Monday, December 31, 2007

At the Check-out

Two stories



He does so, grateful.










"I guess not."




It's a goal, is all.





She has a load of groceries. It's an expensive order.



"Here, take mine," he says.


A happy 2008, my friends.


* K"H removes the evil eye.

Saturday, December 29, 2007

Internet Pornography- Part Two




What’s it to you anyway, TherapyDoc?









Wikipedia backs me up with the following distinction:






But owning that photo on the Internet?











But posing naked surely couldn't help.

copyright 2007, therapydoc

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Kids at the Movies: ALVIN!




At a wedding the other night I got this text message:

Took munchkin to the movies. A disaster.
Well, what did he expect? She's not even two.





Rac added to the replies,


I thought he'd never get over it.




Friday, December 21, 2007

Internet Pornography- Part One


You don't get a picture on this post.


I'd like to study Internet Addictions, I said.
I published an article on it actually.















"And why not?" I gently ask.

"We wouldn't let her."

"How could you stop her?"




I nod, consider what he says, take a breath.





He stopped going to the restaurant nevertheless.


The point?



It's a living, see?





copyright 2007, therapydoc

Monday, December 17, 2007

Think it, Don't say it











What else could I be talking about except:

Don't you DARE say that about my mother.


How DARE you say that about my mother?

Same thing.


My mom's always been a good sport.














But let's let the victim make that call.


(b) You insult people? You look bad.


And mean it.



Wednesday, December 12, 2007















I forgot! It's that season to be jolly!


We'll talk about it again soon. I'm not finished.

To be continued.

Copyright 2oo7, therapydoc

Sunday, December 09, 2007

Using What You've Got







Save and Close is PRETTY IMPORTANT.




We're in the Being Late territory we've discussed before. **


She sounds quite fine with that.


Would you agree?




She smiles. I'm getting better already.

Oh, how I love people.

Copyright 2007, therapydoc



Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Starting Young: Neuroplasticity


You should call that guy about the other job.
You should be taking guitar lessons.
You should be going back to school.



One can hint, but not nag.



Why not?







The point is,








Neuroplasticity is the lifelong ability of the brain to reorganize neural pathways
known as










Sunday, December 02, 2007

Guys & Dolls and Couples Therapy

When you see a guy reach for stars in the sky
You can bet that he's doing it for some doll.
When you spot a John waiting out in the rain
Chances are he's insane
as only a John can be for a Jane.

When you meet a gent paying all kinds of rent
For a flat that could flatten the Taj Mahal.
Call it sad, call it funny.
But it's better than even money
That the guy's only doing it for some doll.











If you get tired of me you can go there.

But back to the show.

Women playing men.






Of course I could post about gambling, here.






But let's get to the couples therapy stuff.













And sure, I’ll recommend it whole heartedly: Guys & Dolls

Try these songs for starters:

"I’ll Know" (when my love comes along)

"A Bushel & a Peck"


"I’ve Never Been in Love Before"


You can get tickets at the door. If you're female.



November 07 Back a' cha'
















Shirat Devorah explores the bee situation. Not good.








Friday, November 30, 2007

The Sales Rep
























And that wouldn't be such a bad idea, either.



Tuesday, November 27, 2007

It's His Mother

There I was, minding my own business, picking at the broccoli quiche at a bridal shower, when from across the table I heard an old friend of mine shout to me,

"Hey, Doc! What should a woman do if a guy tells her something that turns her off in the first five minutes of a first date, something really scary?"

"Like what," I ask, "Like he's got a gun? Pass the nuts."

He had told her that he had mother issues, that his mother had screwed him up.
"And you don't find that interesting? Why is that scary?"
For me this is confusing. Most of my conversations start with, My mother screwed me up. In my defense, this time I did not crack, Come on, the guy's Jewish, right?

Contrary to popular belief, Jews do not have a corner on mother stories.

And truth be told, I can certainly see why a person would hesitate getting involved with someone who divulges a personal issue before his first diet coke.

She might have had good reasons to want to run before ordering her sushi, reasons like:

thinking he should have cleared up his issues by the ripe old age of forty, either by watching Oprah, going to therapy, or successfully banishing negative memories to the recesses of his mind, hoping never to have to deal with them. Like the rest of us.

thinking the polite thing for him to do would be to ask her about her issues, perhaps not talk much about himself at all

thinking he could have showed his mother more respect than to diss her in the first five minutes of a date

So I buttered a roll, gave her the benefit of the doubt, and was about to explain the facts of life, when she challenged me further.
"Well wouldn't you see problems with a mother as a red flag?"
What's with the flags? Are all issues red flags? Is everyone a potential serial rapist? Does this mean he'll be obsessed with navel lint? How's one to know? Must there be a tragic flaw? Things are culturally synchronous (I know they are with her dates), you share the same values and yiddish nuances. You can work the rest out.

