“rrrrrrAAAAAAAWWWWWWWWWOOWOWOOWWWWWOOOOOOOO…”

It may not be gunfire, but it might as well be. There is nothing like the sudden and intense screeches of an actual catfight.

Ever since a recent vet visit for our two cats, they have been like mortal enemies to one another. They have claimed different areas of the house, and have frequent standoffs that require intervention from higher authorities (usually me). This has made managing meal times, playtimes, and sleep times much more difficult than usual.

We have tried different interventions to bring peace to our little nation. We tried bribery, both cats getting a nice catnip toy. This started out well but soon turned to conflict when one cat (Ozzie) decided he was jealous of the other cat’s (Boo’s) catnip banana and grew tired of his catnip carrot. He attempted to fight her off for it.

Lesson learned:

When giving handouts, they MUST be equal, otherwise conflict will ensue.

We have tried separation, or sanctuary rooms, if you will. This works to a certain degree, but whichever cat is cordoned off starts making a real mess of the environment in short order, as if in some kind of protest. The free cat then typically taunts the one in isolation, as if to ridicule the barrier put between them.

Lesson learned:

When attempting separation, both parties should have equal access to resources if at all possible.

I personally have tried aggressive domination, or about as “aggressive” as I’m willing to get with two cats I love dearly. A brief scruffing followed by gentle placement in another room or separate location is about as aggressive as I have gotten. There have been side effects to this too though. Now my daughter has seen me yell at our cats when they fight, and she has either periodically been scared of me when I yell or starts imitating the behavior and yells or pushes the cats herself. Neither or these effects are desirable and thus aggressive confrontations have ceased.

Lesson learned:

Aggressive resolution of conflict always has casualties, in this case the casualty being the changed behavior from my lovely 17 month old daughter.

So now we are trying the “just let it play out” method and hoping that over time they will learn to love one another again. We have enough space and resources for them to live together or separately, as they see fit. Realistically, I could never build a wall to keep them permanently separated, it would hurt too much…

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I love this story and we are working on “gentle” too! I am happy to say my daughter has plenty of aunts and uncles that will help her learn or unlearn these rules for many years to come. Thanks for sharing!

Yesterday, my 16 month old daughter threw an entire container of blueberries out of our grocery cart. To say the container exploded when it hit the ground would be exaggerating, but only slightly. I embarrassingly tried picking them up until a store employee came by and assured me they would take care of it. All the while my daughter looked on repeating her new favorite phrase:

“UHHHHhhhh ohhhhhhhh…”-my wonderful daughter

The first time she said it it was funny. A mother and her two older daughters looked on giggling at my daughter’s response to the clean up efforts. The second and third times it was cute. The fourth through six times it was mildly endearing. After about the tenth “Uhhh ohhhhhh” I started to explain to her that it wasn’t an “uh oh” if she threw the container. It also wasn’t funny and it wasn’t cute.

Okay…yes it was, damnit…but how did we get here?

Like a lot of problematic toddler behaviors, my daughter has picked up things from watching me and my wife. She has also taken one thing we teach her, like throwing balls, and used that one thing in other places, like throwing her food at home or even in restaurants. We never taught her to throw her food, but if throwing things is fun and exciting at one time, surely it can be fun and exciting at other times as well, right? We can’t get mad at her for not understanding that there is a time and place for different behaviors at 16 months old!

Not that we aren’t trying…

You have to understand this is somewhat embarrassing for me because I work with parents on modeling healthy behaviors for their children all the time. I send a consistent message to them that their children will exhibit the behaviors they see at home. But somehow between my office and my daughter’s playroom I conveniently forget this message. I play a game with my daughter where I put her socks in my mouth and take them from her like a dog would. I am literally modeling that it is fun and funny to put things in your mouth that don’t typically belong there.

I shouldn’t be surprised then, that she puts her socks (along with everything else) in her mouth all the time.

Yet I wonder why she has gotten sick as often as she has.

As soon as my daughter could grab things she would grab my wife and my glasses off our faces, something we thought was cute the first few times she did it. That behavior has graduated from grabbing our glasses to trying to put her hands in our mouths to actually hitting or slapping our faces. We don’t think she knows exactly what she is doing, but you can imagine our shock and concern at this behavior.

I try to think about where else she could pick up these behaviors. Daycare is possible of course, but I even think about how I pet our cats and how sometimes it is “petting” and sometimes it is “patting.” Could patting the cats on the head be something my daughter now thinks she is doing to us? We struggle with these questions as she continues to grow and learn.

I have to keep reminding myself that laughing at my daughters behavior encourages it. I’ll admit I was proud when she started to get really good at throwing balls across the room. I didn’t consider that this behavior would become a favorite of hers though. I also didn’t consider how chasing a ball across the room is easy, while cleaning spaghetti sauce off the walls is…not.

I think as parents we get wrapped up in teaching our kids things we want them to learn or do instead of just letting them be. We want them to do funny things for pictures or videos so we can send them to friends or family or post on social media. We don’t think about the consequences of these behaviors.

