What If You're Riding a Dead Horse?

The Comfort Trap: or What If You're Riding a Dead Horse?
by Judith Sills, Ph.D.

Your comfort trap is the familiar, tolerable, but unsatisfying situation you've created in your life, complete with the trappings of security. It's the job, the relationship, the bad habit, the friendship that won't end unless you end it - though it drags down your spirit. Clinical psychologist and bestselling author Judith Sills shows you how to make self-propelled change in seven life-changing steps. Sometimes life's tide does move us forward. This is a book for the times when it doesn't.

Some years ago, back at the dawn of Prozac, I met weekly with a woman who was excruciatingly single and full of self-recrimination for it. Hers is a familiar unhappy story. Our sessions centered on dates to which she brought an excess of hope; the relationships ended with just enough of a twist that she could never seem to learn from one in order to cushion the disappointment of the next.

She and I spent two years together in this loop: focused from man to man, from possibility to pain, with no particular positive learning curve that either of us could observe. During this time she completed an advanced degree, found a better than decent job in her field, and bought a home. She didn't delight in these achievements because they were not her true heart's desire. Still, I pointed to these accomplishments frequently, wondering why in our huge, rich universe of possibilities, marriage was her only path to satisfaction. It was, though, and she had no genuine interest in art or music, politics or travel, literature or architecture, or Rollerblading or anything else on this planet except meeting a man and getting married. That's not to say that she didn't participate in much of the above. She did, but dutifully, to become the woman she needed to be so that a suitable man would love her. Her pastimes were just that, passing time. Her only passion was for a relationship.

Eventually, she got worse. A broken engagement precipitated a more acute depression, killing her appetite, interrupting her sleep, and holding the black gun of despair to her head. As a clinical psychologist I do not prescribe medication, so I referred her to the psychiatrist with whom I consult. I saw her on a Tuesday; he met with her on Wednesday and gave her a prescription for Prozac. We spoke several times and met ten days later. When I saw her, this is what she said: "A funny thing happened on the way to your office. I stopped at the bookstore to buy the new Cosmopolitan, but when I picked it up, it didn't look interesting to me. Instead, for some weird reason, I wanted to read U.S. News & World Report.

That's what I bought." She took it out of the bag and showed it to me.

Ten days on medication, and she was changed.

From that moment, and in so many ways, she was unarguably different. Not only different, but in her opinion, and in mine, she was better. It wasn't simply that her depression was largely gone, though it was. It was that something else was gone, her narrowness of thinking, her conviction that there was only one path to happiness, her rigid, entrenched apathy. Gone. It was as if a switch was thrown and this lovely, sad, struggling woman had come to life.

The change persisted. An unfamiliar sense of optimism. Travel plans. Fun at work. Giggling over dates in a complete absence of desperation. She got interested in writing. Turned down an attractive man because she was going to a writer's conference. Went and had a good time. Damn it. She was Sleeping Beauty and Prozac was the prince's kiss.

That was my first experience with the way in which medication can - only rarely, unpredictably, often only temporarily - make the dead horse simply vanish in the night. This experience changed my thinking forever about causes, cures, and my own role in both. It might change you.

In my practice I have seen this profound reaction occur only rarely, whether to Prozac or its several descendants. Perhaps for every ten of my patients who have a trial of medication - prescribed by either my consulting psychiatrist or their own physician - only one person has experienced this penetrating and life-altering release from a prison of emotional pain. The other nine people have experienced a range of reactions from significant improvement, through modest gains, down to no help at all. Some have felt unpleasant side effects and a few have experienced frightening and seriously destabilizing upheavals. These pills are no magic bullet; their positive effects sometimes inexplicably evaporate and the risks are real.

Still, the person who swallows a few pills and is suddenly different in some desirable way is experiencing change of a different order of magnitude. I don't know if you would be that person. I don't know if you need to be or want to be, if you'd choose the risks involved, or even where you stand on the philosophical questions such pills naturally generate.

What follows from here is a book about getting yourself to change - about why, where, and how you might move yourself forward in your life. The book talks about the part you can do, will have to do, on your own. Let's face it, your part is most of it, pill or no pill.

But just as psychotherapy is a resource for change, medication is a resource, too. I won't mention it again, but I want you to remember it's out there.

Judith Sills, Ph.D.
February 22, 2003

© 2005 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Judith Sills, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist who for the last decade has appeared regularly on such national television shows as Oprah, Sally Jessy Raphaël, and NBC News. She is a contributing editor to Family Circle, the largest-circulation women's magazine in America, and also writes for O, The Oprah Magazine.