The Therapist Is In

10 Tips to Beat the Holiday Blues

Mark Sichel, L.C.S.W. — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 11:46:17 +0000

As we approach Thanksgiving, we're starting a five-week period called "the holidays." We're supposed to look forward to the holidays and hope that they will be a time of happiness, friendliness, fellowship, and harmony. Yet often our anticipation and excitement turns into feelings of depression, commonly called holiday blues. Symptoms can include headaches, insomnia, uneasiness, anxiety, sadness, intestinal problems, and unnecessary conflict with family and friends.

Part of what happens in the holiday season, in terms of mood changes and anxiety, may occur because of the stressfulness of holiday events. Overdrinking, overeating, and fatigue may also cause it. The demands of the season are many: shopping, cooking, travel, houseguests, family reunions, office parties, more shopping and extra financial burden. Our current recessionary economy may exacerbate many of us who are already stressed out or depressed.

Here are some tools to get through the holiday season happily, as well as ways to prevent problems and misery for yourself and your loved ones.

1. Be reasonable with your schedule. Do not overbook yourself into a state of exhaustion--this makes people cranky, irritable, and depressed.

2. Decide upon your priorities and stick to them. Organize your time.

3. Remember, no matter what our plans, the holidays do not automatically take away feelings of aloneness, sadness, frustration, anger, and fear.

4. Be careful about resentments related to holidays past. Declare an amnesty with whichever family member or friend you are feeling past resentments. Do not feel it is helpful or intimate to tell your relative every resentment on your laundry list of grievances. Don't let your relative do that to you, either. If you need help with unburdening yourself of your investments, check out these seven strategies for giving up resentments.

5. Don't expect the holidays to be just as they were when you were a child. They NEVER are. YOU are not the same as when you were a child, and no one else in the family is either.

6. Feeling like you are under scheduled or under planned for the holidays? Volunteer to serve holiday dinner at a homeless shelter. Work with any number of groups that help underprivileged or hospitalized children at the holidays. There are many, many opportunities for doing community service. No one can be depressed when they are doing community service.

7. Plan unstructured, low-cost fun holiday activities: window-shop and look at the holiday decorations. Look at people's Christmas lighting on their homes, take a trip to the countryside, etc.--the opportunities are endless.

8. If you drink, do not let the holidays become a reason for over-indulging and hangovers. This will exacerbate your depression and anxiety. Contrary to popular opinion, alcohol is a depressant. Alcohol is a depressant. People with depression shouldn't drink alcohol", says Sherry Rogers, MD, in her 1997 book on "Depression."

9. Give yourself a break; create time for yourself to do the things YOU love and need to do for your physical and mental wellness: aerobic exercise, yoga, massage, spiritual practices, taking long fast walks or any activity that calms you down and gives you a better perspective on what is important in your life.

10. Most of all, if you find yourself feeling blue just remember: The choice is always yours: The sky is partly sunny, and the glass is half full and revel in our gratitude for our bounty, health, hope, and our courage to face each day with hope and determination.

If you need more help than these tips offer you, then go to this very funny video, which talks about tips for the holiday blues on Jon Stewart's Daily Show.

Poisonous Parents: Should You Cut Them Off?

Mark Sichel, L.C.S.W. — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:32:32 +0000

Dr. Richard A. Friedman writes an excellent article in the NY Times called “When Parents Are Too Toxic to Tolerate.” The most valuable point he makes is that therapists have a bias to salvage family relationships, even when the relationship is abusive and hurtful to our patients. I am a therapist who has worked with many people in this situation as well as having experienced a family rift myself. Many years ago I was also a therapy patient and experienced exactly what Dr. Friedman is talking about. “Tell your parents what you feel toward them,” one therapist advised. I listened. He was a therapist after all and had helped me in many ways. Disaster, however, was the outcome and my feelings were responded to with a barrage of invective that was exceedingly painful to hear. Another therapist suggested that my problem was my own feelings about myself, with the implication that if I had better self-esteem, I would not be so deeply affected by my family’s abuse.

