THERAPY STORIES

Stories include “Couples Therapy with a Twist,” “Shy Girl Turns Un-shy,” “How a Disaffected Husband Fell in Love with His Wife Again,” “Panic Attacks Eliminated,” “Claudia’s Remarkable Recovery from Childhood Sexual Abuse,” “Flying Blind but Better than Dad,” “Between Mexico and America,” “Dog Gone Phobia,” “Bratty Girl Decides to Become Nice,” “Foiling a Death Wish” and “Interpersonal Therapy of Depression.” (Names and other identifying information have been changed to protect clients’ privacy.)

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IF AT FIRST YOU DON'T SUCCEED, QUIT TRYING TO SUCCEED, AND TRY TRYING TO FAIL

With a client who felt depressed, cried a lot, and embarrassed herself in front of her co-workers, Dr. K at first worked at getting rid of her depression. But that didn't seem to help much. During the third of fourth session, the client began crying during therapy and said it was just like what always happened to her at the office where she worked — when she started crying she just couldn't stop. After watching sympathetically, and listening to her cry, it occurred to Dr. K to suggest that she try to cry harder instead of trying to stop crying. She tried it and immediately found she could not cry harder, in fact, she couldn’t keep crying at all. Her tears just plain stopped. From then on, when she wanted to stop crying, she just tried to cry harder. And it worked. After she wasn't being embarrassed to death at the office anymore, her depression seemed to evaporate. (The therapeutic technique involved here is known as paradoxical intention.)

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COUPLES THERAPY WITH A TWIST

My supervisor mentioned to me that clients sometimes don’t really want what they think they want. I didn’t see how that observation applied to this particular case, but I was new to doing therapy — a student in a practicum at a mental health clinic in Mira Mesa, in San Diego County, California, in the late 1970s.

My client, a twenty-nine year-old Filipina woman, had come in alone. She wanted her live-in boyfriend to be more financially responsible and to keep his promises. She also wanted him to ask her to marry him, but she didn’t know how she’d respond, if and when he proposed.

She had a pattern of living with a guy for several years, but when he proposed to her, she’d say no and they’d break up. She’d seduce and fascinate a guy, move in with him, then break it off when he got around to trying to make the arrangement permanent.

The woman was competitive with other women, and with men, too, but nothing in her background or her personality seemed to explain the “Marry me! (But I’m really not interested)” pattern. A female friend who read a rough draft of this story said, “Every woman needs validation, so perhaps she needed to know that he really wanted her, but after knowing that, she would then decide if she really wanted HIM. A woman wants to be wanted, and then she feels confident in herself. Many women feel validated by the fact that they have a man desiring them.”

My Filipina client had set her sights on her current boyfriend because he was strong-jawed, handsome, fit, charming, a winner, easy-going, a dancer, and the object of many other women’s lust. While he was emotionally loose, she was emotionally tight. While he drank to excess, she never got drunk. And while ran up his credit card balances, spending money hand over fist, she saved her dough until her bank account bulged.

Her stated objective was to get him all the way in harness. She wanted him to come home when he promised he would; to spend less time with his buddies and his video games; to spend more time with her; to pay off his credit card debts; and to start putting money in the bank. She was grooming him to be a good husband and father.

For his part, he said he appreciated her efforts, and he was trying. “I used to be a fairly bad type of guy,” he said, but he wanted to be — and do — better. He respected his girlfriend. In fact, he held to her like a drunken gambler clings to the fundamentalist minister who is saving him from a life of sin.

But still, something wasn’t right. The woman (my primary client) felt she wanted more from her boyfriend — more commitment, more respect, more responsibility. And she wanted that marriage proposal — to which she still wasn’t sure how she’d respond, with a Yes or a No.

After about six conjoint sessions, when the woman came in by herself, she told me how they’d met and how she’d been so intrigued by his “hard-to-get-ness.” All the women in their group wanted him, and she got him. The straight-laced, glasses-wearing, proper, upwardly-mobile, money-in-the-bank girl got the handsome, hard-drinking, womanizing, partying, stay-out-all-night, loose, juicy playboy. But now that she had him under her thumb, she missed the way he used to be — casual, careless, and care-free.

With this information under my belt, the break-through came in the next conjoint session. For the first time, her boyfriend complained. He talked about his reaction to her constant nagging. He said that if one of his buddies nagged or criticized him in that fashion, he’d just brush it off and say “fuck you,”and that would be the end of it. I suggested maybe he needed to find the boyfriend-to-girlfriend equivalent of the buddy-to-buddy “fuck you,” and start responding that way to her.

Nest session, he said he’d done as I suggested, and that everything was better between them. For her part, the woman had no more complaints. We terminated therapy, with the understanding that they could call me for more sessions if and when they needed it.

The interesting thing was the fact that the woman said she wanted her boyfriend to toe the line. But when it came down to it, his towing the line didn’t satisfy her. What she really wanted was the guy she had chased after in the first place, the carefree wild-man. When he broke out of the overly domesticated role she had saddled him with — when he reclaimed his “spine” or his “balls” — her long list of complaints mysteriously evaporated. It wasn’t that he had begun drinking again (he hadn’t), it wasn’t that he was spending money again like it was water (he wasn’t), and it wasn’t that he was chasing after other women (he wasn’t). It was just that he started standing up for himself. He talked back to her when she carped at him, and for some reason, that made her feel better.

About this issue, my female friend said, “I think you found the perfect solution to their problem, Steve. Good job. Every woman wants her man to love her, respect her, and do her bidding, but without giving up his macho, man-like qualities. A woman really needs to look up to — and respect — her man.”

What I don’t know, and what I wish I knew, was whether he ever asked her to marry him, and if he did, whether she answered him “Yes,” or “No.”

This case fascinated me because it illustrated the workings of compensatory attraction. We are drawn to someone who has the qualities our personality type lacks, but needs. The female workaholic perfectionist is drawn to the bad boy’s spontaneity and playfulness — and vice versa.

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SHY GIRL TURNS UN-SHY

She didn’t want to get anywhere close to me. She didn’t want me looking at her for more than a second. She’d hide by jamming her face into her mother’s hip, stomach or breast.

Her mother complained that she didn’t make friends at school, and didn’t speak up in class. Some days she’d act normal, but most times she wouldn’t.

In her shy way, she was a charming, playful, five-year-old girl. The way she related to me, or avoided relating to me, seemed like a game. She’d look at me, all wide-eyed, and then escape from the contact byrunning to bury her head in a cushion on the couch, or in her mother’s lap. Her mother would always receive her in a friendly, loving way. Mom wasn’t irritated or punitive, just concerned.

I listened to the mother’s descriptions of her daughter’s behavior, and at the same time, I kept playing the “make-contact, break-contact” game with the girl. At first, the girl stayed as far away from me as possible. But for all her shyness, she was adventurous, too. She climbed along the back of the 15 foot-long, wrap-around sofa. She explored everywhere. After a session or two, it seemed she was getting more comfortable with me, and she would walk around the office, sometimes getting closer to me. When she got close, I initiated a game of grabbing for her, and she would run away to the safety of her mother. I made sure my “grabs” were slow enough to avoid appearing dangerous, slow enough to be playful. Then, I escalated by tugging on her foot when she was wrapping her arms around her mother. She’d peek at me and pull away, but she seemed more intrigued than fearful.

I didn’t have much hope that my approach would pay off. I was just flying by the seat of my pants, making it up as I went along. Since the girl wouldn’t talk with me, I couldn’t think of anything else to do but play those make-contact, break-contact games.

After two or three sessions, I suggested the mother bring in the girl’s brother, figuring the girl might feel more comfortable with me if another person she knew and felt safe with was there. So, the next session, her brother, a few years older than the girl, joined us. He was totally comfortable with me from the start, interactive and playful and not the least bit shy. The girl saw us interacting happily, and she became a little bolder.

To make a long story short, the girl eventually became as playful with me as her brother was, climbing on my lap, playing “tag-the-therapist-and-get-away-before-he-grabs-your-arm” and other games we made up. I never stopped looking at the girl, always kept her in mind, and I made sure to make my play genuinely playful, and never strayed over the line into something that could frighten the child. Nevertheless, “pretend fright” was the essence of all our games. Eventually, after four or five sessions, she felt comfortable enough to hug me around the waist as I was sitting in my chair. Another breakthrough came when she let me tickle her, and she tried to tickle me.

Throughout all this therapeutic play, she seldom said anything to me, or to her mother, although she did talk and argue with her brother from time to time. With the two adults in the room, her mom and me, it was all a matter of approach/avoidance on the girl’s part, unmediated by words.

My hypothesis had been that if she got comfortable with me, she would be more comfortable with other people, too. Looking at it now, I don’t know if that was a reasonable theory or not, but one day the mother told me her child was now chatting as much as any other kid at school, and not acting the least shy. She said the girl’s teacher was amazed and wanted to have my phone number to offer to other parents.

I was surprised. The weird thing is, I didn’t really know how it worked. I thought maybe the improvement in behavior might have been coincidence, or a matter of the girl just growing up a little more. But the mother didn’t think so. She praised me and thanked me and seemed supremely happy with the results of therapy.