But I wipe my mouth and say,
"Why look for reasons not to like this guy? You only had one date. Anyway, isn't it INTERESTING that his mother screwed him up? Do you think there's someone out there who ISN'T screwed up? I'll bet he's been in therapy."
I'm thinking therapy is a good thing, see.

But I'd rather not get into any of this, not over salad, not across a table, and I've just been asked to emcee the shower (n = 70) and to introduce the next speaker, and I'm not a hundred percent sure I know her name.
"Well, yeah, he's been in therapy," she says, frowning and shaking her head from
side to side, as in, therapy's a bad thing.
More than a sigh, not quite a groan. A sroan.
"Don't you want to know what happened to him in his childhood?"
Blank look and decent enough pause.
"Not sure."
I'm a patient person. This is my friend, after all, and I love her and I want her happy. So I decide to wait before introducing the speaker, to postpone the opening of the presents.

"Would you really rather talk politics and religion on a first date? Do you really care? Everyone has something going on upstairs. I'd want to define that something, maybe talk about the person who's had the most tremendous influence upon his psyche, behavior, relationships, attitudes, and habits. Don't you want to know about those kinds of things? Here's a guy who wants to talk about this stuff. Geshmacht. Delicious. And the quiche isn't bad, either."

She tells me she still can't see past the red flags.

I suggest she try to weed out violent tendencies, substance dependency and abuse. But rather than use the filtering method for dating she might consider something else, something much less popular yet very sophisticated. She needs to look for something other than flags.

"What?! What do I need to look for?!"

The wonderful.

You need to look for the wonderful.

The point of dating is projecting into the future, seeing what it is that you'll see twenty, forty, perhaps even sixty years from now. You're looking for things that will make you smile, that will make you happy. There's something truly wonderful in everyone, and your job, should you choose to accept it, is to find it. If you decide to spend the rest of your life with this person, you'll want to absorb, love, enjoy and build on the wonderful. It's the wonderful that you need.

"The wonderful," she repeats.

"The wonderful."

Way too simple, is it?

Pass the dressing.

copyright 2007,


Monday, November 26, 2007

The you in how are you

Someone asked me to elaborate on how one goes about developing self. I'm loathe to do a self-help, how-to post since there are so many ways to answer this and any other question and the ways vary depending upon age and at least a dozen other variables. But I'm thinking that one possible approach to the problem is derech ha'gav.

Oh, you're sick of Hebrew/Yiddish expressions? But they're more poetic and more to the point, and you know it's true.

So derech ha'gav (Hebrew) means the way to the left . Or it can mean in an unusual way or an alternative path to get to where you want to go. Sometimes it's the long way.

How DOES one go about developing self, TherapyDoc?

Well, derech ha'gav, let's discuss (a) people asking How are you? and (b) people answering Fine.

Let's skip (a) and go directly to (b) Fine. It's quicker. Plus, this being an easy class (everyone gets an "A") we can postpone How to ask Invasive Questions and Asking Socially Appropriate Questions and Knowing What questions to Ask When, of Whom, and about What, until next semester.

(By the way, should I be giving mid-terms? I had that recurring dream last night about forgetting to attend a history class senior year, undergrad, and getting an incomplete or a failure and wondering if indeed I had graduated.)

But back to you.

FINE is not a good answer. Even though it's the popular answer, it's not a good answer.

Say you're at an event, maybe a religious reception, or a wedding, a holiday party. We just knocked off Thanksgiving and more cool holidays are coming right up! No, I can't wait either. And someone comes up to you and says, How are you?

I think that most* people automatically say, Fine.

It would be nice to hear, however, something more along the following lines, something with a few more words tagged on, words that hit on the dimensions of self. No one really wants to hear a pathetic, FINE. What we're dying for is . . .

Well, emotionally, I'm up and down, you know, all over the map, I'm feeling insane half the time.

And financially things are a wreck, we're barely making ends meet, and who
knows how Little Joey's going to go to college.

