A Structure for DIY Therapy
During the time when I was organizing the first of my successful efforts to heal (vs. the decades-long failed patterns), my goal-setting challenges modeled from The One Thing book turned into more of an organized effort. I decided beginning in July of 2020 to start one of these 66-day challenges (read on for an explanation of this) that focused on physical and mental health. Basically, that meant that my health came first. I repeated that to myself over and over again. It meant that my health came first during the day, because I would start my day with journaling and meditation. And it meant that, in the face of conflicting priorities, I chose to focus on my health over anything else.
It’s meant implementing most of the things I’ve already described–meditating, journaling, hiking–I began exercising three days a week, and choosing to do things that I felt like doing rather than attempting to force myself to do stuff I felt like I “should” do.
66-Day Challenges, ONE THING At a Time
These goals that I’ve accomplished have all taken place under the framework of 66-day challenges. Why 66 days? It comes from the Gary Keller book The One Thing, and was selected because of a study that showed that 66 days was the average length of time that it takes to form a new habit. Given that it’s merely a statistical average of the actual findings (which ranged from 18 days to over 200 days), it’s not that critical of a number. Sometimes I change the length of my challenges, if I think a different time frame will be more helpful. But I also find that I like the 66-day time frame. For one thing, it’s a long enough time to dig in and really focus on a new habit, which the more typical 30-day challenge often is not. I also find that the fact that 66 days doesn’t fit neatly into a calendar is an advantage. If I was doing one or two months, for example, then if I don’t meet my goals for a day or two, I can get discouraged enough to drop the whole challenge, because I’ve messed up the calendar month. However, the 66-day time span somehow allows me to not worry about that all-or-nothing picture and just get back to the challenge if I’ve had a bad day, or even a bad week.
Foundations: Health, Burnout Recovery, Boundaries
This is how I developed most of the foundational health habits that I still use today. A few of these early challenges, in particular, built on each other and launched my healing work. First was one I simply called “the health challenge”, where I combined physical and mental health in as many ways as I could think of. It started with the paint by numbers, I started meditating. I joined the Creative Calling book club. The next challenge was like a “Part B” of the health challenge. That’s when the hikes and the workouts began.
Next came something that was a little bit more like the maintenance phase of the successful ideas from the earlier challenges. It was the “burnout recovery challenge”. I kept most of the new habits that I’d started. I did not keep up some others that I’d tried, including puppy fostering, which lasted about a month, and which unfortunately derailed the rest of the health challenge because of the constant demands of it. But it was a trial-and-error phase, and looking back on it, I don’t think I’d ever really given myself permission to experiment in that way before.
I then tried an assertiveness training workbook. The workbook, incidentally, was something I came to thanks to psychologist Nick Wignall. His website’s been one of the places I returned to as I worked on myself and tried to figure out what’s wrong with me. I think I found his site when I was desperately googling phrases like “how to stop being miserable.” One of his podcasts was an interview with Dr. Randy Patterson, who writes about assertiveness. I almost didn’t listen to it. I thought of “assertiveness training” as a fad that had passed sometime in the 90s or 00s, for people who were exposed to court mandated or therapy recommended anger management classes.
I’m incredibly glad I did listen to it though, because the idea of assertiveness – versus passivity, aggression, or passive aggressiveness – has turned out to be quite critical. I realized how passive I was. How I’d learned never to actually express my values, but to hope that somehow people will be accommodating and figure it out. This is a horrible way to exist. It’s a way of existing that’s neither fair to yourself nor to other people. I saw it very plainly in action when I was taking care of my grandmother. That is how my family communicates. Passive aggressively. Constantly hoping for permission to do what we really want. Somehow thinking you have to suppress it unless you can get someone else to tell us to do it, whatever “it” is.
This was a painful step toward realizing what we all refer to now as “setting boundaries”. It meant doing a lot of internal work on my reactions. It was the tip of the iceberg compared to my later understanding of emotional reactivity, social anxiety, and many other dynamics. But it was the first step.
Building on the Foundation
I’ve come a long way since then, when I was groping simply to understand the concepts that named my toxic thinking patterns, and the dysfunctional dynamics that governed my relationships and all my failed efforts at self-improvement. But I still push my life forward in the framework of these 66-day challenges.