Psychotherapy.net Team, Author at Psychotherapy.net

Why Clients Choose Online Therapy

Posted on February 9, 2017February 11, 2026 by Psychotherapy.net Team

When I think about why clients choose online therapy, the first intuitive answer that comes to mind is about convenience: the comfort of being in your own office or home, no travel necessary, the time saved, and the possibility to have sessions during a work trip or a holiday.

For many of my clients online therapy was the only practical option. For example, I have worked with refugees or expats unable to find a therapist speaking their language within reachable distance. I have other clients who are constantly on the move, and don’t stay in one place long enough to engage in a stable therapeutic relationship (their peripatetic existence may indeed be a topic to explore in the therapy). I also work with women from some very conservative parts of the Middle East, for whom a therapist outside their country is the only way they are willing to open up and explore their religious beliefs, or their experience of oppression, without the risk of being judged or possibly persecuted.

In other, less dramatic cases, online therapy becomes the best choice for certain deeper psychological reasons. One such underlying reason is shame.

A feeling of extreme shame, of not being enough, freezes us, and makes reaching out for therapy nearly impossible. When the potential support is just one click away, and there is no physical exposure involved, we can take that step more easily. There is always the option to keep the camera off, which already reveals a lot to the online therapist.

Tim, a policeman from Ireland, had always suffered from shyness. He had grown up in a narcissistic family, which had left him with a deep sense of not being good enough. His father openly referred to him as a “failure” and the “biggest disappointment of his life.” He had sought traditional face-to-face therapy before, whilst struggling with drinking and depression, but hadn’t trusted the therapist enough to open up and expose himself to his potential judgment. He felt that his parents never really saw him, and any close emotional or physical contact seemed unbearable for him. Bound by shame, he had retreated into loneliness, which was his only safe space.

In the early sessions he would talk “at” me, and seek little input. His camera would easily get wobbly, focusing on a far corner of the room, avoiding his face: it seemed to enact his hidden desire to flee.

Later on, we explored the deeper reasons for his choice of online therapy with a foreign therapist. Tim reckoned that he felt safer this way: the distance between us and the differences in our cultural backgrounds made him feel more relaxed, allowing him to grade his exposure.

Another case, which comes up often with expats, is their tendency to develop extreme self-reliance.

As for Lucy, a Canadian aid worker based in Rwanda, she felt disillusioned by traditional face-to-face therapy. She had never been able to trust any of her therapists. All her previous attempts to get some support had only confirmed her belief that she could only “make it on her own.” This time, in the middle of an extremely unsafe environment, rigged with the weight of huge responsibilities, added to loneliness, she decided to give it another try and reach out to an online therapist.

At times, Lucy’s extreme self-reliance and difficulty in trusting others made our work challenging for both of us. But she gave it a chance. Letting a face on her screen slowly become a person, she allowed our therapeutic relationship to develop. She eventually learned how to trust again and receive external support. Paradoxically, a virtual online therapist facilitates the development of trust, especially when it seems nearly impossible. Turning potential obstacles into advantages is one of the creative challenges of online therapy.

In the same way as our clients do, therapists may display the avoidant attachment style and be uncomfortable with too much intimacy. Carl Rogers admitted that the intimacy he was able to develop with his clients in the therapy room "without risking too much of his person" compensated for his inability to take such risks in his personal life. I guess he would have become a keen online therapist…

The requirement for therapists to have an experience of personal therapy is an important one. I argue that any therapist offering his services online should go for an online therapy himself, experiencing the process “from the other side of the screen.”

My own personal therapy online helped me enormously to offer a better service to my online clients. The sensitivity and generosity of my “virtual” therapist also has continuously guided my work.

My choice for online therapy must have been influenced by my own displacement, and I often recognize in my clients who have left their country of origin, a familiar self-reliance.

Therapy is also about letting somebody else give you a hand.

Giving people who experience shame or extreme self-reliance the option of a seemingly easier way into therapy is not a trick; it is a gift to those who may otherwise never take the hand that is there to help them work on improving their lives.

Ayahuasca Is My Therapist (Or Is It?)

Posted on January 22, 2017February 11, 2026 by Psychotherapy.net Team

It was about 4am, and the ceremony had concluded. People were making their way from the jungle marquee towards the “temple” and kitchen where hot soup was waiting. Some walked in silence, while others began to talk of their experience. I sat in the circle longer than most, taking in the scene. I had drunk 4 times in total. Each drink taken in an effort to catalyze some sort of non-ordinary experience. The Peruvian curandero chuckling mischievously each time I returned, tapping his head and saying “stubborn, like a donkey,” before offering me another cup of the sacred brew. Despite my four cups, I had sat through the night fairly uneventfully, watching as people sat in silence, moaned, sang, cried, and laughed their way though 6 hours of “medicine” journey.

I wandered up the hill, trying to determine whether my perception was in any way changed, and concluding that the jungle bathed in full-moon light was special enough to account for the subtle sense of magic I was feeling. I arrived in the dimly lit kitchen, and fixed myself some pumpkin soup and bread. I sat on a little staircase and took in the scene around me. People in blankets and beanies, eyes twinkling. After a time a man approached and began to speak to me. I noticed in passing that his T-Shirt read, “Ayahuasca is my Therapist.” This man—let’s call him Fred—turned out to be something of a professional ayahuasca evangelist. He told me in his jovial British accent of his travels around the world spreading the word through medicine circle after medicine circle. He told me of skeptics who became believers: bankers, engineers, doctors, and drug addicts.

His stories were interesting, but I didn’t really feel like talking all that much. As I plotted my way to a sentence that might free me from Fred’s grasp I noticed that his poncho was taking on an odd texture. “I looked up at his face again only to find myself looking into the face of a large owl.” I squinted and closed my eyes. I opened them again. I was looking at a jaguar or some other big cat. I looked at the floor and stood, giving up on any hope of forming a polite sentence to excuse myself. What do you say to an owl anyway?

I made my way to a low couch and lay down as the voices in the room became cacophonous. I called out to a woman—let’s call her Jane—who I trusted and who I knew was nearby. She was one of the “midwives,” skilled in sitting with people as they “journeyed.” She came and I asked her to take me to the temple. It felt like someone had turned up the dial on all my senses, and in an effort to dull the world I had placed my blanket over my head. She gently took my arm and led me away from the others. We arrived at the temple, a beautifully crafted small space with high windows and a wooden floor. Thankfully it was empty. I sat there and moved quickly into my journey, which lasted some 2-3 hours. Jane sat by me the whole time, silently offering support and modeling a certain trust in the process.

That journey was profound for me, as have been the journeys I have taken with ayahuasca in the three years since. I learned that night that a little bit of food helps my body start to work with the ayahuasca, and since then I always take a small bag of nuts or a piece of bread. To some aficionados this is a “no go,” but hey, it works for me. I could write about my experiences with ayahuasca, all the lessons I think I’ve learned, the ways I’ve grown or changed, and the places I’ve been, and I think that’d make for some interesting reading. But this piece is about something else. And it comes back to the statement on Fred’s T-Shirt: “Ayahuasca is my Therapist.”

Or Is It?

I was a psychotherapist when I met Fred, and I am still a psychotherapist. I am also regularly in therapy myself. It’s often powerful, healing work, and an absolute privilege for the therapist. But it takes time, costs money, and—for many clients—is difficult. If there were a way to bypass the work of therapy, and achieve the same ends—or greater ends—more cheaply, more effectively, and perhaps even more beautifully, then I’d be first in line. Is ayahuasca an alternative to therapy? Or do these experiences relate to each other in some other way? It’s taken me a few years to gain clarity around this question.

In the ayahuasca community I have encountered those who speak of therapists as though they prey on the weak, benefiting from their misery, while contributing to locking them into their stories of stuck-ness and separation. To some, this is an attractive conspiracy that has a certain resonance with other conspiracies of insidious power structures that inhibit the Great Awakening. Some of these same people see ayahuasca as a panacea—a cure-all—for the ills of contemporary society. In the medicine community there often seems to be a simplistic assumption that ayahuasca can have only a good impact on the individual or the collective, but my own experiences tell a different story, and perhaps a more nuanced one.

My emerging understanding of the place of ayahuasca in the journey towards human wholeness is informed by a number of things. Over the last five years I have worked with a growing number of clients who have come to me, in part, to talk about their experiences with ayahuasca. I also teach transpersonal psychology and encounter many—often young—students who are participating in medicine circles or are considering doing so. Finally, I have been to number of extended retreats where I have come to know the participants and facilitators, and something of their stories and personalities, and what ayahuasca means to them.

The Ayahuasca Experience

There are a great many things the ayahuasca experience does for people. In many instances the experience itself is quite radically different from a person’s everyday or ordinary waking experience. What is more, the experience usually takes place in the context of a supportive exploratory community. People report that experiences with ayahuasca include profound personal healing, intergenerational healing, deep psychological insight, a recognition of inter-being with others and with the earth, life-changing spiritual peak-experiences, insights into the nature of mind, liberation from ego, a sense of spiritual community, a shift from ego-centrism to eco-centrism, and an opportunity for exploration and adventure. This list could go on and on.

How does the individual integrate or understand these experiences? How do these experiences relate to and inform the individual's everyday existence? Are they always beneficial? If not, then in what ways can they be detrimental? For some people the integration is quite obvious and seamless. But my work with clients and students suggests that for some, repeated ayahuasca experiences do not necessarily lead to fuller, happier lives. As ayahuasca becomes more widely available I feel it would be good to see a more balanced discourse emerge around what we might call “best practice.” This discussion might include an exploration of the role of the facilitator and his/her ongoing responsibility, an outline of supportive or aligned mindfulness and health practices, and an understanding of social and psychological contraindications. But for now we might ask more simply, ““When is it not a good idea to drink more ayahuasca?””