Now that I’ve written this down, it occurs to me that the girl’s mother might have been right, and rather than maturation or chance, the therapeutic process may actually have been responsible for improving the girl’s behavior. My approach was 100% intuitive, but when I think about it in a more structured way, the reason the therapy worked may have been as follows. First of all, the girl’s diagnosis would have been Social Phobia (DSM IV 300.23). In other words, she was terribly afraid of social interaction with strangers. Without having planned to do so, and without thinking about it in these terms, I ended up using several behavior therapy strategies – (1) “modeling,” by having her older brother show her it was possible to relate to an adult male stranger (me, the therapist) in a fun and fearless way, and (2) “in vivo desensitization,” or “exposure therapy,” by having this adult male stranger keep focusing his attention on the girl, minute after minute, without ceasing, without getting tired, without getting bored, without tuning out and then turning his attention to someone or something else. In this way, from the girl’s point of view, the feared stimulus, the stranger, gradually changed into a manageable stimulus, even an entertaining and delightful stimulus. Through the phenomenon of stimulus generalization, the girl realized that other people she feared and avoided might turn out to be fun and entertaining, too. And she lost her shyness! Using the terminology of the medical model, we could say she was “cured,” although there was nothing medical about it. It was all psychology.

In connection with this case, I am reminded of one of the unforgettable moments of my career. I was working at the Centinela Child Guidance Clinic in Los Angeles County. During an in-service presentation, an elderly, gray-haired African American psychiatrist, on the verge of retirement, talked about working with troubled or difficult children. “We sit down on the floor with them and play games,” he said, “and – magically – everything gets better.” I’ve never forgotten his charming, and deceptively simple, explanation. That accessible, kind, gentle, grandfatherly man exuded a goodness that healed the kids he worked with. I hope maybe I’ve come to a place in my life, now, at age 65, where I can do the same.

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HOW A DISAFFECTED HUSBAND FELL IN LOVE WITH HIS WIFE

“He doesn’t sleep with me anymore,” said the beautiful young wife, her voice quivering with distress. “He sleeps in a different bedroom. He doesn’t talk to me anymore.”

I listened to her complaints for one session, and I felt the depth of her corrosive anxiety. At first, I thought her husband must be “the bad guy,” because that’s the way she portrayed him. He was ignoring her, for no reason at all. He was a bad man.

I could not understand how her husband had become turned off to his wife, because the young woman in front of me was lovely in every respect, and lively, and as winsome as a happy child. Only she wasn’t happy, she was miserable. Even miserable, though, she was still gorgeous and winsome.

I developed an idea of what was going on, but I couldn’t confirm it without seeing how her husband acted with her. Realizing we were going nowhere unless she brought her husband in, I encouraged her to do so. She canceled several appointments, saying he refused to accompany her, or that he told her he became tied up at the last moment.

Finally, they came in together. She looked at him and complained to him — non-stop — while he looked straight ahead and answered in the fewest words possible. Sometimes he rolled his eyes as if to say, “Oy vey.” He was disengaged and disaffected. I could see that she would never be able to change him, so I offered the only advice that would help her get what she wanted.

“Never pursue a distancer,” I said to the beautiful, yet sad wife.

“What?” She looked puzzled; she didn’t understand.

“Your husband is putting distance between himself and you,” I said, “and you are running after him, trying to get him to pay attention to you. Stop it.” I paused for effect. “It never works.”

“But what can I do?”

“You catch more flies with sugar than with shit,” I said.

“What!?”

“Have you ever been out camping or picnicking where there are a lot of flies buzzing around and bothering everybody?”

“I’ve never been camping.”

“If you want to get rid of the lies, you use traps. Fly traps have to be baited with something that the flies can smell. Sugar-water works, or opened fruit. Shit also works. Anything smelly will attract flies into the trap, and then they can’t get out. But sugar works better than shit. When I was in the Boy Scouts — being young, curious and male — we tried both sugar and shit, and sugar always worked better.

“I don’t get it,” she said. “What does that mean? – ‘You catch more flies with sugar than with shit.’ ”

“It means that if you want to attract your husband, you have to ply him with something sweet rather than something shitty. You have to be sweet, rather than miserable, whining and shitty. You have to calm yourself, center yourself, get peaceful, and get happy, deep within yourself. Then he’ll come to you. Don’t go to him complaining and nagging. Let him come to you because he is drawn to your beauty and your peace and your contentment.”

She got the idea. I gave her a homework assignment: “Don’t try to start any conversations with your husband this week. Don’t go to him. Let him start conversations with you. Let him come to you. Don’t say anything to him unless he says something to you first.”

Next week, they both came in, and she said, smiling, “He’s sleeping with me again, in the same room, all night. And we’re having sex, too.” She looked happy. “It worked,” she beamed.

“Then I guess that’s all the therapy you need,” I said. “Call me if something else comes up.”

It was that simple. Two sessions and the sad, beautiful wife turned herself into a happy, beautiful wife. All it took was for her to implement one simple yet powerful idea — sugar over shit.

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PANIC ATTACKS ELIMINATED

A successful lawyer (I’ll call him “Paul”), age 49, came to see me to help him get rid of panic attacks. An impressive blond-haired fellow, broad-shouldered, with a deep voice, Paul stood well over six feet tall. His manner bespoke years of telling people what to do. Whenever Paul said “Jump!” he was used to having people respond with the proverbial “How high?” He’d gained the reputation of being at the very tip top of top-notch attorneys in his field. His law practice was so successful that he spent days, sometimes weeks, on legal business in Chicago, New York City, and various European capitals, and we had to schedule our sessions around his trips out of town.

Paul had a panic attack the day after his 49th birthday. At first he thought it was just a result of drinking a little too much the night before, but his heart raced, his palms got sweaty, his vision blurred, his legs went weak, his hands trembled, he felt like he was choking and he thought he was going to die. Fearing he was in the midst of a heart attack or a stroke, Paul asked his wife to drive him to the nearest hospital emergency room. The doctors kept him for six hours, gave him a bunch of expensive tests, concluded it was a panic attack and told him to find a psychologist or a psychiatrist.

“We can eliminate the panic attacks,” I told Paul. Some panic attacks seem to come out of nowhere, but most can be attributed to the patient’s worries, tension and stress. When I went through my series of intake questions, Paul revealed that what had panicked him was that he had turned 49, and he’d always promised himself that he would make partner in the firm before he was 50. With only one year to go, he had begun to worry that if he didn’t make partner by 50, he could be considered too old and might never make it. In addition, his marriage was under considerable strain. His wife, 37, had been listening to her biological clock — tick, tick, ticking — and wanted a baby. Paul didn’t want a child, but he loved his wife, and he feared she might leave him if he didn’t agree to foster some progeny before she lost the chance forever.

To help him cope with his anxieties, I taught him a technique called Jacobsen’s Progressive Muscle Relaxation, and asked him to practice it four times a day. “When you relax your muscles thoroughly, your mind follows along and relaxes, too.” I mentioned that this was what made Valium work — it relaxes your muscles first, and your mind follows suit. But I told him I didn’t want him taking tranquilizers or muscle-relaxants because they can become addictive, and during the withdrawal phase, after you stop using them, your anxiety and tension can go up as high as before you started. I suggested to Paul that once-a-week therapy would be a good idea. We would eliminate the symptoms first, and then delve into the causes. Usually, in psychotherapy, you address the causes first, or at least right along with the symptoms, but with panic attacks (and to a certain extent with some other disorders) the symptoms are so frightening and debilitating that it is wise to alleviate them right away, with relaxation exercises.

A week later Paul came in to see me again. “Better,” he said, “but I still feel jittery inside, as if something’s terribly wrong and everything’s going to fall apart.” I asked him to close his eyes, take a deep breath, place his feet flat on the floor and sit with his hands apart, resting on his thighs. I took him through the Autogenic Training Program developed by a German medical doctor many years ago. Twenty-five minutes later, he opened his eyes slowly and stretched his hands above his head. “I feel like I just woke up from a two-year nap,” he declared. “I’ve never felt this relaxed in my entire life!”

“Relaxation and anxiety are mutually exclusive,” I explained. “When you feel one of them — thoroughly — you can’t feel the other.”

During our third session, Paul said he’d been doing the muscle relaxation four times a day, every day. To make sure I had enough background information, we reviewed the 50 questions on my intake form. When I delved a little deeper into his family relationships, Paul said he hated his father, the worst of the worst, the rat who divorced his mother and left them all alone. The only good thing that eventually came from his parents’ divorce was the new guy in his mother’s life, who later became Paul’s step-father — an ideal dad — concerned, charming, smart, accessible and caring. To Paul, his biological father was all bad, while his step-father was all good.

Paul’s therapy evolved into a discussion about his two fathers. Bio-dad was the epitome of everything negative — he deserted Paul’s mom (and Paul himself) when Paul was eight, moved two hundred miles away, never sent birthday presents, never returned phone calls, and didn’t care. A horrible man, this bio-dad. Nevertheless, after a number of sessions during which I heard more and more about this terrible guy, I began to wonder what Paul wasn’t telling me. If step-dad was wonderful, and right there at hand, and bio-dad was atrocious, and two hundred miles away, why was Paul fixated on the short-comings of bio-dad? Why hadn’t he just relaxed into the warm embrace of his step-father? Something didn’t fit. To paraphrase Shakespeare, it seemed Paul was protesting too much.

Little by little, the hidden side of the story came out. In actual fact, Paul’s biological father had been involved with him quite a bit, even after the divorce. He’d driven down for Paul’s little league baseball games, he’d spent time playing “catch” with him, and he’d invited Paul to his new home to hang out on weekends, taking him to see all the nearby attractions. Not only that, but when Paul was about 16, and feeling suicidal after some huge disappointment, his dad had driven down and spent the day with him and offered him guidance that resonated so deeply that it saved his life.