Health-wise I'm struggling, but it seems the rest of the family is in a good place, so okay, at least that's good, on the other hand, ya' never know when the other shoe is gonna' drop, do you?

Spiritually I'm totally disconnected and hate myself for not even trying, let alone caring, on the other hand, I still go through the motions, so maybe I'm not such a worm after all.

Relationship-wise there's nothing. Nothing is going on. I have no time for
my friends. Forget old friends to whom I haven't spoken in years. Maybe 20 years.

The stress at work is eating away at me. I'm just not hitting the mark. I come home and can barely talk at the end of the day. Laundry's not happening. I eat potato chips.

But my pottery class, my creativity is going well, even though I broke something that I'd been working on for three months, for sure it's a gam zu*. And even though that broke, my banana cake was a hit on Thanksgiving, and I think I've finally got the knack of wild rice.

I hit the ball too hard and now I have tennis elbow, and there's no way I can exercise, and since it was my only sport, I now get zilch recreation and since that was the only thing that made me happy I'm pretty grouchy all the time and am gaining weight, of course.

Thank G-d. By you?

Okay, so it's an old joke, but all of those things are self-defining. When someone asks, HOW ARE YOU they're saying, not demanding, but subtly suggesting, TALK ABOUT YOU.

Crazy as it sounds, we often think How are you is a direct question about our happiness. But it isn't, and our answers shouldn't be limited to some sort of declaration of emotional health. Some relationships, it's true, are founded on these intimacies. We talk about our troubles with certain people, bask in issues. Some people like to talk about their feelings.

But not everyone does, and its a diss to the human condition to think that all we are is the way we feel. Emotion is just an interpretation of our body sensations, that's all. Sure, it can be overwhelming and they feel like they take over and can. Sometimes we're conscious of nothing but our sadness, anxiety, guilt, resentment, anger, umbrage. We feel diagnosable, and we might very well be.

But you have to keep that in it's place, too, the idea that I am my disorder. I alluded to this in the post on Borderline Disorder. We're usually more ordered than not.

Managing and staying conscious of the rest of one's identity and focusing upon others is the job when in an emotionally tight spot.

And no question, for some of us, being in a social situation means being in an emotionally tight spot.

So. When you're mingling and talking to people next month at holiday parties, or even at work, tasting the cookies and fruit cakes, snacking on celery and dip, consider embellishing your answers. My guess is that you've got a lot more self than you think.

And when in doubt you can always skip to another social skill and say, Pass the guac (the cookies, the lasagne), would you please? It's really good, don't you think? What do you think is in there? I taste oregano, or is that cilantro? And there's a hint of peppermint in that chocolate chip cookie, for sure try that.

Everyone loves to talk food. Talking about what we like to eat, cook, taste, prepare, or carry out is another dimension of self, lest we forget. Like we could.

copyright 2007, therapydoc

* No, I have no research to support this contention.
* gam zu (rhymes with Tom Zoo) means this, too, and refers to this, too, is good, and deserves an entire post which no promises I really will write one day. My patients hear this from me often, gam zu, and most don't graduate therapy until they start saying it back.

Sunday, November 25, 2007

The Kid with the Funny Laugh

This is a reprint from August 29, 2007. I wrote it a few years ago for a patient (16), stayed up pretty late to do it, too. (It helped, so it was worth the work. See, there are different kinds of therapy, you know). Then I published it here, still writing under my name, and took it down when I went anonymous, but can't remember why.
Someone recently asked about it, so here you are.

In retrospect it's a little dark. But being on the receiving end of any kind of violence isn't exactly light, is it? Feel free to copy and use it, but I've got a copyright, for those of you kids who still like stealing things off the Internet.


by therapydoc

Once there was a boy who attended a Catholic school. It could have been a Lutheran school or a Christian school or a Mormon school. It doesn’t matter.

It was the kind of school where the kids pretty much follow the rules, and if they don’t follow the rules they try very, very hard not to get caught.

There aren’t any gangs in his school and you can count on one hand the number of kids who use drugs or even drink very much alcohol.

This was an average boy except that he had a terrible laugh and he was a little on the uncoordinated side. For as long as he could remember, almost all of the boys in his class made fun of these things and just about everything else they could think of.

Maybe there’s at least one scapegoat in every class, but it didn’t help the boy to know that. He had a few friends, but he felt really bad that all of the other boys didn’t like him.

It was an all-boys school and they were already at the age, seventeen, where they should have known better. Knowing they didn’t like him made him nervous which made him laugh nervously to disguise his feelings. That made him an even greater target for their jokes.

