Not too long ago I met a young lady. She was in her early 20’s. Her demeanor was timid and shy, unsure of herself and angry. She was diagnosed with ODD (oppositional defiance disorder), depression and social anxiety. She also struggled with learning skills and experienced stress coping with day-to-day pressure.
The first day I met her it was obvious to me that the girl sitting in front of me was lost and did not have an identity. When I asked her to tell me a bit about herself she listed all the labels she identified with and one of them was ‘stupid.” She went on to tell me everything she couldn’t do because of her learning disability. I asked her to tell me which medication she took or had been taking. The list included: Wellbutrin, abilify, effexor, lamictal, paxil, and xanax. She went on to tell me that at one point she was taking 5 of the 6 medications, daily. I also noticed a slight tremor during the assessment.
My first step was to destroy the labels she identified with and to illustrate the limiting beliefs and the self imposed expectations at the root of her guiding principles.
The first belief to get destroyed was “I’m a failure.” It wasn’t difficult to prove the opposite. Simply by asking her to list her accomplishments she realized she wasn’t as big of a failure as she wanted to believe. In fact after the exercise she discovered she experienced very little to no failure. The shift came after she realized success doesn’t mean perfection.
The second step was to destroy her impulsive need to prove herself for validation. After illustrating the behavior using a diagram she started seeing the pattern. But the bigger question, why did she need to prove herself to everyone? We discovered that that’s what she believed she needed to do to get attention from adults, but even then, she rarely got any. She realized by proving herself she was going against her own will for a benefit she never got.
She destroyed one belief at a time and slowly started feeling better about herself. She started identifying with values and strengths. She challenged what she believed about her abilities and took on a full time job. With each success her self-confidence boosted giving her a desire for more. She even started going to the gym and working out 3x week with a trainer and goes on her own 2x week.
I am proud of her. She is weaning off medication, down to half of what she was taking when we first met and continues weaning under the supervision of her physician. She no longer believes that she is a stupid, lazy procrastinator. She has goals and plans to achieve them. And she reestablished a healthy relationship with her family.
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