After months and months of therapy, it turned out that, underneath it all, Paul did not detest his biological father. Quite the contrary. He loved him so much that he couldn’t stand feeling the separation, so he covered it over and hid it from himself with hatred. Hate is love made angry. This was a whole different story from the one Paul told me in the beginning. As soon as Paul realized that he loved and missed his biological dad, and that he thought his bio-dad was one of the finest men on earth, he started wanting to have a son. He told his wife to throw out the diaphragm and to quit taking the Pill.

His wife was elated. Coincidentally, a month later, his law firm offered to make him a partner. Needless to say, Paul was a happier man than when he first came in for therapy. About ten months after he started, Paul was feeling great. We terminated therapy.

The key, in this case, was the exploration of Paul’s feelings about his father. I’ve never met a man who idolized and enjoyed his father so much, and I’ve never met a man who had so completely fooled himself about what he really felt. When Paul was able to hold a positive image of his father in his mind, he was then able to imagine himself becoming a good father, too. It was at that point that he decided he wanted a child, and that willingness warmed up his marriage.

Right after his 40th birthday, Paul called to set up another appointment. The anniversary of his panic attack had spooked him. We did the Autogenic Training Program for three sessions. Every year, he came in again just after his birthday for another series of relaxation sessions, and to talk about what was going on in his life. He never suffered another panic attack.

Paul’s cover-up story about his horrible bio-dad shows how our minds can spin layers of fiction to help us cope. However, while protecting his feelings by denigrating his dad, Paul ended up hurting an important part of himself. To paraphrase the title of a book, this case illustrated the fact that, at least in part, My Father = My Self. Paul had the courage to work through his pain and explore his deeper feelings, and it changed his life.

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CLAUDIA’S RECOVERY FROM CHILDHOOD SEXUAL ABUSE

In her twenties, Claudia radiated beauty and misery. I’ve never seen a woman prettier, or gloomier. She came to see me for therapy while I was serving as an intern in the psychiatric unit of a hospital in the largely Polish community of Wyandotte, Michigan, south of Detroit, in the early ’80s.

Three men raped Claudia when she was four and didn’t stop ’til she was twelve.

Claudia’s earliest memory? Sitting on a bed, naked, in a pool of blood.

Seething with hatred, totally unhappy, Claudia prayed daily to find a therapist who could help her. She’d visited several other counselors before she called me. When she heard my voice on the phone she thought maybe I would be the one to finally make a difference.

Claudia arrived at my office with her 6-year-old son Michael. He wanted something from her—reassurance, cuddling, or just a warm word and a loving glance—but she was cold and distant. She treated little Michael with impatience and outright irritation, as if he were a heavy rock chained around her neck.

Anxious and fidgety, her son sat in the waiting room while Claudia and I talked. After learning her history, I told her, “The sexual abuse was not your fault.”

“I know it wasn’t my fault,” Claudia said. She did know, intellectually, but emotionally, most of us want to believe that the adults around us are good-hearted. If they hurt us, we think we must have deserved it. I deserved to be raped, she must have thought. It was my fault.

“Roll up the windows in a car,” I suggested, “and yell, ‘It wasn’t my fault!’” Claudia said she already knew it wasn’t her fault, so she didn’t see a reason to do any silly yelling. I prevailed upon her. “Try it and see.”

A week later, when she came in for her session, Claudia said she’d yelled over and over, “It wasn’t my fault! It wasn’t my fault! It wasn’t my fault!” Then she’d started crying, and kept crying for two days while horrific scenes flashed before her eyes, memories of being repeatedly raped by her step-father, repeatedly raped by an older cousin, and repeatedly raped by the teenage son of one of her drunken mother’s drunken friends. Remembering, she sobbed and wailed. After two days, she stopped crying, she mentally forgave her abusers, and she felt better.

This young woman’s steely defensiveness and deep unhappiness had disappeared. I was astounded it happened so fast. In one week, she’d overcome many of the ill effects of the sexual abuse. Now Claudia gazed at her son Michael with fondness, and when he asked something of her, she attended to his needs. It looked like she actually loved him. Her son, for his part, seemed cheerful and relaxed.

As a psychology intern at the hospital, I had a supervisor, whose first name, coincidentally, was Steve. He told me to look around the edges of Claudia’s swift recovery, because it might be a “flight into health.” There had to be more going on beneath the surface, Steve said, and I should be vigilant and watchful rather than just kicking back and celebrating.

I figured Claudia had made such astounding progress because she believed that God was helping her. She was convinced He could change everything, make wine out of water, move mountains, raise the dead, create peace where there had been enmity, and put love and forgiveness in the place of hatred. “The Lord is moving in my life,” she said during her first session. And indeed, something had moved in her, something had changed. Gone was the seething hatred. Gone was the tension in her back, neck, and shoulders. Gone the constricted, angry tone of voice. Gone was the resentment towards her son. I am not a religious or spiritual counselor, and I didn’t say anything to Claudia regarding religion, but I had to admit that her positive beliefs and expectations may have been one of the reasons she was able to transform herself so rapidly. It usually takes years.

JUST ’CAUSE THEY WERE MALE
Claudia and Michael were happier than they had ever been. The only one who wasn’t climbing onto the happiness bandwagon was Claudia’s husband, Richard. From his point of view, they whole thing must have looked exceedingly strange. His wife gets into therapy, next day borrows the car for a few hours, comes home sobbing, locks herself in the bathroom, and cries nonstop for two days and two nights. Then, after the crying ceases, she is inexplicably cheerful.

Richard, Claudia’s husband, had been the stronger one. At the end of every marital argument, he’d been the victor. But now his wife was unfailingly happy and it was impossible to get her down. She was always up, up, up, and you’d think it might have made him glad, but, no, it got him down. He rolled out his cleverest interpersonal trickery, but she’d just toss her head and say, “Oh, that doesn’t matter.” Poor guy, how was he supposed to deal with the iron-willed Pollyanna who had replaced the tractable (although resentful) and submissive (although unhappy) woman he had married? Richard must have felt confused.

Claudia said she wanted to leave him, but I suggested she give him a chance to adjust.

After a few weeks, when it looked like Richard couldn’t or wouldn’t adapt, Claudia still wanted to leave him. I asked if she would be willing to invite him in for couples therapy. She ran the idea by him, but he wouldn’t agree to it. “Give him time,” I said. Claudia said she was tired of him because he always acted grumpy and mean-spirited. I understood her feelings, but I also felt for him. “Give him a chance,” I advised.

Claudia started missing appointments. She’d come once, miss once, come again, then miss again. After a while, she just plain quit. I phoned her and left messages, and she’d leave a message in return, promising to come. But then she wouldn’t show up.

After two months without a session, I phoned her, got her on the line, and heard the deep, slow rhythm of hopelessness in her voice. Uh oh, I thought, severe depression. Furthermore, I thought, I was wrong. I should have listened to her. I should have let her leave her husband. I figured I’d been wrong to ask her to give Richard time to adjust. Perhaps she’d been dying to get out of her marriage for years, and the boost from the “It wasn’t my fault” exercise gave her the energy to leave. I’d foolishly stood in her way. My mistake. She sounded terribly depressed. I felt bad. I tried to get her to make an appointment, but she wouldn’t promise to come in.

Every month or so, I left a message on her answering machine suggesting she come back into therapy. I finally called her mother (Claudia had previously given me permission to do so), and I left a message saying that Claudia sounded like she was in a dangerous depression, and perhaps the mother should try to facilitate her daughter’s leaving her husband. I got no response to this message, either. Feeling like I had done all I could, I let go. I couldn’t think of anything more I could do.

Three months later, Claudia called and left a message saying she wanted another appointment. I felt surprised and pleased. She said that after she’d quit therapy with her previous counselors, none of them had bothered to phone her and ask her how she was doing. She felt touched that I had done so, and she was coming back. Her voice on the answering machine sounded cheerful again. I wondered if she’d left Richard. When she came in again, I found out.

Nope. She hadn’t left him, and from the way she talked about him—with a lilt in her voice—it seemed as if she was in love with him again.

But one evening when her husband hinted he wanted sex, she hissed at him out of the corner of her mouth and tossed her head in a gesture of disgust. She realized she’d been doing that throughout their marriage, every time he approached her for sex. It had nothing to do with the idea of having sex with him, it was a holdover from her childhood when she’d been disgusted because her abusers were forcing her to have sex with them. “I realized it wasn’t him I was mad at,” she told me. “It wasn’t his fault. I was mad at them, not him, but I hadn’t even realized I’d been doing that!”

Her gesture—dismissive and hostile—had torn a hole in the heart of their marriage. In becoming aware of her subconscious actions, Claudia managed to crawl out of the pit of neurosis, which consists of confusing then with now. (What’s the definition of a neurotic? “Someone who gets now and then confused.”) Claudia noticed what she’d been doing, she stopped it, and she changed in a positive direction. She quit trying to punish Richard for the things those three men had done to her when she was young. She quit punishing her son, too.

“Just ‘cause they were male,” she said, “I’d been blaming them. I’d been trying to get back at them. As if it were their fault!” She laughed at how stupid she had been.

Way back in our second therapy session, Claudia said she had forgiven the three men who abused her, but forgiveness is like peeling an onion---there are layers of blame under layers of hard-heartedness under layers of hate under layers of…. You have to go through all the layers. You have to forgive and forgive and forgive. Claudia was doing that now.

LEARNING TO SHOW HER TRUE FACE
Claudia said her husband still tried to make her angry, but she “refused to play that game” anymore. She always acted cheerful with him. She never argued, she just went on feeling happy, no matter how negative, irritated, or demeaning he became.