Before proceeding here I want to re-emphasise that I do not seek to generate fear around the phenomenon of ayahuasca, nor to suggest that its use is inherently dangerous or misguided. On the whole I think its emergence is a blessing and an opportunity for humanity. Rather, I am seeking to introduce some discernment in the use of—and “pushing” of—ayahuasca, and also to explore the place of ayahuasca alongside something like regular psychotherapy. I do not feel that I have all the answers, but I do feel that I can ask some well informed questions.

Spiritual Bypassing

One of the phrases that I’ve come across in researching working with people and their experiences with plant medicines is “spiritual bypassing,” a term coined by author and therapist John Welwood. Spiritual bypassing is essentially the tendency to avoid, or bypass, certain aspects of our day-to-day existence through an escape to a more spiritual realm. Very often what is being “bypassed” are those more stubborn and abiding aspects of our psychologies relating to personal or emotional “unfinished business.” People particularly susceptible to spiritual bypassing are those who are struggling with what therapists might call “developmental tasks.”

A classic caricature of a person engaged in spiritual bypassing is the monk who returns from a year-long cave retreat to a lunch with his family, only to find himself emotionally charged and bickering with his parents. Closer to home, my own encounters with spiritual bypassing involve working with people from the medicine community who have difficulty in two key areas: 1) In getting the affairs of their life in order—family, work, money, and physical health or 2) Forming and maintaining nourishing relationships. Just as work and relationships alone may not fulfill our spiritual hunger, so it could be said that spiritual work alone cannot enable us to deal with the challenges of relationship and modern life. In medicine communities it is not uncommon to encounter individuals who struggle with forming satisfying relationships, or with life’s practical demands, returning again and again to ayahuasca as therapist. It was my witnessing of this phenomenon that first gave me cause for concern that the discourse around ayahuasca was overly simplistic and utopian.

The Therapeutic Relationship

So what might therapy offer that ayahuasca cannot? One of the most widespread conditions I encounter as a therapist is loneliness. This loneliness is generally born of an inability to successfully navigate intimacy and contact with other people. Many people in contemporary society spend their days surrounded by other people, but feel the absence of any genuine connection or intimacy. I suspect we all know something of this.

Therapy has something unique to offer in the domain of developing the capacity to form and sustain close interpersonal relationships. It provides a container in which client and therapist can explore that defining human tension between a need for emotional safety, and a craving for a genuinely intimate connection. Every one of us comes to adulthood with certain learned—and often intense—responses to various types of emotional contact. Taking the time to understand and unknot these reactions, so that we might respond with greater freedom and choice, is the very heart of the therapeutic encounter. This work is delicate, takes time, and is grounded in a process of two people relating in an ordinary waking state.

Abiding loneliness is a sad fate for a social being, and working through the correlated issues is difficult work that requires a great deal of courage and persistence. For this reason, it is exactly the type of experience that we are likely to seek to deal with via an escape to the realm of the spiritual. My encounters through therapy, teaching, and the medicine community suggest to me that ayahuasca is not the best way for an individual to address this issue, perhaps largely because the ayahuasca experience is primarily a "solitary" experience that does not support us at our human-to-human relational edge.

Perhaps the simplest observation I can make from working with the medicine community as a therapist is that ayahuasca’s gifts can most readily be received and integrated when the journeyer launches from a solid foundation of sound life-skills and a capacity for relationship. In this context, ayahuasca can be a wonderful companion. Where these are lacking, more ayahuasca is not helpful. Somewhat contentiously perhaps, I would say that ayahuasca as a regular practice can be detrimental to those who struggle with life’s demands or with personal relationships, especially when it becomes something of an escape, or a person’s primary source of meaning and connection.

Cultural Context

It is worthwhile noting in passing that the practice of working with plant medicines traditionally takes place within a cultural context that offers fairly seamless integration with other social and psychological realities. In contrast, contemporary ayahuasca drinkers return from their ayahuasca experience to worlds, families, and workplaces that do not offer simple pathways for integration or understanding.

While this culturally decontextualised use of plant medicine no doubt has certain advantages, it might also place greater responsibility on people in positions of leadership within the medicine community to consider the need to nurture a more complex, nuanced, integrated, and supportive model of best practice.

Allies, Not Alternatives

In summary then, let’s return to Fred and his T-Shirt that reads, “Ayahuasca is my Therapist.” I believe that Fred was sincere in his work and in his belief that he was bettering the world by spreading the practice of sitting with the medicine. And for the most part I too think it is a great gift to human consciousness. But I wonder how many people, lured by the easy promise of bypassing the hard work involved in addressing real developmental or relational issues, return to the medicine only to drift further from a solid foothold in the everyday world. It is in the “everyday” world, after all, that we must ultimately find or create meaning through relationship and expression.

In so far as both therapy and ayahuasca enable us to become whole, to give and receive love more readily, and become more complete members of the earth community, I’d say they are aligned. But what each of these activities offer on the path to wholeness is quite different, and while there are clearly things that ayahuasca can offer us that therapy cannot, the same is true in reverse. It would be a mistake to think that ayahuasca replaces or makes redundant the work of therapy.

Wisdom from a Customer

Posted on January 21, 2017February 11, 2026 by Psychotherapy.net Team

One of the joys of running Psychotherapy.net is my interactions with customers. But of all the correspondence I’ve had over the years, this a recent exchange has been perhaps the most intriguing. It began with this email describing our videos:

Good evening Victor,

I have enjoyed the almost freakishness of Albert Ellis telling it like it is, he was a man to be respected by the way he wanted the patient to come clean, and at the same time to be true. "I know what it ails you. Why are you not moving on? Why is this keeping you stuck?"

Mr. [Ernest] Rossi's presentation on physiological phenomena explaining deeper alignment within our bodies may be scientifically right. Yet, he appears to be a loose cannon in the therapeutic healing profession. I probably will never know what he knows when he stood up with the peripatetic albeit Arizonian healers like Milton Erickson. The trailing effect that I can appreciate from Mr. Rossi is his unquenchable desire to find what the truth of personhood means and yet, he does not persuade me.

James Bugental spun a fantastic thread of reality in his appreciation of the human misery. I appreciate his candor, and soulfulness, No one can be sitting down without knowing this man was with you.

I thought the old psychotherapy videos were helpful to see what it is going on with the world. Your father [Irvin Yalom] has explored that conundrum, and has provided some telling answers about man and his/her destiny.

Otto Kenberg is a studious, logical man prone to make assessments of a given type of person and qualify it as we qualify blue from red….I thought he is imbibed with the old psychotherapy lingo and forgot to see the everyday person. I was lost when his Germanic approach took over the healing process. Somehow.

I did not like the videos about the "proper" way to handle patients in a hospital setting. It felt prosaic.

Victor, I like the way you interview giants. You are polite but not entirely swayed by their philosophical, therapeutic views. It seems to me that you want to know what works, and what does not. Therefore, you are in my good books.

Manuel

This was followed the next day by another email:

More feedback.

I found the Torontonian's videos (even though they use actors) more akin to principled truth. I did like them.

I have not seen a video that tells me really how to operate in a psychotherapeutic setting yet. Maybe it is because we cannot really ascertain a typical process and therefore, the videos are just a guideline as to how the novice interpreter can fathom the whole story developing in front of him.

I would like to see the failures of therapists rather than the enhanced recognition of a university degree. I want to know what the key words are, and what moves a real person to state their present problem. And I want to see the masters in action.

How the hell can you prescribe a reasonable note in the person you are seeing? How do you get this person to move on their own volition? Therapy must acquiesce to praxis.

Respectfully,

Manuel.

Who was this Manuel? His writing was incisive and eloquent, and yet seemingly from another era. I would have written him back regardless, but my burning curiosity prompted me to respond immediately, offering some genuine words of praise for his observations.

He responded in kind:

Greetings Victor from Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada.

I felt so honoured by your reply; it literally made my day.

(I am of course not immune to flattery; but I am on guard, as when I hear similar words, I often discover that the other party thinks they are corresponding with the other Yalom.)

He went on to tell me a bit about his family, concluding as follows:

So you must know that I am truly blessed with kids who can think on their own despite the pressure I have exerted upon them. Good kind of pressure though, to not only shoot for the stars, but to admire mystery in life as it presents itself. All these things coming from a Honduran guy who thinks the greatest person is always one who is able to not only to stand back, but to turn around to listen and to hear the whole spectrum of fascinating details.

I, on the other hand, have not a university degree but I have held a reverent penchant for good books. We do not have money, but we do have some 400 good books from language to psychotherapy.

I am though, a salesperson who has had over 20 different positions from a machine printer to manager. I am currently working selling expensive area rugs, carpets and all that. When I see this rich person coming to our store, for some reason, I do no think of them as “customers” but someone who is materially or emotionally trying to add class or more than decor to their homes. I have been able to impress on some of them subtlety in choices. Like the "Grey Woman" who came in asking for wild colours in an area rug. I knew she wore a grey suit, grey shoes, and grey purse. Even a grey car! But she was insistent she was ready for change, “something wild,” she said. This was not an encounter about price, but about lifestyle choices. She bought the wild colourful area rug and returned it a few days after. I wish I could have been more perceptive and offer a gradation in grey, but missed it. I sometimes feel the best gradation for therapy begins with the understanding that it is not so much about the style, but the caring.