Before I go on, I want to point out that there are also toxic adult children who divorce their parents for reasons that are generally related to perceived injustices or simply personality disorders. I’ve worked with many parents whose adult children stopped speaking to them, and they were the ones who were trying to reconcile even while their child remained obstinately silent. In other words, it is not always the parents’ fault, and leaving this piece out of the article does a great disservice to those parents whose hearts break every day because they have been estranged by their adult children.

Dr. Friedman also notes, correctly, that this “topic gets little, if any, attention in standard textbooks or in the psychiatric literature, perhaps reflecting the common and mistaken notion that adults, unlike children and the elderly, are not vulnerable to such emotional abuse.” He did not, however, note that there is self-help literature that addresses this very issue. I wrote about it back in 1993 when my father told me he was never speaking to me again over some imagined insult or injustice perpetrated by me or my wife—probably both of us—which, at the time, occupied the top of his list of injustices perpetrated by other relatives or business associates. By the way, as I and many of my clients can attest, often toxic parents produce toxic siblings and the process and emotions involved in sibling estrangement can be as upsetting as with parents.

It is true that symptoms of anxiety and depression related to a family estrangement can be debilitating, but at the same time they may be helped by therapy and medication. That is true, but not everyone has access to therapy and medication, certainly not the 47 million people in the U.S.who have no heatlh insurance.. We all, however, have access within ourselves to spiritual and social tools that can be profoundly helpful. If we draw upon our inborn resilience and moral fiber, we can find many ways to contend with severing ties with toxic family members.

Dr. Friedman writes about a patient who was cut off by his toxic parents because he was gay. He notes that the patient eventually recovered from his depression but “his parents’ absence in his life was never far from his thoughts.” The issue need not be disposed of with such gloom, however, and I say that out of personal, as well as professional, experience. It is difficult at first to contend with this level of family dysfunction, but in my experience there are definitely great benefits when you dispose of abuse from a family member. It most certainly can be a growth experience, but even more than that perhaps, it makes family events and special occasions much more fun when you don’t have to worry about an abusive family member ruining the event.

I did find ways in 1993 to seemingly and temporarily repair the rifts in my family. Despite my experience and expertise, I thought I could prevent the abuse I’d known most of my life. In 2000 my family again disowned me and my wife and children, and it put me right back into turmoil. Like Friedman’s patient, my parents’ absence in my life was never far from my thoughts. Writing “Healing From Family Rifts ” became my therapy and I noticed that the pain of the estrangement diminished with time and eventually I realized I was much happier without my family of origin in my life. Time heals. I’m blessed with a great deal of inborn resilience, but I also went through this trauma with a wonderful support network of my family of creation and choice. I knew I had made every effort possible to repair the rift and I did all the “right” things to try to make peace. Ultimately the right thing was the wrong thing. I realized that life without toxic parents can, ultimately, put the “fun” back into dysfunctional.

Use Your Ego Wisely: Humble Men and Confident Women are More Successful in Work and Love

Mark Sichel, L.C.S.W. — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:03:21 +0000

The humble man and the confident woman are the two people you'll find when you encounter a couple that has survived and thrived together over time. Humility is difficult for men, easily confused with weakness. Confidence is challenging for women, even those who would appear to be sure of themselves. Each day in my therapy practice, I see people whose relationships are deteriorating because a man has difficulty with being humble and a woman is challenged by lack of self-confidence. I, like most men, have had to fight my own battles against a well-defended and groundless arrogance. Finding and sustaining the elusive balance between pride and self-confidence has been a challenge for me both as a therapist and a husband. In my work with clients, I try to help everyone who comes to see me become more balanced: humble yet confident, modest yet proud.

Interestingly, recruiters offer job seekers similar advice based on their experience of gender specific strengths and challenges. Each year the Wall Street Journal/Harris Interactive business-school survey asks recruiters about a variety of issues, among them the difference between male and female MBAs. Among the many questions considered in the survey are variables in each gender's inborn assets. In a Wall Street Journal article by Robert Alsop, he reports that the advice recruiters tend to give men is to be more humble and collaborative, listen better to other points of view and stop taking credit for other people's accomplishments. The recommendation offered by recruiters to women is to "toot their own horns," and build confidence. "Female M.B.A.s," Alsop suggests, "have a bias to nurturing and team building and male M.B.A.s to a more analytically driven focus on success and independence. My advice is that both should develop more well-rounded skills."

