The purpose of psychotherapy, speaking broadly, is to help patients get to where they want to go in life. Since everyone is different, with different strengths and weaknesses, not to mention symptoms, getting from point A to point B is sometimes a subtle process. The principal problems, however, are two: point B may not to be where the patient thought it was. He/she may have always wanted to be a movie star, but then it turns out that what that person really wanted was the respect of certain family members. A second, more obvious, problem is that getting to where someone wants to go invariably involves behaving in ways that are unaccustomed and uncomfortable, and often anxiety-provoking. Still, the situations that everyone needs to cope with are familiar, even stereotyped. They are the ordinary problems of life: learning how to go about finding a job or choosing a college, or how to behave on a first date, or how to navigate through a divorce. Or how to manage any of a hundred other situations that we all have to confront, but are especially difficult for some. For those who find it particularly difficult maneuvering through these everyday problems, their special difficulties need to be addressed, but the proper ways to behave, for them and for everyone else, falls within certain parameters. In other words, there is still a proper way to go about choosing a college or looking for a job or behaving on a first date.
As a psychiatrist for many years, I’ve found myself encouraging patients to follow certain guidelines that apply more or less to everyone. Experience suggests that certain things work, and others don’t. Just as baking a cake follows certain rules, so does everything else in life. An example: doing well at work involves among other things:
- Deciding what kind of work to do.
- Deciding where and how to look for work.
- Knowing how to present oneself on a job interview.
- Knowing which issues are especially important to address during the first few weeks on the job.
- Knowing how to cope with an unreasonable boss or a jealous colleague.
- Knowing how to present one’s work most favorably.
And so on.
A similar list of guidelines could be presented for social behavior, family interactions, sexual encounters, doing well in school, dieting, coping with physical illness, and on and on. The most effective ways of behaving in these situations sometimes contradict conventional wisdom. Promoting self-interest effectively sometimes involves doing things that other people disagree with. There are certain ethical rules which should not be contravened, but there are other rules that are violated by everyone. It is not easy always for a person who wants to do the right thing to figure out exactly what that right thing is. I know this sounds vague; but the issues of right and wrong are not very far away when deciding how someone should behave, for example, to a sexual partner, or to a business partner, or to a spouse.
Besides those general categories, listed above, there are subcategories which tend to come up in day to day life, such as how to apologize for missing an appointment or coming home late for dinner.
I will offer on this blog suggestions for how to cope with these everyday problems. These recommendations come out of the experience of being a psychiatrist for 50 years. To make clear what I mean, let me mention one of those problems listed above:
How to behave during the first three weeks on a new job
Someone starting a new job will not know how to perform that job immediately; and if it is an important, challenging job, it will take some time to master it. If someone is especially anxious, catching on will take longer than it would otherwise. For instance, someone who has self-doubts will not be listening to instructions from a boss; instead he/she will be focusing on whether or not he is paying attention properly and remembering—which means, of course, that he/she will not be paying attention to what the boss is telling him/her. For some people, this is inevitable. Someone who has low self-esteem should expect to experience these distractions when beginning a new job. It doesn’t matter.
No one will be fired during the first few weeks of a new job because of incompetence! What matters during these first few weeks are:
- Being friendly to everyone. That includes secretaries especially. Secretaries are often in a position to help, or hinder, you, depending on whether or not they like you.
- Stay late. People don’t usually notice if you come early to work, but they will notice when you stay late. I do not mean to suggest that succeeding at work requires working long hours indefinitely, but during the first few weeks staying late is essential to giving the impression that you are motivated to work hard.
Let me give one example when these following these rules paid off:
I saw a middle-aged man once who had been out of work for a long time and was becoming increasingly desperate to get a job. When there is not a choice between jobs, I always encourage someone to apply for any job, including those for which he may not seem to be qualified. The worst that can happen, I explain, is that he will be fired. This particular gentleman told me that the job he had just accepted was working with complicated printing press machinery. He had lied on his job application and told his future employer that he had three years of technical experience working and fixing these machines. This was such a technical job that I expressed some misgivings about his being able to fake it long enough to learn the job. But then again, the worst that can happen, I agreed, was that he would lose the job. Then he told me the job was in California. We were in New York.
“Wait a second,” I told him, “that’s a long way to go for a job that most likely you will not be able to keep.”
But he said he was willing to give it a try.
After three weeks at this new job, his employer called him in and said:
“You don’t really know anything about these machines, do you?”
He admitted that he did not—and his boss told him that the company would train him!
During those few weeks he had impressed his boss with his intelligence and willingness to work. Also, he seemed to be a nice guy. For these reasons, his boss was willing to train him, although he would never have hired him in the first place if he thought that that was what he was going to have to do.
There are similar suggestions that I will make on the pages of this blog to manage all the various problems that come up in ordinary life. If a reader has a particular question, I will try to respond.