At first, that sounded okay to me. I figured Richard just needed time to adjust to his wife’s newly positive attitude. But this marital battle-dance went on for months. Claudia stayed happy and upbeat, while her husband got angrier, drank more often, and occasionally stayed out all night with his friends, using drugs.

My supervisor, Steve, told me that one of the most important things in doing therapy is to get a good handle on the real motivations of the people in your patient’s life. “Who is Richard, actually?” Steve asked me. “Beyond what Claudia thinks of him? Where is he coming from? What does he want? Does she see him clearly? Or is she projecting something onto him, like a movie gets projected onto a screen?”

I suggested once again that Claudia invite Richard in for couples counseling. But again he refused to participate. She kept at him, and eventually he agreed to counseling, but with a different therapist. They had two sessions together, and Claudia said it improved things.

However, a couple of months later, she was again complaining about his negativity. She said she wasn’t letting it put a dent in her positive attitude. Even when he talked about divorce, she didn’t let it bother her.

I kept thinking the problem was within him. But then I heard her say that sometimes she felt really angry about his attitude but didn’t let it show, she just kept smiling. Ah ha! Claudia didn’t actually feel happy, she was just putting on a happy front. The problem wasn’t in him, I realized, it was in the interactions between them. Or maybe it was in her.

I tried to put myself in Richard’s shoes. Here he was, feeling angry at his wife, and she acted as if his emotions had no impact on her. What was the point of his having a wife if she didn’t respond to his emotions?

“You’ve got to let him know when you feel angry,” I said. “Pretending to be happy when you feel angry is not going to work. He can sense when you’re angry, and when you act happy instead, he thinks you’re being spacey or crazy and hiding your true feelings from him. If you feel annoyed, irritated, or angry with him, you’ve got to tell him. You’ve got to let your face show your inner feelings.”

She seemed doubtful. After working her way up from perpetual hatred to a measure of inner peace, she didn’t feel like giving it up. But she said she might try it and see what happened.

The next Sunday, she left me a message on my answering machine. Sounding delighted, she said, “Dr. Kierulff, thank you! I tried your advice and it worked!” During our next session, she told me that Richard had been talking down to her, explaining something to her in simplistic terms as if she were a baby or an idiot, and she’d frowned at him and told him how much it irritated her. He backed off, apologized, and started speaking to her respectfully, as befit a conversation with an adult, rather than a child.

Claudia was amazed at the change in her husband’s attitude. She hadn’t known she had the right to express annoyance when she felt it. When she communicated her real feelings instead of putting on a false front, her husband responded immediately.

“YOU SMELL LIKE LATEX,” HE SAID
During Claudia’s next session, she told me something so unusual I couldn’t believe what I’d heard. I asked her to repeat it so I could make sure I got it right. “He said I smelled like latex,” she said.

“Excuse me, what did you say?”

“He said I smelled like latex, like a condom.”

I thought this was the most inexplicable thing I’d ever heard, until I realized, after pursuing the conversation farther, that her statement did not mean she herself had an odor like a condom, but that her vagina did.

“When he said that,” Claudia told me, “it just tore me up inside. I went and asked one of my co-workers what a condom smelled like, and she thought I’d gone crazy.”

Claudia believed the whole thing was her husband’s way of accusing her of having an affair. If she smelled like latex, it could only be because she was having sex with somebody who was using a condom, and Richard didn’t use condoms because they were trying to have a baby, ergo, she figured he figured she was having an affair. “But I think it’s him who’s having the affair,” Claudia said. “And he’s turning it around and accusing me.”

Because she thought he was cheating on her, Claudia didn’t enjoy sex with her husband. She didn’t want to be close with him because she didn’t trust him. Again, for the second time in the course of therapy, I advised her to let him know how she felt. Being open and honest was a risky move, but it could generate a liveliness that might make all the difference.

At first she didn’t like the idea. It had been her habit to do a lot of pretending where her feelings were concerned. It was as if she had forgotten all about the previous episode where Richard was talking down to her and she’d showed her annoyance and he’d suddenly become respectful. We talked about it for a full fifteen minutes. “Yeah,” she finally admitted, “I’ll never be happy if I keep my real feelings all bottled up inside.”

ALL WET
Next session, Claudia said she’d followed my advice and told Richard how she felt about having sex with him. “I said I wasn’t really enjoying sex. After I told him I didn’t like it, the next time we did it, it felt good.”

“In what way?”

“Well.” She hesitated for a moment, apparently embarrassed. “I got wet.”

“You mean you lubricated?”

“Yeah,” she said. “It wasn’t any fun before, because I was dry and it hurt.”

“Did he do anything different?”

“No.”

“So it was just your telling him that you didn’t like it, and that somehow triggered something in you.”

“I guess.”

I wondered how that could be. Nothing had changed except for her telling him she didn’t enjoy sexual intercourse. After that, despite the fact that her husband didn’t vary anything he was doing, she went from dry to wet. It was as if before she revealed her feelings, her body was “speaking” her feelings for her, saying I’m dry and turned off. And as soon as she divulged her negative feelings, her body didn’t have to carry the task of communication, so it dropped into a more natural mode—it got turned on and she lubricated.

“You’re amazing!” I said as she was leaving, referring not just to the latest positive change, but to her remarkable progress in therapy from day one.

“With your help!” She smiled over her shoulder.

When she was raped as a child, it must have hurt terribly, because she was so small, and because as a pre-pubescent girl, she was unable to lubricate. If she complained to the rapists, they didn’t care. So now, in her marriage, she finally disclosed how she felt after years of dry, painful sex, and just the telling of it, just the speaking up, changed the situation. When one of the body’s organs, in this case the vagina, is called on to speak for the tongue-tied mouth, it’s called “organ language.”

During her next session, Claudia told me that for the first time in their marriage, on Mother’s Day, Richard brought her flowers, and her son helped her husband prepare a meal for her, serving her breakfast in bed. She couldn’t have looked more pleased. If someone had been running a contest, looking for a young woman to serve as a poster girl for Happiness, they would have chosen Claudia. When she told me about the Mother’s Day flowers and the breakfast in bed, her smile radiated out into the world with an intensity that rivaled the sun. I have never seen anybody happier.

That wasn’t the end of Claudia's therapy. We kept working together, and she kept making progress.

Among the things I learned from Claudia was that faith in the possibility of healing can go a long way toward ensuring that healing. In her marriage, and with her own child, Claudia had become as happy as a protected, beloved little girl. As novelist Tom Robbins wrote, “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.”

Even though this “herstory” is essentially true (except for identifying details), it’s not a fairytale, and it can’t be said that Claudia lived happily ever after. Like everybody else, she had challenges to meet, and her life kept changing. Nevertheless, the Claudia that went through the changes and met the challenges was not the same stiff, steely, defensive, angry, unhappy, hate-filled Claudia that came into my office that first day. It was a different Claudia, a happier, lighter, more creative Claudia---more loving and more loveable. This Claudia had faced her past squarely, come to terms with it, and moved on.

Therapy is work, but it’s worth it. In this case, Claudia did the work, and I can’t take the credit. I just made some suggestions. Claudia was the one with the guts and determination.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

FLYING BLIND BUT BETTER THAN DAD

“Ned” had narrow shoulders, walked with a swagger and talked with a slightly aggressive edge. Afraid he was going to get fired from his job, he had been getting to work late, not sleeping well, and feeling bad about his marriage. He was depressed, but he hid it pretty well.

At the time, back in the late 70’s, I was interning at a crisis intervention center in Mira Mesa, California, just a few miles north of Miramar Naval Air Station. Ned’s score on the Beck Depression Inventory was high enough that I recommended he get anti-depressant medication, and he did.

More than anything else, Ned wanted to be a fighter pilot for the Navy. He yearned to fly F-14 “Tomcats” off aircraft carriers. But Ned got nervous in fighter planes. He had spent four years in the Navy, and was now in the Naval Air Reserves, but he couldn’t qualify for the F-14s. Every time he tried, he got jumpy and he screwed up.

Ned wasn’t a bad pilot. He flew large passenger aircraft for United Airlines, the west coast routes, north and south from Fairbanks, Alaska to Mexico City. So it wasn’t that he didn’t know how to fly, but his reflexes just weren’t fast enough to qualify him for the “Top Gun” school at Miramar. He was great while flying straight, but his record in dog fights wasn’t so hot.
Ned’s dad had flown Naval air reconnaissance during the Vietnam War. He’d been shot at, and he’d been shot down. After bailing out and parachuting into Laos, he’d survived 28 days in the jungle with his RIO man (the radio intercept officer) before they were helicoptered out to safety. Ned’s father had congratulated his son on getting the job with United, but I think Ned felt that only a career as a Naval aviator would really impress his dad. He was downhearted after repeatedly failing to qualify.

Ned’s marriage was also in trouble, partly because what turned him on, anal sex, wasn’t something his wife liked. Ned had tried to get his wife interested in what he wanted to do in bed, but she wouldn’t oblige. They had sex infrequently. Ned craved children, while his wife said she wanted to get ahead in her career before she thought about becoming a mother. The specter of divorce was in the air.

Since his wife wouldn’t indulge him, Ned spent hours in the bedroom when his wife was away, masturbating while leafing through girlie magazines that featured his special interest. His wife never caught him at it, but it was eating up a lot of his time and he felt guilty, as if he were doing something that wasn’t quite right.

Ned was about 30 pounds overweight, mainly in the gut. His wife told him he didn’t look sexy to her anymore, and because of that, she wasn’t interested in having sex with him.

