Therapist Short Quotes

What people don’t like to think about is that you can do everything right—in life or in a treatment protocol—and still get the short end of the stick.

To make matters worse, everyone she talks to has a different opinion about the nature of his problem and what she should do about it. Her clergyperson may tell her, “Love heals all difficulties. Give him your heart fully, and he will find the spirit of God.” Her therapist speaks a different language, saying, “He triggers strong reactions in you because he reminds you of your father, and you set things off in him because of his relationship with his mother. You each need to work on not pushing each other’s buttons.” A recovering alcoholic friend tells her, “He’s a rage addict. He controls you because he is terrified of his own fears. You need to get him into a twelve-step program.” Her brother may say to her, “He’s a good guy. I know he loses his temper with you sometimes—he does have a short fuse—but you’re no prize yourself with that mouth of yours. You two need to work it out, for the good of the children.” And then, to crown her increasing confusion, she may hear from her mother, or her child’s schoolteacher, or her best friend: “He’s mean and crazy, and he’ll never change. All he wants is to hurt you. Leave him now before he does something even worse.” All of these people are trying to help, and they are all talking about the same abuser. But he looks different from each angle of view.

Happiness comes from making good choices. Integrity, energy, perseverance, and courage all contribute. In short, happiness is related to character structure, work, health and relationships.

Some seek the comfort of their therapist’s office, others head for the corner pub and dive into a pint, but I choose running as my therapy. It was the best source of renewal there was. I couldn’t recall a single time that I felt worse after a run than before. What drug could compete? As Lily Tomlin said, “Exercise is for people who can’t handle drugs and alcohol.” I’d also come to recognize that the simplicity of running was quite liberating. Modern man has virtually everything one could desire, but too often we’re still not fulfilled. “Things” don’t bring happiness. Some of my finest moments came while running down the open road, little more than a pair of shoes and shorts to my name. A runner doesn’t need much. Thoreau once said that a man’s riches are based on what he can do without. Perhaps in needing less, you’re actually getting more.

Go to every IEP with a plan of your own. Be the expert. Teachers and therapists know general information only. You, on the other-hand, know the specifics about your child – you are your child’s only real expert. Pop in unexpectedly to observe. Keep educators on their toes. Be kind and push gently. If needed, push hard.

This fear of dying would haunt me for the next forty years. It was an anguish that drove me to travel the world studying religions, magic, esotericism, alchemy, and the Kabbalah. It drove me to frequent initiatory groups, to meditate in the style of numerous schools, to seek out teachers, and in short wherever I went to search without limits for something that might console me in light of my transient existence. If I did not conquer death how could I live, create, love, prosper? I felt separated not only from the world but also from life. Those who thought they knew me only knew the makeup on a corpse. During those excruciating years, all the works I accomplished, as well as all my love affairs, were anesthetics to help me bear the anguish that gnawed at my soul. But in the depths of my being, in a hazy kind of way, I knew that this state of permanent agony was a disease that I had to cure by becoming my own therapist. At its heart, this was not about finding a magic potion to keep me from dying, but above all about learning to die with happiness.

Trust of others is in short supply for many adult survivors, as complex trauma generally involves major relational betrayal. It is, therefore, expectable (although paradoxical) that clients with these histories are predisposed to be mistrustful at the outset of therapy, precisely because of (and in proportion to) the actual trustworthiness of the therapist. When past experiences have thought hard lessons, namely, that one can least afford to trust the people who should be most trustworthy, it stands to reason that confusion about trust results. The therapist must understand and not take offense either personally or professionally and not react judgmentally or defensively. Practically speaking, this involves the therapist being prepared to patiently and empathically respond to active or passive tests or challenges to trustworthiness as legitimate and meaningful communication that deserves a respectful reply in action as well as in words.

short term always leaves us in a place worse off than when we started. — To properly heal from addiction, we need a holistic approach. We need to create a life we don’t need to escape. We need to address the root causes that made us turn outside ourselves in the first place. This means getting our physical health back, finding a good therapist, ending or leaving abusive relationships, learning to reinhabit our bodies, changing our negative thought patterns, building support networks, finding meaning and connecting to something greater than ourselves, and so on. To break the cycle of addiction, we need to learn to deal with cravings, break old habits, and create new ones. To address all of this is an overwhelming task, but there is a sane, empowering, and balanced approach. But before we discuss how to implement solutions to the Two-Part Problem, we need to address one of the bigger issues that women and other historically oppressed folks need to consider, which is how patriarchal structures affect the root causes of addiction, how they dominate the recovery landscape, and what that means for how we experience recovery. If we are sick from sexism, homophobia, racism, classism, microaggressions, misogyny, ableism, American capitalism, and so on—and we are—then we need to understand how recovery frameworks that were never built with us in mind can actually work against us, further pathologizing characteristics, attributes, and behaviors that have been used to keep us out of our power for millennia. We need to examine what it means for us individually and collectively when a structure built by and for upper-class white men in the early twentieth century dominates the treatment landscape.