Another way of framing the above equation is to note that an out of control ego can be a serious relationship buster. Lack of ego can be equally disastrous. On the one side too much ego prevents humility and too little ego prevents confidence. Arrogance is the opposite of humility and excessive self-importance is synonymous with what's referred to as an oversized ego. An out of control ego can hurt you in any area of your life. Ego can be helpful to men in business and in love, but when a man's ego is out control, he'll fail in both areas of life.

A central part of the problem here is that men have difficulty understanding the word humility. In the dictionary, we can clearly see why humility is inherently undesirable to many men. The word is defined only in negatives: lowliness, meekness, and submissiveness. In fact, pride is listed as the antonym to humility. If, however, we define humility in a positive manner, we can call it the virtue of knowing your own limitations, the strength of admitting you're not always right, the knowledge that you are not God and that other people have something to teach you. This doesn't diminish what you can teach others but, in fact, broadens it because it comes from generosity as opposed to contempt. The wisdom to not know is essential to a good and loving relationship. Without humility it is impossible to feel and express gratitude, appreciation, hope, or empathy for others. In a narcissistic world where so many people crave admiration, practicing humility can be elusive.

Most men I see in therapy want to improve their relationships with their partners and if they learn to understand and practice humility, they can surely achieve that goal. In the well-known book "Good to Great" Jim Collins identifies humility and modesty as the central quality that allows a CEO to achieve greatness in business. The same holds true for marriage and any other form of loving partnership. When a man has the strength to acknowledge that he might not be right about an issue, that he may be smart but has things to learn from other people, particularly his partner, conflicts can become resolved and a relationship like a business can go from "Good to Great."

Upload Character When You're Hard-Wired to Worry

Mark Sichel, L.C.S.W. — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 16:53:53 +0000

As you can see in the picture, "Anxiety," is the title of this past Sunday's New York Times magazine cover story. The thought bubble above the woman's head is not legible but it says, "Am I going to be laid off? If the black and white picture of the worried woman with the yellow background and bold title weren't enough to catch my attention, the woman's thought rang true for sure: it's a fear I'm hearing in my therapy practice every day now. Underneath the headline in smaller black lettering the author invites us to explore whether anxiety is reactive or simply reflective of our brain wiring.

When I read this, I immediately flashed on a host of clients I've worked with over the years who most certainly were hard-wired to worry. Their external circumstances and interpersonal relationships didn't seem to jibe with their level of anxiety. The article's author, Robin Marantz Henig, cites a number of longitudinal studies that arrive at the conclusion that overly fretful babies become overly anxious adults. The histories of the subjects of the studies are similar to the histories I've heard in my psychotherapy practice over the years. For certain people excessive anxiety waxed and waned over the course of their lifetime and persisted even during the best of times.

The story is well written and solidly grounded in scientific theory but presents a danger of too easily promoting resignation for those who live with this type of chronic anxiety. This is a report well worth reading because the writer accurately documents historical data and brain patterns that accompany anxiety disorders and remains evenhanded when she notes that "temperament is important but life intervenes." The story, however, is potentially hazardous because highly anxious people are going to read it and likely say to themselves, "There's nothing I can do about my anxiety. I was born that way."

