An Interview with Therapist Jim McDonnell
Jim McDonnell, LMFT is a Psychotherapist at Seattle Anxiety Specialists. He specializes in working with clients in the tech industry and high-stress environments. Jim also has extensive training and experience providing couples therapy and family therapy.
Anna Kiesewetter: Hi, thank you so much for joining us today on this installment of the Seattle Psychiatrist Interview Series. My name is Anna Kiesewetter and I'm a research intern at Seattle Anxiety Specialists. I'd like to welcome with us today our own Seattle Anxiety Specialist psychotherapist, Jim McDonnell. Before becoming a therapist, Jim had a successful career in technology across two decades. With his experience as a researcher at NASA's Ames Research Center, as a senior program manager at Microsoft, and also as a senior business intelligence analyst at T-Mobile, Jim is an excellent resource for clients working in high-stress careers. So before we get started, could you please just tell us a little bit more about yourself?
Jim McDonnell: Sure. Hi, Anna. Nice to meet you and thanks for organizing and running this. A little about me. I grew up in New York. I was raised just north of New York City. I've spent years in the restaurant industry, and then I transitioned into technology. I worked in startup companies in Silicon Valley and then moved up to Seattle, worked in the tech industry in Seattle for a number of years. I'm an outdoor enthusiast. I like being outside in the woods. I love to exercise and keep my body in shape. It helps my mind stay clean and clear. I'm a father, my daughter's in college, and I don't know what else to say beyond that. Yeah.
Anna Kiesewetter: Yeah. That's awesome. So you mentioned you worked in tech in Silicon Valley before you came up to Seattle. Could you tell us a little bit more about what got you interested in making that switch?
Jim McDonnell: Sure. The switch from being in tech to a therapist?
Anna Kiesewetter: Yeah.
Jim McDonnell: I've always enjoyed helping people and making people feel better. When I was younger I used humor a lot to do that. I can make people laugh relatively easily, and if a friend had fallen down and hurt himself, or if something happened, I would sort of employ goofiness and jokes and physical comedy and stuff to bring someone out of their sadness into happiness and laughter and sort of lighten the mood. And I really leaned into that early in my life. I was a joker, a jokester, a prankster, and I just liked laughter.
I also loved gadgets and technology and loved programming and trying different... I was always sort of buying the latest gadgets when I was a kid. I had these electronic dictionaries in the early '80s when they were super rare and I loved them. I was a bartender and I was going to college. My undergrad is in industrial organizational psychology. I had a research methodology focus so when I graduated, I got a job at a startup company doing statistical analysis and database programming. I really loved that.
And so I sort of left the helping laughter stuff behind and really leaned into this, and the whole country and the world was sort of embracing this and I thought maybe I was going to be a gazillionaire and get all sorts of stock options and stuff like that. And I pursued that for many years, but in the background was always this desire to be a helper.
And I should point out that I originally wanted to be a therapist when I was in college. And I had an advisor who, for whatever reason, I'm assuming their reasons were sound, but they advised me against it. So I was in a bit of an existential crisis, like, “Who am I? What's my purpose in this world?” And so I leaned into the research methodology. I still wanted to be in the psychology domain, but I, for whatever reason, just accepted that fact that I couldn't be a therapist. So I went that route.
And so for many years I was leaning into that. I really enjoyed my time in technology, in the tech industry. I really loved the people that I was working with and the projects I was on. But there was this sort of transition in my mind where I was becoming a bit disillusioned with the industry. I wasn't finding deep meaning in it. And it wasn't really resonating with this core value of wanting to be helpful to the world and to reduce suffering.
And so, as I progressed through my career, I started getting closer to a point in my life where maybe some people have a midlife crisis or something like that, and I just was like, "I'm no longer satisfied. I'm not happy." I was actually super anxious. I was having panic attacks and anxiety attacks in the workplace. And then I decided to make a change. So I had some people in my life that were pushing me towards this. They recognized that I had particular skills and personality temperaments, and some gifts and traits that would be really, really helpful to people. I actually received formal training in being a therapist.
