Boot Camp Therapy

BOOT CAMP THERAPY,  Brief, Action-oriented Clinical Approaches to Anxiety, Anger & Depression, by Robert Taibbi, W. W. Norton & Company, New York 2013

What would happen if we combined the speed and simplicity of a movie from The Rock, with drive-through psychotherapy?  Pull into the drive-through depressed, anxious, twitchy, give the microphone your order – “I would like to be serene, capable, unflappable with a brilliant future," then  pull ahead to pick up your order, a super-sized new attitude packaged with a side of confidence and nicely salted wisdom. Oh, and hold the meds.  Would you believe it, would you do it?  And more important, would your insurance company pay for your drive-through therapy visits?

What we have here in Boot Camp Therapy is a new prescription for The New, Quick Tough Love.  Even the book itself is designed to be a quick study, and although it is written for psychological professionals, the three areas Taibbi chooses to focus on and illustrate – anger, anxiety and depression - are well-covered and each includes exercises and options for dealing with these troubles. 

The objective is behavior change and the kind of awareness that allows individuals to alert and understand their reactions, and safely modify them.  Here’s an example:   

                Marie has been written up at work.  Her supervisor has been receiving one too many complaints from Marie’s staff about the way she treats them – her snapping at them and her flare-ups and bullying behavior – and hearing about the sense of dread that everyone in the department feels.  In Marie’s mind she is just doing her job, being tough, making sure everyone is getting done what she thinks they need to. 

Taibbi shifts into the Book Camp approach to anger by listening to what Marie says about the complaints, as well as how she expresses it.  Taibbi says that for Marie, control and anger seem to drive her everyday behavior – she falls into the persecutor role.  Taibbi warns that some persecutors are in fact sociopathic, with no conscience or empathy for their victims.  But others – not so a mixed bag like Marie - nevertheless will continue to find themselves in unsettled situations,  treating anger as a by-product of overwhelming anxiety rooted in childhood chaos. Taibbi suggests in his toolkit, that Marie should use anger as information: solve the problem.  Rather than simply tamping down the anger, only for it to erupt at another time, the author challenges Marie to track back; he assigns a homework exercise to monitor irritability levels on a scale of 1 – 10 throughout the day.  When Marie finds irritability levels rising, she needs to ask herself “What else am I feeling – worried, sad, scared, hungry tired?” because Taibbi says that anger is an umbrella emotion that masks other human reactions and needs.  The remedial lessons that follow include helping Marie understand that the reactions and behaviors she adopted as a child in a chaotic, unsafe environment – confrontation, independence, etc – are not working for her years later in a work environment where she needs to trust and enable other professionals.

As much as this short book was aimed at counseling professionals, readers who have an interest in these three deep human challenges – anger, depression and anxiety – and their roots will find this a fascinatingly useful quick read.  No meds.