When you’re struggling to navigate your response to a challenging circumstance, it can be helpful is to model your behavior after someone you trust.
It can be difficult to judge our situations, how we are doing, and how we should respond. One therapeutic tool that can be helpful to navigate this is the idea of outsourcing your decisions to someone you trust or have accountability with.
Judging our situation
We are not often the best judge of ourselves and how we are doing.
At the clinic, we use symptom questionnaires as objective measures of how patients are responding treatment. However, the subjective experience and judgement of the people close to us can also be especially valuable.
The people around us are often able to notice the changes we experience before we do. For example, they might notice, “Oh, you’re going out to lunch,” “You cleaned your room,” or “You picked up your guitar.” While we may not feel like we’re feeling better yet, the people around us may be able to see the progress we’re making.
Similarly, the people around us may be able to notice first when we begin to fade. This might look like staying in bed more, not wanting to go out, doing less of the things that interest you, or even just irritability. Irritability is an indicator of being a little on edge, fragile, and a little less resilient — and can be an early sign that it may be time to come in for another treatment.
Outsourcing our judgment of the situation and trusting the word of the people around us can help guide us in determining when it is time to come back in for maintenance, and when to make other steps outside of the clinic such as reemphasizing vitamins or going on walks and exercising.
Determining what to do next
Everyone has areas where they know they have a weakness. It may be standing up for yourself, or putting yourself out there socially, or dealing with anxiety about a situation.
It can be helpful to look around to see if there’s another person in our life who is handling the situation in a better way than we are. Just like how some people may wear bracelets with the letters ‘WWJD’ — ‘What would Jesus do?’ — we can ask ourselves, what would Bob do with the nasty people judging me at work? Or, what would James do with the way my sister-in-law is talking to me? Or, What would Francine do with going to the party where she doesn’t know many people?
We can look to the best examples of how the people we trust would handle our situation and ask, what would stop us from doing the same thing? How can we make those thoughts or behaviors exhibited by this other person accessible to us?
That jealous feeling of ‘I want what they’re having,’ exists to tell us that we can access that too. We can outsource our decisions to the people around us who we trust to handle the situation better than we would, and fake it ’till you make it. Adopt those behaviors until they begin to feel natural to you — and even if they never feel entirely natural, they can still be useful accomplishing your goals.
About Us
Wells Medicine is a Houston-based practice designed to provide meaningful care for mental health. Providing targeted interventional treatments for Depression, Anxiety, OCD, PTSD and other conditions, with Ketamine Treatments, Stellate Ganglion Blocks, TMS, and Nitrous-Oxide Treatments. Focused on comprehensive care and integration with Psychiatry, Psychology, and Support Services. We are evidence-based, patient-focused and mission-driven.
The content here is for informational purposes and should not be relied upon for medical decisions. For the details of your specific medical conditions and treatments consult your doctors or other qualified healthcare professionals.
