to your health:: DECEMBER 15, 2004

Okemos psychologist takes on those shameless excuses
By UTE VON DER HEYDEN

‘Somehow I found myself...’
Judith St. King’s "Somehow I Found Myself in Her Bed" sells for $9.95 plus shipping and is available at www.womenctr.net. If you don’t have Internet access, call (517) 349-6145 and order it directly. Dr. St. King’s office is located at 4660 Marsh Rd., Okemos.If there’s a season for making lists, this is it. A Christmas card list, a gift list, a holiday dinner list, and, of course, somebody annoying who’s been naughty and nice list.

Okemos psychologist Judith St. King, MSW, Ph.D., has been making a list of a different sort. Over the years, St. King has created and kept a list of statements that allow people to disown personal responsibility for a decision, feeling or choice. Recently she turned these excuses into a self-published book titled, "Somehow I Found Myself in Her Bed."

While the "somehow I found myself...” excuse gets first-place status in her book, she also discusses other favorites like "the devil made me do it," "it’s my subconscious," "I just lost it," "I’m no good," "I was only trying to do the right thing," and "I’m PMSing, big time." And those are just a few of the gems in her book we use to bamboozle others.

King, a licensed social worker, limited licensed psychologist, registered nurse and director of the Women’s Personal Growth and Therapy Center in Okemos, says that these are statements she hears all the time, in public and in therapy sessions. Sometimes she even says them herself. (Even therapists are human?)

"We all do this and most of it is just normal, social conversation," St. King says, "but when it’s used on you to excuse bad behavior — that’s when you want to pick up on it. The intention of the person reading the book would be to not be manipulated by this language."

Although her book has a whimsical, tongue-in-cheek approach and the cover blurb describes it as "a handy, dandy little book that will help you minimize or eliminate personal responsibility for just about everything or how to tell when people in your life would rather not admit to their choices," when you talk to St. King, she is dead serious.

Even the provocative title of the book has a serious basis. St. King was co-leading a men’s therapy group when one of the members explained that he would have to go back to jail for having sex with a minor. The courts had ordered him to stay away from that minor. "I was at Joe’s house," he explained, "and the phone rang and I answered it and it was her and somehow I found myself in her bed . . ."

"Somehow I found myself . . . is an interesting concept," St. King writes. "It would appear he made no conscious decision. Did he get carried to her bed by a strange force, such as a blue light, perhaps? Did he think perhaps that he had been lost or in a coma prior to discovering himself there?"

The book also suggests ways to avoid the embarrassment of holiday disasters, like when a loved one again gets drunk before Christmas dinner with the in-laws, or when a friend gets inebriated, comes on to a colleague and messes up the office party. Their line of defense might be: "The alcohol (drugs or whatever) made me do it."

In that case, St. King suggests you might say: "Last year we had a problem. Marylou said you were coming on to her and she had a difficult time with that and she left early." Your responsibility-avoiding friend might say: "Well, I drank too much. I would never have thought of doing what I did had it not been for the alcohol. The alcohol made me do it."

Then your response should be: ‘So, what is it you want from the holidays this year? Is this kind of behavior going to get you what you want? What kind of limits are you going to set? What’s your plan this year so this doesn’t happen again?’

"The key," says St. King, "always is to ask: ‘What do YOU want?" followed by ‘What is YOUR plan to obtain that?’ The worst place to come out of is ‘what I want is for you to change.’ That’s not going to work," she emphasizes.

Asked what one can do if a partner or friend has a serious addiction problem and uses his or her disease to justify consistent irresponsible behavior, St. King says that while she believes in the disease model of addiction, there is treatment and you still have to ask yourself how much you’re willing to put up with.

"Often the victim of the behavior is someone who feels overly responsible and keeps taking responsibility for others," she adds. "When a person is addicted — whether it’s smoking, sex, gambling, alcohol or whatever — it affects all relationships around that person," St. King says. "All of us have to decide how much we’re willing to tolerate out of somebody else’s addiction."

One of the most important questions to ask yourself in dealing with irresponsible people, she says, is "what do I want in an intimate relationship or in a community." For herself — and she knows this is true of most people — she says it is to nurture and to be nurtured.

"I want to be safe and for other people to be safe and to be close to me and to share with me. So that also guides my behavior."