The Gift of Therapy

Just finished reading "The Gift of Therapy" by the noted psychiatrist and therapist, Irvin Yalom, MD. I had read Dr. Yalom's writings on group psychotherapy and his hilarious and poignant case studies in the book "Love's Executioner." "The Gift of Therapy" is a well-written look at case studies that form an open letter to today's therapists. As soon as I finished the book, I passed it on to a gifted client who is in graduate school, preparing to become a therapist. There is no more interesting writer in the field of psychotherapy than Dr. Yalom. He is a gifted storyteller with a wonderful mind that can easily analyze an individual client and the broader issues in the industry. What strikes me about Dr. Yalom is both how he truly belongs to no school of therapy -- cognitive behavioral or insight-oriented or psychodynamic, for example -- but instead has an amazing ability to pick and choose different elements of each school to create a unique therapy for each of his clients. What a neat philosophy - a welcome lack of orthodoxy, a recognition that each client has truly different needs that goes beyond that general concept -- which everyone can agree on -- and permeates his therapy. I find in my work life coaching and in my own personal therapy this line from the book sums up what works best: “the task of experience therapists [is to] establish a relationship with the patient characterized by genuineness, positive unconditional regard, and spontaneity.” One of the reasons I choose life coaching as opposed to tradition therapy is that it allows me to more freely bring to bear a wider variety of individualized treatments for my clients. The other striking thing about Dr. Yalom is his willingness to admit his mistakes, in the book and to his clients in session, and his ability to use those mistakes he makes as a touchstone for his clients learning and his own. It's insightful and a great read. I finished it in one evening.

The Truthfully Maddening Dilemna of John Nash's Story

John Forbes Nash Jr. was a brilliant mathematician and a suffer of something, depending on whom you ask, in the neighborhood of schizophrenia and manic depression. Nash, who died in a car accident with his wife a little more than a week ago, was, first and foremost, a Nobel laureate, whom, like many mathematicians, made his greatest discoveries in his 20s (As G.H. Hardy wrote in 1940, of “all the arts and sciences mathematics is the most remote” and “no mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than an other art or science, is a young man’s game”). Knowing that history and those peculiarities of mathematics and mathematicians, strange behaviors –extended solitude, writing equations on walls, a frenetic pace to develop solutions, mumbling to themselves in public – probably did not seem so far outside the norm among his brethren at Princeton University. But, according to a 2010 edition of The Princetonian , the daily newspaper at Princeto...

The Gift of Fear (or the Gift of Intution in Protecting Yourself and Lie Detecting)

A friend was recently on the phone with me walking down a New York street and she noticed a man starring at a street pole, and it didn't make her comfortable. Now, as the boys at Matchbox Twenty would put it, this is from a woman who makes friends with shadows on her wall, hears voices telling her that she should get some sleep, takes to herself in public and dodges glances on the train. What, on Earth, could bug this woman out? After first she dismissed her reaction. Could it be because the man was black and she racial stereotyping was making it worse? No. She lives in New York, and sees blacks all of all ethical and moral stripes and sizes every day. Could it be the neighborhood? Nah. It was familiar too her. Maybe something was different about the street lights? That could be it. Eventually, I said, "Who cares, why? If it doesn't feel right, just move, move." Gavin de Becker, a personal security professional, received acclaim for his book "The Gift of Fear...

Down the Road from McLean

My fascination with the sprawling 240 acre campus of McLean Hospital , in Belmont, Mass., and what was done there, began in 2003, the year I lost my job at The New York Times and days later found myself 270 miles south, at Silver Hill Hospital , in New Canaan, Conn., a premiere hospital that rivals, and in some estimations, is stronger than McLean . There, I was treated to my first experience in an acute, inpatient locked ward where I was evaluated for the first time by a psychiatrist and quickly diagnosed with a mood d isorder that later turned out to be bipolar disorder. Over more recent years, especially when I struggle to maintain my stability, I think back to that place and wish, for a minute, that I could come up with some reason to return to its 60 acres, complete with a social worker who spends the day checking in on you, the constant psychiatric care, the intense medication management, the priest who comes, if you so choose, to pray with you and the buildings full of fellow ...

Jayson Blair

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