Once, at the end of a session with Wendell, I told him that sometimes, on days when I left more upset than when I came in—tossed out into the world, having so much more to say, holding so many painful feelings—I hated therapy. “Most things worth doing are difficult,” he replied. He said this not in a glib way but in a tone and with an expression that made me think he spoke from personal experience. He added that while everyone wants to leave each session feeling better, I, of all people, should know that that’s not always how therapy works. If I wanted to feel good in the short term, he said, I could eat a piece of cake or have an orgasm. But he wasn’t in the short-term-gratification business.

I resolved to come right to the point. "Hello," I said as coldly as possible, "we've got to talk." "Yes, Bob," he said quietly, "what's on your mind?" I shut my eyes for a moment, letting the raging frustration well up inside, then stared angrily at the psychiatrist. "Look, I've been religious about this recovery business. I go to AA meetings daily and to your sessions twice a week. I know it's good that I've stopped drinking. But every other aspect of my life feels the same as it did before. No, it's worse. I hate my life. I hate myself." Suddenly I felt a slight warmth in my face, blinked my eyes a bit, and then stared at him. "Bob, I'm afraid our time's up," Smith said in a matter-of-fact style. "Time's up?" I exclaimed. "I just got here." "No." He shook his head, glancing at his clock. "It's been fifty minutes. You don't remember anything?" "I remember everything. I was just telling you that these sessions don't seem to be working for me." Smith paused to choose his words very carefully. "Do you know a very angry boy named 'Tommy'?" "No," I said in bewilderment, "except for my cousin Tommy whom I haven't seen in twenty years..." "No." He stopped me short. "This Tommy's not your cousin. I spent this last fifty minutes talking with another Tommy. He's full of anger. And he's inside of you." "You're kidding?" "No, I'm not. Look. I want to take a little time to think over what happened today. And don't worry about this. I'll set up an emergency session with you tomorrow. We'll deal with it then." Robert This is Robert speaking. Today I'm the only personality who is strongly visible inside and outside. My own term for such an MPD role is dominant personality. Fifteen years ago, I rarely appeared on the outside, though I had considerable influence on the inside; back then, I was what one might call a "recessive personality." My passage from "recessive" to "dominant" is a key part of our story; be patient, you'll learn lots more about me later on. Indeed, since you will meet all eleven personalities who once roamed about, it gets a bit complex in the first half of this book; but don't worry, you don't have to remember them all, and it gets sorted out in the last half of the book. You may be wondering -- if not "Robert," who, then, was the dominant MPD personality back in the 1980s and earlier? His name was "Bob," and his dominance amounted to a long reign, from the early 1960s to the early 1990s. Since "Robert B. Oxnam" was born in 1942, you can see that "Bob" was in command from early to middle adulthood. Although he was the dominant MPD personality for thirty years, Bob did not have a clue that he was afflicted by multiple personality disorder until 1990, the very last year of his dominance. That was the fateful moment when Bob first heard that he had an "angry boy named Tommy" inside of him. How, you might ask, can someone have MPD for half a lifetime without knowing it? And even if he didn't know it, didn't others around him spot it? To outsiders, this is one of the most perplexing aspects of MPD. Multiple personality is an extreme disorder, and yet it can go undetected for decades, by the patient, by family and close friends, even by trained therapists. Part of the explanation is the very nature of the disorder itself: MPD thrives on secrecy because the dissociative individual is repressing a terrible inner secret. The MPD individual becomes so skilled in hiding from himself that he becomes a specialist, often unknowingly, in hiding from others. Part of the explanation is rooted in outside observers: MPD often manifests itself in other behaviors, frequently addiction and emotional outbursts, which are wrongly seen as the "real problem." The fact of the matter is that Bob did not see himself as the dominant personality inside Robert B. Oxnam. Instead, he saw himself as a whole person. In his mind, Bob was merely a nickname for Bob Oxnam, Robert Oxnam, Dr. Robert B. Oxnam, PhD.

Yearning for some form of reconciliation, for a new, fresh beginning to their relationship, she looked forward to her father’s driving her to college—a time when she would be alone with him for several hours. But the long-anticipated trip proved a disaster: her father behaved true to form by grousing at length about the ugly, garbage-littered creek by the side of the road. She, on the other hand, saw no litter whatsoever in the beautiful, rustic, unspoiled stream. She could find no way to respond and eventually, lapsing into silence, they spent the remainder of the trip looking away from each other. Later, she made the same trip alone and was astounded to note that there were two streams—one on each side of the road. “This time I was the driver,” she said sadly, “and the stream I saw through my window on the driver’s side was just as ugly and polluted as my father had described it.” But by the time she had learned to look out her father’s window, it was too late—her father was dead and buried. That story has remained with me, and on many occasions I have reminded myself and my students, “Look out the other’s window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.” The woman who told me this story died a short time later of breast cancer, and I regret that I cannot tell her how useful her story has been over the years, to me, my students, and many patients.

