Lynne S. Gots, Ph.D.
Licensed Psychologist
Going Home Again: Advice for College Students and Their Parents
By Lynne Gots, posted on May 15th, 2012.
Recently I’ve been hearing from many frantic parents of college students. The semester is coming to an end, and they’re worried. How will everyone adjust to being together again after a year of living apart? And they’re not the only ones looking ahead with trepidation to the long break. The students have their own worries.
So I’ve been mulling over the issues quite a bit, especially as I’m also anticipating the return of my own college student, who will be taking up residence in his old room for a few weeks—the longest stretch in a year—before he heads off again.
With approximately eleven summers as the parent of three college students under my belt, along with the semester breaks I’ve weathered with students in my practice, I’ve learned what works, and what doesn’t, to keep harmony. Here are my suggestions for parents.
1) Don’t expect things to be the same. Your child is a young adult now, and it’s normal for your relationship to change.
2) Talk to your college student at the beginning of the summer. You need to discuss your expectations about curfews, household responsibilities, use of the car, and checking in with you about comings and goings.
3) Lighten up on the rules. Within reason, your young adult should be in control of his own schedule and how he spends his time.
4) It’s not unreasonable to expect your son or daughter to get a job. But understand that finding paid summer work isn’t easy. Volunteering or taking classes to get some distribution requirements out of the way are other options.
5) If your student comes home with a new political perspective, unfamiliar dietary regimen, sexual orientation, or religious beliefs that differ from yours, have a conversation and try to understand her position rather than becoming angry and shutting down communication.
I asked my own kids—current and former college students themselves—what they’d like parents to know. They said, “Give us space! We’re used to having freedom and no supervision, so you shouldn’t treat us like we’re still in high school.” They also pointed out, “You feel like a totally different person when you come back from school, and you don’t want to go back to being your old self.”
It’s not one-sided, though. They acknowledged that college students should compromise when they’re at home. “We realize we’re not at school and different rules apply.”
Well put. I’m looking forward to having my son under my roof again for a little while. I’ve put fresh sheets on his bed and stocked up on his favorite foods.
I don’t expect any conflicts as long as he follows one longstanding, but oft-ignored, rule. He has to empty his suitcases and not leave them sitting in the middle of his room for the entire time he’s here. I know he doesn’t live at home anymore. But I’d rather not have the luggage out to remind me that he’s just passing through on his way somewhere else.
Tags: college students, Parenting, summer vacation
Posted in College, Parenting |
It’s Just Behavior: You Don’t Need to Figure Out “Why” to Change Habits
By Lynne Gots, posted on May 7th, 2012.
On Saturday mornings I volunteer to assist my friend in the dog training classes she teaches. When the alarm goes off at 5:30 am, I always grumble and vow not to sign on for the next session. But in the end, I reenlist time and again, always forgetting how much I hate forgoing the luxury of sleeping in after a workweek of early risings.
Why do I opt for another commitment over sleep? Because it’s so much fun! Especially when we have a class full of puppies like the one we’re currently teaching.
Aside from the obvious too-cute-for-words factor, the puppies are great to work with because they haven’t yet built up a repertoire of annoying bad habits. They’re still very malleable. For the most part, their owners are, too (having already demonstrated their motivation with their willingness to bring their dogs to a 7:30 am class on a Saturday).
Training dogs is a lot like training people, except much simpler. Dogs don’t tend to analyze their actions. If a behavior, such as sitting on command, yields a good payoff, such as a piece of chicken, the dog will repeat it again and again.
Their owners, however, sometimes have trouble buying into this concept despite its scientific grounding in learning theory. We know positive reinforcement increases the frequency of a behavior. But the students in our dog training classes tend to be stingy with food rewards, often arguing that a “Good dog!” or a pat on the head (which animal behaviorists say dogs tolerate, but don’t enjoy) should be sufficient. Come to think of it, the parents of the teenagers I work with often feel the same way about giving their kids tangible rewards for behaviors they’re trying to cultivate.
I also like my dog classes because they give me a forum where I can freely express my opinions about hot-button issues. In my professional life, I try to remain neutral about treatment philosophies I find lacking. But on Saturdays I have free reign to voice my disapproval about theories of canine behavior I deem inappropriate or just plain wrong.
Take the outdated but still wildly popular concept of dominance. Despite its having been discredited by veterinary behaviorists, dominance theory is often invoked by traditional, compulsion-oriented dog trainers like Cesar Millan to justify unnecessarily harsh training methods designed to establish the owner as “alpha.” Even if punishments don’t physically harm a dog (as with the classic “leash pop” for disobedience), they don’t promote optimal conditions for learning. And interpreting an animal’s failure to respond to a command as a sign of insubordination often detracts from the thorough analysis of the problem needed for an effective solution.
If you believe the ultimate goal is to control your dog rather than teach it how to behave, you’ll get frustrated, maybe even angry, if a training exercise isn’t going your way. I saw this happen one day with a neighbor, who was trying to train her recently rescued Golden Retriever to sit squarely at her side when she stopped on their walk. (This position for the “automatic sit” is a requirement in the competitive obedience ring, and old school obedience classes still make it seem like a necessity for pet dogs, too.) Every time they came to a halt, the dog sat a foot in front of her owner, looking back expectantly.
Great, I thought. The Golden had bonded and was checking in, waiting to see what was expected next. But my neighbor was getting increasingly irritated. She kept jerking the leash to “correct” her dog for sitting in the wrong place. Eventually the animal stopped glancing back at her, probably having concluded that turning around was causing the unpleasant tugging sensation on her neck.
By way of explanation, the owner said to me, “She’s dominant. That’s why she’s sitting in front of me.”