Thank you Manuel. My encounter with you has made my day, and my week as well!

A New Year for Psychotherapists

Posted on January 4, 2017February 11, 2026 by Psychotherapy.net Team

I was just on the phone with Peter Levine discussing a new video we are making using his Somatic Experiencing approach to working with pain. I started to tell him that we want to release the video next year….and I caught myself as I realized that next year is now this year. Hello 2017! I still remember my kindergarten teacher writing 1964 on the board after our Christmas vacation, and I was so surprised. How could it be a new year? What did that even mean?

Which brings us back to the current state of things. Yes it’s an arbitrary date on our western calendar, but it is the calendar we live by. The earth has completed its little jaunt around our sun. And yes, there are possibly billions of other suns around the universe, and who knows how many planets circling those stars. But this is our little planet until we destroy it, and this is my life, and this is our new year. What am I going to make of it?

Here are a few things that come to mind, in no particular order:

1. Continue to make psychotherapy videos. In our pipeline for 2017 we have video series on Emotionally Focused Therapy Step-by-Step, Irvin Yalom on the Art of Psychotherapy, Diagnostic Interviewing and the DSM-5, Motivational Interviewing for Adolescents, and that’s just for starters. After 20 years of making training videos, we are pushing and stretching ourselves to move beyond single or multiple session videos, and trying to break down the specific skills needed to improve therapeutic efficacy.
2. Keep working on my tennis game. This has been a longer work in progress than #1 above, and the results so far less impressive. But suddenly I’m feeling a sense of urgency, as I know eventually that any increase in skills will be offset by a decrease in agility, given that I’ve survived 57 rotations of our planet going around our sun.
3. Paint and make more wooden spoons and bowls , and perhaps learn welding so I can make some metal sculptures.
4. Enjoy watching my children become adults.
5. Spend less time staring on my computer. Now that’s a challenging goal.
6. Perhaps write more blogs. Starting now.

In many ways I’m just going to continue what I’m doing. I’ll take that as a good sign that my life is not in need of a radical change. But I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

And what about you? For those of you who are practicing therapists, what is in store for you in this coming year? What tweaks do you wish to make in your work and personal lives? What will make you more effective, and more satisfied? How you will actually increase your skills as a therapist? I just conducted an interview (not yet published) with my friend Tony Rousmaniere, and the research seems fairly clear that simply reading books or attending workshops, or even more clinical experience does not lead to increased efficacy. He has some great ideas in his new book Deliberate Practice for Psychotherapists.

Is your practice running you, or are you running it? Are you seeing the number and types of clients you really want? If not—and I imagine for most of us it’s not the perfect mix—what can you do to move it towards your ideal? Are you getting the collegial support you need to avoid the pitfall of isolation? Looking back on my 25 years of private practice, I realize I was more isolated than I would have liked, and would have benefitted from much more peer interaction. Live and learn. What other passions are you pursuing? What would you like to do this year—or not do—so that when the calendar turns to 2018 you can look back and think “this was a year fully lived”?

Tea with Freud: An Imaginary Conversation About How Psychotherapy Really Works

Posted on October 4, 2016February 11, 2026 by Psychotherapy.net Team

Following is an adapted excerpt from Tea with Freud: An Imaginary Conversation about How Psychotherapy Really Works by Steven B. Sandler. Segments from each of the first three chapters are reprinted here with the author's permission.

I. Where Did the Roses Go?

By the time I reach the apartment building at Berggasse 19, it is nearly two in the afternoon. The sky over Vienna is increasingly cloudy, and the first drops of rain are starting to fall. A young couple walking arm in arm look up at the sky in unison and pick up their pace a bit. Given my destination, it would be fitting to have strident discharges of lightning and thunder, signifying an elemental conflict between earth and sky. Mother Nature is not so inclined today. This is merely a soft spring rain, and I have arrived just in time to avoid getting too wet. I enter by the main door of the building and walk up a long flight of stairs bordered by a wrought iron banister. At the top of the stairs, the door to the apartment suite has his name on it in bold lettering. The door opens, and I am greeted by a maid, a petite young woman who smiles politely but says nothing. I assume that she speaks no English, and I have never studied German. She shyly motions to me to follow her into a waiting room. When we get to a closed set of double doors, she knocks softly and disappears without a word.

“ Good afternoon, please come in.” I am not sure what I was expecting, but I am immediately surprised that he is not taller. After all, this is Sigmund Freud. I am standing before one of the intellectual giants of the Western world, and I am not prepared to meet a man of rather average height. He is very handsomely dressed, of course; his three-piece suit is accompanied by a bowtie that is partly hidden, tucked beneath the collar of a clean white shirt. His whole demeanor is professional and confident, but his unremarkable height is not what I have anticipated. I suppose I have traveled to Vienna with some sort of childlike notion of a man who is larger than life, a father figure staring down at me—at all of us—from an Olympian peak. Instead, I find myself eye to eye with Freud, a man no bigger than myself.

“It is an honor to meet you, Professor Freud. Thank you so much for agreeing to speak with me. I know how busy you must be.”

“It is my pleasure.” He is just the age at which I always imagine him. He is neither the forty-year-old with the thick, dark beard and relentless ambition, nor the frail eighty-year-old who is struggling with oral cancer and packing his belongings to escape the Nazis. Someplace in his late fifties, perhaps sixty or so, this is the Freud who has clearly established himself as a major thinker. He is still strong and healthy, and still capable of producing more important work.

I am at least twenty years his junior, still in my thirties; curiously, I feel even younger standing before him. For a brief moment, I glimpse a memory of myself sitting in the library of the Capital District Psychiatric Center in Albany. I can see myself as a psychiatry resident, sitting at a small desk with a volume of Freud’s work open in front of me. There was something in those pages that confirmed for me that my decision to switch from pediatrics into psychiatry was the right move. Freud was trying to go beyond the classification of symptoms and diseases, beyond the typical treatments of his day (water baths, massage, and rest cures), beyond giving the patient suggestions under hypnosis—You can move your arm!—to arrive at an understanding of the root of the problem. He wanted to comprehend the mysteries of the psyche. I remember sitting in that library, paging through his book, feeling like I was being initiated into a very selective secret society whose membership was limited to intrepid explorers of the mind.

Now I am standing before him, and he looks at me directly for a long moment, as if he is already engaged in a psychological calculus of my character. Naturally, I am taking a measure of him as well, trying to read what I can in his eyes. Although he is a man of ordinary height, there is nothing ordinary about his gaze. He looks at me with the eyes of someone with an immense capacity for concentrating on one object at a time, and presently that object is me. There is obvious intelligence in those eyes, of course, and a look of relentless curiosity. Here is a man who can ponder a question for years: What is anxiety? He can wrestle with such a question tirelessly, and he can continually revise his understanding of it. He has a very direct gaze, a look of someone who is neither afraid to see nor afraid to be seen. For a brief moment, I think back and puzzle over something I once read about him. In one of his books, he wrote that he sat to the side of the couch, out of the patient’s view, because he could not stand to have people staring at him all day long. After one long moment of meeting his gaze, I have trouble believing this.

I can imagine that his eyes might be unnerving to some people, but there is warmth in them, too, and it would not be hard to imagine him breaking into laughter and making a joke. I find myself wondering why the photographs of him always show such a stern expression. He is not smiling or laughing at the moment, but there is nothing severe about his gaze. Something in his look makes me feel welcomed as well as analyzed. I wonder for a moment what I convey to my own patients when I look at them sitting across from me in my office back in Albany.

“Come take a seat, and we will have a nice chat. You have traveled far. New York State, yes?” His English is quite good. Accented, but good. My first impression of his consulting room is that it reminds me of a museum, or perhaps the back office of the museum curator—a cigar-smoking curator, to be sure, as the air is permeated with the smell of cigar smoke. The walls are crowded with framed artwork depicting ancient civilizations and their myths. To my left, there is a painting of Pan, the half-man and half-goat of Greek mythology who caused panic in mortals when they encountered him in the forest. In addition to the paintings, there is Freud’s famous collection of miniature antique statues, sitting on a ledge, on a desk, in glass display cases, or wherever there is a bit of space. These are the little artifacts from around the world that he had acquired over time, and there are legions of them. On one table, I see Egyptian figures standing erect, a large camel, and a couple of sitting Buddha figures among rows of other assorted pieces. One would think, judging by the cluttered profusion of antiquities, that the resident of this place is someone who is far more interested in archeology than psychology.

There are bookshelves, of course, filled with hardcover volumes. On one of the shelves, I notice a photo of a woman. She has a penetrating gaze the equal of his. Surrounded by the collections of weighty books and dead little statues, the woman in the photo looks intensely alive and alert. One of his relatives, perhaps? A sister? But he had several sisters, so it would make no sense to have a photo of only one of them.

“Yes, I live in Albany.” The couch is directly in front of me as I enter, and to the left of the couch, there is a wide green upholstered chair for him to sit in while listening to the “associations” of his patients. Why do I keep looking at the couch? In order to answer my own question, I look once more, and then I allow myself the visceral reaction taking shape within me: “This is it! I am looking at Sigmund Freud’s couch! This is the couch that has symbolized, for well over a century, a guided journey into the center of the human psyche.” This couch was the epicenter of some of the greatest psychological discoveries my profession has ever known. I have to take in every detail of it. There is a large Oriental rug thrown over it, a second rug hanging on the wall behind it, and a third larger one beneath our feet. Of the many colors in the rugs, the reddish browns stand out most to me, giving a very warm feeling to the room. There are large pillows on the couch for the patients to use, as well as a blanket in case of cold drafts in the room. I can barely believe my good fortune at being here.