Even the phrase "life intervenes" promotes a gloomy response because it's as passive as brain wiring: they both are things that happen to people and have nothing to do with potential actions to adaptively manage a brain that is wired for worry. Life events may be as inevitable and immutable as brain wiring, but personal power and resilience can be optimized if an individual chooses to do so. Any concept of free choice, free will and strong character might have left the reader feeling empowered and hopeful. On the other hand, issues like moral fiber and spirit might not merit inclusion in an article that attempts to be scientific. These were my thoughts when I read the article on Saturday night and, sure enough, a client who'd read the same piece emailed me early Sunday morning declaring, "If I'm born like this, there's really nothing I can do to change that. I'm just unlucky, I guess." Fortunately, I believe, for her, I emailed her back, explaining my belief that "we make our own luck and even if we don't, we retain the power to choose our attitude towards life's conditions and toward ourselves." Even more important," I wrote, "you're blessed with an abundance of strengths including, but not limited to, an inborn willingness to struggle and persevere and sweat your way through the inevitable bad times."

My intervention related to the unexplored variable that is presented when psychology and neurology both hit a dead end: character. We can choose to sculpt our own character traits and overcome even the worst of circumstances. Character can be defined by the virtues and qualities associated with it: integrity, self-discipline, interest in others, gratitude and determination. These qualities are consciously built over time with how we've coped with difficult situations. Beyond that, part of character is willingness to get help combined with the grace to receive it.

Victor Frankl was a Viennese psychotherapist who founded a school of therapy called logotherapy. Its meaning derives from the Greek word "logos," to make meaning out of something. The central premise of logotherapy is that while we cannot control what happens to us in our lives, we can choose our attitude toward life's conditions and toward ourselves. The path to recovery, according to logotherapy, is literally to learn to make meaning out of whatever circumstances come our way in life - learn to reflect profitably on our experience so that we can frame it in a way that both mirrors reality and serves our most cherished aims.

Frankl, a young psychiatrist in Vienna was interned in a Nazi concentration camp between 1942 and 1945. Partly because of this experience, Frankl developed his theories of logotherapy. He certainly confirms the lessons I've learned as a psychotherapist and these lessons are exceedingly useful in that they empower us rather than promote resignation into depression and a personal identity based on having been born with an anxiety wired brain. Making meaning, giving back to the world, strong character, determination and moral fiber can and will be the central determining factor in what each of us does with our brain wiring and the circumstances of our lives.

Why Women Want Their Man To Be A Caring Caveman

Mark Sichel, L.C.S.W. — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 18:56:28 +0000

Ideas about what constitutes a strong man are often framed in the negative. Real men, it is thought, are not obedient, needy, effeminate or acquiescent. Men who are perceived to have success in seducing women are seen as masculine and men who have relationships with other men that are overly intimate or sexual are definitely not seen as masculine. For many of us with distorted understanding of strength, the very qualities that make a relationship work make us fear that we are being wimpy and submissive, when in reality we're being strong in our ability to accommodate, be flexible and generous, and lacking in an obnoxious bravado.

In reality, a strong man is tolerant, flexible, generous, faithful, and competent without believing he's omnipotent, and more interested in being close than being worshipped. Women may fall and fall hard for a bad boy with a big ego, but are then devastated when that man is not protective and reliable, fun and funny, kind and accessible. Yet he needs to retain his wild side, which, when properly channeled, is rewarded by admiration, laughs and sex.

In a New York Times article, Marta Meana, Professor of Psychology at the University of Nevada said, "What women want is a real dilemma... Women want to be thrown up against a wall but not truly endangered. Women want a caveman and caring. If I had to pick an actor who embodies all the qualities, all the contradictions, it would be Denzel Washington. He communicates that kind of power and that he is a good man."

Women and men are simply wired differently. Each gender has its own way of solving problems and often labels the other gender's process of resolution as disability or willful dysfunction. The overriding and default solution to danger, stress, threat and conflict is determined by inborn gender specific solutions and the different ways boys and girls are socialized. Men "fight or flee" (for and with their woman and children), with the goal of protecting their family. Women, on the other hand, "tend and befriend": they nurture and take care of the people they love, particularly their children, partner, and close friends and relatives. Men may group in order to more efficiently fight or flee, but action overrides relationship. Women become all about relationships and proximity, and intimacy overrides action. Each response is a loving one but when misunderstood, will lead to conflict. For a man and woman to thrive as a couple, each must be an activist for the relationship and given the difference in how each gender is activist, learn to value both equally. The caring caveman is an activist for sure; an assertive, strong, take charge guys who can be caring, warm, affectionate yet retain his maleness.