Well, no. The dog sat in front because she’d never been taught the rules of the obedience ring. She didn’t know she was supposed to park herself next to her handler’s left leg with her nose in line with the knee. And with the training method my neighbor was using, the hapless dog wouldn’t be figuring out any time soon what she was supposed to be doing.
People often attribute their difficulties to hidden motivations when they’re trying to modify their own habits, too. In my experience, this tendency to search for supposedly unconscious obstacles to change (“I’m lazy,” or “I must really want to fail, deep down”) makes it harder to come up with effective solutions.
So if you’re trying to change your dog’s behavior, or your kid’s, or your own, remember, you’ll make much more progress if you ask “how?” instead of “why?” And, as I constantly remind the puppy owners: Don’t skimp on the rewards!
Tags: behavior therapy, dog training, positive reinforcement, positive training
Posted in Behavior Change, Dogs, Techniques |
How Long Should Therapy Take?
By Lynne Gots, posted on April 23rd, 2012.
Picture a day bed draped with an exotic, patterned blanket on a faded Oriental carpet in a room decorated with African sculptures and shelves overflowing with books. This image accompanied an opinion piece in yesterday’s Sunday New York Times about the ineffectiveness of long-term, unstructured, open-ended psychotherapy.
Although the author Jonathan Alpert doesn’t say it, the picture does. The kind of therapy he’s describing, in which the therapist listens passively with just an occasional nod or a “How do you feel about that?” is the psychodynamic approach practiced by Freud and his disciples. Even in the absence of compelling scientific evidence to support its effectiveness for a host of psychological problems, this type of treatment still has a tenacious hold on many practitioners today. But that’s a topic for another discussion.
The article has inspired a barrage of outraged Tweets and blog posts by therapists who’ve perceived it as a disloyal attack on our profession. Many of them practice long-term psychotherapy and, understandably, feel the need to defend their approach. While I’m not as offended by Alpert’s allegations as those colleagues, I still take issue with much of his argument.
When people seek me out for treatment, they’ve usually done their research and know I practice Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy. CBT is much more focused, problem-oriented, and time-limited than the traditional therapeutic approach that keeps patients on the couch for years on end, perhaps with no resolution of their neuroses (think Woody Allen). So if you’ve decided to work with me, you’re not expecting the process to drag on indefinitely.
Even so, problems aren’t always neatly resolved in the twelve to sixteen sessions described in the treatment manuals. That’s why, when I’m asked how long therapy will take, I always say, “That depends.”
Depends on what, exactly? A variety of factors enter into the algorithm—your willingness to push through discomfort, the presence of complicating conditions (depression, substance abuse, marital problems) secondary to the problem that brought you in, scheduling and financial constraints, the level of your current distress, among others.
I’m not trying to be vague or evasive. To the contrary, from the first session I try very hard to help my patients define clear, specific goals and understand what it will take to reach them. But it’s not nearly as simple as Alpert (“Manhattan’s most media friendly psychotherapist,” according to his website) makes it seem when he writes, “Many patients need an aggressive therapist who prods them to face what they find uncomfortable: change.” (I don’t think it’s by accident that Alpert, as media savvy as he appears, is touting an all-out assault on the fear of change. His new book, Be Fearless: Change Your Life in 28 Days, is due for release any day now.)
More important than having a particular therapeutic style, I believe, is understanding how change happens and being willing to confront the obstacles as they come up, even if it means putting the therapeutic work on hold for awhile or discontinuing treatment altogether until the interfering conditions can be resolved. Better yet, predicting and addressing potential difficulties at the outset can help speed the progress of therapy and minimize both the patient’s and the therapist’s frustration.
To that end, I spend a lot of time up front laying a solid foundation for the treatment phase of the work, sometimes taking a month or more to build the base. (So much for 28 days, and the treatment hasn’t even begun!) As tempting as it may be to offer a quick therapeutic fix, I’ve learned from experience and some unsatisfactory outcomes not to jump in too fast. And while I agree “it doesn’t take years of therapy to get to the bottom of . . . problems,” I’m also highly skeptical of Alpert’s claim that “for some of my patients, it doesn’t even take a whole session.”
Most critical to me—and, I hope, to my patients—is for us to have the same agenda. So if someone has learned to cope with her panic attacks but wants help in sorting out career issues, say, I’m fine with continuing treatment for as long as we both agree it’s helpful.
Many of my patients are ready to wrap up therapy in two months, or six. But I’ve been seeing others for four or more years, though not ever week, certainly, and not because they’re not making progress. If that were the case, I’d have referred them on long ago, possibly to a psychodynamic therapist with a different set of skills from mine. Still, I know some more orthodox cognitive-behavioral therapists wouldn’t openly admit to extending the length of treatment past the standard guidelines despite the prevalence of this practice.
Sometimes people like to come back every so often, or even on a semi-regular schedule, to stay in shape. It’s like continuing to see a trainer after you’ve achieved your peak level of fitness. Reevaluating your routine and shaking it up from time to time can help keep you on top of your game.
So I wouldn’t necessarily conclude, as Alpert does, that an extended course of therapy means the treatment is bad or ineffective. I wouldn’t even agree that someone who’s in therapy to feel better (a situation he likens to relaxing “spa appointments”) without working on specific goals for change is wasting his time, although I personally wouldn’t be treating that individual. What’s most important, in my view, is to assess what you’re hoping to get from your treatment. And if you don’t feel you’re making the progress you’d like, by all means bring it up with your therapist for review.
You might need to tweak the approach, or you might need to move on. It depends.
Posted in Behavior Change, Mental Health and the Media, Psychotherapy |