II. The Root of the Problem

My office at Albany Medical Center is a small, boxy allotment of space, but it is sufficient for the necessities of psychotherapy: a desk, an old oak file cabinet (my attempt to bring a little character into the room), several chairs, and a small bookshelf. On top of the bookshelf sits a small plastic figure of Freud, holding his trademark cigar. The room easily accommodates me, Freud, and the friendly young woman sitting across from me. There is also space for a small video camera sitting on a tripod to the left of my seat. The young woman has agreed to let me videotape our sessions and use the tapes for my teaching.

Her name is Carla, and she is twenty-six years old. She has an Italian last name, which agrees quite nicely with her dark hair and dark eyes. She works at our hospital as an x-ray technician. Because this is her day off, she arrives in T-shirt and jeans rather than hospital garb. Even on a casual day off, she obviously takes some pride in her appearance; the bright, clean T-shirt is a colorful promotion for the New York Yankees, and the jeans look new. She is pretty, and she smiles the easy smile of someone who is used to having other people respond kindly to her features. She knows that she makes a good impression.

She looks directly at me, and she seems comfortable sitting here, or at least as comfortable as anyone can feel in her first psychotherapy appointment. She wastes no time in announcing her agenda for our first meeting. She reports that she is chronically nervous, and she finds it difficult to relax. (In today’s terms, she has a generalized anxiety disorder; Freud would have called it a neurosis.) She has a second problem that is even more disturbing to her than the anxiety. She gets angry at her fiancé and says mean things to him, words that he does not deserve. She just cannot control what she says when she gets angry. She has no idea why she is so nasty to him, but she knows that it bothers her, and she fears that her behavior will end the relationship before the wedding date ever arrives. She knows that she needs to get help with this.

So she has anxiety and she has a relationship problem. These are not the root of her problems, of course; they are the symptoms at the surface. Still, it is a good sign that she can state these problems clearly and succinctly. Some people come to therapy and they cannot even articulate a clearly defined problem. They come to the office because a friend or a spouse urged them to make an appointment. They have “a lot of issues,” but they cannot name a single one. They describe all kinds of difficult events they have experienced in life, but they cannot tell me how those past events are still affecting them now and why they are seeking therapy.

I also notice that she is describing problems about herself, rather than blaming others. She could have said that she is mean to her boyfriend because he is a terrible person who makes her feel irritable. Instead, she seems able to take responsibility for her own behavior. She has an intrapsychic focus, a focus on something about herself and her own psyche that she wants to work on. She does not externalize the problem and blame her environment. So far, so good. Now I need to get some details.

“How much of the time are you nervous and tense?” I ask.

“A lot. I’d say, half of the day.”

“Half of each day, typically?”

“Yeah.” Then she sighs. She takes a big breath, as if she is now feeling some anxiety that has tightened up the intercostal muscles of her chest and limited her to short, shallow breaths. She looks like she needs more air; she needs to get free of the tension and breathe more deeply.

“You sighed?”

“Yeah,” she says. “It just seems like I’m always rushed. I always have a million things to do. I never sit still, you know. I mean, that’s kind of my personality. I go, go, go. But last night, we just got a movie and sat on the couch, and it feels so good just to relax. I feel like I’m never relaxed.”

I explore this a bit more, and I run through a mental checklist of anxiety symptoms with her. I learn that she has no panic attacks, no obsessive-compulsive behaviors, no social phobia, and so on.

“And you say that you get angry and you have trouble controlling what you say. Can you give me an example of that?”

“I sometimes hold things in, and then—with Jimmy, my boyfriend—I get irritated about something. Or when he’s driving, you know. I tell him I’m going to punch him in his face because I get so mad.”

“You actually say those words?” I ask.

“Yeah, I do.”

I notice that she is doing something with her mouth, perhaps putting her tongue against her cheek. Maybe she is chewing on the inside of her cheek. Yes, I think that’s it. She is chewing the inside of her lip and cheek. She must be getting more anxious as we talk about her anger at Jimmy. Perhaps there is something about this anger that makes her more tense and anxious. It is a perfect example of what Freud said in one of his theories of anxiety: the ego can send out a signal of anxiety because the patient is coming too close to an impulse or emotion that is dangerous or unacceptable. Signal anxiety is the label he gave it. This chewing might be a clue to me that she is getting anxious about troubling feelings lurking beneath the surface.

“I’m not really going to punch him in the face, but … He’ll say something to get me going. He knows how to get under my skin, and I’ll say, ‘Oh, shut the … heck up. I’m gonna punch you in the face if you do that.’”

Clearly, she did not say ‘heck’ to him. She is cleaning up her language a bit as she tells her story. I suspect that she uses pretty rough language when she is mad at him. I would not have guessed this just by looking at her. Her whole appearance gives the impression of someone who is sweet and even-tempered.

“What might he say that would make you angry?”

“That he’s going to show me how, um . . .” She has been starting to smile, and now she breaks out with a small laugh. “Let’s see, what happened the other day?” She laughs more openly now. We are getting closer to something. As long as she could keep the topic general, she was managing fairly well, just a little tense. Now that I ask for a specific example, the tension rises and she starts to laugh.

The nervous laugh. It is such an interesting phenomenon. She gets anxious and the chest muscles contract and she sighs, trying to get more air. When the tension increases further, Mother Nature provides an escape valve with the nervous laugh, which suddenly loosens up those chest muscles, and she automatically takes bigger breaths of air to support the next burst of laughter. At the same time, the laughing turns a difficult situation into a funny one, so it also functions as a defense mechanism against feelings that are threatening or painful. What a marvelous invention, this nervous laugh! No wonder we all make such liberal use of it. It is a very pleasant social invention, as well. I could easily join her in the laughing.

“I don’t even remember what he said to me,” she continues, “but it was just the whole situation.”

“So you were really angry.”

“Oh, yeah!”

“And how do you feel right now, talking about it?” I ask.

“Just aggravated.” She’s laughing again. “Because I’m thinking about it, and I just can’t get him to …” Suddenly she brings her hands up, fingers spread wide and slightly flexed, as if she would like to grab him and shake him. “She presents me with such an interesting mixed message: her hands are energized with anger, but her face says it is all just a funny story.”

“You laugh, I notice.”

“Yeah, I can’t . . . it’s funny, because it’s like . . . I think about it now and it’s almost funny.”

“But the laugh doesn’t match the emotion of the moment, does it?”

“No.” She is laughing freely now, and she looks like she is really enjoying it.

“But I wonder if the laugh covers up the anger,” I say.

“It could.” She is still smiling, but the laughing stops. “Yeah, it could.”

Good. I made my first attempt at pointing out a defense mechanism.

I told her that the laugh does not match the anger she describes.

III. Inspired

“This is not psychoanalysis!” That is his entire response, a merciless verdict delivered by a stern judge in a terse four-word sentence. I have just spent the better part of an hour describing the case of Carla in some detail. He has listened, but as I proceeded, I could see his expression growing more distant, more cautious. At first, he looked interested and asked a few questions, but he gradually became silent and aloof. Now he stands up and walks over to get one of his cigars. Is this a sign that the discussion is over? Should I just get up and leave? Outside on the streets of Vienna, it is a beautiful sunny day in May. Perhaps I should abandon my hopes for a dialogue with Freud and go sightseeing.

He stands by the bookcase near a photo I noticed during my first visit, a photo of a woman with very intense eyes. As he examines his choice of cigars, I find myself attracted to the photo. I see intelligence in her eyes, or at least I imagine that I do, and perhaps a tendency to be passionate about things that interest her. What I cannot discern is the nature of the emotion in those eyes. One could read a heavy sadness in them, but maybe she just looks serious. I can imagine her eyes becoming angry, but she is not passionately angry at the moment of the photo shoot. Maybe it is not anger at all. Is she trying to contain some kind of distress, some inner turmoil, her eyes warning the photographer not to come too close? She looks at me with a direct, engaging look, but she will not let me know what lies within. But why am I so absorbed by a photograph on a bookshelf? I suppose I would like to enlist her help in getting him to listen to me. Would she help? Who is she, anyway? And why does her photograph deserve a special place on Sigmund Freud’s bookshelf?

He has yet to light the cigar, after some fiddling with matches and an ashtray; he comes back to his chair and sits down with his pleasure still unlit. I still have a chance to make my case, although I can see that the odds of success are diminishing with each passing minute.

“But Professor, this is a direct offshoot of your psychoanalysis. It’s just a newer version of your original ideas.”

“You have no couch, correct?”

“That’s correct. The patient and I sit facing each other in chairs.”

“You do not ask her to tell you her associations as they occur to her. Correct?”

“That’s true. I don’t tell her to just say whatever comes to mind. This is a more directive approach to treatment.”

“No couch. No free association. This is not psychoanalysis!” He stands up again, and now he paces back and forth. He not only disagrees with what I have presented; he is clearly angry. In fact, he looks insulted, as if I have personally attacked him. I am stunned that a man of his stature can be so easily offended. I have read about this aspect of his character, to be sure. No matter how much positive attention he received in the world, he was prone to misinterpreting even the most balanced critique as a vicious attempt to destroy him and his theories. Friendships fell apart because someone dared to disagree with him. I must have been dreaming to think that I could interest him in a reasonable discussion about modern changes to his original technique. Still, I feel that I might as well try to finish my argument, as long as I have come all this way.

