TRANSCRIPT OF AUDIO FILE:

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT:

THERAPIST: It's seasonal thing kind... Just let me know if it's too bright over there.

CLIENT: Okay. (PAUSE) I start dreading going to work starting the night before and it's made getting to bed at a reasonable hour even harder.

(PAUSE) [00:01:00]

THERAPIST: How so?

CLIENT: Because... (SIGH) If I haven't gone to bed yet I can distract myself from work with other things, you know, reading a book, watching TV, practicing the piano. But once I'm getting ready for bed and going to bed, there's nothing to do but think about how awful work is.

THERAPIST: Sure. Yep.

CLIENT: So I want to put that off as much as possible.

THERAPIST: I see.

CLIENT: Which doesn't help me get up and get to work at a reasonable hour in the morning which just compounds the problem because then my mentor makes fun of how late I get up.

THERAPIST: Yep.

CLIENT: And it's not like I'm not working a full day, right? Like some people work, come into work at 7:30 and leave at three. I come in around 10 and leave at 6:30 and I think... I mean, I'm putting in eight hours plus a lunch break. [00:02:05]

THERAPIST: Right. Right.

CLIENT: And I'm not the only one who comes in at 10.

THERAPIST: Sure.

CLIENT: Like there are people who get in even later than me.

THERAPIST: Sure.

CLIENT: So...

THERAPIST: Yeah. I understand. You're an engineer. (LAUGHTER)

CLIENT: (LAUGHTER) Electrical engineers typically don't have as much flexibility as software people. But...

THERAPIST: Uh huh.

CLIENT: We still have a great deal.

THERAPIST: Yeah. (PAUSE) And you don't need anything making it harder to get to bed and fall asleep.

CLIENT: Right.

(PAUSE) [00:02:59]

CLIENT: And my mentor, who I talk to almost every day at work, his whole demeanor and style towards everyone is really kind of abrasive. In fact, lots of people who don't like him because he, he will frequently belittle people or say, you know, "I think that's completely stupid." Or make snarky remarks during a meeting while someone is speaking. Like that's just his style. But he's been directing a lot of that at me the last couple of weeks. And it's been... (SIGH) It's just been compounding the feelings of shame and avoidance and guilt. Like he was out... So everyone worked from home on Friday.

THERAPIST: Right.

CLIENT: So Thursday before the blizzard came we talked about a smaller side project he wanted me to do. And I said, "Okay. That'll be my project for Friday." And he said, "You probably won't finish it on Friday. You'll probably spend all of Friday trying to figure out what the heck is going on."

THERAPIST: Yeah. [00:03:57]

CLIENT: And I said, "Oh, okay." So I tried to figure out what was going on Friday but as we mentioned Monday, I didn't have a very productive day on Friday.

THERAPIST: Right.

CLIENT: But I finally wrapped my head around what was going on on Monday. I got instructed with a bunch of other stupid bullshit tasks for other things. On Tuesday my mentor was out. He took a sick day. I tried to wrap my head around it more and tried to get started but there were like three (inaudible at 00:04:27) little details that I couldn't quite understand. Like I got the big picture but there were three like... So they're using this command. And I understand they got these results but I don't quite understand how this command behaves. Like how did... Like I understand the results they got but I don't know how they got them. Like how do I replicate this? And then there was another question about a tool. Like I've got this viewer opened and I can't figure out how to zoom in on the viewer. "Can you just show me how to use (inaudible)?" So when he came in Wednesday, I came over to his desk to ask him these questions and he was like, "Did you do anything at all Monday or Tuesday?" [00:05:01]

And then he started walking me through the whole project that he wanted me to do. I was like... And as he was explaining all this stuff, I was like, "I figured that out. I figured that out. Yes, I've already done that. I really only have..." And he kept harping on, "Did you work on this at all?" I was like, "But I figured out 90 percent of it. I just brought you a couple of like..."

THERAPIST: Right.

CLIENT: "...loose ends that I needed fixed."

THERAPIST: Right.

CLIENT: (SIGH) And so I'm worried that this, this cycle is happening again. That, you know, a bunch of fuck ups are just compounding and compounding until people have this idea that I can't do anything but fuck ups so that even when I am getting work done, there's a perception that I'm not.

(PAUSE) [00:05:53]

CLIENT: And it's really hard for me to fight off the voice in my head that says, "Well, it's too late. Everyone knows you're a fuck up. You're never going to change their minds. You're never going to progress in this job. You might as well just quit and find a new job because you'll never be able to turn this train around."

