Today is my last episode on the show.

In honor of that, I wanted to give you a brain dump of quick and dirty tips that I use with my patients that help them build lives worth living.

You've heard of smart goals, but today, I'm going to talk to you about the benefits of being dumb.

Welcome back to savvy psychologist. I'm your host, Dr. Monica Johnson. Every week on this show,

I'll help you face life challenges with evidence-based approaches, a sympathetic ear, and zero

judgment. While I consider myself an integrated psychologist, a large

part of that philosophically is DBT. And in that work, our aim is to help our patients build a

life worth living. At the beginning of our work, that's often a laughable idea. Many of my patients

have suffered for many years, and the thought of

such a thing seems far-fetched when your lived experience is nothing but fire in brimstone.

In most situations, the fundamentals are sorely lacking. And here's the thing. Fundamentals either fix

or support, many of the things that ail us.

Everything I talk about here will be accessible to some degree to the average human being.

And if you play dumb well enough, you might find yourself being your own version of Elle Woods.

So, of course, I'm leaving you with an acronym because that's kind of

been one of my things this whole time. So let's talk about dumb. The D is for decode slash

disrupt the patterns. As I tell my patients all the time, the first step is to stop lying to

yourself, and the second is to figure out how to trick yourself.

What I mean by this is you have to engage in strategies that allow you to gain insight and awareness around your patterns in a non-judgmental and wholly honest way.

For example, if you're struggling with dating, is it true that all men slash

women are trash? No. There are likely some ways in which you are contributing to the pattern

of this dynamic that are completely within your control. What are those factors? Where did

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