Life Can Change In A Moment

Have you ever wished you could do more?  You see suffering in front of you, but you don’t have the knowledge or skills to make a difference?  

Dr Judy Ho shares an emotional moment that drove her to get her Phd in psychology, ultimately so she could become someone much more able to help.

• [1:00] Dr. Judy Ho is a Forensic Psychologist; she appreciates the value of time.
• [3:00] Judy’s life-changing moment that leads to her career when she was a teacher aide, a child wants her to be his mom and touched her heart.
• [6:55] Judy did a double major in business and psychology; she was more interested in psychology than business because she wants to understand the human mind.
• [9:00] Judy believes that there are people who were born evil no matter what environment and love you give on them; they don’t respond. 
• [12:00] Judy got more interested in psychology when she was in high school mentoring younger kids, she realized that just being there is a massive thing for them.
• [13:55] She felt motivated to get a degree to help the kids.
• [15:20] After she graduated, she got into a combined program of the Department of Psychiatry and Department of Psychology and got her Ph.D. degree in clinical psychology.
• [19:00] The generation right now is fast-tracking everything. She believes it takes time to be an expert on something. One of her favorite Malcolm Gladwell, quotes “you have to have 10,000 hours in a subject to be an expert.
• [23:15] There was always a get rich quick theme, but she believes in hard work like her parents.
• [26:44] The goal of cognitive behavioral therapy is you become your own therapist over time. You learn these tools, and then you build resilience and know what to do next.
• [28:30] One of the useful tools from cognitive-behavioral therapy is assessing the situation more realistically and the emotion regulation aspect that tells what to do if your anger is rising up.
• [31:25] Somatic experience is a humor therapy that focuses on your physiology because when we have traumas or negative patterns, they got stuck in our bodies somewhere because we stop ourselves on allowing the natural process to occur like crying and yelling. For example, as a doctor in the ER, I can’t cry in front of a dying patient.
• [35:55] She loves somatic therapy because it does not require people to restate their trauma in treatment, not like EMDR and other therapy. EMDR is eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy that involves recollection of the actual trauma.
• [39:15] Judy thinks that mind and body dualism is a thing in the past because there is such a deep connection there. For example, in cancer patients that you have a more positive outlook on your future helps with your treatment.
• [42:00] Dr. Judy Ho also run every day because she knows the positive benefits of it, if she didn’t exercise in the morning, she was very irritable.
• [44:25] Judy wrote her book Stop Self-Sabotage because she saw many people, successful people still self-sabotaging in one area of their life. Others have a good career and health but failed in a relationship but ignored it.
• [47:50] Most people are not aware of sabotaging themselves selves, but they can access it because thought precedes every feeling and action.
• Thought, Feeling, Action is a linear process, and people don’t realize it because an average person has about 15 thousand thought a day. We take those negative thoughts out of automatic mode then we take actions on it.
• [50:30] Judy said after you notice the thought and start to feel something, once you realize the patterns, then you can do something about it. In the book, she talks about three basic categories of techniques that you can use, and one of that is routinely questioning your thought.
• [52:35] Once you start to question your belief, then the next step is, can you change that thought to be more reflective of what is happening by simply using the yes. But, yes acknowledging the bad of the situation and acknowledging something going right because people are often negatively thinking all about the bad.
• [54:00] Judy’s other technique is called labeling; the thought is there, but it does not mean to affect your actions or how you feel. If you have a negative thought, you add a little clause in front of that, and the clause is “I have a thought that.” She has a patient who is constantly saying, “I’m a loser” to himself, and she said what if your thought was “I’m having a thought that I’m a loser,” the negative thought separated from him.
• [56:09] People have very black and white thinking when it comes to their health and exercise. Having a set of plans in advance when you miss your diet and exercise by using if’s and then, for example, If I’m stress in the ER and I see a bunch of cookies in the breakroom, then I eat one of them and get back to work quickly.
• [59:00] Dr. Judy Ho is not self-sabotaging now because she was very aware of it, but in her earlier life, one of her self-sabotage things is procrastination, but it made her better.