Carol Gilligan is a psychologist, ethicist, and feminist author who explains that "each sex perceives a danger which the other does not see - men in connection, women in separation." When a man can confront his fear of connection and use his character strengths and virtues to create connection, he will find himself with a woman who is responsive, loving and wants to have sex with him. When a woman can learn to confront her fear of separation and thereby learns how to let go of issues and attempts at control, she will find a man who is also quick to respond, tender and amorous.

Being instrumental means men eagerly assert themselves on behalf of the relationship. The caring caveman is a guy who does not hesitate to be instrumental. We make dinner reservations, buy flowers, find interesting ways to spend time together, and are quite present and instrumental in creating and solidifying the team, the WE. The thing that is hardest for men to learn is that women are responsive to their actions. Men and women are equally frightened of being powerless and submissive. Men generally are activists during courtship; we know how to be the caring caveman when we court the woman. Men don't understand that if they act like they acted during courtship and continue to be the caring caveman, if they made sure that everything was good between them and their partner, they would get what they want more consistently.

Yes WE Can Therapy

Mark Sichel, L.C.S.W. — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 11:26:46 +0000

Any collaborative relationship, whether it be a therapist and patient, a close loving intimate relationship, a business or a nation, requires all parties to be in what therapists call "a working alliance." A working alliance is, in effect, an agreement between two or more people who have made a clear-cut commitment to working toward the benefit of the relationship, the We.

We all remember the beautiful music of the USA for Africa music video and in that song, I can hear the refrain of people who summon the bravery to come to see a therapist: "There's a choice we're making, we're saving our own lives." The song is an invitation to join a world wide therapeutic alliance, in hope of aiding African victims of famine.

Therapists often forget about the power of WE, as do friends and lovers. We all too easily dissociate ourselves from our lovers and friends in crisis, telling them "you'll work this out" when they in fact need us to include ourselves in response to their cry for help: "We'll work this out." Artists seem to have a better knack at remembering the power of WE. In fact, in my years of training I was never encouraged to intervene with the word WE. I learned to do it with experience and development of my art as a therapist, and I think it's important for all therapists to integrate this concept.

If I tell a worried patient, "You'll get through this" it's reassuring but impersonal and not terribly powerful. If, however, I boldly bring myself into the working alliance and say, "WE'LL get through this," it's much more reassuring and puts me into the problem in a very personal way. After all, a working alliance is a deal contingent on two people taking responsibility for their part of whatever challenges stand in the way of their success as a team. That's why WE is the proper pronoun for a therapist to use in a crisis situation or when a client is going through tough times.

In an interview in the NY Times on April 18, 2009, Nell Minow, a co-founder of the Corporate Library, a provider of corporate governance research was quoted as saying, "One thing that helped move my thinking forward was that I noticed in my first job that there was something very definitional in who was included in somebody's "we" and who was included in somebody's "them." I found generally that the more expansive the assumptions were within somebody's idea of who is "we" - the larger the group that you had included in that "we" - the better off everybody was. I started to really do my best to make sure that my notion of "we" was very expansive and to promote that idea among other people."

Ms. Minow makes a powerful point here and it's the very expansiveness she describes that makes using the word WE into a commanding force in business and the relationship between leadership and inclusion. By the same token, when a therapist uses the word WE, as in "we'll figure this out together," as opposed to the restrictive "you'll figure this out" that therapist is creating a much more potent alliance which exerts a much more influential force of change for the patient.

The very expansive inclusiveness that helped elect President Obama was nurtured by his campaign mantra, "Yes, WE can." That's not terribly surprising given that the very foundation and declaration of ourselves as a nation begins with "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

One of the lines of the Yes We Can video states, "Yes we can heal this nation, yes we can repair this world." The whole campaign embodied hope and hope is what we all crave in this country. Hope is also the best prognostic indicator for improvement in psychotherapy. So if you want to help someone you love and at the same time feel better about yourself, all you have to do is remember and remind, "Yes, We Can"

The Resilient Relationship: Is Money the New Sex?

