for one reason or another; that was how I saw myself then. So there was all the identifying. I think maybe even the fact that she’s boring and responsible and serious spoke to me as well, because I was trying desperately to break out of being the good girl mold.

Then, the love triangle with Wolverine….

My long-term boyfriend, who’d moved from California to live with me in Washington, never was and never will be a Cyclops type, nor was he Wolverine. He had long curly hair and a round face with a huge smile; he was boisterous and very physical, friendly to pretty much everyone; silly, artistic, ADHD. (IIRC, he got kicked out of Boy Scouts for having Playboy mags on a camping trip. Early 90s cartoon Gambit might actually be a good fit.

G, on the other hand…

Kinda short, stocky. Body hair. Very charismatic in a much more masculine way than I usually like. In the Army when we met him. Pretty much bad news on a platter. And being the overly romantic kind of girl that I was, the Jean Grey/Wolverine thing was RIGHT THERE for me. Although Wolverine probably wouldn’t sleep with EVERYONE in his social circle, which was pretty much what happened. (Someplace I have this amazing multi-color diagram that I drew for a therapist of the relationships in my group of friends. It looks completely insane.)

And I was not into comic books at all, mostly I think because I was a snob. But this cartoon, with its total weirdness and at the same time this visceral connection to things that I was going through that I didn’t how to deal with or how to integrate into my self-image, I fell in love with that cartoon.

Then a zillion years went by. G drifted out of my life. The boyfriend and I broke up, eventually. I graduated from college. X-Men went off the air. Life went on.

I watched it again maybe a year or two ago, all the way through except for the last season. And hot damn is it WEIRD. Like basically the weirdest. The art is terrible, and the stories are discontinuous and bizarre. I think I never realized how odd the story arcs are partially because I came in presumably somewhere in the second season, and our local Fox channel showed a lot of reruns, so it was always mixed up and out of order. Even in order they’re pretty odd.

Yet, still, I hear that opening music, and some part of me is on a terrible secondhand couch in a room with ancient shag carpet, curled up with the people I loved or at least lusted after intensely, and that’s comforting. Or complicated? Nostalgic, in any case.

 

I realized last night that each of the cats has a different way of getting my attention during the night. You probably don’t care (dear reader), but I decided to write it down.

Boingo jumps on the bed and walks around and around my head. I often think he’s just there to sleep, since he often sleeps on my bed, but if he just won’t settle down, then that means he wants something. (Food, usually.)

Creamsicle cries. And cries and cries and cries. It’s the worst horrible infant-like sound, completely impossible to sleep through. Plus sometimes what he “wants” is just to be petted and played with. At 3am.

Pika  wanders around the room scratching on random things. Walls, cardboard boxes, pieces of furniture. The scratching is more akin to someone knocking on a door, vs a cat using a scratching post: just a light scritch-scritch-scritch.

Trixie…is awesome. Occasionally I’ll hear her running down the hall, but in that case she’s just entertaining herself. Usually she sleeps all night curled up in one of her few preferred spots, and doesn’t bother us at all. (Altho when I get up she sometimes comes over and meows quite insistently until/while she gets pets.)