The depressed person shared that she could remember, all too clearly, how at her third boarding school, she had once watched her roommate talk to some boy on their room's telephone as she (i.e., the roommate) made faces and gestures of entrapped repulsion and boredom with the call, this popular, attractive, and self-assured roommate finally directing at the depressed person an exaggerated pantomime of someone knocking on a door until the depressed person understood that she was to open their room's door and step outside and knock loudly on it so as to give the roommate an excuse to end the call. The depressed person had shared this traumatic memory with members of her Support System and had tried to articulate how bottomlessly horrible she had felt it would have been to have been that nameless pathetic boy on the phone and how now, as a legacy of that experience, she dreaded, more than almost anything, the thought of ever being someone you had to appeal silently to someone nearby to help you contrive an excuse to get off the phone with. The depressed person would implore each supportive friend to tell her the very moment she (i.e., the friend) was getting bored or frustrated or repelled or felt she (i.e., the friend) had other more urgent or interesting things to attend to, to please for God's sake be utterly candid and frank and not spend one moment longer on the phone than she was absolutely glad to spend. The depressed person knew perfectly well, of course, she assured the therapist;' how such a request could all too possibly be heard not as an invitation to get off the telephone at will but actually as a needy, manipulative plea not to get off-never to get off-the telephone.

Why do families blame themselves? If so many of the family theories have been discredited why spend so much time on the issue here? Family theories in mental illness continue to exercise a remarkably powerful hold over us despite the evidence. And not just in schizophrenia but in depression, anorexia nervosa, personality disorder, drug and alcohol abuse, etc. Parents seem to have an endless capacity to blame themselves for what happens to their children (and perhaps children to blame their parents). This is probably because we need to believe it. Just as we need to believe in free will and our influence on the outside world, family members need to believe that they influence each other. If we didn’t why would we bother? The evolutionary psychologists would say that parents need to believe it to invest years and years bringing up their children. We’re biologically programmed to look after our children so we need some belief system to support it (just as they might say we’re biologically programmed to mate and need to believe in love to support it). It is proposed that such a belief is a mechanism for sustaining our attention to our biological task. The downside is, of course, guilt and blame. If we believe we have an influence we feel we have failed if things do not work out well. It is inescapable. Even in expressed emotion work where therapists insist emphatically that no one is to blame and that the aim is solely to find more effective coping strategies, families do feel blamed. ‘If only we weren’t so over-involved he would not have so many relapses.’ ‘Other families must have dealt with it better otherwise how would the therapist know what to advise?’ For some families feeling responsible, despite the guilt, is preferable. It implies the logical consequence that there must be something they can do to influence the outcome. Cultures which value resignation are less likely to blame themselves (high expressed emotion is less common in India than in Europe).

John Bradshaw, in his best-seller Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child, details several of his imaginative techniques: asking forgiveness of your inner child, divorcing your parent and finding a new one, like Jesus, stroking your inner child, writing your childhood history. These techniques go by the name catharsis, that is, emotional engagement in past trauma-laden events. Catharsis is magnificent to experience and impressive to behold. Weeping, raging at parents long dead, hugging the wounded little boy who was once you, are all stirring. You have to be made of stone not to be moved to tears. For hours afterward, you may feel cleansed and at peace—perhaps for the first time in years. Awakening, beginning again, and new departures all beckon. Catharsis, as a therapeutic technique, has been around for more than a hundred years. It used to be a mainstay of psychoanalytic treatment, but no longer. Its main appeal is its afterglow. Its main drawback is that there is no evidence that it works. When you measure how much people like doing it, you hear high praise. When you measure whether anything changes, catharsis fares badly. Done well, it brings about short-term relief—like the afterglow of vigorous exercise. But once the glow dissipates, as it does in a few days, the real problems are still there: an alcoholic spouse, a hateful job, early-morning blues, panic attacks, a cocaine habit. There is no documentation that the catharsis techniques of the recovery movement help in any lasting way with chronic emotional problems. There is no evidence that they alter adult personality. And, strangely, catharsis about fictitious memories does about as well as catharsis about real memories. The inner-child advocates, having treated tens of thousands of suffering adults for years, have not seen fit to do any follow-ups. Because catharsis techniques are so superficially appealing, because they are so dependent on the charisma of the therapist, and because they have no known lasting value, my advice is “Let the buyer beware.