So I made the choice to just try. I applied to a couple of graduate programs. I was accepted and I kept saying, "Okay, I'm going to do this for a semester. If I don't like it, I can always just drop out and I still have..." I was working full time my first year in graduate school. So I was holding down a 50-hour-a-week job and I was going to classes and working in the classroom while I was learning. I just really liked it. It resonated with me. And so I've just stayed with it.
I think the question was what prompted the shift. It was sort of like this awakening. To be more specific, my father passed away when he was 46. I was 46 at the time, around the time that I wanted to be a therapist. I was maybe 44 when I finally decided to start applying to graduate schools. But it was sort of like, "What am I doing with my life?" If I was my dad, I would've been two years away from death. "Is this the legacy I want to leave for myself?" That really pushed me out of my comfort zone, as well.
So all of that is the reason why I shifted out. Looking for more meaning, finding something that was better aligned with my skills and my values and partially just sort of a life cycle change of like, "What do I want next for myself?"
Anna Kiesewetter: Wow, that's really powerful. I think it's really inspiring that you pushed forward to doing that, making that change and showing what you value. Do you feel like you kind of fulfilled that, that kind of wanting to find more of your life's values in the change, the switch between careers?
Jim McDonnell: Yes. When I first started off in graduate school, my vision was to be working more with youth and teens. And so I did that at a community mental health during my internship, and it turns out it wasn't a great fit for me. It wasn't really aligning with my passions and through, I would say, serendipity, maybe, what's the word, synchronicity. Some kind of, if you want to think more spiritually, woo-ish. I found Seattle Anxiety Specialists when I was looking for a group practice. And the more that I started thinking about the practice's mission and the focus area of specifically treating anxiety disorders, the more it just sort of was like, "Duh, you've been anxious your whole life."
So to be able to help people who are in the industry that I used to be in, learn how to recognize why they're anxious, to help interrupt feedback loops and disrupt patterns that reinforce their anxiety and to find more confidence in themselves, in their ability to experience distress, to reduce how long it lasts and how intense it is, and to just generally understand how their particular mind works and why it responds a certain way, is so fulfilling to me.
I go to sleep at night happy, knowing that I haven't helped every single person in the world, I'm never going to eradicate all of the distress on the planet, but every person that I interact with, from a client-therapist relationship, I feel like I'm doing the best job that I can to make the world closer to being in that state than it was before I started, if that makes sense.
Anna Kiesewetter: That's amazing. How do you think that being in the tech industry yourself has helped you to help these people now that you're working with them? Especially people who have been working in tech industries?
Jim McDonnell: Yeah. I mean, I don't know what it's like to work at every single company. I don't have a visceral understanding of every company culture. I've never worked at Amazon or Google or Facebook or Apple. So I don't know what it's like specifically to work at those companies. And I know what it's like to work, generally speaking, in the industry. I know the expectations that are put on people. I understand how software is created and managed. So project management perspectives and program management perspectives and different kinds of software development methodologies.
I understand those enough to be able to speak the language of the person. So when they come to me and they're trying to describe what's going on in their life, they don't have to explain the culture of the company. They don't have to explain why it's stressful. I get it and I am able to speak their language. I use metaphors a lot in the work that I do and I bridge kind of how we go from, this is the way the product is now and here's how we want the product to be in the next revision, and here's what we're doing to make that happen and here's our timeline and our plan and all of the schedules and milestones.
And I kind of use that same approach for mental health. So here's how you are right now, version, whatever, one, of you. And then you want a new version where you're not as anxious and you're not as stressed out and you have a more adaptive response to these stressors. What do we have to do to get you from here to there? How long is it going to take? How do we know we're making progress? How do we measure progress along the way?
So that sort of understanding, being able to speak the language. I know the different terminologies and review cycles and pressures and sort of the cultural contextual factors that are feeding and reinforcing the anxiety. I'm really rambling on a bit here, but it's helpful for me and I think my clients appreciate that I have been in similar spaces to them and understand, generally speaking, what it's like and why it's stressful. So I think that's probably the best way that I can answer that question. It's just like there's familiarity with the context and yeah, I'll leave it there.
