One of the conditions I negotiated in the severance was the workplace health cover, because essentially I am in the midst of treatment and that would be difficult to rearrange on the fly. I am covered for the notice period anyway, but I was able to extend it a little further so I could see the psychologist a couple more times and, start brief psychotherapy in January. I have no idea whether it will help me in any way, but as you can imagine, I am interested in the experience of it, as behaviour is one of my key areas.
There are lots of little things that nudge us this way and that, and we might not even notice the changes. For instance, one of the things you may or may not have noticed in the last few days since I set up my computer again, is that my spelling has changed. Previously, I worked for a company with a lot of US colleagues, so even though I was dealing predominantly with the EMEA region, I spent a lot of time with the US also. Because of this, I changed my behaviour to behavior.
Such a small thing, right?
Well, yes and no. I have written in British English all of my life, so it came naturally to continue on that way. The reason I changed was because I had to share a lot of my content and because their spellchecks were in US English, my work would come up with a lot of red lines under it. Yes, they could work it out of course, but that wasn't the point, because when we see red, we automatically have a response to it - especially the people who are a bit longer in the tooth and remember getting hand-marked tests back from teachers.
Red means stop.
It also means wrong.
So, I made the conscious decision very early on to switch my grammar tools over to the US variations in order to reduce cognitive load on the audience. Such a little thing to do for me, but it probably had some effect on their experience, even if they didn't know it. One of the problems with risk mitigation that stops something from happening, is that the lack of it not happening doesn't make an impact.
We don't feel the close calls we never knew about.
This means that we also don't feel the times where things were easier for us than they could have been. For the most part, we only really remember the highlights, the lowlights, and the ends of experiences, and even then, we don't necessarily remember these well. This is also why so many people think that they are self-made, because all of the middling experiences that facilitated progress, just isn't recallable. Firstly, it didn't make a big enough impact on the memory to stick, and then, there is just so much of it that it is impossible to bring it all into the awareness at one time.
Did any in the US notice over the last years I write in US English?
I know that there are people in Europe and Australia who have asked occasionally over the years, because for them, my spelling is wrong, so it stand out, even without a wavy red line underneath it. However, with most spending time across multiple information sources these days, perhaps it doesn't make as much of a negative impact as it would have earlier, when I would write decentralization, or decentralisation.
The first looks wrong to me - but it is the way I have written it a lot.
Spelling is just an illustrative example of many aspects of life that make an impact on our feelings and behaviours, but largely go unnoticed, or are quickly forgotten. But, they do have an impact on us and perhaps because they don't touch our awareness, they might have quite profound impacts, because they influence without us having the chance to catch them and make a choice on what we will do. All of these nudges add up.
To what, I am not sure.
I don't really know what to expect from psychotherapy for me, but I am going to go in with as open a mind as I can manage these days, and see if there is something good that comes out of it. I haven't met the therapist yet, but when setting up the first appointment, I said that at least she will probably find my case interesting to deal with. A lot of attention is put on "neurodivergence" over the last few years and as a result a lot of people are self-diagnosing and even getting treatment based on what might actually be neurotypical brains, driven by their consumption habits. However, I guess that I am now in the divergent category, and have the brain scans to prove it.
Anyone here had psychotherapy?
Did it do anything?
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