I know I’m thinking about these consequences now. I do worry that what are minor “Uhh ohhh’s” now could turn into real behavior problems in the future. I worry about these consequences for our society as well. What kind of impact will pointing cameras and cell phones at our kids from day one have on their sense of self and self worth? Will it make them entitled? Selfish? Attention seeking? For now only time will tell but I for one am not waiting to find out.

I intend to be more mindful of what I am teaching my daughter, both in my interactions with her and others. I hope you can think about this as well!

Thanks for reading. Please click the little green heart if you enjoyed!

➝ I read every response on Medium, so let me know what you think.

➝ Ask me a question on Quora or Twitter…I answer questions there and often follow up with pieces here!

Do you ever think about why you believe the things you do? How and when did you decide how you felt about abortion, LGBT rights, welfare, how to define success, etc? Did you ever question what you were taught as a child? These days people seem more interested in telling others what they should believe instead of educating themselves on the issues.

Due to this current environment, I’ve started thinking about where my own beliefs stem from. I was raised in a Republican family right outside of D.C. My father worked initially in George H. W. Bush’s campaign and later got a job in the Treasury Department. You might think growing up in that environment would have made me politically inclined or at least informed, but my political opinions at the time could be neatly summed up with Bush/Reagan=good, Clinton/Gore=bad.

I didn’t know much about “being a Republican” outside of having various elephant statues around the house.

I also went to catholic school for 16 years where I was taught a great deal about the world and how people should treat each other. Not until college though did I start questioning some of what I had been taught along the way. For example I was taught I had to learn and accept everyone but my college (Seton Hall University) wouldn’t allow a student to start an LGBT alliance on campus. That seemed wrong to me, but I also saw that there were plenty of students who easily accepted this as being the right thing to do.

This is probably where my transition away from traditional Republican values began. When “W” was elected I was hopeful for a return to what I knew as a child, which was really just “stability,” or what I thought was stability. But it didn’t help to see all the controversy surrounding President George W. Bush and the decisions that led to the war in Iraq. I also learned a lot in my first jobs and internships (in substance abuse facilities) about the “War on Drugs” and how treatment and support were needed more than ineffective harsh sentences and negative stigmas. Then came Barack Obama, a candidate for president that I felt more reflected a lot of my values, and the transition was well on its way.

Questioning our beliefs does not necessarily mean changing them.

This doesn’t mean I am done questioning beliefs though. As a therapist, now I focus on helping others question their beliefs about themselves and their environments. When depressed, all of your beliefs about yourself and the world around you become pessimistic. When anxious, everything you encounter is dangerous or stressful. In therapy I try to help people question these beliefs, and to build new ones that help them accomplish their goals. Part of this work means helping people identify where, when, and from whom they first learned these beliefs.

How to Question Your Beliefs:

Ask yourself:

1. When did I first start believing _________?
2. Who taught me ___________?
3. Did I ever question this teaching or seek to educate myself on the issue from various multiple sources?
4. What would it mean if you changed your mind on this issue? Who would it affect?
5. Have I ever discussed this issue with someone who disagrees or sees it in a different way?

All of these questions are healthy ways for you to explore your beliefs and to help understand others.

Why You Should Question Them:

Our brains crave novelty and learning. Make yourself uncomfortable. Be curious and adaptable and your brain will thank you for it as you age. There is a concept known as Brain Plasticity, which refers to the brain’s ability to CHANGE throughout life. These changes are good for our brain and may even help us lead longer lives.

For my patients, questioning beliefs about themselves is even more important. If a person with depression can go from feeling that they are worthless or helpless (a common belief in people struggling with depression) to even a neutral belief like “things can work out” or “I can make small positive changes,” it will make a huge difference in their ability to recover. Similarly, a little bit of curiosity goes a long way in the fight against anxiety. Instead of anxiously avoiding social situations for example, a person might question their anxious beliefs by saying to themselves, “I wonder how bad it could be if I only stay for 5 minutes.”

I now challenge you to start questioning some beliefs of your own. You might find some new information or some new ways to connect with that friend or family member on the other side of the political aisle.

As always, thanks for reading and please click the little green heart if you enjoyed it!

“Because then I would feel like an asshole!”

Let’s rewind…

My wife and I were having a discussion recently about whether or not we should anchor our daughter’s dresser to the wall. This discussion came up after a facebook warning video showing a dresser falling on two young boys was shared on my wife’s news feed. It was a scary enough video for us to re-evaluate how safe and toddler-proof our new house was for our 16 month old daughter. Having seen her survive enough bumps to the head and having probably too much confidence in her self preservation and intelligence, I brushed it off as not being necessary.

“She’s a smart kid, she would know better than to climb up something that big…” I thought, about the same child who had learned to climb an iron spiral staircase by herself before the age of 1.

As this conversation progressed however, it became clear there were other reasons why I was avoiding following through on anchoring her dresser. I admitted to my wife that not only did I not think it was that important, but that I actually didn’t know how to do it. As simple as it sounded to learn, I didn’t feel up to figuring it out.