“But if you look at my case, perhaps you might agree that this is a variant of psychoanalysis. Just look at my use of defense mechanisms in the session. At first, Carla laughs when she talks about her anger at her fiancé. A nervous laugh, of course, but the laugh also functions as a defense against facing her rage at him. I point it out to her, and she agrees that the laugh might be masking other emotions.”

Freud stops pacing and nods, almost reluctantly. His concept of defense mechanisms was one of the most original ideas in his voluminous work. He must be stopping to consider whether I am honoring his concept by using it wisely or defaming it by blatant misuse. I decide to continue.

“Later in the interview, I ask her how she feels and she again employs defenses. She says, ‘It seems like forever ago.’ She separates her emotions from the story. ‘It doesn’t seem real to me.’” Freud is listening now, and I can hear myself becoming more hopeful as I try to sell my argument to him. “By pointing out these defenses, I am educating her about the workings of her psyche. At the same time, I am trying to turn her against the defenses, so she will face the unacceptable ideas and emotions that she has refused to face until now.” At this point, I reach for the book that I brought with me, as a lawyer reaches for the critical piece of evidence that will prove his client is innocent. “May I read something to you?” I ask.

“Certainly,” he says, still looking quite skeptical.

“These patients whom I analyzed had enjoyed good mental health up to the moment at which an occurrence of incompatibility took place in their ideational life—that is to say, until their ego was faced with an experience, an idea or a feeling which aroused such a distressing affect that the subject decided to forget about it.”

I look up from the book to make sure he is listening. “From your paper, ‘The Neuro-Psychoses of Defense,’ written in 1894. One of your earliest papers. As a child, Carla was faced with terrible, frightening events, events that she would rather forget about. We are now using your concepts and challenging the defenses to get to the disturbing ‘experience, idea or feeling.’ For this patient, she has never really faced the painful reality of what happened in her childhood home. And you can see what happens by the end of the session. She experiences a breakthrough of emotion and begins to realize the magnitude of the situation she endured as a child. She remembers with emotion, just as you and Breuer prescribed in your book, Studies on Hysteria.”

Freud is standing in one spot now. He no longer looks agitated, and he seems to be considering my line of thought. He takes his chair again, much to my surprise. He is thinking, and he takes his time before offering a thought.

“So you are using my concept of defenses as a direct technical intervention with the patient. You actually tell her about her defenses as they arise.”

“Exactly,” I say.

“And by pointing them out to her, you are trying to weaken their hold on her, so that the repressed contents of the mind can emerge.”

“Exactly! The thoughts and memories can emerge, and she can open up with her feelings. She can emotionally expand again.” Freud looks puzzled by my last comment. I want so much to talk with him about Reich’s concept of expansion and contraction. I want to tell him: You cannot be open and closed at the same time. Carla started the session in a state of emotional contraction, and later she was able to re-expand emotionally. But this might be too much to lay on the table so soon. And who knows how he might react to the topic of Reich and his revolutionary ideas? I need to stay focused and talk about short-term dynamic psychotherapy. “Yes, the contents of her mind can come forth. That’s exactly what I am trying to accomplish. If I can loosen the grip of her defenses, then we can dig down beneath the surface and find out what lies buried. Like an archeological dig.” I know that Freud loved to compare psychoanalysis to archeology. He would sometimes point to his vast collection of miniature antiquities to make the metaphor to his patients. I worry for a moment that I am trying too hard to ingratiate myself to him, but he nods his approval at the comment. At this moment, Gretchen opens the door to his office holding a tray with tea. Freud waves her off, apparently not wanting to be distracted now.

He sits pondering what I have said. Here, in the last couple of minutes, I have seen the two sides of Sigmund Freud as I have read about him. On the one hand, he could be remarkably thin-skinned. He was always determined to make a name for himself, and his ambition could sometimes lead him to be competitive, distrustful, and vindictive. To use the psychoanalytic term, his narcissism got in his way. True, he had his detractors, and he endured some unwarranted hostility from colleagues, but he sometimes took an honest disagreement as a narcissistic injury, a blow to his basic self-esteem. On the other hand, he had a quick mind and an intense love of ideas. When he was immersed in the world of ideas and theories, without feeling threatened, he could be a kindly mentor, a committed analyst, and a devoted friend. One could easily see how two people could come away from him with two diametrically opposed impressions of the man.

At the moment, his intense curiosity has overtaken his bellicose instinct to protect his intellectual territory. He asks more questions about how I use defense mechanisms in therapy. Which defenses do I see most often? Are certain defenses associated with particular symptoms? How do I proceed if the defenses do not yield to this approach? As he talks, he sits back and lights his cigar. Now that he is engaged, I make my next move.

“Here is another point I would like to make, with your permission. Just look at your concept of anxiety and how I used it in the session, and you will see why I say that this is still psychoanalytic work. You remember that I noticed how she was biting her lip and the inside of her cheek? This happened early in the session, and it became more obvious as she began to tell the story of her violent, chaotic family life.”

Freud nods, puffing on the cigar.

“And you recall that I pointed this out to her as a possible physical manifestation of anxiety. The anxiety was triggered by the difficult topic at hand. It was your signal anxiety: anxiety that gets triggered by some unacceptable thought or emotion within the person. In your terms, the ego sends out a signal of anxiety because there are uncomfortable feelings lurking beneath the surface. In plain English, she is afraid of her own emotions.”

Freud nods again.

“In Carla’s case,” I continue, “the anxiety was prompted by the stirring of hidden grief over her childhood. Her anxiety, which caused her to chew her lip, alerted me to the presence of unacceptable thoughts, feelings, and memories. When I asked her about the significance of the chewing, she realized that she was anxious, and she was anxious because she was starting to talk about the trauma. Soon after that point, her sadness began to emerge.”

“So you are using my signal anxiety as a marker in the therapy,” he says. “Once you see it, this biting of the lip, you know that the emotions are not far behind.”

“Yes. Exactly! And it can be any sign of anxiety: fidgeting of the hands, gripping the chair, tapping the feet. Any of this might mean signal anxiety, and then I start to suspect that buried feelings are closer to the surface.”

Again, he asks questions. How do I know when the anxiety is not due to buried thoughts or feelings within, but due to a real threat—financial problems, illness, and so on—in the immediate environment? Not all anxiety is signal anxiety, he cautions me. What do I do if the patient’s anxiety gets too overwhelming? How soon do I address the anxiety in a session? He calls for Gretchen, and we drink tea and talk for quite a while about defense mechanisms and anxiety, until he has satisfied himself that he understands the approach I am describing. For the moment, at least, the struggle to get him to listen is over, and the battle is mine.

Dreamwork in Stereo

Posted on September 15, 2016February 11, 2026 by Psychotherapy.net Team

Have you ever struggled to share your dream with somebody in the morning? What seemed most vivid and realistic just a moment ago, when verbalized, turns into senseless gibberish, doesn’t it?

What about adding another difficulty to recounting a dream, namely telling it in a foreign language? Which of their languages to use is a dilemma faced by many of my multilingual clients in therapy. It may also open doors that neither they nor I would have dreamt of.

Francesca was Italian, living in Paris. When looking for a therapist, she had reached out to me because we shared common emigrants’ background, and three languages: Italian, French, and English. She was going through a double transition: recently married, she was settling into her new role as a wife when she was laid off by her employer. As a result, Francesca felt anxious, stuck at a crossroads between countries, lost in her professional life, and unfit for her new married life.

She had chosen to communicate with me in English, as Italian felt “boring and obsolete” to her. Having left her country in her early twenties to pursue artistic studies in the US, she was now living in Paris, working as a designer for a large fashion house. Her adopted English was her language for “creativity and self-growth”, as she put it.

For the first time in the two months of her therapy, Francesca arrived early. She rushed into telling me her nightmare:

She was late for her own wedding and stood naked in the middle of her bedroom. Her groom Alain was waiting at the church; she needed to dress quickly, but was unable to find her white-laced wedding gown.

The clock on the wall was ticking, adding to her growing panic. She pulled the door of a huge cabinet. Inside, a dirty pig was smiling at her, insolently.

Terrified, she pulled a rope hanging alongside the pig, hoping to make the beast disappear. But as a result, a shower of vomit dropped from the ceiling, full of disgusting noodles.

A strong smell of vomit had woken her up.

Now, sitting in front of me, she looked sick indeed.

Going through the dream again, with me as a witness, had been sufficient for Francesca to make some sense of it: she realized that the ticking clock could be her biological clock (time for children), time passing on the job hunt, time to go back to Italy…

But, listening to her, I felt that something was missing: usually very much in touch with her emotions, this time Francesca was slipping into a very cognitive, fruitless field. Her storytelling made sense, but I wanted us to go further into exploring it. Two objects actually echoed in Italian in my mind: “the ticking clock” (orologio) and “the noodles” (spaghetti).

This “stereo effect” triggered my curiosity and I asked Francesca to tell her dream again, this time in her mother tongue.

She did, and as she started describing her anxiety, and the feeling of urgency at not being ready for her wedding, we both felt how the flow of emotions had finally penetrated the room. Francesca’s voice had changed. The immediacy of the emotional experience gave me goosebumps.

Francesca admitted that she had “felt much more emotional” when recounting her dream in Italian. If in English her mother’s not being there had not seemed to provoke any particular feeling (she had died when Francesca was a child); in the Italian version, her mother’s absence stood as a painful void. The sense of loss and solitude had become almost tangible, and I could see how much Francesca was missing her again at this stage of her adult life, when she may herself become a mother soon.