Albert Mohler Jr. for the Christian Post. “In short, [this] God is something like a combination Divine Butler and Cosmic Therapist: he is always on call, takes care of any problems that arise, professionally helps his people to feel better about themselves, and does not become too personally involved in the process.” In continuing his troubling dissertation,

So Amira Kashyap, what’s your story?” he asked as he set the big display stopwatch to a designated period of 59 minutes and 59 seconds. The perfectly tranquil way in which he asked me the question made me slightly nervous, even though I had spent the last few years of my life having imaginary conversations with an imaginary therapist. There were a lot of things I wished to tell him. From wanting to tell him about my first triggers to the very thought of me standing in front of a mirror haunting the living daylights out of me.These were just a couple out of the many thoughts in the archives of my brain. However, my mind went completely blank. I stammered and hesitated and managed to utter a total of seven words.“I don’t know where to start.” “Just say the first thing that crosses your mind,” he said. “I’m scared of food,” I blurted.

My parents are worried about me, so they take me to a lady, so I can talk about my dragon. She says she knows about dragons like mine. I am hoping for a magic spell or a dragon slayer, with sword in hand. No such luck; just a tiny woman dressed in a short skirt with a lot of pleats and a fancy top with tons of sparkles. […] She looks me in the eye and for some reason I don't feel like I have to look away.

Life is too short to not be happy

Most things worth doing are difficult,” he replied. He said this not in a glib way but in a tone and with an expression that made me think he spoke from personal experience. He added that while everyone wants to leave each session feeling better, I, of all people, should know that that’s not always how therapy works. If I wanted to feel good in the short term, he said, I could eat a piece of cake or have an orgasm. But he wasn’t in the short-term-gratification business.

Shelby put in her time, did the right thing, took good care of her mom, and now it’s her turn. She’s going to go back to school. She says she’s going to be a nurse, but you watch—she’ll end up a doctor or something. She’s quiet, but scary smart. She has money from selling a paid-off house—so she can travel all over the world, pay for a dozen years of college. You know how important that is, we’ve been all over the world and it’s worth seeing.” Aiden laughed. “I hope she sees better parts than we did. You saw a bunch of deserts, I went to sea, medical officer on a ship…” “But it all counts. Life experience—it’s worth it. She’s young—she has time to look around. I’ll tell you what—that girl’s going to have men hunting her down, she’s that good-looking. She never had that before. In high school she was shy, had a couple of short-term boyfriends, but she lost a lot of shyness, got tougher and more aggressive while she was taking care of her mom and had to go up against doctors and therapists and hospitals and insurance companies.” His eyes glistened proudly. “Believe me, she’s ready now. It’s her time.” He’s letting her go, Aiden thought. For her, though it’s going to kill him.

Therapy must begin with empathy - not a patronizing sympathy, but instead one that is unflinching (Marotta, 2003). Empathy of this sort is highly attuned to the client, no matter the circumstance. The therapist strives to "travel in the client's shoes" or to "view the world from the client's perspective" in order to really understand his or her emotions, cognitions, and beliefs - in short, to understand from the perspective of the other (Wilson & Thomas, 2004). Treatment involves understanding that a client's defeatist and apparently helpless, disempowered, or "masochistic" perspectives can be a logical outgrowth of formative traumatic experiences and, further, may be highly creative means of self-protection. The therapist must not attempt to undo or "make up for" past abandonment or betrayals by their client's caregivers or in their close relationships, but instead first understand the client's perspective and approach to the world, while working to provide alternative perspectives on both past and present that promote change.

The Passion Trap: How to Right an Unbalanced Relationship by relationship therapist and psychologist Dean C. Delis.

I’d been mistaking feeling less for feeling better. The feelings are still there, though. They come out in unconscious behaviors, in an inability to sit still, in a mind that hungers for the next distraction, in a lack of appetite or a struggle to control one’s appetite, in a short-temperedness,

In the beginning of their relationships, both short term and long term, the AVP seems to welcome assistance. As time progresses, they can see these same helpers as incompetent. This could be from a spouse helper to a therapist. When this occurs, passive–aggressive displays can be apparent, subsequent to distancing from a given relationship.

a 1907 report in the Montreal Star that cited a 24 percent national death rate of Native children in the schools (42 percent when counting the children who died at home shortly after being returned because they were critically ill). These children died of tuberculosis, starvation, or simple neglect. Many just disappeared; their parents were never informed. In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission reported that between four thousand and six thousand children had died. The number is probably much higher, since many were simply unaccounted for. Over the course of 150 years, more than 150,000 children went to residential schools. Because the death rates were so high, the residential schools stopped counting.