“Why didn’t you just say that? I’m sure we could pay a handyman to do it.” — my wife.

“Because then I would feel like an asshole…” is what immediately came out of my mouth.

What I meant was that I would feel like a bad dad. In either scenario, I either don’t care enough to learn how to anchor a large piece of furniture to protect my daughter’s safety, or I have to pay some other more handy person to take care of a seemingly simple task.

This bad dad (or sometimes bad husband) guilt has held me back from starting or finishing a lot of home improvement projects. I’ve had mixed success fixing everything from light bulb fixtures to leaky faucets to installing backsplashes, and had considerably more success when working with my wife on projects like installing new floors or building dreaded Ikea furniture. In both cases though, my anxiety built and built as it felt like the project wasn’t coming out well or the problem wasn’t fixed at all (looking at you blinking closet light bulb.)

Now every new problem or project that is brought up, even something so simple as anchoring furniture to the wall, I basically just avoid to prevent the anxiety and guilt from setting in.

This is not healthy!-Ryan putting on his therapist hat…

Guilt is not a particularly helpful emotion, especially when it is not confronted in a productive way. What I mean is that when you go through life avoiding people, opportunities, or projects because you don’t want to feel the anticipatory anxiety (before) or the possible guilt (after) said interaction with that person, opportunity, or project, you miss out on a lot. Or worse, I put my daughter in danger because I don’t want to admit to these uncomfortable feelings about a (probably simple) project.

So what to do with this unhelpful guilt then?

Guilt CAN be helpful when it is confronted productively. In my case, that might look like acknowledging how I feel about the project to my wife so we can constructively identify a solution to the problem, instead of avoiding it altogether. If I still feel guilty, I can apologize to her for putting this and so many other past projects off, and express my willingness to try again in the future. Or I can just accept that I am not a handyman, and pay someone to do these types of tasks for us. After all, when the project is done by an expert, it saves me the anxiety of wanting it to be perfect and the time I would have to spend learning what to do and how to do it.

This has been a learning process for me. I am comfortable with emotions, but not so with a hammer in my hand. That’s okay! The sooner I accept it the sooner I can focus on the things I’m actually good at and enjoy, like teaching my daughter how to climb, err, I mean read!

Thank YOU for reading and please click that little green heart so others can read as well.

A recent theme with my patients and myself is the use of television (or social media) as a distraction, or to be more accurate, a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad coping skill.

For myself, this has looked like collapsing on the couch after a long day when everyone else is asleep. I should probably just go to sleep myself but after working so long I feel I am owed some sense of relaxation or me time. The problem is that watching television is not particularly relaxing or even a good use of me time. I never really enjoy watching TV, I am more likely passively watching while thinking of other things I could or should be doing.

Shoulda Woulda Coulda

This extends to time with my daughter as well. She is only 15 months old but already has a strong familiarity with characters from Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood and Sesame Street. On one hand all the positive messages from those programs are perfectly appropriate, but do I really want my daughter’s morning routine to already involve a half hour of television? Even worse, now when we are trying to play without the TV on, she will on occasion find the remote or the wireless keyboard and bring it to me, clearly asking to put the television on. To be fair, she also brings books to me or my wife to read to her, which is great! The remote finding is concerning though nonetheless.

It breaks my heart just a little bit every time she brings me the remote.

As for patients I work with, I always ask in their evaluation what their coping skills are. This gives me an idea of what they do when they are stressed, depressed, anxious, or lonely, and whether or not those skills are actually effective or if they contribute to their negative thoughts or emotions instead. If “watching TV” is a coping skill they identify, this is a sign that building new coping skills may be a priority in our work together.

I admittedly feel like a hypocrite when I harp on this issue though. Even if it isn’t relaxing, it is a way I connect with friends and family who watch similar shows. It is a way I celebrate my sports fandom with my brother and father. It is (though less frequently of late) a source of news or news related entertainment. It does serve these purposes, but I wish there were more personal ways I could find these connections.

I often make this suggestion to patients when discussing how to find new coping skills:

• Figure out what you get from your negative coping skills (in this case TV).
• Determine if you can get these same benefits from new skills or from more personal connections with others.

If I were to follow this suggestion myself, it might look like the following alternatives:

• Connect with family or friends by spending quality time with them or by participating in non television watching activities.
• Celebrate my sports fandom by actually going to games or at least watching games together for a more personal connection.
• Get news or entertainment from more varied sources. Taking a lesson from my daughter, maybe try reading a book or two.

I firmly believe if I made these changes I would have a closer connection with not just my family and friends, but a better connection with myself and how I reward myself or find ways to relax. This reminds me of a recent quote from author and self-experimenter Tim Ferris:

The more voluntary suffering you build into your life, the less involuntary suffering will affect your life.

 — @tferriss

I am embarrassed to admit that turning off the television would be considered “voluntary suffering,” for me at times, but pushing myself to more fully experience life and make better use of my time would be well worth the effort.

I challenge you to do the same! Thanks for reading.

TURN OFF THE TELEVISION was originally published in Fit Yourself Club on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.