Lessons from the Sessions: 04202023

I am grateful for today's session.

My patient and I were working on methods to "get out of one's head." They told me they had stumbled across a list of cognitive distortions, and how helpful it was for them to "catch themselves" in a distortion. Once they realized they were caught, they reported they could step out of the distortion and feel a greater sense of peace and purpose, and continue to live their lives more authentically connected with themselves and their loved ones.

While my own ego was a bit deflated ("omg Brad, how'd you not give them a list of Cognitive Distortions before!"), I was thrilled that my patient had discovered something that "fits" with their psyche to deepen their relationship with themselves! As a primarily psychodynamic practitioner, my default is to explore emotions, patterns of behaviors in interpersonal and intrapersonal relationships, dreams, the unconscious, and the like. But clearly I too get wrapped up in my own ego, forgetting that other therapeutic lenses were developed primarily for the reason that different folks have different strokes, or in other words, psychology is not one-size-fits-all.