What people don’t like to think about is that you can do everything right—in life or in a treatment protocol—and still get the short end of the stick. And when that happens, the only control you have is how you deal with that stick—your way, not the way others say you should. I’d let Julie do it her way—I was so inexperienced that I didn’t have a strong sense of what a “way” should look like—and it seemed to help.

final problem of cognitive therapy is that it is generally a short-term treatment so it is unable to build a strong enough therapeutic alliance to allow the patient to experience the corrective emotional experience. Deep change does not happen when a patient is consciously reflecting on an emotion. Rather it happens when the patient actively experiences the emotion and when a resonating emotionally present therapist recognizes and regulates that emotion, thereby modeling new ways of being with another while one is under stress. There is no interpersonal space for this repair of attachment ruptures in current models of cognitive therapy, where left brain insight dominates over right brain interactive regulation. Coming to the end, Sieff asked Schore what message he would like people to take home from this interview. Schore answered that the earliest stages of life are critical as they form the foundation of everything that follows. Our early attachment relationships, for better or worse, shape our right brain unconscious system and have lifelong consequences. An attuned early attachment relationship enables us to grow an interconnected, well-developed right brain and sets us up to become secure individuals, open to new social and emotional experiences. A traumatic early attachment relationship impairs the development of a healthy right brain and locks us into an emotionally dysregulated, amygdala-driven emotional world. As a result, our only way to defend against intense unregulated emotions is via the over reliance on repression and/or pathological characterological dissociation. Faced with relational stress, we are cut off from the world, from other people, from our emotions, from our bodies and from our sense of self. Our right brains cannot further develop or grow emotionally from our interactions with other right brains. Too many people suffer alone with their desperate pain due to their early relational trauma. For somebody struggling with such emotional dysregulation, the way to emotional security, and to a more vital, alive, and fulfilling life, does not come from making the unconscious conscious – which is essentially a left brain process

her takes a good deal of clinical experience. More importantly, the therapist needs to have worked deeply with her own early life experiences, and has to actively work with it throughout the life span. A successful therapeutic relation precipitates emotional growth not only in the patient but also in the therapist. Sieff refered to the fact that short-term cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is currently very popular and widely used. Can it help with healing relational trauma? Schore answered that CBT is grounded in cognitive psychology, and its research base is grounded cognitive processes such as explicit memory, rational thought, language, and effortful conscious control. Cognitively based therapy’s basic theoretical assumption is grounded in the assumption that we can change how we feel by consciously changing how we think and what we believe. This means that cognitive therapy focuses on language and thought, both of which are located in the left brain. People who have trouble regulating their emotions typically have a left brain that is already more developed than their right brain, and they may well have learned to use rational thinking and words to obscure the deeper emotional experiences and to keep them dissociated. Cognitive therapy may strengthen the very strategies that keep the affect dampening defense of dissociation in place. Even if the left brain becomes more able to control the emotions of the right brain, it can only control emotional arousal that is of low or moderate intensity. As a rule, when emotional arousal reaches a certain level of intensity the left brain goes off-line and the right brain becomes dominant. Changes made in the cognitive strategies of the left brain are unavailable when this happens. At these times, emotionally-focused therapy may enhance the neural connections between the right amygdala and the right orbifrontal cortex which allows the patient to more effectively tolerate and regulate intense emotions. Cognitive therapy which exclusively focuses on the ability of the left brain to control the right cannot directly alter changes within the right-lateralized limbic system. The

hours spent surfing the internet (an activity my colleague calls “the most effective short-term nonprescription painkiller”).

For all of you who might be experiencing this, or something similar, I want you to know that it doesn’t go on forever and that ROCD has in fact a very good prognosis. Treatment with CBT and ERP is very favorable and has shown to produce effective results within a short period of time. In our case, after Hugh began practicing ERP with the help of his therapist (to whom I am eternally grateful), his attitude changed overnight. It was a revelation. He had been cold and distant and I had in turn reacted defensively. But then he made an effort to do ERP and in a matter of days he was completely different around me. He treated me with more kindness and he didn’t shy away from showing affection. Of course, there were still moments when he would be afraid and engage in his OCD. But those were nothing compared to the barrage of intrusive thoughts that harassed him and the compulsions he was giving into before. I felt like we might make it through to the other side. Now I understand that there isn’t really another side. We have needed to learn to keep going with the intrusive thoughts, but doing our best to ditch the compulsions. You might wonder that I speak in the plural here. Well, we both interact with Hugh’s OCD. I make the mistake of offering him reassurance more often than I would like to admit, and I sometimes ask him about the thoughts, both things I should never do. But even though OCD is incredibly tough, one can learn to live with it. And that has been one of the greatest lessons we have learned so far. We live with the OCD not as our companion, but as a condition, like so many others, in our lives (don’t forget that I also have OCD, although it doesn’t manifest as ROCD).