Mark Sichel, L.C.S.W. — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 23:55:43 +0000

As an individual and couples therapist people most often have come to
see me about relationship problems centered on sex, romance and intimacy. The two big issues were quality and quantity of a couple's sex life and to a lesser degree, sexual infidelity. Rage, shame, guilt, culpability, blame and hurt feelings were the emotions that accompanied most of these discussions over sexual issues.

Since the near collapse of the U.S. economy, however, money problems seem to dominate and endanger relationships. Love, romance, and sex have become secondary presenting problems of new patients and emerge as symptoms of breaches in a couple's financial partnership. The two biggest issues again are quality and quantity but of money, not sex and financial infidelity.

Joblessness, pay cuts, slashed bonuses, increased taxes, and drastic devaluation of the worth of people's homes and the size of their retirement accounts give any and all of us terrible feelings of powerlessness and loss of control. Suddenly there's fierce juggling to see who is going to be CEO of the couple's financial partnership. Deals between spouses are being renegotiated, not often to everyone's satisfaction.

According to matrimonial lawyer Lisa Zeiderman, an attorney at Johnson & Cohen, LLP, a White Plains, New York law firm, the current recession may be the final straw for many couples contemplating divorce. "Husbands and wives, previously content to complacently permit a spouse to make unilateral decisions about the family finances, are now taking a more proactive role in their family's financial decision making. Not only does this new relationship about the family's finances disrupt the marital status quo, but spouses are literally commencing divorce proceedings in order to assure themselves the ability to make financial decisions about their assets and spending." Couples cannot weather these tough times without a great deal of
resilience.

Resilience is achieved by following one fundamental rule: Your commitment to your relationship must be stronger than your personal history, frame of mind, or the burden of a distressed situation. If both partners acknowledge that there are times that will be difficult, that matrimony or partnership will demand that the well-being of the team overrides individual need, thought and feeling, then that couple will achieve the kind of resilience required to get through the most difficult of times.

"The failure to approach financial crisis with a team attitude is critical," according to Ms. Zeiderman. "It is the abandonment of that team approach that is leading the couples to divorce. Individuals who are no longer focused on the family unit but instead are panicked about their individual financial future are placing their marriage at great risk." The act of putting a relationship before personal need, feeling, or circumstances requires accepting personal responsibility and being accountable to yourself for the ways in which you are or are not stimulating progress and resolution to your current dilemma.

With personal responsibility also comes empowerment, because while we can't change others, we can change how we think or what we do with a problem with our partner. I hear people in my office say that their spouse needs to spend less or work more or is to blame because of past expenditures, job problems, or simply foolish investments. That approach just won't work, but harnessing a couple's history of resilience through life's crises can allow for a new normal to be found.

Time Magazine recently posed the question "Will the Market Kill Your Marriage." The article cites some frightening statistics and stories about the toll the financial crisis is taking on Americans. Finally at the
end of the article they take us full circle, right back to sex: the activity that is free and limitless and healthy for you. "If partner A does not know the full lay of the dire financial land, partner B should map it out while partner A makes a robust attempt not to scream. Then figure out how to address your liquidity issues as a team. All this honesty might even work as foreplay, suggests New Jersey sex therapist Sandra Leiblum, but if not, she recommends putting down the BlackBerry and reminding your spouse of something that's "free, burns calories, releases tension and creates bonds." Bonds that, luckily, can't be traded."

When You're in Love, Words are Not Always What they Seem

Mark Sichel, L.C.S.W. — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 17:11:35 +0000

When I see couples in therapy, at some point I will invariably hear: "no one has ever spoken to me as hurtfully as she did last night." Or "He says such horrible mean things to me. No one's ever talked to me like that and I won't put up with it." Variations on this theme abound. Sometimes people acknowledge the behavior within themselves, and with horror: "I can't believe I spoke to her that way. I've never said such disgusting things to anyone other than my wife or husband." I too, have said things to my wife, who I love dearly, that are meaner than things I've said to anyone else in my life. Why is that?

