I was standing in the waiting room before my first session with a new therapist some twenty years ago, when I perused a cartoon that she had displayed on her bulletin board. In panel 1 of the wordless cartoon, a woman with a dark cloud over her head is talking to a friend who has a shining sun over hers. In panel 2, as the first woman gestures in a way that indicates complaining, the cloud covers her friend’s sun….
Gone in 60 Seconds: How to Handle a Mental Health Workshop Heckler
Like most of you, as a psychotherapist, book author, and educator, I am often asked to give workshops, and educational seminars. For many of us, sharing our unique expertise is a part of our professional mission. A while back I was contacted by a church group who wanted to give a series of eight different mental health workshops during the spring. Each of the workshops would be presented by a different expert. I was going to be the final presenter, number…
Diana Fosha on Accelerated Experiential-Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP)
AEDP founder Diana Fosha discusses the journey that led her to create a new model of psychotherapy, the strong community support that ties the AEDP community together and how men have traditionally gotten a bum rap in couples therapy.
Transforming War Trauma: The Healing Power of Community
Psychoanalyst and Zen master, Joseph Bobrow, PhD, describes his groundbreaking work providing healing retreats for traumatized veterans and their families.
The Lying Artist
Once upon a time and many years ago when I was a very new therapist, I worked with a client who had completely made herself up. A lot of things never added up with her. For starters, there was her presenting problem. Some days she would report a diet of jelly beans (not many) and carrots, and yet she was never low weight. But since clients with eating disorders are so often metabolically out of sync, it didn’t seem completely unbelievable…
The Therapist and the Fee: Why Everything Works out and Also Doesn
A close friend of mine is a wonderful therapist, a child of the 60s, a gifted man, large-souled, big-hearted and wise. His practice nourishes him and is saturated with life. He is committed to a worldview that eschews anything close to greed. “I won’t ask my patients for more, at least not if I can avoid it,” he says. “Often I will wait years to do it.” My friend’s position makes perfect sense to me. He is a thoughtful and principled…
Self-Care for Therapists
Therapist Elizabeth Sullivan explores the similarities between mothering and “therapizing.”
Psychoanalysis is Alive and Well
Although we have evolved many schools since Freud articulated psychoanalytic theory at the turn of the 20th Century, in almost all of them conspicuous analytic features remain. These are so familiar that for the most part they exercise their dominance without our being aware of them or their origins. We may think psychoanalysis has been discredited and that almost no one practices it any longer, but there are ways psychoanalytic theory is present in our listening and thinking because of…
Vanquishing the Inner Critic
In my work with clients who were severely traumatized in childhood, I sometimes feel hopeless in helping them to address and deconstruct their inner critics. I feel daunted by the viciousness and incessancy of their self-attack. When a child is relentlessly rejected by contemptuous parents, she mimics them and learns to obsessively scorn herself. Like them, she focuses only on her defects and deficiencies; like them she radiates hate and scorn at herself. Her superego grows into an outsized critic as…
Through the Anger Looking Glass
On this past Sunday’s broadcast of “Weekend Edition” on National Public Radio, the focus was on the 50th anniversary of Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique. In this book Friedan raged against the status of women in the 1960s. Although millions of people have read this feminist manifesto, it seems very few presently understand how anger in general and Friedan’s anger in particular could be a source of insight, motivation, and personal and social transformation. Anger is an emotional state that has…