Of the two, Rick Doblin has been at it longer and is by far the more well known. Doblin founded the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) all the way back in the dark days of 1986—the year after MDMA was made illegal and a time when most wiser heads were convinced that restarting research into psychedelics was a cause beyond hopeless. Doblin, born in 1953, is a great shaggy dog with a bone; he has been lobbying to change the government’s mind about psychedelics since shortly after graduating from New College, in Florida, in 1987. After experimenting with LSD as an undergraduate, and later with MDMA, Doblin decided his calling in life was to become a psychedelic therapist. But after the banning of MDMA in 1985, that dream became unachievable without a change in federal laws and regulations, so he decided he’d better first get a doctorate in public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School. There, he mastered the intricacies of the FDA’s drug approval process, and in his dissertation plotted the laborious path to official acceptance that psilocybin and MDMA are now following.

Some of the prominent ones that have been particularly useful for many trauma survivors include dialectical behavior therapy for borderline personality (Linehan, 1993); systems training for emotional predictability and problem solving (STEPPS; Blum et al., 2008; Bos, Van Wel, Appelo, & Verbraak, 2010 also for borderline personality; short-term psychodynamic treatment of affect phobia (McCullough et al., 2003); and mindfulness and mentalization-based treatments such as acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT; Follette & Pistorello, 2007). In the past decade, manuals that specifically address the

My years with Dr. Maggie Cooper, a therapist who practiced in The Hollows just a short ride from school, helped me navigate the ugly terrain of survivor’s guilt and PTSD.

For a split second, Az thought Madi might tell him to move so he could slide in behind him, but after a moment's hesitation, he stepped into the oval-shaped tub and sat, moving until he was flush against Az, leaning back tentatively, shoulders up around his ears. Az chuckled. “At ease, motek. I simply want your company. I’m not waiting here with a weapon under the bubbles.” Madi relaxed visibly, resting his head against Az’s shoulder. “That’s better.” Az let his hands roam along Madi’s chest and torso. It seemed the best way to appreciate Madi’s form: slick, soapy fingers playing at his nipples, slipping along the ridges of his abdomen, threading through the hair just beneath his navel, stopping just short of his cock before slowly traveling upward again. Madi gave a sigh that sounded almost content. Az nuzzled behind his ear and along the curve of his throat, enjoying the salty tang of Madi’s skin on his lips. The longer Az caressed him, the more tranquil Madi seemed to grow, his chest rising and falling beneath Az’s hands. “Why didn’t you let me answer the question?” he finally asked. “What?” Madi asked, voice husky. “Earlier. Why didn’t you let me answer the question the therapist asked? What I admired about you? Did you think I’d have nothing to say?” Madi hesitated. “I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe I don’t want to know. Maybe once it’s out there, there’s no taking it back.” Az threaded wet fingers through Madi’s hair, murmuring, “And if I don’t want to take it back?” Madi took a deep breath, shaking his head. “What is there for men like us? Just this. Fighting. Fucking. Killing. Mistrust. Misunderstandings.” “Is that all this is to you?” Az asked, knowing in his heart that wasn’t how Madi truly saw them, even if it would make things easier for the both of them if he did. Madi was quiet, but his hand caught Az’s wrist, sliding to tangle their fingers together. This gesture spoke the words it seemed Madi could not, causing a warmth to spread through Az that rivaled the bath water. Az spoke before he could stop himself. “The first thing I admired about you was your beauty. You were a sight for sore eyes that night in the bar, and I was shocked you wanted me.” This time, it was Madi who turned his head, nosing under Az’s chin in a barely-there touch. “When I realized why you were there after a bit of shameless snooping, I dismantled your weapon, not because you were the competition, but because I realized after the night we spent together, the only way I’d ever see you again was if I did something to make you angry enough to want to get even.” Madi didn’t answer but squeezed Az’s hand. Az could feel the uptick in his breaths, which told him Madi was listening. “I admire your skill with a weapon, motek, your precision. The way you kill is art. Truly. But you fucked like you killed…from a safe distance, where nobody can harm you. I needed you closer to me. At the core of every stupid decision I’ve made, every backwards plan, it was always just that. I wanted you—the real you—as close as I could get you.” “Why?” Madi asked, voice raw. “Because I knew, even then I think, that I could love you, but I wasn’t sure I could ever break down your walls enough to get you to love me.” “Yet here I am.” Az raised their intertwined fingers to kiss Madi’s palm. “Yes, here you are.