Anna Kiesewetter: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. You mentioned anxiety is one of the things that you see a lot in people experiencing workplace stress and having to deal with these issues. What other kinds of areas or symptoms or disorders do you often see in your patients who are working in high-stress environments?
Jim McDonnell: Other symptoms? Well, if we're thinking about this from an experiential perspective, like what are they experiencing? Obsessive, intrusive thoughts that are generating distress, physiological distress. So there's muscle tension and dysregulated breathing and fidgeting, elevated heart rate, perspiration, that sort of thing, racing thoughts. Really, there's a lot of what are we call cognitive distortions in cognitive behavioral therapy. So a lot of stories that people are telling themselves about what's happening now and what's going to happen in the future.
Anxiety's generally a future-oriented experience. We're thinking about the future and we're worried about it. And then the predictions that we make. Our mind is a model maker, modeling the future constantly, trying to figure out how to make sense of the world. And that model has some distortions in it. Maybe it's predicting a tragedy constantly. Like, "This is only going to turn out bad," or we can only see things either or, either good or bad. I think I've forgotten the question. I'm a little lost in my answer now. Can you restate that question so I can refine it?
Anna Kiesewetter: Yeah, of course. Of course. I was asking what kinds of typical, or maybe not typical, but what kinds of different symptoms and disorders do you see in people who are experiencing high-stress work environments?
Jim McDonnell: Right, yeah, so symptoms versus disorders. The disorders tend to be generalized anxiety disorder. There's a lot of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but maybe less on the traditional or the technical way of interpreting that diagnosis. I look for obsessional thought patterns and disturbing, intrusive thoughts, and then compulsive responses to that. Things that people are doing in response to those thoughts that try to protect themselves from it.
I see a lot of that OCD, generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, so people who, really, just there's runaway anxiety that leads to panic attacks, depression, as a result of that. So when you start to feel scared about your future over and over and over again, you can't figure out how to solve a problem, you end up becoming hopeless about the future. And so you can have people experiencing depression and anxiety simultaneously, which is a double whammy. That's not very fun.
I'm trying to think if there's other things. That is generally the areas that I focus on, things that I'm looking for or listening for. And then all of the physical symptoms that people are describing or experiencing, and the cognitive side of that as well. And the behavioral side of it. So what behavioral choices are people making? And again, it's typically in response to some sort of a trigger that's dysregulating a person, cognitively and physiologically, and then in response to that, they're making choices to protect themselves somehow. And sometimes it's just like fight, flight, freeze sorts of choices. Yeah.
Anna Kiesewetter: I see. So when you're experiencing the patients with these different symptoms and disorders, can you talk a little bit about your treatment approach and how you approach therapy with these people?
Jim McDonnell: Yeah. I'm generally using cognitive behavioral therapy as a therapeutic modality. I lead with a discussion around... How do I want to answer this question? My goal is to help people have an adaptive response to stressors. When you're in a state of constant anxiety, that's a maladaptive response to the stressor. So I want to help people get to that place where they can experience that stressor. They know how to process it, digest it, and instead of being stuck in an anxious feedback loop, they're able to resolve the thought, the feeling, the behaviors, and leave with confidence that they know what to do. Even if they don't know exactly what to do, they know generally what to do.
That sort of guides my approach. I want people to become consciously aware, explicitly aware of, what triggered me? I was doing fine and then suddenly I wasn't. What was it? Was it a thought that I had? Did I see somebody that reminded me of something? Did somebody say something to me? Was there an event that just happened, the anniversary of something that was traumatic? What is it? Because we're not just suddenly fine and then not fine.
So getting really clear on that and then getting really clear on what happens in your body when that happens. So that thought passed through your head and then your muscles tensed up and your breathing became shallow and quick and your heart rate elevated and you started sweating. Okay, great. So you understand the connection between why you're feeling this way in your body right now and what just happened. And then what stories do you tell yourself, your model-making machine, meaning-making machine? How do you make sense of this? Your prefrontal cortex has to tell you a story about, "Well, you don't feel good right now. Why? Oh, it must be because..."