I explain to clients that it's a universal fact that we humans always hurt the ones we love the most. "She talks to you that way because she loves you more than anyone else," I'll say. It's certainly an oddly paradoxical way of expressing love, but it's reflective of the fact that someone so easily bruises us when we love him or her more than anyone else in the world. The process goes something like: "I feel so hurt by you that I am now going to retaliate by saying this most imaginably awful things I can possibly come up with."

This dynamic within couples has been around a long time and brilliantly translated into a beautiful love song "You Always Hurt the One You Love" by composers Allan Roberts and Doris Fisher in the 1944. It's been performed by many great pop artists such as Michael Bublé, Ringo Starr, and Fats Domino, just to name a few.

You always hurt the one you love
The one you shouldn't hurt at all
You always take the sweetest rose
And crush it till the petals fall.
You always break the kindest heart
With hasty words you can't recall
So if I broke your heart last night
It's because I love you most of all.
You always break the kindest heart
With hasty words you can't recall
So if I broke your heart last night
It's because I love you most of all...

When a person is being verbally slammed by their partner, it's not a normal or reflexive reaction to feel, "oh my God. They really love me. They are saying such awful things to me. I have to thank them for being so loving." What's normal and instinctual is to retaliate by verbalizing in an even more disgusting way.
I am not, by any means, suggesting to anyone that they should start expressing their love by saying terrible things to their partner. However, if you can remember how common it is, the next time you're told "you, @~$#@*$~!" you might just change the tune and the tone by remembering that "you always hurt the one you love" and simply say "I'm sorry if I hurt you so much that you feel that angry with me" rather than...."well, you are an even bigger and badder @~$#@*$~!

Once a Parent, Always a Parent: One Mother’s Resignation by Literary Defamation

Mark Sichel, L.C.S.W. — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 18:23:24 +0000

Children are, in my book, off limits when writing about personal experiences. As an author and psychotherapist with an expertise in family estrangement, I have not hesitated to share my personal experiences with readers. Other writers and clinicians have also contributed their stories because like me, we feel our experiences can help others. In my writing, however, my children are off limits when it comes to public exposure. I feel strongly that they’re entitled to this respect and privacy; after all, thought they’re all grown up now, they’re still my children.

This week I was shocked and appalled by a story in a British newspaper, The Independent, about an acclaimed writer named Julie Myerson who decided to write the story of her decision to cut off all ties with her 17 year old son. Myerson, by the way, is no hack; she’s a well-known and critically acclaimed writer in the UK.

Myerson’s son Jake had developed a habituation to a form of marijuana called “skunk.” For some reason, skunk smoking has become epidemic among British adolescents. I don’t know why this trend hasn’t migrated to the US, but fortunately it hasn’t, at least to my knowledge. Skunk is extremely powerful cannabis that is grown hydroponically and is up to 25 times more powerful than the pot smoked in the U.S. It’s created a serious public health problem in Britain and has caused a dramatic rise in psychosis and hospital admissions due to skunk abuse are at their highest level.

In Myerson’s soon to be released semi-autobiographical book, “The Lost Child”, she writes that her son Jake’s drug abuse was so out of control that he became violent and posed a threat to his two younger siblings and to her and his father. Because he refused treatment and became unmanageable to live with, she took the advice offered by drug abuse experts to throw him out of their home and in effect, to disown him. To put it another way, she resigned from her job as Jake’s mother.

Ironically Myerson had been disowned by her own father and had promised Jake when he was 12 years old that she would never cut him out of her life because “we think a parent's relationship with their child is the parent's responsibility – however old or bad the child is." Good for you Julie, I agree with you there. A parent is a parent and is always a parent of their children. Having been cut off by my parents, I couldn’t agree with you more. I also don’t disagree with the professionals who advised her that she needed to throw Jake out of the house. That’s the only way to stop enabling the addiction with the hope the addict will hit bottom and get treatment. Apparently Jake did become abstinent from drugs after a period of time and this drama could have been used as a stepping-stone to repairing the rift between Jake and his family.