(PAUSE)

THERAPIST: I mean, is an alternative hypothesis with him in particular that he can be kind of a douchebag?

CLIENT: Well, he can be kind of a douchebag but it was the, "Did you do anything at all?" that makes me worry.

THERAPIST: Yeah.

(PAUSE)

CLIENT: And I think the voice that says I'll never be able to turn this train around and convince me I'm incompetent, I'm pretty sure that's wrong but it's awfully persuasive. [00:07:00]

(PAUSE) [00:08:00]

THERAPIST: Hmm.

(PAUSE) [00:09:00]

THERAPIST: Yeah, so I gather you, you feel like you're headed for a crash and burn.

CLIENT: Yep.

(PAUSE)

THERAPIST: I'm not at all convinced that's where you're headed but I absolutely understand.

CLIENT: That's how it feels.

THERAPIST: That's how it feels. Yeah.

(PAUSE) [00:10:00]

THERAPIST: I gather another aspect of this is that you feel entirely helpless and powerless. I mean, as though you're on an airplane that's going swish.

CLIENT: Yeah. I don't know. Maybe more... I'm trying to think of a good word.

(PAUSE) [00:11:00]

CLIENT: (inaudible at 00:11:03) there's definitely a part of me going, "Why even try to do good work because no matter what I do, people are just going to assume I'm a fuck up anyway." So I might as well actually just goof off at work and, you know, play games and hang out on Twitter. You know, if they're going to think I'm a fuck up, I'll give them a reason to think I'm a fuck up. Which, you know, will only cause the spiral to escalate.

(PAUSE) [00:12:00]

THERAPIST: Yeah, I think that's a way of managing your anxiety. Like...

CLIENT: Well, it's a pretty crappy way of managing it.

(PAUSE)

THERAPIST: How so?

CLIENT: Because it's guaranteed to lead to a bad outcome. [00:13:01]

THERAPIST: I, I agree with that much. I think it may work to manage your immediate anxiety. Like again, with the crashing airplane metaphor, I imagine it's like...

CLIENT: Mm hmm.

THERAPIST: "Okay. Then let's just turn up the speed. Let's aim the thing straight down." You know, there's... It's almost like a little bit, sort of counter-phobic or something.

CLIENT: Mm hmm.

THERAPIST: You know what I mean?

CLIENT: Yep.

THERAPIST: Because you're terrified. (PAUSE) Um...

(PAUSE) [00:14:00]

THERAPIST: And I feel like I feel a little bit in here as well. I could be wrong and misreading you but I feel like when you walked in, you initially posed this sort of question or problem like, "Look. This thing is happening where I dread work so it makes it harder to get to sleep which then makes things worse."

CLIENT: Yeah.

THERAPIST: And the tone that I heard was kind of, "Aah! What do I do?" or "How do I handle it?"

CLIENT: Yep.

THERAPIST: And as we've kind of settled into talking, you're more like, "Here we go again." And... (PAUSE) Again, I imagine that sort of, "Here we go again," is a bit of a way to sort of assuage the immediate anxiety. Like as in right this minute.

CLIENT: Right.

THERAPIST: About feeling like you're headed this way again.

CLIENT: Mm hmm. [00:15:00]

(PAUSE)

THERAPIST: Yeah. I'm... I think I'm going to roll with it a little bit. The... I don't, I don't think this is about laziness. I think it's about fear. Like I don't think you kind of throw your hands up a bit because you're lazy and don't want to work or you might as well just have fun on Twitter instead of working. I think it's more like it's really scary and overwhelming to kind of get back into it with your work.

(PAUSE) [00:16:00]

THERAPIST: And to sort of feel more like you have an active part in what's going on.

CLIENT: Right.

THERAPIST: I bring that up for a few reasons but one is because I think I've heard you berate yourself as being lazy a number of times. I think it's much more that you're coping with a tremendous amount of anxiety in this way than that you kind of (inaudible at 00:16:45) Does that make sense? I mean, I can see how it looks the same...

CLIENT: Yep.

THERAPIST: ...if people mistake one for the other. Maybe even you.

CLIENT: Yep.