For a split second, Az thought Madi might tell him to move so he could slide in behind him, but after a moment's hesitation, he stepped into the oval-shaped tub and sat, moving until he was flush against Az, leaning back tentatively, shoulders up around his ears. Az chuckled. “At ease, motek. I simply want your company. I’m not waiting here with a weapon under the bubbles.” Madi relaxed visibly, resting his head against Az’s shoulder. “That’s better.” Az let his hands roam along Madi’s chest and torso. It seemed the best way to appreciate Madi’s form: slick, soapy fingers playing at his nipples, slipping along the ridges of his abdomen, threading through the hair just beneath his navel, stopping just short of his cock before slowly traveling upward again. Madi gave a sigh that sounded almost content. Az nuzzled behind his ear and along the curve of his throat, enjoying the salty tang of Madi’s skin on his lips. The longer Az caressed him, the more tranquil Madi seemed to grow, his chest rising and falling beneath Az’s hands. “Why didn’t you let me answer the question?” he finally asked. “What?” Madi asked, voice husky. “Earlier. Why didn’t you let me answer the question the therapist asked? What I admired about you? Did you think I’d have nothing to say?” Madi hesitated. “I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe I don’t want to know. Maybe once it’s out there, there’s no taking it back.” Az threaded wet fingers through Madi’s hair, murmuring, “And if I don’t want to take it back?” Madi took a deep breath, shaking his head. “What is there for men like us? Just this. Fighting. Fucking. Killing. Mistrust. Misunderstandings.” “Is that all this is to you?” Az asked, knowing in his heart that wasn’t how Madi truly saw them, even if it would make things easier for the both of them if he did. Madi was quiet, but his hand caught Az’s wrist, sliding to tangle their fingers together. This gesture spoke the words it seemed Madi could not, causing a warmth to spread through Az that rivaled the bath water. Az spoke before he could stop himself. “The first thing I admired about you was your beauty. You were a sight for sore eyes that night in the bar, and I was shocked you wanted me.” This time, it was Madi who turned his head, nosing under Az’s chin in a barely-there touch. “When I realized why you were there after a bit of shameless snooping, I dismantled your weapon, not because you were the competition, but because I realized after the night we spent together, the only way I’d ever see you again was if I did something to make you angry enough to want to get even.” Madi didn’t answer but squeezed Az’s hand. Az could feel the uptick in his breaths, which told him Madi was listening. “I admire your skill with a weapon, motek, your precision. The way you kill is art. Truly. But you fucked like you killed…from a safe distance, where nobody can harm you. I needed you closer to me. At the core of every stupid decision I’ve made, every backwards plan, it was always just that. I wanted you—the real you—as close as I could get you.” “Why?” Madi asked, voice raw. “Because I knew, even then I think, that I could love you, but I wasn’t sure I could ever break down your walls enough to get you to love me.” “Yet here I am.” Az raised their intertwined fingers to kiss Madi’s palm. “Yes, here you are.

So many therapists tell their patients how to think and how to feel. That is awfully wrong” (Erickson, Rossi, and Rossi 1976, 101).

because everyone has demons—big, small, old, new, quiet, loud, whatever. These shared demons are testament to the fact that we aren’t such outliers after all. And it’s with this discovery that we can create a different relationship with our demons, one in which we no longer try to reason our way out of an inconvenient inner voice or numb our feelings with distractions like too much wine or food or hours spent surfing the internet (an activity my colleague calls “the most effective short-term nonprescription painkiller”). One of the most important steps in therapy is helping people take responsibility for their current predicaments, because once they realize that they can (and must) construct their own lives, they’re free to generate change.

Emotionally focused couple therapy (EFT) is a short-term, systematic, and tested intervention to reduce distress in adult love relationships and create more secure attachment bonds.

For the billionaires, champagne baths every morning and new Lamborghinis every afternoon couldn’t deplete the fathomless amount of cash on hand. “Your entire philosophy of money changes,” writes author Richard Frank in his book, Richistan. “You realize that you can’t possibly spend all of your fortune, or even part of it, in your lifetime, and that your money will probably grow over the years even if you spend lavishly.” There are dotcom entrepreneurs who could live top 1 percent American lifestyles and not run out of cash for 4,000 years. People who Bill Simmons would call “pajama rich,” so rich they can go to a five-star restaurant or sit courtside at the NBA playoffs in their pajamas. They have so much money that they have nothing to prove to anyone. And many of them are totally depressed. You’ll remember the anecdote I shared in this book’s introduction about being too short to reach between the Olympic rings at the playground jungle gym. I had to jump to grab the first ring and then swing like a pendulum in order to reach the next ring. To get to the third ring, I had to use the momentum from the previous swing to keep going. If I held on to the previous ring too long, I’d stop and wouldn’t be able to get enough speed to reach the next ring. This is Isaac Newton’s first law of motion at work: objects in motion tend to stay in motion, unless acted on by external forces. Once you start swinging, it’s easier to keep swinging than to slow down. The problem with some rapid success, it turns out, is that lucky breaks like Bear Vasquez’s YouTube success or an entrepreneur cashing out on an Internet wave are like having someone lift you up so you can grab one of the Olympic rings. Even if you get dropped off somewhere far along the chain, you’re stuck in one spot. Financial planners say that this is why a surprisingly high percentage of the rapidly wealthy get depressed. As therapist Manfred Kets de Vries once put it in an interview with The Telegraph, “When money is available in near-limitless quantities, the victim sinks into a kind of inertia.