And then that's where the cognitive distortions come in. "This is always going to be this way." I don't know. "I'm going to get fired. I'm going to get a bad review. My partner's going to leave me." Something. It's some tragedy. And then we feel hopeless about that. So getting really clear on the story, what's happening in our body, why, what the trigger was, being really clear on the behavioral choices we make as a result of that.
I want people to get bored with this because I'm going to keep asking them every session so it becomes rote so that when they feel something, they go... It sort of spurs a meta awareness. So like, "Oh yeah, I'm feeling anxious. Let me engage in this higher-level process to understand why." So then once they have that skill, how do we disrupt this pattern, this as-is experience?
There are physiological interventions, like learning how to regulate our breath and how to relax our muscles. There's cognitive interventions, like recognizing cognitive distortions and challenging them, coming up with ways to not lie to ourself about what the stressor is and why we're feeling this way. And also to feel confident that we know what to do in response to it. So appropriately sizing the stressor. So maybe I'm responding to it as though it's a 10 out of 10, but in reality, it's like a four out of 10.
So really right-sizing the way that we're thinking about problems, and then what can you do behaviorally that's different? So we're looking at this as a system and as a pattern, a template of a response to a stressor. And then we want to disrupt that pattern and template and replace it with a bunch of different choices along the way. And then if we score, how do I feel with version one versus version two? So long as we're feeling better with version two, then that's good. We're making progress.
So that's the approach I've taken. Lots of validation. There's no judgment in the process. What purpose does judgment have, right? We need to be able to just be honest about what we're telling ourselves and why. Positive regard. It's important for people, I think, to feel good about who they are, even if maybe they've made choices that they're not proud of, that at their core, they can feel as though they're good and they're seen as good. I think that's really important.
And I use humor along the way, as well, a little bit of levity. And then ultimately aligning all of this stuff with personal values. What's important to you? Who are you as a person? How does this map to your identity and how you see yourself? That's the best I can do in sort of summarizing. It feels complicated sometimes when I'm trying to describe it, but I try to keep it finite and relatively discreet so that it's not overwhelming, that a person kind of understands what we're doing. There's goals, there's structure, there's a plan, we're moving forward towards something. So that hopefully also communicates some confidence in the process, so that's how I do that.
Anna Kiesewetter: That's amazing. Awesome. Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing that. Okay. We're approaching our final question: so, I'm just wondering if you have any other words of advice or anything else you'd like to say to our listeners before we wrap up.
Jim McDonnell: I'm not sure exactly what to say other than perhaps we don't get to choose what happens to us in this world with 100% certainty, but we do get to choose how we respond to those things and suffering, while probably inevitable, is optional in many different ways. I didn't mention this before, but the core metrics that I communicate to clients is, how frequently am I triggered? When I am triggered, how intense is the response and how long does it last? So frequency, intensity, and duration.
We can't really always choose how frequently we're going to be triggered by something or how frequently the trigger is going to happen, but we do have agency on how intense the response is and how long that response lasts. So if people are experiencing a lot of anxiety, I think it's important for them to know it doesn't have to be that way. The world doesn't have to change in order for them to feel more at peace and they don't have to lie to themselves. It's not one of these toxic positivity sort of cycles where we just say, "It's all going to be great and everything's okay and stop worrying." I think that just actually reinforces the power of the stressor so we can't look at it with open eyes and accept things as they are.
So if a person is anxious and they've been anxious and they continue to experience anxiety, more often than not, it doesn't have to be that way. And there are people who can help transform the way that they're thinking and feeling in response to those stressors so that they just generally enjoy their life more. We don't get to live forever. We might as well learn how to use our brains to have a better time on the planet while we're here.
Anna Kiesewetter: Awesome. Yeah, I like that a lot. All right. Well, okay. Thank you so much for your time and your insights coming on here today. I wish you the best and really hope to have you back for another interview in the future, if you're down for that. So this concludes this installment of the Seattle Psychiatrist Interview Series. Thank you so much for listening and we hope you'll tune in next time.
Jim McDonnell: Thanks, Anna.
Please note: The views expressed by the interviewee are for educational and informational purposes only, are not meant to diagnose or treat any condition, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Seattle Anxiety Specialists, PLLC.
Editor: Jennifer (Ghahari) Smith, Ph.D.