dream kitchen, or losing ten pounds. Those things may give you a momentary boost. But it’s your relationships with your friends, family, spouse, girlfriend, boyfriend, coworkers, and neighbors — even your hairdresser — that will determine whether you’re happy for the long term.
The flip side is also true. Your relationships hold the key to your unhappiness. It’s not your inflexible thinking, negative self-talk, perfectionism, inability to bounce back, or wonky brain chemistry. These may contribute to the fact that you feel lousy and depressed. But take a look at the important people in your life — the ones you spend the most time with and the ones who have the greatest influence on you. I bet there are one or two relationships that make you feel stressed, worried, frustrated, inadequate, angry, and basically like crap.
We’re going to give you the tools and techniques to get the most from your supportive relationships, improve your challenging ones, and, if necessary, make the tough decision to end a relationship that’s holding you back from feeling better.
By the end of this book, you’ll know how to communicate effectively; recognize and modify your interpersonal style; set and achieve goals; make constructive decisions; deal with the difficult people in your life; identify your strongest allies and supporters; explore, clarify, and understand expectations; and determine who you want to connect with — and who you don’t.
You can apply your new skills to prevent divorce, raise healthy children, deal with overeating, cope with a breakup, stop choosing the wrong partner, earn employee of the month, avoid stress-related illnesses, talk with your teenager, “consciously uncouple” from your spouse, survive holiday dinners with your in-laws, and more.
It works fast — people have made real improvements in their lives in as little as eight weeks. And you don’t need to be diagnosed with depression to benefit.
PEP TALK: Connect with people, share feelings, embrace change, and put less pressure on yourself — we’ll help you do all four, starting now!
So what’s the secret?
It’s a research-proven approach called interpersonal psychotherapy, or IPT. IPT is an action-oriented treatment that teaches skills, step by step, to improve relationships and alleviate depression.
IPT was developed by Dr. Myrna Weissman and her husband, Dr. Gerald Klerman, in the 1970s. More than 250 studies have shown that IPT is an effective way to treat a number of mood disorders, used with medication or on its own. Today, IPT is recognized as a gold-standard, evidence-based psychotherapy by the American and Canadian Psychiatric Associations, the American and Canadian Psychological Associations, the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, and the international organization Cochrane. IPT has been chosen by the World Health Organization as one of only two psychotherapies to be shared worldwide.
We want you to give IPT a try. And we want to be your coaches and cheerleaders, sharing helpful advice and words of encouragement every step of the way.
Meet Your Coaches
Imagine a grandma who watches Orange Is the New Black, and you’ve got me, Cindy Stulberg. Ron says I’m the bossy one. I’m also the one who gets stuff done — which is why I’m the one who does most of the talking in this book! I believe that friends and family are the most important things in life, so it’s not surprising that I liked IPT’s emphasis on relationships right from the start. I became a real fan when I completed my training and started using it with clients — because it works. Fast. I’ve been using IPT for more than twenty years, specializing in helping adults and teens cope with depression and eating disorders. When the clinicians we train want to take their IPT skills even further, I’m the one who supervises their work.
I like to say Ron is the younger, cuter one. His work has taken him into prisons, above the Arctic Circle, and even to Hollywood. He discovered IPT when he was a grad student. Everyone was training in cognitive behavioral therapy (you might know it as CBT), but Ron thought focusing on a client’s bad thoughts and inflexible thinking was a lot like blaming the victim. IPT was a refreshing change. Instead of keeping tedious thought journals, IPT encourages people to look outward and engage with others as a way to feel better. IPT made sense to Ron. After all, who wouldn’t rather hang out than do homework?
Together, we founded an institute dedicated exclusively to IPT. We had been looking for a good book to recommend to clients for a long time, but there was nothing on the shelves. So we decided to write it ourselves.
Twelve Weeks to Feeling Better — the Natural Way
For years, the first line of defense for depression has been pharmaceuticals, but we believe people can be taught the skills to help themselves feel better — no pills required.
That’s a good thing, since more and more people are looking for ways to feel better without using antidepressants; they want to deal with the issues contributing to their unhappiness, not just rely on drugs to alleviate the symptoms. Some don’t like the side effects of prescriptions. If women are pregnant or nursing, they may worry about the impact of pharmaceuticals on their babies. For others it’s a point of pride: they want to feel better on their own.
Some people have tried antidepressants, but have noticed they aren’t working as well as they used to. Or they may be sleeping and eating better on the pills, but are still fighting with the important people in their lives. Perhaps they were feeling better using medication, but then relapsed.
If you’re suffering from depression, we can help you recover without a trip to the drugstore. And if you’re currently taking antidepressants, we can help you get the most from your prescription, using tools and techniques that will help you feel better because they improve your relationships. The good news? You just might not need that next refill.
We’ve divided the book into weeks, rather than chapters, so we’re being true to IPT, which is a short-term therapy that asks people to work on particular tasks in a particular order over eight to twelve sessions. Think of it as making an appointment with yourself every week to work on feeling better — like therapy, only cheaper! Ultimately, though, the pacing is up to you.
Each week we introduce a new topic, teach new skills, and offer tools and resources to help you practice. Look for the “Try This” and “Pep Talk” callouts if you need quick words of wisdom, friendly reminders, and on-the-go encouragement. Brief anecdotes about “clients” will help you apply the approaches to real life (though the anecdotes and the names we’ve given the “clients” have been made up). To-do lists will help you stay on track. The “Guy Talk” sidebars, written by Ron, address issues unique to men (which we think women will like to read too).
In Week 1, we help you understand that depression is an illness as legitimate as any physical ailment and give you permission to take time off from some of your regular responsibilities to get better.
In Week 2 you’ll draw your social circle — identifying the relationships that help and the ones that hurt — and then explore a few of the stressful ones in detail.
TRY THIS: Want to know what you’re getting yourself into? Skim the book once; then read it week by week and complete the exercises the second time through.
Week 3 is all about feelings and their connection to our relationships and our behavior. You’ll get information and tools to help you express and manage your feelings in ways that will improve your relationships and your mood.
Week 4 is where we talk about the four problem areas that people experience when they feel down, depressed, and lousy and help you pick one to focus on.
In Week 5 we offer step-by-step instructions for setting a “smart” goal. Case examples help you make your goal the smartest it can be.
You can feel