(PAUSE) [00:17:00]

(PAUSE) [00:18:00]

CLIENT: There's an advice column I read on the Internet called "Captain Awkward." And there was a post last week about someone who didn't know how to deal with accepting compliments and just got very anxious and unhappy whenever anyone complimented her. And, you know, Captain Awkward gave her some advice and the comments exploded. And it just turned really ugly with people... So the Captain's advice was, "You say, ‘Thank you,' or if you really think the compliment was wrong, ‘It's really kind of you to say so,' and you don't let the complimenter know about all of your self esteem issues and anxiety because compliments are social lubricant in our society. So, you know, you just say the words and go deal with the emotions it brings up with a journal or a therapist or something." And the commenters exploded and told the Captain, "That's terrible advice. How could you? You know, we should live in a society where no one gives unwanted compliments." It was just this whole huge... [00:19:03]

And so there's, you know, several of the people who comment on Captain Awkward's blogs are therapists by profession. And so one of them wrote her own blog post about validation and praise and compliments. And I don't quite remember the, the nuances of the argument she was making but she had this really great analogy is that, you know, people are desperately thirsty and praise is kind of a way to quench that thirst but it's like drinking sea water to quench your thirst in that, you stop, it solves the immediate problem of wanting to drink something but it just makes the thirst worse.

THERAPIST: Hmm. (PAUSE) Do you know what the the segue there... Is that because I said you weren't lazy? [00:20:03]

CLIENT: No, no.

THERAPIST: Okay.

CLIENT: I was going for... So this analogy...

THERAPIST: Yeah.

CLIENT: ...of drinking sea water just...

THERAPIST: Yeah.

CLIENT: ...really struck me. I realized that in some ways, that's kind of how I react to work and getting work done. But I have this desperate need to feel like, to justify my existence. And sometimes finishing a piece of work or completing a project provides temporary relief but it only ends up making the problem worse because you can't really justify your existence by capitalist output and production.

(PAUSE) [00:21:00]

THERAPIST: I'm smiling because my first thought (inaudible) as, "Well, you know, don't throw the baby out with the seawater, you know?" Like... (LAUGHTER) Um... (PAUSE) (inaudible) you feel like, feel like you act, like work goes, when something goes really well only exacerbates the underlying problems...

CLIENT: Right. [00:22:08]

THERAPIST: ...of being so tied into...

CLIENT: Right. Because I think... I might be wrong but I think sane people, if they have a bad day or even a bad week at work or if they screw up a project, they just move on and they do better the next week. Whereas, for me, it sends me into this horrible tailspin of, you know, I did badly on this project, therefore, I'm a bad employee, therefore, I'm worthless as a human being. Which then becomes crippling and makes it unable for me to, makes me unable to put the week behind me and just move on with my life and start fresh on Monday.

THERAPIST: Right.

(PAUSE) [00:23:00]

(PAUSE) [00:24:00]

THERAPIST: Maybe you can only (PAUSE) allow yourself the satisfaction of doing work or doing well with work when (inaudible) or followed by a lot of self criticism or like trashing yourself.

(PAUSE) [00:25:00]

THERAPIST: I mean, there's a quality of like, almost like a very precise targeting that you do.

CLIENT: Mm hmm. [00:26:00]

THERAPIST: Like of being able to have like a satisfying (inaudible at 00:26:15) productive work experience.

CLIENT: Mmm.

(PAUSE)

THERAPIST: Does that make sense (inaudible)

CLIENT: How so?

(PAUSE) [00:27:00]

THERAPIST: (inaudible)

(PAUSE) [00:28:00]

THERAPIST: (inaudible)

(PAUSE) [00:29:00]

THERAPIST: I guess probably because it identifies you with the one who's giving yourself a hard time. Whereas you tend to, in a, I hope, synthetic way, when you tend to identify with the one who's sort of having or being given a hard time as though by, almost by someone else. Like (inaudible) say, "Well, I (PAUSE) dread work so much that I have to give up on my sleep which that only makes things worse." [00:30:27]

CLIENT: Right.

THERAPIST: Than to say, "You really can't let yourself off the hook, and make yourself feel so bad about going to work that you can't just let yourself relax and go to sleep and sort of benefit from that in a way that would help you at work.

CLIENT: Mm hmm.

(PAUSE) [00:31:00]

THERAPIST: Obviously I'm not saying this is anything you've got control over.

CLIENT: Right.

THERAPIST: But (PAUSE) if we line it up, it, you know... (PAUSE) In so many situations, you're sort of acting precisely in a way to make life more difficult for yourself. I'm saying I don't think (inaudible at 00:31:35) but perhaps really intended.

CLIENT: Mm hmm.