Listening to her Italian fluid words, I finally connected with the little Francesca, who, like any other young girl, had idealized marriage. In that ideal representation, maintained by a rich cultural imagery, she was to wear white and her parents would be there. The reality was different, her parents had been long gone, the white wedding dress was not compulsory, having a first child at her age was nothing abnormal in today’s world.

Now the vomit image made sense as well. She associated it with the pregnancy nausea, and her anxiety about not being able to be a good mum (or even not to be able to bear a child at all).

As she was sharing her fears with me, Francesca felt slightly nauseous. She recognized this very sensation in her throat as something she had been experiencing lately. She had been repressing it successfully, but could now understand the reason for it.

Finally, I asked Francesca to go back to her dream and replay it all over again. Playing with its own imagery seemed like an opening for re-writing Francesca’s story about herself at this stage of her life. This time, she decided to stop looking for the white wedding gown, as she realized that it was more important for her at this point to get to the church, where Alain may start to worry.

In this refabricated new dream, as she ran through the fields towards the church, dressed in her old jeans and a jumper, she reported feeling young and liberated; excitement replaced anxiety.

Compartmentalization is a psychological strategy, naturally adopted by emigrants. Francesca’s world was divided into two well-separated realms: her childhood and life in Italy before her expatriation, and her “new”, more independent, life in the US and then France.

Up until that session, using mainly English, we had been engaging with the latter; the young Italian girl had been left behind. This feeling was a familiar one: after all, she felt abandoned by her mother who had gone too suddenly and too soon. Sticking to English, I may have re-enforced this narrative, leaving the little Francesca to a lonely and sad past. On the other hand, had Francesca told me her dream in Italian only, we would have done a good job eventually; possibly an easier one. But having access to both “parts” of her through telling her dream in both languages had enriched our work.

Working with dreams in therapy is a deeply relational activity. We don’t just recount our dreams (as we do by writing in a dream journal), but we let somebody else enter its realm, and re-experience it with us. This is also why the language we use for it has a meaning. This unique experience had not only allowed me to see Francesca more fully, but our therapeutic relationship had deepened, with her younger and more vulnerable self now invited to the therapy room as well rather than waiting behind a closed door.

Dreamwork is a great opportunity to move forward the therapeutic work, especially with highly cognitive clients. The multilinguistic perspective goes one step further restoring a missing stereo effect to the music heard by the therapist.

The Gloria Films: Candid answers to questions therapists ask most

Posted on August 16, 2016February 11, 2026 by Psychotherapy.net Team

When I penned an article and a book chapter on the classic Gloria Films some years ago I never dreamed these pieces would continue to bring me a seemingly endless string of correspondence. Indeed, this classic video influenced the psychotherapy training and subsequent practice strategies for thousands and thousands of helpers.

To this day the battle rages on about whether this work of art was the savior of psychotherapy, or psychotherapy’s worst nightmare.

Recently a graduate student contacted me with a string of seriously good questions. In this blog I shall share those questions with my answers to shed a tad more light on this major artifact of the 20th century counseling and psychotherapy movement. Okay, let’s do this!

Question: Is the Gloria Film the actual name of the training video? I couldn't find an official reference for it?

Answer: No, the actual title was Three Approaches to Psychotherapy I, II, and III, but folks dubbed it the Gloria Films.

Question: Is the work really as old as it looks? I mean it comes across as ancient.

Answer: That’s because it is ancient. The actual filming took place in 1964 and the movie was released in 1965. In 1964 the Beatles made their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show and in 1965, "The Sound of Music" was a big hit at the box office, and the mini-skirt was just released.

Question: Who came up with the idea for the project?

Answer: The mastermind (aka the producer and director) behind the flick was a California psychologist and psychotherapist of note, Everett.L. Shostrom. He created some self-actualization inventories and two years after the Gloria films he authored a successful book, Man the Manipulator.

Question: Why do you think Dr. Shostrum got involved in this project?

Answer: At that time a shroud of secrecy had permeated professional psychotherapeutic helping. The books gave mountains of information about theories, but there was very little literature about what therapists actually said to clients. In 1950 Shostrom recorded the late, great Carl Ransom Rogers with a client on a magnetic wire (yes, go ahead and laugh, this predated digital, cassettes, reel to reel, and eight-track recordings). But: It was not to be. The recording was lost forever when the head of the history department recorded his own presentation of Adam and Eve on the wire recorder! I mean seriously, could I make that up?

Question: Why did Dr. Shostrom choose Albert Ellis, Carl Rogers, and Frederick (Fritz) Perls as the therapists?

Answer: Well, quite frankly, it was an all-star line-up. A lot of folks in the field felt these three helpers were the dream team . . . the best in the world, if you will. Perls created gestalt therapy; Ellis pioneered RET or rational emotive therapy (abbreviated RT at the time of the filming); while Rogers was the father of nondirective counseling which in today’s world is often called person-centered counseling.

Question: Why do my professors always call the approach by Ellis REBT? Is that the same thing as RET?

Answer: Late in his career Ellis added the “B” to stand for behavior based on the longstanding recommendation of a well-known psychologist and psychotherapy book author Raymond J. Corsini.

Question: Had Gloria met Perls, Rogers, and Ellis prior to the filming and what did she know about them?

Answer: No. She just knew they were prominent therapists and would each have approximately 15 or 20 minutes to cure her of what ailed her.

Question: Was Gloria a real client or merely an actress pretending to be a client?

Answer: Oh definitely, a real client. In 1963 Shostrom put together a film titled "Introduction to Psychotherapy." The film featured an actress who was pretending to be a real client. Shostrom was not happy with the movie, nor the acting, hence a real client, Gloria, was cast for 1965 project.

Question: I thought Perls acted like a jerk during his session. Do you have any evidence that Perls was aware of how he was coming across? I am totally sure my current internship supervisor would never allow me to treat a client in such a mean manner.

Answer: I can say with great certainty that Perls was aware of his actions. At one point in the session he quips, "Well, Gloria, can you sense one thing? We had a good fight?"

Question: So how do experts who practice gestalt therapy defend the practice of this theory?

Answer: Well, generally speaking, they say something like, "You don't need to do therapy exactly like Perls to be a gestalt therapist." To be fair, I have heard top practitioners say precisely the same thing about Ellis, though to be sure they are not talking the way Ellis came across in this movie. If you ever witnessed a therapy session or workshop conducted by Ellis he was often prone to use a little off color language, and that's putting it mildly!

Question: Okay, well here is my biggest question and the one I really want to know the answer to. In the movie, Rogers comes across in a very warm moving way. Ellis, is seemingly a tad less empathic, but not bad, while Perls is flat out mean to her. After Gloria experiences therapy sessions with all of them she is asked which therapist she would most like to continue therapy with and she chooses Dr. Perls. I was shocked. I mean, I just thought Rogers was the hands down winner. What in the world was going on here?

Answer: You were surprised, I was surprised, my entire graduate class at the time we viewed the films was surprised, and seemingly countless others who viewed the sessions were in shock and awe. There was just something not quite right about her choice of Perls. I didn’t buy into it then and I sure don’t buy it now. In fact, it was her strange choice of Perls which piqued my interest in researching the movie.

Personally, I thought it was the strangest response (from a client who was not psychotic) I had come across in the entire field of psychotherapy, and that's saying a lot!

Question: Did you find it difficult to research this film?

Answer: Do birds fly? Absolutely. Lots of people were trying to piece this puzzle together with very little success. Perhaps the most remarkable was a fellow I corresponded with in another country who was actually offering small rewards for information. Seemingly folks with connections to the film just were not talking. On one occasion a person who actually knew Shostrom told me he insisted I share anything I came up with him before I had it published! He wanted to approve or disapprove of what I was going to write. What? (Excuse me, but when did America stop being a free country? Just asking.) He also refused to give me any information and told me it wasn't relevant why Gloria chose Perls. This made me even more suspicious and made me want to research this even more!

Question: Did Gloria ever see Perls after the interview and if so what transpired? I hope the transaction was more cordial than the therapy session.

Answer: Yes they saw each other, but no it wasn't pleasant! According to Gloria, after the cameras stopped rolling and the experts and movie crew were preparing to depart, Perls used Gloria as a human ash tray (not a misprint). He motioned for her to hold her hands cupped with her palms facing up. He then flicked his cigarette ashes into her hand.

Question: Geez, that's downright abusive, wouldn't you agree?

Answer: Yeah! At the very, very least I could safely say it is behavior that was unbecoming of the father of a major psychotherapy modality.

Question: Lots of folks on the web accuse Gloria of having an affair with Rogers or Ellis. Some even suggest she married one of them. Any truth to the rumors?

Answer: Totally false. Junk science. Not a shred of evidence to support these claims. In fact, to the contrary, Gloria became very close to Rogers and his wife.

Question: Okay, so I can't wait another moment. Why did Gloria pick Perls as her favorite? Rogers came across so empathic. Wasn't he surprised when Gloria did not choose him? I have heard therapists say that Perls was chosen because she realized she needed a tough helper and he would not allow her to remain disturbed.

Answer: Rogers did admit he was baffled. In my mind Rogers gave a flawless performance. I'd give him five stars. Six if I could. As the session began to wind down Gloria says, "Gee, I'd like you for my father." Rogers replies, "You look to me like a pretty nice daughter." As you remarked earlier, it was very moving and Rogers came across as an ideal billboard advertisement for his own theory. Moments after the session with Rogers Gloria announced that, "All in all I feel good about this interview."