Before our second session, I saw Ned drive up in a sporty Mercedes 450 SL. He said he made additional cash volunteering to fly businessmen in their company jets here and there, and sometimes they’d be late showing up for a return flight, and as a result Ned would be late showing up for a United flight. He said he liked the smaller business jets because they felt more like fighter planes, but he acknowledged that moonlighting might cost him his main job. Being a pilot for a major passenger airline wasn’t an easy position to get. Ned was nervous about over-booking himself, but he wasn’t willing to give up the extra money and the thrill of flying the fighter-sized business jets.

An unhappy man with a lot of worries, Ned had gotten into therapy when United put him on probation. Now he had to show up early for the pre-flight check-ins or they would eventually can him.

I wondered how to go about trying to help Ned. He seemed like a solid-enough guy, but if he didn’t change his ways he was going to lose his job and maybe his wife.

I asked my supervisor how to handle it. “Weekly talk therapy,” she said. “Encouragement, medication, unconditional positive regard — because he apparently didn’t get enough of that from his father — and a behavior management program to get him to go to the gym as often as he can. Start with that, and let’s see how things proceed.”

Ned agreed to come in once a week. He was ingesting the anti-depressant meds, but it usually takes about 6 weeks before they show any effect. I was careful to put him “up,” and never to put him “down,” and we set up a rewards system whereby if he went to the gym five days in a row when he wasn’t flying, he rewarded himself.

Ned was really down in the dumps. It took him four weeks before he started working out, but then he began to feel a little better. Pumping up the muscles also pumps up the body ego — the sense of the physical self, its solidity and integrity. Of course, the anti-depressants were probably kicking in about that time, so it’s impossible to say which helped more, the meds or the work-outs, but Ned was sitting up straighter and he looked me in the eye more often.

I checked with my supervisor, told her about the new developments, and she said, “Get him to give up the dream of pleasing and besting his father. If he were to succeed at qualifying for the F-14s, he could do both at the same time — impress his father and surpass his father, since his father never flew fighter planes.”

Yep, I thought, she was right. Ned had to give up his adolescent dream.

It took a while. We talked and talked about fighter planes and about his relationship with his father. Ned loved his father intensely. Despite what my supervisor had said about him not getting enough unconditional positive regard from his dad, to hear Ned tell it, my patient was one of those lucky guys whose father was always supportive, always loving, always a perfect role-model. The problem was that Ned thought he himself didn’t measure up. He felt he wasn’t as good as his father, and that made him angry, and sad.

Using an approach called reality therapy, I introduced some plain facts. “Ned, your dad never flew fighter planes. The stuff he flew didn’t have a single gun on it, not a single cannon. He flew reconnaissance planes, not the equivalent of an F-14.”

“True,” said Ned, “but so what?”

“So what,” I said, “is that you’ve been setting your heart on showing him up, on doing him one better. By dreaming about flying F-14s, you’re telling yourself, and him, that you can do better than he did.”

Ned was silent. He sat still as a stone on the couch, but his eyes moved rapidly left and right. After a long while, he said, “Damn! I never thought about it that way before.”

“You love your dad,” I said. “You adore him. You admire him. You think he’s just about the best person in the world.”

“That’s exactly right,” admitted Ned.

“So why do you need to be better than someone you feel is the best?”

Again, Ned was silent. This time, however, his eyes didn’t dart left and right, he just sat staring straight ahead. After a minute or two, he started to weep softly. He put his palms on his cheeks and lowered his head so his elbows rested on his knees.

I let him cry.

I usually allow my patients do most of the talking as they work things out for themselves, but this time I thought it might be helpful to clarify what Ned was beginning to recognize. “The upshot of your realization,” I said a few minutes later, after Ned had wiped away his tears, “is that you don’t have to strive to fly F-14s, you don’t have to jeopardize your United job by flying business jets every chance you get, and you can enjoy the fact that you are actually doing a job that is about as tough as the one your dad did. Flying a 200-passenger airplane is not a piece of cake. Its not nothing. You’re doing as much as your dad did. You can be proud of yourself,” I said. “And no doubt your father is proud of you.”

Ned sat still for a while, then leaned back against the cushions on the couch and stretched his arms over his head. “Son of a bitch.” He swore, but he looked relaxed and happy. “Son of a bitch ” He said it louder, with more emphasis and conviction.

I ventured to say a little more. “The only difference between what you’re doing and what your dad did is that you’re flying in peace-time while your dad flew in a war zone. There aren’t any wars going on now [this was in 1978], and anyway, you don’t have to equal your dad in every respect. You can be your own man. You can do your own thing.”

“Son of a bitch ” Ned turned a little and punched a cushion on the couch. Then he uttered the same phrase again, but he strung out the words, saying them slowly, softly and contemplatively. “Son ... of ... a ... bitch.”

Patients sometimes reject therapists’ interpretations, but Ned had apparently “taken in” the insight I had offered him. Naturally, I was quite pleased.

Ned stayed in therapy with me for several years. I mainly listened and reflected back to him what he was saying, serving as a sounding board. He never mentioned his troublesome sexual interests again, and I didn’t bring up the subject, either. He lost weight, gained muscle, and quit flying business jets when they might make him late for his main job. He and his wife had a healthy baby boy.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

BETWEEN MEXICO AND AMERICA

While I was serving as a post-doctoral intern at the Wilmington Clinic in Farmers Branch, Texas, located in one of the suburbs north of Dallas, in the early 80’s, “Maria Elena” came to me, because she was feeling deprimida — depressed. She didn’t know much English, so we spoke in Spanish.

Elena sat there looking sad and depleted. Her responses to the Beck Inventory suggested she was moderately depressed. “Anti-depressant medication would be a good idea,” I said, and she eventually got a prescription.

In the middle of all her misery, she did enjoy her children. When she brought her two kids in, my office was a happy place.
Elena talked animatedly about her children, but regarding Miguel, her husband, she picked her words carefully. It was as if two Libyans were talking about that country’s fearsome dictator, Muamar Kadafi, while keeping a hand over their mouths and surreptitiously looking around for eavesdropping government snoops. A wife had to be very careful how she spoke about numero uno. Elena’s husband Miguel yelled at her, called her filthy names and beat her up whenever he felt like it.

Elena met Miguel when she was 16. She had just arrived in the U.S. and was staying with a cousin. Miguel, who lived nearby and was ten years her senior, raped her, got her pregnant, and married her.

An impoverished Latin American Catholic, Elena felt guilty about not loving her husband and not liking her marriage. She didn’t feel she had a right to complain. She certainly didn’t feel she had a right to hate. Life is a vale of tears, she believed. The rewards come later, in Heaven. Suffer now, later rejoice.

Little by little, more of Elena’s story came out. When her husband had sex with her, he didn’t care whether she enjoyed it, he just took what he wanted when he wanted it, usually when he came home drunk after carousing with his buddies. After Miguel ejaculated in her, he waited until he got soft, then he urinated while still inside her. Elena thought all men did that. But what disgusted her most was that after Miguel had sex with her, he would spit a big wad of saliva into her mouth and insist she swallow it. She nearly gagged each time, but she accepted it without question, because, again, she thought that’s what all men did. She was surprised when I said it wasn’t so.

Elena was the youngest of her siblings. She had been bossed around by her older brothers and sisters, beaten by a father who drank and went into rages, and verbally abused by her mother, who convinced her that she was every kind of bad. Elena grew up believing she deserved to be treated unkindly. I referred her to a battered-women’s group, which she agreed to attend while she continued with me in individual therapy.

Understandably, Elena’s self esteem was low. I tried everything to convince her she was a valuable and deserving person, but after six months of treatment, it didn’t seem like we were getting anywhere. She never contradicted her husband, never complained, never told him she wanted sexual pleasure, never told him she felt disgusted by his intrusive urination and spitting. She did what he expected her to do — she cooked, cleaned, took care of the kids, and acquiesced when he wanted sex. That’s what her mother had done and that’s what she did.

She didn’t have any friends to talk with, just relatives. She’d never told anybody besides me what was happening and how she felt about it.

Elena wasn’t getting better. I told her she was acting like her husband’s slave, as if she didn’t have any rights, but she seemed to think everything I was saying might be fine for an Anglo woman, but didn’t apply to a Mexicana like herself. Elena was passivity personified. Nevertheless, she kept coming to therapy. She said it felt good in my office. She said she felt happy talking with me.

I was tempted to give up. I talked with her, I listened, I advised, but she never took my advice, she didn’t seem to be making any progress, and I couldn’t figure out what to do. My supervisor said that continued talk therapy, along with the anti-depressant medication and the women’s group, might eventually lead to some positive change.

I don’t know what made me think of this intervention, but one day I was sitting with her and listening to her mumbled litany of miseries, when I remembered the “havingness” exercise I experienced when I briefly dallied with Ron Hubbard’s organization while down and out in New York in my twenties. I figured it might help. “Look around my office,” I told Elena, “and say out loud, ‘I could have that. I could have that other thing.’ Name any specific thing you would like to have.”

The exercise I had participated in years before hadn’t involved taking the things you claimed you could have. Just by expressing your desires, you ended up feeling better — just by thinking to yourself, “I could have that!”

Elena looked around my office, and she said, “I could have that toy dog.” The fluffy animal had been a present from a girlfriend I no longer dated, and I picked the stuffed toy off the shelf and gave it to her. In her quiet way, Elena brightened a little. She looked around again. “I could have that calendar,” she said, pointing to a calendar hanging on the wall, featuring a beautiful photograph of African elephants and giraffes on the cover. I unpinned it and handed it to her. She actually smiled a little bit. I was bending the rules of the havingness exercise by actually giving my patient the things she said she could have, but it hadn’t cost me anything much, and it seemed to be having a positive impact.