Instead Julie chose to publicly expose her child’s drug problems and the related behavioral problems caused by the drug abuse. Now that, in my opinion, is off limits, indecent and obscene. No one with a heart would publicly expose their child’s personal struggles. Any parent with respect for their child and human decency, love and kindness would not be critical of their child in their writing and publicly humiliate them for their own glorification as a writer. She made a choice to do this, though and never even gave her son the choice to have his and the family’s dirty laundry aired out in public.

Every adolescent challenges their parent’s self-control and engages in unpleasant defiance and sometimes abusiveness. I was no picnic as a teenager and certainly adolescence was not the easiest of times for me as a parent. Julie Myerson, however, made two indefensible moves: she not only publicly defamed her son but she never, at least in public, reflected on her role in her son’s problem. I’m not saying her son became a drug abuser because of bad parenting, not at all, but I am saying that as parents we always have to look honestly at our part in perpetuating our children’s very normal human challenges. Julie, its time as they say in AA, to make a searching and fearless moral inventory. Addiction is a family disease after all.

Turn In the Hate Card and Find Your Better Self

Mark Sichel, L.C.S.W. — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 21:12:46 +0000

Talk about injustice collecting: On Saturday night, my wife and I went to see Jane Fonda on Broadway in previews of the show “33 Variations.” As we approached the theatre, we saw six men with American flags seemingly engaged in a protest of some kind. This seemed like a strange place for protestors but as we got closer, their shouts of “Commie Traitor” made it clear that they were not Jane Fonda fans. They were still angry about some anti-war statements the actress made in North Vietnam in 1972.   That’s the hallmark of an Injustice Collector: holding on to grievances from the past and discounting any actions since the crime was perpetrated, as they see it, onto them.

Jane Fonda has since spoken publicly about her regret at having taken this action and apologized in all manner of media about any hurt she inflicted on American soldiers. "I would like to say something, not just to Vietnam veterans in New England, but to men who were in Vietnam, who I hurt, or whose pain I caused to deepen because of the things that I said or did. I was trying to help end the killing and the war, but there were times when I was thoughtless and careless about it and I'm...very sorry that I hurt them. And I want to apologize to them and their families."   How can you not forgive such forthrightness and authenticity?

I doubt that the protestors detracted any audience members from what was a moving and beautiful story in which Fonda portrays a woman dying of ALS (Lou Gherig’s disease) who somehow manages to celebrate music, life, beauty, art, and her love for her daughter. “Hanoi Jane,” as Fonda was called, was certainly not what I would remember about this amazing woman. She has had not only outstanding success as an actress but has devoted herself to promoting ideals of human rights.

The very next day, Sean Penn eloquently expressed himself about the anti-gay protestors at the Oscars.    A reporter asked Penn what he would say if he had a chance to talk to those protesters. "I'd tell them to turn in their hate card and find their better self, you know. I think that these are largely taught limitations and ignorances," he explained. "It's very sad in a way, because it's a demonstration of such emotional cowardice to be so afraid to be extending the same rights to a fellow man as you would want for yourself."

I agree with Penn about the sadness of people who allow their worst selves to keep them trapped in a pit of hatred. He’s also right about their emotional cowardice, because if only they could summon their courageousness, that very act of elevation would bring them great joy and maybe even allow them to celebrate the rights of all human beings. Both “33 Variations” and “Milk” are stories of hope and reconciliation, which is exactly what the protestors on each coast need in abundance. The resentment they carry around is toxic. So much of the work we do in therapy is helping people let go of their resentments so they can have nourishing and satisfying human relationships. Stop dredging up your parents crimes of the past, let go of your husband’s hurtful disconnectedness, forgive your child the inevitable mistakes they’ve made as they’ve grown up. That’s the only way to repair a relationship and to experience the pleasure of loving relationships. If any of these protestors asked for my help…which is a fantastical notion, of course…. I’d suggest they forgive whatever crime they believe has been perpetrated because ultimately they are the ones who suffer the greater loss of life in all its glory.