Three years before he passed away, Ellis told me that Gloria hated Perls for the rest of her life. Ellis revealed that the movie was "a fake" in the sense that, prior to the filming Gloria had seen Shostrom for four years of psychotherapy. When the film was produced Rogers didn't know this either. At the time, Shostrom was a supporter of Perls. To quote Ellis, "He [Shostrom] got her to say it was Perls who helped her, when he actually didn't." Was Gloria experiencing positive transference toward Shostrom? Was it just that she didn't want to disappoint her therapist? Could it have been that she was petrified of Perls? I don't have the definitive answer, but I think all of the aforementioned issues most likely entered into this. Just for the record Ellis felt he tried to cover too much in his own session with Gloria, and thus while his intervention was not horrific, he was clearly not at the top of his own psychotherapeutic game.

Question: So what is the take-away message you think counselors and therapists need to know?

Answer: Well, first let me be 100% crystal clear that there are occasions when a helper must be direct and use confrontation. No argument about that. Not now, not ever. However, after watching the movie, countless generations of therapists came away with the false notion that a sarcastic, up in your face, card carrying mental judo therapist (in this instance Perls) will walk away with the grand prize. Over the years I routinely heard therapists, supervisors, and my own students brag, "I got right up in the client's face and came across like Perls in the movie," thinking that was the best approach. According to Gloria's daughter (referred to as Pammy, just a fifth-grader at the time of the film), who authored Living with the 'Gloria Films': A daughter's memory in 2013, these Perls wannabes got it oh so wrong. After perusing her book it is safe to say the brief session with Perls negatively impacted her for the rest of her life.

Question: Is Gloria still alive?

Answer: Sadly, Gloria passed away in her mid-forties after a battle with cancer. I believe Gloria said it best herself as she was fond of saying, "Believe half of what you see and none of what you hear." Every aspiring and practicing therapist who wants to complete the emerging gestalt should see this film.

The Rolling Stones and the “Age of Anxiety”

Posted on June 14, 2016February 11, 2026 by Psychotherapy.net Team

As I tap away on the first installment of a my little blog about mental health in music, I sit only a hundred yards or so from a Chinese restaurant in my little East Texas town where, legend has it, Mick Jagger was at one time known to dine on occasion with his former paramour, model Jerri Hall. Hall is or was the owner of a ranch in the general vicinity, according to local lore. In any case, while wondering if Mick and I may possibly have in common a love of the establishment’s sumptuous Pu Pu Platter, I find myself also musing upon the 1966 Rolling Stones classic, “Mother’s Little Helper.”

This twangy two minute and 40 second tune is a scary short story of ennui and substance abuse set to music; complete with the trendy-at-the-time spooky sitar riff (which according to some experts may instead be a rather less-exotic electric 12 string guitar.) It tells the tale of the growing disenchantment of a mid-century suburban housewife and her descent into a rather tenuous pharmacologic subsistence. The mother sung of, it seems, has a doctor who writes her prescriptions for a “little yellow pill” even “though she’s not really ill. ” The listener meets the doleful protagonist at the point she has begun to rely more and more on this ostensible remedy for her world-weariness and to make it through her “busy dying day.”

The medication Jagger and the song’s co-author Keith Richards mention by size and color but not by name can be pinpointed by those details, the song’s context and a little knowledge of cultural and pharmaceutical history as Valium in 5mg dosage. A blockbuster product launched in 1963, the same year Betty Freidan published her best seller The Feminine Mystique, Valium promised prompt relief from what Friedan’s book called “the problem that has no name.” The pharmaceutical industry and advertising wizards of the era took a shot at naming it anyway and came up with “psychic tension.”

As the song progresses, Jagger disdainfully warbles on about the mother of the title exceeding her dosage (“Outside the door, she took four more”) after pleading for what probably was an early refill (“Doctor please, some more of these”) and alludes to dark consequences if things keep on this way. And in point of fact, Andrea Tone, in her 2008 examination of America’s troubled love affair with tranquilizers post WW II, The Age of Anxiety, seems to feel that the lady in the song is a goner. The “busy dying day,” Tone suggests, is actually a day in which mother’s busy dying. However, absent co-ingestion of potentiating substances, medical literature finds benzodiazepine overdose to generally be associated with low levels of mortality. (Not that it is a “safe” drug to consume counter to a prescriber’s instruction by any means–no drug is.)

But nevertheless, the wife and mother (the primary social constructs that much of society at the time, and probably she herself would employ in her cultural categorization) sounds as though she is falling victim to the all too common misconception that prescription drugs are harmless. Since her trusted doctor blithely prescribes her little yellow pills, and he in fact keeps giving her more, they must by definition be safe. If a little is good a lot is better.

While the song is a fictional vignette, it is perhaps rather representative of the negative potential of the power differential between physician and those in the patient role (particularly suburban homemakers) in the period before such considerations were even a matter of concern in care delivery. In a 1979 qualitative study seeking to determine social meanings of tranquilizer use, researchers Ruth Cooperstock and Henry Lennard identified “the culturally accepted view that is the role of the wife to control the tensions created by a difficult marriage” and an accompanying “implicit” acceptance “that drug use is justified in order to accomplish this.” All gender politics aside, mother’s negative feelings do abate for a time after the pills are taken. It’s just that she’s swallowing more and more pills, more and more often.

Yet sooner or later the haze lifts, albeit briefly, and there remains, as there always remains, that same unappreciative spouse, those same unyielding children and that more recently arrived acrid stench of burnt steak and cake resulting from stuporous attempts at cookery. All of which drive her to the distraction of her little yellow pills and further along the road to overdose and subsequent rest cure in a nearby sanitarium (this song is perhaps backstory for The Stones’ earlier hit, “19th Nervous Breakdown”). After all that there may indeed be “no more running for the shelter of a mother’s little helper,” at least not in the form of diazepam. The song’s good doctor would probably just scribble for something newer and “safer” when mother’s discharged with a clean bill of health. After all, she “isn’t really ill.” She’s just suffering from an unwanted buildup of psychic tension that can be washed away with the right chemical, as is the waxy yellow buildup on her lime-green kitchen floor.

The underlying human desire to avoid or extinguish psychic distress is of course much older than even The Rolling Stones (formed circa 1962). From the beginning of time, people in pain have sought what frequently turn out to be illusory or half-measure methods (e.g. a bottle of little yellow pills) to escape it. Often doing so to their greater disadvantage. Another Pop (psychology) Icon R.D. Laing, who somewhat coincidentally gave refuge to a confused gentleman who believed himself to be Mick Jagger at one of his “therapeutic communities” in the 70s, had this to say about such evasion, “There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain.”

Intuitive Therapy

Posted on May 17, 2016February 11, 2026 by Psychotherapy.net Team

Janice is sitting on the loveseat in my office. The sun slants through the Venetian blinds behind her, casting a warm glow that looks like an aura around her. She is a beautiful woman. This is just a fact.

“I was talking at a meeting at work. I really think the policy they’re considering is dangerous. I was ticking off point after point for some of the unintended consequences I see in the distance, and it’s like . . . like they weren’t even listening to me.”

. . . Because they all think I’m just a dumb blonde, are the words in my head that spilled into my awareness at the end of her sentence.

Where did these words come from? What do they mean? What do I do with them?

For many years in my career as a therapist I noted that the words popped up, and filed them away. Maybe somehow at some later point I’d understand their place.

Kimber is draped across the same loveseat. I’m absorbed in her posture, her rhythm, her tone of voice. “I want to go on vacation next month, but my boss told me that she really needs all hands on deck. She said I need to hang in there just another month.”

The word “boss” feels electric to me. It’s hot and bright. Where does that feeling come from? What does it mean? What do I do with it? File it away?

No, I say it out loud. “Boss. Can you talk about that?”

Kimber begins to unwind a long-standing schema that has been at the core of a lot of pain in her life.

Intuition has been the red-headed step-child of psychotherapy since Freud. While he publicly decried the occult, there are private correspondences in which he confessed that he thought that “telepathy” was an important part of his work.

In the world of risk-management and Evidence-Based practice, intuition is scorned. Even so, therapists have admitted in several studies that intuition is an important part of their clinical approach.

The good news for those clinicians is that there is growing research that, if not supporting the use of intuition, is at least legitimizing the existence of the phenomenon. Currently among cognitive psychologists there are two dominant models for what constitutes this phenomenon: the Heuristic model, and the Learning Theory model.

One of the better-known proponents of the Heuristic model is Kahneman. He has suggested that intuition is a quick-and-dirty problem solving strategy. Which variables get considered in this strategy are based on ease of retrieval. Ease of retrieval is highly influenced by emotional valence, which means that intuitive judgments are likely to be highly biased by emotion. Not too reliable, the heuristic camp warns.

The Learning Theory perspective has looked at the question from a different perspective, and has a different opinion on the reliability of intuitive judgments. From this perspective, intuition is the fast implicit processing of past experience and learning. These researchers suggest that “professional intuition,” or a judgment regarding an area of repeated experience and expertise, is often highly accurate.

Many psychoanalytic thinkers have developed an understanding of intuition as a form of unconscious communication. This communication can be explained by direct right-brain-to-right-brain communication, as the neuroscientist Allan Schore suggests, or by the operation of mirror neurons. In either case, the communication involves micro-expressions, or subtle changes in muscle tension and movement, along with para-linguistic aspects of speech such as tone, rate, volume, and prosody of speech.

