The Empty Nest Cure Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy

392 The Empty Nest Cure Featuring Jill Levitt, PhD  
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Today we are proud to feature our beloved Dr. Jill Levitt. Jill is the Director of Clinical Training at the Feeling Good Institute in Mountain View, California, and co-leader of my Tuesday evening psychotherapy training group at Stanford. She is a dear friend, and one of the world’s top psychotherapists and psychotherapy teachers.
Today, Jill joins us to discuss the so-called “Empty Nest” syndrome. According to Wikipedia, this is the “feeling of grief and loneliness parents may feel when their children move out of the family home, such as to live on their own or to pursue a higher education.“
Jill emailed Rhonda and me to explain why she thought a podcast on this topic might be of some value. She wrote,
Recently, I was working with two different women around the same age who were having similar feelings of guilt and shame about the choices they made around parenting versus working.
Jane is a 60 year old high level executive with two boys who was super successful and is now retired. She is telling herself, “
I did not do enough for my boys. I should have worked less. I should have spent more time with them. I was selfish, and worked because I enjoyed it. I should have done more for them. I’m a terrible mother. Stephanie, in contrast, is a 60 year old stay-at-home mom of four adult kids, and now that her last kid has left for college, she is telling herself:
I should have had a career. I have done nothing with my life. I am a smart woman so I should have done more. I am inferior compared to other women who have contributed to society in some way. Jane and Stephanie both struggled with feelings of guilt, shame, sadness and inferiority, and they were both telling themselves that they should have made different choices.
I’m sure your life is very different from their lives, but you may have also looked in to the past and beaten up on yourself for what you should or shouldn’t have done. Or, you may be beating up on yourself right now with shoulds, telling yourself that you should be better, or smarter or more successful or popular than you are.
In fact, according to the late Dr. Albert Ellis, these “Should Statements” are responsible for most of the suffering in the world, and there are several different types, including:
Self-Directed Shoulds, like “I shouldn’t be so klutzy and shy in social situations. These self-directed shoulds trigger feelings of depression, anxiety, inadequacy, inferiority, guilt, shame and loneliness, to name just a few. Other-Directed Shoulds, like “So and so shouldn’t be such a jerk!” Or, “You have no right to feel the way you do!” These other-directed shoulds trigger feelings of anger, blame, resentment, irritation, and rage, and can easily escalate into violence, and even war. I’m sure you can see that both women were struggling with Self-Directed Shoulds. What can you do about these shoulds and the unhappiness they trigger?
Jill explains how both women experienced rapid recovery when she used simple TEAM methods systematically, including empathy and Positive Reframing as well as other basic techniques like the Double Standard Technique and the Externalization of Voices, and more.
I, David, then described a woman he treated who fell into a depression when her two daughters went off to college. And she was perplexed, because she’d always had a super loving relationship with them, just as she’d had with her own mother when she was growing up.
When I explored this with her, a Hidden Emotion suddenly emerged, as you’ll hear on the podcast, and that also led to a complete recovery in just two sessions.
Then Jill had a sudden “eureka” moment and realized that the Hidden emotion phenomenon was