Then she said, “I could have that chair,” and she pointed at the chair I was sitting in, an antique oak rocker that had cost me a fair amount. I hesitated just a second, but then I thought, I don’t really need this chair. I’ve got enough chairs. This chair creaks, anyway. Maybe this would make an impression on her — convince her she’s worth something. I got up and opened a drawer in my desk and grabbed a screwdriver and started taking the chair apart. I handed her one of the elegant arm rests to take home that day. Each time Elena came in for a session, I gave her another piece of the rocker — one week a gracefully curved runner, another week one of the slats that formed the back. After three months, she had all the pieces and all the screws.

She told me she asked her husband to put the chair together for her. It was the first time she asked Miguel to do something just for her.

“Why did this guy give you such a nice chair?” Her husband was suspicious. “Are you having an affair with him? What do you do for 45 minutes every week? Just talk? I don’t believe it!” Despite his misgivings, her husband assembled the rocker. Elena put the chair in her living room and rocked in it. I imagine she must have thought, That therapist must think I’m worth something, to give me this fine chair.

Time went by. She kept coming to therapy, but I didn’t see any positive changes. Then one day, she said she was flying to Mexico along with her children, to visit her parents, siblings, nieces and nephews. And she told her husband that if he didn’t change his ways and become a lot nicer to her, she wasn’t coming back.

I was surprised. “Where did this assertiveness come from?”

She was quiet for a while, which was her way. Then she said, slowly, “The way you treated me all this time. You kept talking with me. Like I was valuable.” She paused. “I guess it got to me, gradually. You cared. I finally started caring about me, too.”

Her husband Miguel agreed to treat her better. She and her children visited their relatives in Mexico, then flew back.
She started standing up for herself in other ways, too.

When she first came into my office, Elena was a pure Mexicana, but by the time our therapy sessions had ended, she had begun to exercise her right to two of the privileges of being a Norte Americana — freedom of speech, and the pursuit of happiness.

The “Mexican” side of Maria Elena was not all negative, of course. Presumably, her passivity in regards to her husband and her reluctance to stand up for herself were culturally influenced, but, on the other hand, her devotion to her children and her delight in them may also have stemmed from Mexican culture. Warm relations between parents and children are often found in Mexican families.

Therapy helped Maria Elena to become a bit more independent, and to ask her husband to respect her and treat her decently, but she began therapy with — and she continued her life with — her own resources and positive qualities. Patients make progress by building on their inner strengths.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

DOG GONE PHOBIA

Referred by his pediatrician, the boy felt paralyzed, his body shook, his heart beat fast, and he began crying whenever he saw a dog. This reaction of extreme fear started when a big dog took him by surprise and frightened him, four years previously, when he was seven years old.

I diagnosed the boy’s condition as a simple phobia — DSM IV 300.29 — the code from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, fourth edition.

In constructing a therapeutic conversation, it helps to tell the truth, and it is certainly true that a dog can be a boy’s best friend. Children are often so suggestible that I don’t have to use a formal hypnotic induction. I told him dogs would be his best buddies and protectors, and I taught him how to make friends with them.

After 45 minutes, the child was cured. I treated him with the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), along with Eye Movement Desensitization and Restructuring (EMDR). His subjective units of discomfort scale (SUDS) went from a score of 10 — the worst discomfort imaginable — to a score of one — which represents almost no discomfort at all. He was no longer afraid of dogs.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

BRATTY GIRL DECIDES TO BECOME NICE

The most muscular and aggressive pubescent girl I’ve ever met? — “Renee.”

Her mother, Doris, came in complaining that 11 year-old Renee refused to help around the house, defied her, and even cussed at her.

Such problems are best remedied by working with the child and the parent together. However, the mother said she had no time, because she had to take care of her two-year-old baby, so I agreed to see Renee alone.

This was back in 1980, when I was a psychology intern at a general hospital south of Detroit. Like many of the Polish-American residents of Wyandotte, Michigan, Doris and Renee were trying to survive tough times in a hard-scrabble, working class milieu.

During our weekly sessions, Renee and I chatted and played therapeutic games such as the Talking, Thinking and Doing Game and the Ungame, which encourage young people to talk about themselves, and Sorry, which facilitates the socialization of reasonable degrees of aggression, and teaches children how to apologize even while being assertive. After Renee got comfortable with me and began opening up, she made her point of view clear — “Everyone in the house is unhappy and swears at everybody else, and everyone acts mean to everybody, and I’m just doing the same as everyone else ”

By “everyone,” she meant her mother, her step-father, and her grandfather. The step-father, sullen and unhappy, brought Renee to her therapy session a couple of times. Renee and he apparently felt undisguised hatred for one another.

But Renee didn’t seem hateful, defiant, mean or touchy with me. We had a good time playing games and talk But even though I tried everything I could think of to get her to be nicer and more considerate at home, she adamantly refused.

Normally, I would have asked Renee’s step-father to participate in therapy with her, but he seemed like a slippery, false-faced, thin-skinned person, and I doubted that working with him together with his step-daughter would have helped.

So I focused on individual therapy with the girl. After six weekly sessions, her mother phoned and complained that Renee hadn’t changed a bit.

“Well, what did you expect,” I wanted to say, “without your participation?” But I held my tongue and simply invited her to come to the next session. She said it would be hard to find a baby-sitter for her one-year-old, so I suggested she bring him along. (I should have thought of that possibility back in the beginning, but perhaps I intuitively realized that I need some time to establish rapport with tough-as-nails Renee.)

For the next five sessions, the four of us sat and talked — myself, Renee, her mom, and her two-year-old half-brother Roger (who didn’t talk much, but did make a variety of interesting noises). What emerged? The main source of misery in the household was Renee’s grandfather, who, at 65, suffered from three serious diseases, needed a lot of assistance, and was rock-hard, cold, and mean-as-a-junkyard-dog 95% percent of the time. He demanded, he complained and he screamed. Grandfather Jack was particularly rough and leathery with Renee, who was expected to carry his food up to his bedroom because Jack’s legs were too weak to make it down the stairs most of the time. Doris also expected Renee to bring Jack all his numerous medicines and make sure he took them twice a day. She was at his beck and call whenever she was home. If Renee didn’t do things exactly the way her grandfather wanted them, he yelled and cursed at her.

Over the years, Renee had come to yell and curse back at him — which was probably better for her than caving in and feeling bad about herself. Habitual anger turned outward toward others is often easier to moderate than habitual anger turned inward toward the self.

The information about Jack changed the picture considerably. Far from Renee being the only problem in the family, grandpa had become a candidate for that designation, too.

I couldn’t get Renee to change her behavior without changing the family dynamic, so I asked the linchpin, Renee’s mother, to come in by herself. I learned that her father had been quite mean to her when she was young. Nobody had protected Doris from her father back then, and Doris didn’t shield her daughter from him now. From the way Doris spoke about her childhood, she really would have liked someone to force her father to tone down his nasty rhetoric, but Doris’ own mother was weak and sickly, and couldn’t stand up to her husband to protect her daughter.

I suggested Doris do for her daughter what no one had been able to do for her when she was young, namely, stand up to Jack and get him to treat Renee with consideration and respect.

This turned the tables. Suddenly Renee wasn’t the bad one, and it wasn’t Renee who needed to change, it was Jack. Now it wasn’t the rest of the family who needed protection from Renee, it was Renee who needed protection from Jack.

With my encouragement, Doris gradually began to confront her father. Although she felt timid and frightened at first, she eventually demanded that Jack quit swearing and screaming at Renee.

I began seeing Doris one session and Renee the next, occasionally seeing them both together. I would have asked Jack to come in with them, but he was too crippled to leave the house.

About this time, Renee’s step-father took a higher-paying job in another state, hoping to make a better life for himself and eventually get his family to join him there.

Despite the other changes we’d been able to make, Renee remained nasty to her family. She felt extremely jealous of her mother’s new baby. I tried to get her to see that her mother had no choice but to pay more attention to baby Roger, and that didn’t mean Doris didn’t love her daughter, too, just that the baby needed a lot more time and help because he was too young to do anything for himself.

Renee listened to me, but nothing seemed to change her behavior. Her mom reported that she was as negative as ever. So I tried a new tactic. I encouraged Doris to forcefully demand that the girl behave better. However, physically and emotionally, Renee was stronger than her mother. While Renee looked and acted like a World War Two tank, Doris was — comparatively, at least — a cream puff. Doris was just plain afraid of her daughter Renee. Renee could stare Doris down, and she could probably have out-fought her if it had ever come to that. Renee was so strong, for a ‘tween-ager, that she gave me a good run for my money when we arm-wrestled. (Arm-wrestling can build rapport, and I sometimes employ it with receptive young clients.)

I felt like I had run out of options. I didn’t know what to do. I’d tried everything I could think of. I thought about it for many weeks, and what I finally came up with was that if I spent more time with Renee, playing games and chatting about her personal concerns, talking about her weekly fights with her friends and the inevitable makings-up, concerning myself with what she was concerned about, laughing and having fun and showering her with good vibes, she might sooner or later introject me — take me in, psychologically, to form a new self-object and a new part of herself. Hopefully, then, she might warm up and quit acting cold and hostile to her family.

During our 15th therapy session, while we were lying on the carpet face-to-face, playing a board game, five months after therapy had begun, Renee mentioned, with a little smile, that she’d been nice to her mother.