There is one other theory that appears in the psychoanalytic literature. This is field theory. Field theory comes to us from the world of physics. Matter emits force. We know of two such forces: gravity, and electro-magnetism. The earth has a gravitational field that keeps the moon in orbit; the moon has a gravitational field that affects the tides on earth. The fact is, the force that the moon emits and the force that the earth emits intermingle. So really, both the earth and the moon exist in a force-field that is co-created by and effects both bodies. Some analytic theorists have suggested that this is a good metaphor for what happens in therapy. The existence of a co-created field allows therapist and client to be affected by each other’s unconscious processes and content.

I don’t know which, if any, of these theories is right. Maybe they all are. Maybe intuition is not just one thing. What I do know is that when I allowed myself to bring the words that pop into my head into the therapeutic conversation, when I repeat the “hot” words, or those that pop into my mind in my client’s voice, therapy goes deeper more quickly than it did when I kept these musings to myself.

Queer Couch for the Straight Girl

Posted on May 5, 2016February 11, 2026 by Psychotherapy.net Team

The Prescription

I prescribed Gone Girl for my client. Yes, the best-selling psychosexual thriller about a woman who rewrites her life—and perhaps a queer suggestion for a psychotherapist to make. But I am queer, and that is why Amelie chose me.

By queer I mean gay, but I also mean non-normative and unconventional. My approach to therapy is not informed by one school of thought but rather draws from various theories and experiences—as an actor, a writer, and a gay man. Because when we are queer or do not fit in, survival demands that we adapt and often, in the process, become our most awakened, alive, and creative selves.

Amelie’s wish to be those versions of herself may explain her choosing me as a therapist. But she put it to me more simply: as a straight woman she wanted to work with a gay man.

“Much has been written about how working with gay therapists benefits LGBT clients. But little, if anything, has been written about the benefits to straight clients in working with queer therapists.”

The Glass Box

Enter Amelie.

With a graduate degree in journalism, Amelie was a master of writing other people’s stories. Yet she found herself trapped in a story of her own and unable to write her way out. As her classmates landed jobs at major publications, she was still unemployed and struggling to get by. “I graduated from the top program in my field and I can’t get a job," she said. “It’s official. I’m a loser.”

Amelie had always been told who she was. When she was six she wanted to be an actor, but after seeing her in a school play her father chided, “That’s not you. Try something else." At ten, as her parents were divorcing, her mother tearfully told her, “You’re a good listener,” while Amelie kept her own grief to herself. In high school she was surrounded by frenemies who daily reminded her, “You’re the fat one,” though she was always thin. And in college, after repeated criticism of her creative writing, a professor told her, “You should really be a journalist.” The rest was history.

But this his-story wasn’t working out as she imagined—she couldn’t get a job—and it was finally time to try and write her story. Hence Amelie’s decision to start therapy. When we first met, she felt she was not up to the task, powerless and hopeless to author the next phase of her life. And after a few months, I too felt inadequate. When I empathized with her pain, she felt weak. When I emphasized her strengths, she disowned them.

“I can’t be helped,” she said. “It’s like I’m cursed to watch myself forever the way other people watch me, scrutinizing every move. And every move is always wrong. I see it. But I can’t change it.”

“That makes two of us,” I replied. “I see you locked in a glass box without a key. Every attempt I make to free you fails. Which only makes you feel worse, and makes me feel like a lousy therapist.” This made her feel understood for the moment. But what was next for us? We couldn't sit re-reading this hopeless story forever.

The story in which Amelie was trapped was that of a narcissistic father and a self-deprecating mother. Nothing was ever good enough for her father, including her mother (hence the divorce), and Amelie (so it would seem). He would boast about his own achievements but leave no room for Amelie’s. Her mother, on the other hand, would tell her, “It’s too late for me, but you, you can do anything.” While this would momentarily inspire Amelie to dream of success, where her father might finally see her, it also induced the fear of leaving her mother behind—sad, broken, and alone.

How could Amelie ever be good enough for her father without abandoning her mother, the only reliable source of comfort in her life? This was the glass box in which she was trapped. Every move Amelie made, like attending a fancy graduate school, was intended to strike a delicate balance: win her father’s approval, or at least avoid his critical eye, while at the same time not hurting her mother. She felt frozen, like a gymnast on a balance beam, always at risk of falling. Good reviews or accomplishments kept her safely in a spotlight, but only for a moment, and never enough to sustain her. In this hollow, frozen pose she was arguably safe, but ineffectual. Now, out of grad school and without a job, Amelie had finally fallen, at last revealed herself as a fraud, and let her public down.

I needed to shatter the glass box of this hopeless narrative, and to help her use the broken shards to build a new story of her own making. Yet my own feelings of inadequacy as a practitioner crept into the room, as did my fear that she would leave me behind (like her mother). I began comparing myself to better therapists—peers, mentors, renowned experts—asking myself, “What would they do?”

I looked to Freud and Oedipal theories. I would help her resolve the classic fear of destroying her mother so as to win the love of her father. I sat in our sessions, serenely allowing her to project feelings about her father onto me. I hoped that my subtle insinuating interpretations would lead her to a catharsis, the way a successful psychotherapy treatment is “supposed” to go. But it didn’t, because I couldn’t explain anything she didn’t already know. She was keenly aware of the Oedipal inferences in her dilemma, which made her all the more despondent that she couldn’t resolve it. My interpretations only tightened the lock on the glass box and magnified her feeling that she was not enough—even for her therapist.

Together we failed to tell the story the way it was “supposed” to go. I began to watch my every move, seeing myself the way I imagined she saw me: caught in the spotlight, wide-eyed, locked in my own box, stuck on my own beam. “I became an empty replica of a therapist, going through the motions, safe but ineffectual. Just like her.”

I did not usually try to play this role of the orthodox expert with my other clients, and I wondered why I was doing it with her. Could it be that her fear of disappointing her father induced similar fears in me? Was I afraid to un-closet myself to her? To reveal myself as a crap therapist, unintelligent, also a fraud?

“I thought of my closeted days in high school, how I would walk the halls watching my every move, hoping to camouflage myself from scrutiny and derision, hoping to pass, to be anything but gay.” I thought of my own days in therapy, and how the Oedipal story never really helped me to understand myself either. How being a boy attracted to boys in a hostile world had made my journey of self-discovery queer, outside of the box, and creative. How I had to write a new story of my own to make room for myself in the world.

Show Your True Colors

And then I realized it. By trying to pass as an “expert” therapist for Amelie—to be her Wizard of Oz—I had denied myself access to queer insights from behind the curtain that could be of use to her. Cut to me running late to work one day. Windblown hair, shirt untucked, coffee spilling—and Amelie watching it all as I approach the elevator bank. “Busted,” I think. Of course I don’t want her catching me backstage, disrupting the character I had tried to play for her: the serene, wise, powerful therapist. “You caught me in Bruce Wayne mode,” I say to her. And she laughs. In our session I share my embarrassment at being caught fumbling. I wonder if this resembles the feelings she has described in her own life.

Amelie seems relieved that I’m human. She says that none of the men in her life—including her boyfriend and her father—understand how much pressure she feels, as a woman, to hide her inadequacies and pain.

In the past I might have said something flat and clinical, like her father, or over-validating, like her mother. But this time I do something queer. I take a page not from a psychotherapy book but from one I read for fun—Gone Girl. I feel a momentary rush of humiliation as I take off my superhero mask and recommend a beach read—and not just to any client, but to one who is extremely well-educated and has read everything. Unsurprisingly, she has not read Gone Girl. But her eyes abruptly brighten, and I start to relax. I’ve made a crack in the glass box. Suddenly there is more possibility in the room.

I describe the character of Amy from the novel. How as a child her therapist parents had written books based on idealized versions of her that she could never live up to. How oppressively scrutinized she feels, and how her sudden disappearance gives her the freedom to write a new life. (Albeit one that involves murder and framing her husband for crimes he didn’t commit.) I suggest that the book asks whether the only way to make a straight man understand a woman is to rewrite his life, against his will.

“She laughs and says, playfully, “This is why I wanted to work with a gay man.””

Amelie wanted to be seen by someone who understood her experience of not fitting in. Someone who existed outside of tradition, who knew personally the need to adapt in an unwelcoming world, and who could help her to reclaim a lost sense of self. She wanted the man behind the curtain all along, not the Wizard of Oz.

I suggested that Amelie write a story about herself. Not a journalistic piece, but something more creative, outside of the box (without killing anyone). And she did. The following week she told me how rewarding it was to transform her pain and hopelessness into art. She radiated with the glow of achievement, and though she did not imagine the story would impress her father or get her a job, it represented something better: her capacity to make use of her own truth.

Ironically, the story was published in a prestigious journal. It was then spotted by the owner of a popular blog, who eventually hired Amelie as a staff writer. Ecstatic as I was for her, and for myself—didn’t this imply that I was, in fact, a wizardly therapist?—I had concerns. I asked her if this too-good-to-be-true outcome might validate her, and me, in all the wrong ways. Launching us back up onto the balance beam, for instance, or down into that suffocating glass box, with that old familiar fear of failing?

But then Amelie shattered my suggested narrative and pieced together one of her own.

“No,” she said. “The reward in writing that story was in writing it. I discovered how valuable it is to make meaning out of my own experience, no matter what the response. This job symbolizes a new self-narrative for me. I used to think I needed to contort myself to get anything in life—a friend, boyfriend, a job. But now I know that I can be truthful, vulnerable, and creative, and the opportunities available to me as a result will fit much better. I used to chop off my toes to fit into glass slippers. Now my slippers are custom-made.”

This is my version of Amelie's story. After she reads it, I’ll look forward to hearing her own.

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