This is not a conventional “how-to” book. It contains no exercises, and it has few formulas saying “first do this, then do that.” This is intentional. As we’ll see later, eros doesn’t like to be told what to do. If you set a goal, your sexual mind will be happy to reject it. It’s kind of childish and brilliant that way. You also won’t find much about sexual biology or neurochemistry on these pages. Sex books these days tend to be full of advice for “boosting your dopamine”—or your oxytocin, or some other such nonsense. In all my 30 years as a sex therapist, I’ve yet to see a dopamine molecule walk into my office. We’ll stick with things you can see and feel yourself, without needing a laboratory. I’ll also spare you the body diagrams. You already know what a penis and vagina look like, right? And we won’t discuss how many neurons are concentrated in your clitoris. It’s an impressive number, but who really cares? There are a few great sex books already out there, and I’ll point them out to you as we go along. But reading most of the others is like gnawing on dry bones. As my friend and colleague Paul Joannides, the author of Guide to Getting it On (one of the aforementioned great ones), has accurately noted, “the trouble with most books on sex is they don’t get anyone hard or wet.” This book is not intended to get you hard or wet. But it’s meant not to get in your way either. The chapters are short, so you can read them even if you get a little distracted. Hey, I hope you get a little distracted. There are no lists to memorize, and there won’t be a test afterwards. We’re dealing with a part of the human mind that hasn’t gone to school yet, and never will. Any questions? OK, let’s get started . . . Adapted from LOVE WORTH MAKING by Stephen Snyder, M.D. Copyright © 2018 by the author and reprinted with permission of St. Martin’s Press, LLC.

Why is this? How can experience be so valuable in some professions but almost worthless in others? To see why, suppose that you are playing golf. You are out on the driving range, hitting balls toward a target. You are concentrating, and every time you fire the ball wide you adjust your technique in order to get it closer to where you want it to go. This is how practice happens in sport. It is a process of trial and error. But now suppose that instead of practicing in daylight, you practice at night—in the pitch-black. In these circumstances, you could practice for ten years or ten thousand years without improving at all. How could you progress if you don’t have a clue where the ball has landed? With each shot, it could have gone long, short, left, or right. Every shot has been swallowed by the night. You wouldn’t have any data to improve your accuracy. This metaphor solves the apparent mystery of expertise. Think about being a chess player. When you make a poor move, you are instantly punished by your opponent. Think of being a clinical nurse. When you make a mistaken diagnosis, you are rapidly alerted by the condition of the patient (and by later testing). The intuitions of nurses and chess players are constantly checked and challenged by their errors. They are forced to adapt, to improve, to restructure their judgments. This is a hallmark of what is called deliberate practice. For psychotherapists things are radically different. Their job is to improve the mental functioning of their patients. But how can they tell when their interventions are going wrong or, for that matter, right? Where is the feedback? Most psychotherapists gauge how their clients are responding to treatment not with objective data, but by observing them in clinic. But these data are highly unreliable. After all, patients might be inclined to exaggerate how well they are to please the therapist, a well-known issue in psychotherapy. But there is a deeper problem. Psychotherapists rarely track their clients after therapy has finished. This means that they do not get any feedback on the lasting impact of their interventions. They have no idea if their methods are working or failing—if the client’s long-term mental functioning is actually improving. And that is why the clinical judgments of many practitioners don’t improve over time. They are effectively playing golf in the dark.11

Housemothers are all things to the girls—we’re therapists; we’re friends; we’re nurses; we’re short-order cooks; we’re tailors. Sometimes, we’re even plumbers.

And visit they will, because everyone has demons—big, small, old, new, quiet, loud, whatever. These shared demons are testament to the fact that we aren’t such outliers after all. And it’s with this discovery that we can create a different relationship with our demons, one in which we no longer try to reason our way out of an inconvenient inner voice or numb our feelings with distractions like too much wine or food or hours spent surfing the internet (an activity my colleague calls “the most effective short-term nonprescription painkiller”).

He’d given me permission to feel and also a reminder that, like so many people, I’d been mistaking feeling less for feeling better. The feelings are still there, though. They come out in unconscious behaviors, in an inability to sit still, in a mind that hungers for the next distraction, in a lack of appetite or a struggle to control one’s appetite, in a short-temperedness, or—

like so many people, I’d been mistaking feeling less for feeling better. The feelings are still there, though. They come out in unconscious behaviors, in an inability to sit still, in a mind that hungers for the next distraction, in a lack of appetite or a struggle to control one’s appetite, in a short-temperedness, or—in Boyfriend’s case—in a foot that twitched under the covers as we sat in that heavy silence under which lay the feeling that he’d kept to himself for months: whatever he wanted, it wasn’t me.