I tried not to show how elated I felt. I just kept playing the game we were playing, and a few minutes later I looked her in the eye and said, “Yeah, it’s nice to be nice. It feels good, doesn’t it ” Renee smiled, and that smile wasn’t just pasted on her face, it came from deep inside.

One usually never knows exactly what produces change. Was it Doris deciding to stand up to her father and protect her daughter? Was it the happy, nurturing hours I spent playing board games and conversing in a relaxed, friendly manner with Renee? Was it the fact that her step-father was no longer around the house? Who knows? It may have been a combination of all three of those things.

The next session provided a partial answer to the causation question. Renee’s step-father had come back home for a while, so I thought Renee might revert to acting angry and hostile to everyone. But she didn’t. In fact, in our next family therapy session, she conversed with her mother amicably, without a single demeaning or irritable outburst. This was a one-hundred eighty degree change. When I’d seen them together previously, Renee had never said one pleasant thing — not even one neutral thing — to her mother, during all our conjoint sessions. Every word out of Renee’s mouth had been cutting and hostile, nothing but over-the-top anger and complaints.

So it wasn’t the presence of the step-father that had been causing Renee to be so hostile. And it wasn’t his absence that had led her to become nicer. So what had done the trick? The game-playing and the warm interactions with me, or the fact that her mother had been confronting nasty old Jack and trying to protect Renee from his wrath?

As I said, one never really knows, but in our last session, the mother revealed a clue by relaying the following story. Jack, Doris’ father, had come downstairs on crutches, in one of his rare forays to the ground floor of the apartment. There he found his cell phone perched near the edge of the dining room table. He exploded with rage, accusing Renee of putting it where Roger, the two-year-old toddler, could reach up and grab it and throw it somewhere, or try to dismantle it. Jack grabbed a Lego creation that Renee had proudly put together, tossed it across the room, broking it into pieces. Momma Doris, who had been outside on the patio, heard the commotion, rushed in and asked what happened. When she heard the story, she berated her father, Jack. “Didn’t you realize it could have been me who left your cell phone near the edge of the table?” she demanded of him. “Why do you always yell and scream and throw things and blame Renee?” This was just the beginning of Doris’ outburst. “I grew up in a fucked-up family and I won’t have that for my daughter ” She yelled. “You and grandma screwed me up something awful with your constant nitpicking and rage. My upbringing was horrible, and I am going to provide something better for my daughter Renee She’s not going to have to grow up in a war-zone the way I did. Now, apologize to my daughter for breaking her Lego toy and for screaming at her and get your sorry ass back upstairs ”

Whew! Milquetoast Doris actually had a backbone.

In my office, Renee listened to the story her mother was telling. Sitting comfortably on the couch, Renee looked peaceful, happy and contented. The aggression in her posture — which had always accompanied her interactions with her mother — had disappeared. The raspy knife-edge of outrage in her voice was gone. She didn’t swear at her mother during the entire session. Rather, they talked together animatedly and happily, leaning slightly toward one another, like fast friends.

The thing I thought might never happen had come to pass. A young soul found its way out of negativity and misery. Renee discovered that it feels nice to be nice, and it feels wonderful to be valued and protected. Mother Doris broke free from her emotional slavery to her father Jack. This turn of events lifted my heart. Just as helium fills and lifts a balloon, my whole being filled with joy, and I was so happy for Renee and Doris, I felt I was floating, intoxicated with bliss.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

FOILING A DEATH WISH

Therapy promises the opportunity to be listened to without being judged. At our first session, Chuck wore a T-shirt, Levi’s and running shoes. Age 41, a well-to-do systems engineer, he stood about average height, trim and fit, but his neck and shoulders, and the areas around his mouth and eyes, looked tense. It seemed he was under some sort of strain.

Raised in a protestant Christian household, “Chuck” was about 10 years old, looking for a snack, when his mother walked in the kitchen and told him a story about a young man who had gotten a girl pregnant and then taken off and left the girl alone. His mother looked at Chuck severely and said, “That’s the very worst thing a man can do.” She scrunched her eyebrows a gave him a long, searing look. The depth of her emotion frightened him.

Nine years later, Chuck had become an atheist. While he was studying at Boston University, Chuck lived with a young woman, and after about six months she got pregnant by him. But Chuck didn’t want to get married, and he didn’t want to have a baby. He thought his girlfriend was just into having fun, like he was. He didn’t want to settle down. He asked her how she would feel about getting an abortion, and she broke down in tears and said she wouldn’t. But when she went home to New York for Christmas vacation, her mother talked her into it.

When Chuck came back from vacation and opened their front door, he saw a “Tuesday’s Child is Full of Woe” doll, hanging by a rope around its neck, dangling from the chandelier above the dining room table. He approached the hanged doll and saw pinned to it’s chest a small piece of paper with the name his girlfriend had given their aborted fetus.

Chuck felt like a murderer, as surely as if he’d hanged their baby. Because he felt so ashamed, Chuck didn’t tell anyone about it — until he told me. He felt he’d done worse than the “worst thing a man can do,” because not only had he gotten his girlfriend pregnant, but he’d also asked her to have an abortion. He felt selfish, he felt he had been thoughtless, but worse than that, he felt he was responsible for for killing their unborn child. His girlfriend’s angry glances merged in his subconscious with the burning stare his mother had given him when he was 10. He felt hated, and he felt he deserved that hatred.

Chuck took his motorcycle off-road in the western Massachusetts hills — the Berkshires — trying dangerous things. He sped downhill on steep, bumpy, dirt roads, sometimes hitting 120 miles per hour. On another occasion, he lost control of his motorcycle on an oil-slick road, fell off and slid on his back at 50 or 60 miles per hour, looking at the oncoming traffic, wondering whether the big rigs and trucks barreling down on him would stop in time or just run him over. He felt indifferent as to whether he’d live or he’d die. Back in Boston, crossing a street without paying attention, he almost got struck by a car. He went mountain climbing in Canada, tumbled down a glacier and nearly fell off a cliff with a thousand-foot drop. He was vaguely aware that his conscience was trying to kill him for what he had done to his girlfriend and their potential baby, but he couldn’t shake himself out of his self-destructive mood.

Twenty years later, Chuck was still at it. He didn’t own a motorcycle anymore, but he’d taken “vacations” in northern Ireland during the troubles, hanging out in bars near Shankhill Road in the rough working-class neighborhood that divided Catholics from Protestants in Belfast, Ulster’s bloodiest city. He toured Israel during one of the intifadas. He “vacationed” in the jungles of Colombia where drug-running guerillas battled government forces; he barely escaped being kidnaped for ransom.

Chuck was also enticed by extreme sports. He took up sky diving and bridge jumping — flinging himself out of small planes and off high bridges, with nothing but a piece of thin, billowing silk to save himself from getting smashed to death. He hired helicopters to drop him on snowy mountain peaks and he’d shuss down by routes no one had tried before — dangerous stuff.

After hearing Chuck’s story, I figured he’d come to me because he wanted to get it off his chest. During our second session, Chuck said he’d told his shameful story to his new girlfriend, Laura, a lawyer who worked as a public defender for the District Attorney’s office. “It was funny,” he said, “but after I told her about it, I began to see it in a whole new light.”

“Laura started asking questions,” Chuck told me. “She asked if my old girlfriend had been using birth control. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘she was using the Pill, but then she stopped taking it.’

“ ‘Did she tell you she was going to stop taking it?’

“ ‘No, she did it without telling me.’

“ ‘Your old girlfriend wanted to get pregnant,’ my new girlfriend Laura said. ‘And she didn’t reveal her intentions to you.’

“ ‘Right,’ I said. ‘When she told me she was pregnant, it was like an electric shock. It made my brain turn to mush. I couldn’t think straight.’

“ ‘It was totally unexpected.’ said Laura.

“ ‘I wasn’t ready to have a kid,’ I said to Laura. ‘I was just nineteen. She was only the second woman I had slept with. I was still exploring, not ready to settle down, not ready to give up college and go out and get a job and support a wife and child. I thought she was just having fun with me, like I was with her, but apparently...’

“Then Laura put her hand on my shoulder and said, ‘I understand where you were coming from.’

“ ‘I thought about my girlfriend’s pregnancy for a few days,’ ” Chuck said to Laura, “ ‘and then I asked her how she would feel about having an abortion. I knew she would feel bad about it, ‘cause she seemed so delighted with being pregnant.’

“ ‘What did she say about having an abortion?’ Laura asked.

“ ‘No way,’ is what she said.. ‘No way!’ ” Chuck looked down at the floor of my office sadly, remembering it. “She wasn’t the kind of girl I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, Doc. Maybe I shouldn’t have been fooling around like that, but everybody at B. U. was doing it.”

“It was the norm, the usual, the expected thing,” I said to Chuck, reflecting back what he’d just said to me.

“Strange thing was, she wasn’t really my type. Believe it or not, she was an ex-gangbanger. She’d been a knife-carrying member of an actual gang, in Brooklyn. And here I was, a white-bread, middle-class suburban geek. To me, she was exotic, she was fascinating. I mean, she’d call me from her part-time job and tell me that she’d just put her finger in her pussy and she was smelling her hand while she was talking to me ‘cause she felt lonely for me. That kind of thing got to me so deep. She was so different from the girls I knew in high school.”

“You were entranced,” said I, reflecting Chuck’s words and emotions again.

“I was. Entranced. She was sexy beyond belief and she loved me like crazy.” He paused. “And I loved her, too, but when push came to shove, I wasn’t ready for a wife and child. And I had no idea she’d wanted that from me.”

