I’ve decided to experiment with some shorter works of non-fiction, making them available on the Kindle platform. My first effort is a long-format essay about Greg Mortenson and Lance Armstrong — the ways they cynically manipulated their public images in order to appear heroic. For those of you who read my article about Armstrong for The Atlantic, some of this material will be familiar to you, but most of it is entirely new. The first part relies heavily on Jon Krakauer’s extended essay, Three Cups of Deceit, identifying the features of Narcissistic Personality Disorder in the psychological portrait that emerges. It concludes with a meditation on the blurring of boundaries between heroism and celebrity in modern culture.
This eSingle is about 6,000 works in length, comparable to an article you might read in the New Yorker or The Atlantic. It sells for $.99, less than a cup of coffee at Starbucks. If you do decide to give it a read, I hope you’ll take the time to leave a review on Amazon. Many thanks.
When I first began working with clients by Skype, I was surprised (and relieved) to find how similar it is to working in person. Once I began learning more about affect theory and how facial expressions communicate feeling states, I came to understand why I’m still able to empathize so well with my clients.
Now that I’ve been practicing via Skype for over a year now, I’m also understanding one important way that it differs from conventional face-to-face work: psychotherapy relationships via Skype tend to be much more transient. I suppose it’s a feature of many “virtual” relationships that are quickly formed and easily ended. Despite all the caveats in my disclosure statements, no matter how clearly I state that I don’t do short-term work and believe it takes time for a psychotherapy bond to develop, I still have clients who come for a few weeks and decide to quit because they don’t feel they’re making sufficient progress.
Over on my personal website After Psychotherapy, I’ve now opened the first topic thread on a new discussion forum. In this first thread, we’ll be discussing the Introduction and first chapter of my new book, Why Do I Do That?, then in subsequent threads we’ll take up each of the chapters individually. I view this forum as a place for site visitors who are reading the book to ask questions about what they’ve read and to share their experience of engaging with the exercises. My book adapts the methods of psychodynamic psychotherapy to a guided course in individual self-exploration, for people working alone, but I’ll be available in this new forum to help.
I hope you’ll consider buying the book and joining our discussion group going forward. I expect to open a new topic thread each week, one per chapter, so we’ll be working our way through the book together over the next few months. I hope it will be a rewarding experience for everyone who participates. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of a self-help book that you can tackle in the company of its author and other readers. Online group therapy anyone?
One of the many nice things about having my book completely finished and ready to release is that I now have the time to focus on other things I enjoy such as making videos. Here’s the fourth installment in my series about psychodynamic psychotherapy. This one deals with resistance as it comes up in the early stages of treatment.
In one of our first sessions, Carl told me that his feelings of depersonalization began several years ago when he was reading a self-help or psychology book (he can no longer remember the name of it) and one of the author’s ideas gave him a sudden unpleasant insight into himself. He can’t recall exactly what he realized; but at that moment, he felt himself lift out of his body, into his head and out through the top of it where he has remained ever since. He’s now more or less constantly preoccupied with attempting to regulate how he appears to other people by mind-reading and “empathy.” Other than a pervasive feeling of anxiety, he has little idea about how he feels.
Melissa continues to struggle with the challenges of her new job, vacillating between fear that she won’t be able to master the new skills and contempt for how “stupid and trivial” it all seems to her. We talked about her scorn as a defense: when she can’t bear the fear of failure, when it all seems so overwhelming to her, she take flight into contempt. The indifference she sometimes expresses is, in fact, a variation on this theme, where “not caring” reflects an underlying scorn which is equally defensive. The challenge, as we often find, is believing that she might grow little by little over time and gradually get better at something; she usually believes that she must know everything already or she’s a hopeless failure.
I’ve always had a problem with the term attachment to describe what happens between mother and baby. Today, in session with Janice, I remembered the word attunement and felt it was a much better, more accurate descriptor.
Janice began the session by talking about her husband’s almost complete inability to read her body sexually and to identify what gives her pleasure. The way he had been touching her the night before felt completely unrelated to her own responses; it distressed her so much that she began to cry in the middle of sex. When they talked about it afterwards, he told her he felt there was a very narrow pathway of acceptable behavior and that if he deviated from it, he’d upset her. Janice acknowledged that there was some truth to what he had said. She next talked about how he doesn’t pay much attention to his intonation when he plays saxophone, that he often sounds shrill and off-pitch but doesn’t seem to notice. Her mother had been like that, too — interested in music but unable to carry a tune.
During a session yesterday, I was shocked when Jeff told me that his former pastor and friend was charging him for their “sessions,” calling to tell Jeff when he needed a session, and going so far as to ask Jeff to pay off his credit cards. It seemed unethical, and a betrayal of trust.
This got me thinking about relationship dynamics, and what happens when the person who’s supposed to be the one giving — in a kind of parental role, so to speak — becomes the needy (and exploitative) one. It stirred up thoughts about Jeff’s aged father who’s been calling him 10-20 times per day. It’s become clear to me that during Jeff’s childhood, his father was a highly anxious man who relied upon his children to help manage that anxiety. Jeff talks repeatedly about the pressure he felt growing up to become a lawyer as his father had wanted to do, and his feeling that he wouldn’t be loved if he didn’t do so. Yet Jeff always insists that he “for some reason” misinterpreted reality and came to the mistaken view that he wasn’t lovable.
In our first session following last week’s break, Julian began by speaking about a feeling of pointlessness at his job and went on to question the value of therapy: what had been accomplished so far, and was it unrealistic to believe he could really change? It’s not unusual for clients to minimize the importance of the work during breaks, as a way to cope with feelings of unbearable need or “abandonment” when the therapist takes a vacation, but I didn’t have the sense that Julian was devaluing me. I asked him what he thought had been accomplished, if anything. He acknowledged he had developed a deeper understanding of himself: “Of course, it’s nice and all, but does it really make any difference?” His manner and tone of voice seemed very flat.
When I first began 
In one of our first sessions, Carl told me that his feelings of depersonalization began several years ago when he was reading a self-help or psychology book (he can no longer remember the name of it) and one of the author’s ideas gave him a sudden unpleasant insight into himself. He can’t recall exactly what he realized; but at that moment, he felt himself lift out of his body, into his head and out through the top of it where he has remained ever since. He’s now more or less constantly preoccupied with attempting to regulate how he appears to other people by mind-reading and “empathy.” Other than a pervasive feeling of anxiety, he has little idea about how he feels.
Melissa continues to struggle with the challenges of her new job, vacillating between fear that she won’t be able to master the new skills and contempt for how “stupid and trivial” it all seems to her. We talked about her 
I’ve always had a problem with 
During a session yesterday, I was shocked when Jeff told me that his former pastor and friend was charging him for their “sessions,” calling to tell Jeff when he needed a session, and going so far as to ask Jeff to pay off his credit cards. It seemed unethical, and a betrayal of trust.
In our first session following last week’s break, Julian began by speaking about a feeling of pointlessness at his job and went on to question the value of therapy: what had been accomplished so far, and was it unrealistic to believe he could really change? It’s not unusual for 