(PAUSE)

THERAPIST: Which does not at all address the question of why you would do that.

CLIENT: Or how to stop it.

THERAPIST: Oh how to... Right. (LAUGHTER) Oh, another random question. Yeah, that's right.

(PAUSE) [00:33:00]

THERAPIST: What's coming to mind?

CLIENT: Thinking about the project I have ahead of me at work and how (SIGH) I should have been able to finish, finish it yesterday instead of having more to work on today.

(PAUSE)

THERAPIST: Are there things about that or other things?

CLIENT: It's almost as though the thing I need to do is just make a simple patch to our verilog (ph) code because the architects used a very high level descriptive language of the functionality they want and the synthesizer tool which takes the high level descriptive language in the verilog and turns into actual circuits is doing a really bad job. [00:34:07]

So I need to edit out that single line of verilog (ph) and replace it with you know, forty lines of actually specifying the particular logic gates (ph) they want. But there's, A, I've never written verilog (ph) logs before. So I spent all of Monday just staring at the emax (ph) buffer and knowing exactly what I wanted to write but being afraid to write it because what if I did it wrong? Which doesn't make much sense because, I mean, you have certain control and we have a syntax checker and, you know, there's no way I can screw up the chip. But then there's also a couple of different ways to implement the thing I want to implement in hardware and I don't know how to choose which is the most efficient way to do it. And I mean, I could just pick a way and run it through the process and look at the results and then pick a different way and compare them. And I mean, I could do this experiment. [00:35:11]

THERAPIST: Right.

CLIENT: But I want to get it right on the first try and I'm terribly afraid that I won't get it right on the first try and that I'll have to make a second pass and that second pass will take time. Of course by this point, if I had just done all this on Monday instead of being anxious and perfectionist about it, I could have done like three experiments by now and picked the best one. (SIGH) (PAUSE) I could even run the three experiments in parallel.

(PAUSE) [00:36:00]

THERAPIST: Does that actually solve the problem?

CLIENT: Running the experiments in parallel? Not really. (PAUSE) And it doesn't help the last idea I had and (inaudible) to experiment took two and half weeks to run them and they turned out to be worthless.

THERAPIST: Right. I think you had mentioned that. [00:36:59]

CLIENT: And I mean, that happens. I mean, my mentor was just talking in our team meeting yesterday about how an experiment he had running all week, he finally got results and his results were garbage and he had to go back and make changes it's not like it doesn't happen. That's what experiments are for.

THERAPIST: Right.

CLIENT: Like sometimes your hypothesis is wrong and that's okay and negative results are as valid scientifically as positive results, et cetera, et cetera. But (SIGH) I don't know. I'm afraid of screwing up and that doesn't make any sense because, in many regards, with my skill set and experience, it's much easier to look at code that doesn't work or something that's buggy or a failed experiment and hack at it to finally figure out what went wrong than to start making something fresh. So if I just got something started, if it failed, then I can debug and debugging is something I'm actually freakily (ph) good at. But I don't want it to fail. I want it to be perfect the first time through. It's very frustrating. (SIGH) [00:38:07]

(PAUSE)

CLIENT: Excuse me.

(PAUSE) [00:39:00]

THERAPIST: Do you feel guilty?

CLIENT: No, I don't.

(PAUSE)

THERAPIST: You look concerned.

(PAUSE)

CLIENT: So back on Thursday when I talked to my mentor about this whole project he expounded at length about the design consideration involved and implementing this structure with (inaudible) and taking advantage of (inaudible) because the macro (ph) that we're reading from, their rise path is faster than the fall path and the (inaudible) That's a lot of stuff that becomes second nature after a couple year in the industry and working at this stuff before this job, I had never done any (inaudible) before. [00:42:09]

THERAPIST: Yeah.

CLIENT: Like my entire background is in analog circuitry. So like it's all stuff that I could work through and think through.

THERAPIST: Right.

CLIENT: But I would need to refer to a textbook.

THERAPIST: Yeah.

CLIENT: And it... (SIGH) And I didn't entirely follow his, you know, expounding at length on pros and cons of various types of solutions. And there's a part of me that just feels like, "Well, Brian could do it in half and hour and why am I wasting everyone's time on this?"

THERAPIST: I see.

CLIENT: I don't have the background.

THERAPIST: (inaudible)

CLIENT: Okay.

THERAPIST: And I'll see you on Monday. [00:42:01]

END TRANSCRIPT