One of the therapist’s tools is silence. I didn’t say anything, giving Chuck a chance to go deeper.

After a while, he continued.

“I felt I had to give God a chance to kill me if he wanted to, for what I did to my girlfriend and our baby. I know it sounds crazy, because I didn’t think I even believed in God, but somewhere deep inside me, I felt that if God wanted me to die, I was willing to go. I did wrong, and I’m surprised I haven’t been killed yet. I murdered my own child. I figured I didn’t deserve to live.”

Noticing that Chuck had begun to lean forward, putting his elbows on his knees, I said, “Sounds like you’re coming around to telling me about a turning point.”

“You got that right,” Chuck said. “A year ago, about the time I turned 40, is when I met Laura through an internet dating service, and Doc, I fell so deeply in love with her.”

“And...”

“And she is the brightest, fastest thinker I ever met. Guess what she said? She turned my life around.”

“You’ve told me a little of what she said, already, but what else did she say? Sounds like it was something momentous.”

“Laura listened to the whole thing,” Chuck said, “my whole story, and then she said, ‘Truth is, it wasn’t your fault. Not the beginning of it. And not the end of it, either.’

“ ‘Meaning what?’ I asked her.

“ ‘The beginning of it was,’ Laura explained, ‘your girlfriend deceived you. She’d been taking the Pill because you both agreed you wanted sex but no children. But then she stopped, without notifying you, and she got pregnant. So the pregnancy was her fault, not yours.’

“I told Laura I didn’t think it was that simple. But then she said, ‘And the end of it wasn’t your fault, either. It was her mother who persuaded her to get an abortion. You didn’t kill the fetus, Chuck, her mother did — her mother and the doctor who performed the operation.’ ”

Chuck sat there in my office, barely moving. It was as if he was back in that conversation with his new girlfriend, the public defender.

After a moment, Chuck went on with his story. “ ‘You’re saying it wasn’t my fault,’ I said to Laura.

“ ‘Exactly,’ Laura said back to me. ‘Exactly!’

“ ‘You’re saying I don’t have to look for ways to let God kill me if he wants to.’

“ ‘Exactly,’ Laura said. ‘You don’t have to do that. Because it wasn’t your fault.’

“ ‘You’re saying I’m not a murderer.’

“ ‘Exactly,’ Laura said to me. ‘Your girlfriend’s pregnancy wasn’t your responsibility, and your girlfriend’s abortion wasn’t your responsibility, either. You requested her to do it, but it was her mother who persuaded her to do it.’

“ ‘I can’t believe I’ve been trying to get myself killed for twenty years,’ I said to Laura.

“ ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Laura said emphatically. ‘None of it. Not the beginning of it, and not the end of it. Your ex-girlfriend was responsible for the beginning of it, and her mother was responsible for the end of it. Your girlfriend tried to make you feel responsible for the whole thing, and she succeeded. What she succeeded in doing was creating the illusion that you were responsible. She must have felt very guilty, and she pushed the guilt off onto you. And you bought the whole thing.’ Laura paused. And then she summed it all up by saying, once again, this time very softly, ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

“Doc,” Chuck wiped one small tear out of the corner of his eye, “I can’t tell you how that changed me... how what Laura said changed me, deep down. How what she said lifted a two-thousand pound weight off my back.”

Chuck leaned into the cushions on my couch and stared up at the ceiling for a few minutes. Then he said, “I’m giving up extreme sports and I’m not going to take vacations in ‘hot spots’ anymore.” He told me he was thinking about spending a couple of weeks on the beach in Cabo San Lucas with his new girlfriend, the public defender.

“Send me a postcard,” I suggested. Would I have gotten around to being as therapeutic for Chuck as his new girlfriend had been? Cognitive therapy, logotherapy, “public defense therapy,” whatever you want to call her approach, with a few minutes of conversation, she transformed his mind, his heart and his life, and he finally got it — verdict: not guilty ... by reason of sanity.

After returning from his vacation in Baja California, Chuck kept coming to see me for a couple of years, but the thing that had been eating at him — and nearly killed him — had been laid to rest. He no longer feared divine retribution. He smiled, he laughed, and he looked more relaxed. He and his public defender eventually got married.

****************

INTERPERSONAL THERAPY OF DEPRESSION

The modality known as Interpersonal Therapy of Depression recognizes that when we’re sad and angry — two of the main features of depression — we are generally sad about, and mad at, somebody specific. If we can convince that specific someone to come into therapy along with the person who is depressed, we can sometimes pull depression out by its roots.

Rita came in and her face showed exactly how she felt. A beautiful young woman, she looked like a certain movie star, but she also looked miserable. Rita felt sad and angry because her husband didn’t listen to her, didn’t respond to her complaints, and didn’t seem to care about her feelings. But when she came in for our fifth session, she was glowing, as happy as anyone I’ve ever seen, and even more attractive than the movie star she resembles. What happened during the fourth session to turn things around?

During the fourth session, I explained that her husband might want to, but might not have the ability to listen to her tell him about her feelings. Maybe he loved her (he did), maybe he cared about her (he did), but maybe he just couldn’t do what she wanted him to do.

One of the big differences between men and women is the size of the connection between the right half and the left half of their brain. Women have a huge, wide, thick connecting cable (called the corpus collosum) that can carry lots of information between the two hemispheres. Men have a small connecting cable that can’t carry nearly as much information. For this reason, generally speaking, women can talk more about their emotions (talking is usually mediated by the left brain, while emotions are mediated by the right brain). They have a very big cable that connects the two halves of their brains. Men are not as good at it because their connecting cable is much smaller.

I told Rita that if she wanted someone to talk with about her feelings, she should talk with her girlfriends — they’d be more likely to hang in there with her during a long conversation, because their brains are wired the same way as hers, with a huge cable connecting the language side and the side devoted to emotions.

Rita quit trying to get her husband to talk long and deep about feelings. She accepted that his disinterest in those kinds of conversations didn’t mean he wasn’t interested in her, it just meant his brain wasn’t set up for such things. Realizing this, she felt happy for the first time in a long time.

(This isn’t to say that no man is good at talking about his or his wife’s emotions, and it isn’t to say that no woman is bad at it or disinclined toward it. There is a real difference between the genders, on the average, but not everybody fits the pattern. If we mapped the difference on a graph or a chart, we would say that the two statistical distributions overlap, but the averages (the means) of the curves for females and for males are significantly different.)

When Rita got the point, she quit taking her husband’s relatively diminished capacity for intimate conversation personally, and her anger and sadness about it disappeared.

That change didn’t mark the end of marital therapy for Rita and her husband, but it signified a dramatic movement in a positive direction. Other women I’ve treated in marital therapy have been surprised and grateful when they learned about this, too.

Just to show you that I’m not the only one who is writing about this huge difference between men and women, here are a couple of quotes from a novel by P. J. Tracy — the pen name for Patricia J. Lambrecht and her daughter Traci — entitled Snow Blind (an Onyx paperback, published by New American Library in 2007):

Writing about their female protagonist, Sheriff Iris Rikker, they tell the reader:
“By the time she got downstairs, Sampson was already in the lobby, and the Minneapolis detectives were coming through the front door. Magozzi [a male] gave her a nod of recognition, and Iris nodded back. That, she decided, was the secret to communicating with men. Whenever possible, use signals instead of words. Words just confused them.”

Further along in their fine novel, they have their male detective, Magozzi, thinking:
“Sometimes you [as a man] had to have quiet, to think about things… Women didn’t understand that. It was one of the ten million things he’d simply accepted and stopped trying to understand a long time ago. Women’s and men’s minds worked differently. It didn’t make one method better than the other; it just made working with the opposite sex – on the job or in a relationship – a whole lot tougher.”

It may be tough, but when you understand how the other gender thinks, how their brain works, it becomes much easier.

* * *

One woman who read the “Interpersonal Therapy of Depression” story e-mailed me her reaction.

“I had a similar epiphany maybe twelve years ago. Following some fight, my husband (a particularly and probably overly rational man) and I were in the bedroom. I was sitting in a chair and he was slouching against the headboard while I tried to explain to him what had made me so angry. My complaint had something to do with consideration and his lack thereof, in regard to me. My epiphany came when I looked at him, scrunched up against the headboard, brow furrowed in concentration, attempting to grasp what I was saying, biting his nails. It hit me that my explanation was just swooshing right over his head, despite his being (I am often told) a brilliant man and attorney. I realized it wasn’t personal. He just didn’t, indeed very likely couldn’t, get it. Since then, when in these arenas where I now realize him to be particularly challenged, I am much clearer and straight-forward about my needs. This has proven to be a much more workable approach!

“This message, about men and women viewing things differently, cannot be said too much! If you ever have the opportunity to see Rob Becker’s ‘Defending the Caveman,’ a one-man show done by a comic, see it! This is its theme, presented very humorously. Another favorite of mine is Deborah Tannen’s book You Just Don't Understand. Also quite eye-opening for me.

“Similar to your message in your story, some years back I saw a 6-hour documentary on the Discovery Channel about teenagers. One of the things, very helpful indeed, that has stuck with me was when they explained about a teenager’s brain development: ‘When you think your teenager is thinking with only half a brain, that’s because they are! Half the brain connections they will have as an adult have not yet developed.’ That makes you reassess just how grown up you expect your teenager to behave, and enables you to have much more realistic expectations. When we realize someone’s behavior has underlying physical explanations & limitations, it takes that personal, hurtful bite away that we had felt when we mistakenly attributed their behavior as some sort of personal affront. That’s quite liberating.”

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