One day he could take it no longer and he blurted out, “Would it make you all happy if I killed myself?” The boys were surprised at first, and they took a long time before one of them shot back, “Go for it, do what you gotta’ do.”

That depressed him even more. But at least he had made them think. And for a whole week, whenever they picked on him he would reply, “Would it make you happy if I killed myself?”

Soon they thought of funny come-backs and they could laugh again at his expense.

By the weekend he was even more depressed. He thought to himself, “Why bother with these idiots? I’m a good kid, and they’re jerks. I certainly wouldn’t kill myself over them! They’ve tortured me all my life, practically. I shouldn’t care about what they think about me. They’ll go to hell in the end.” And he went ahead and entertained himself on his own like he always did.

Thinking about his classmates, who happened to be good kids in the eyes of their parents and teachers, by the way, did have an effect upon him.

It made him very, very angry. The more he thought about them, the more he wanted them to disappear.

The next day, when one of the kids called him clutz and all the other guys laughed, he snapped back, “Maybe it would make me happy if I came to school with a gun and killed everyone of you—you, and you, and you.” He said each "you" very slowly.

The boys were taken aback but then one of them said, “Sure, like you could even handle a gun, you weakling.”

But he kept repeating it every time they said something mean, which was often enough that day.

“Maybe it would make me happy if I came to school with a gun and killed everyone of you. It’s been done before. Hmm… now there’s an idea. Take you out, one by one, bullet by bullet.”

Well, one of the boys told the principal.

It didn’t seem likely, but maybe the boy could pull a Columbine, who knew?

The principal was very concerned and pulled the boy out of class. He called his parents and told them that their son wouldn’t be let back into school without a note from a doctor saying that he wasn’t dangerous.

This was something new. The boy hadn’t anticipated therapy, but he didn’t mind going. He wasn’t afraid of it at all, looked forward to it, in fact.

He couldn’t tell the doctor all the details because he believed it to be a sin to talk badly about others, but the doctor got the general idea.

“You need,” said the doctor, “assertiveness training.”

Then he went ahead and explained what that was. Apparently there are three types of responses to confrontation. One can be passive, assertive, or aggressive.

When someone budges in front of you in line at the movies, for example, the doctor explained, you can either be: 1) passive, which is to say absolutely nothing, or 2) assertive, which is to tell it like it is, “Excuse me, but the end of the line is actually back there,” or 3) aggressive, which is to hit him or swear, as in, “You blankety blank get your blankety blank to the back of the blankety blank line, blankety blank*@!#”

The boy thought about it and said to the doctor, “I could be assertive but it wouldn’t work. The guys in school actually don’t even swear. They’re just mean.”

The doctor explained that there are many levels of verbal and physical aggression, but being mean, using mean words, is aggression no doubt. “Words hit as hard as a fist,” he said. "I read that on a bus somewhere."

“Why do they do this?” shouted the boy. “Why? Why do they all gang up on me?”

The doctor explained that it only takes a couple of leaders to be mean for the rest of the group to join in. Not that it’s fun for everybody, not everybody enjoys bullying, but rather than risk getting picked on by certain leaders, the weaker boys conform.

By conforming they feel protected, like they’re a part of a club. These are children, after all, and they need to fit in and be liked. So if that means picking on someone for no good reason, that’s the way it is.

The doctor called it Group Think when people don’t think for themselves. Some may realize it’s not nice, but they don’t want to go against the popular kids and jeopardize their own popularity.

And they surely don’t want to become the class scapegoat.

Group think is exactly what makes street gangs work. Weaker kids join stronger kids for protection. Even gang rape is just a bunch of guys hanging out and being criminal together to prove to each other that they’re bigger and stronger than their victim.

Same principles operate when an entire class bullies one kid. They’re bigger and stronger and feel better about themselves for being on top. Wow, we sure showed him, strut strut.

The boy still didn’t get it. He didn’t need to put anyone else down to feel good about himself. All he had to do to feel good was get good grades or watch TV. Why couldn’t they just live their own lives and leave him alone?

The doctor explained that kids who are violent—either verbally or physically—are sometimes copying their parents or older siblings.

If kids are allowed to fight at home, or if they witness fighting in the home, they think it’s what people do. If they watch their parents fight, then they might be afraid there’ll be a divorce. In those cases, the "leader" is often a jealous child, jealous of other kids who seem to have happy families.

For some people there’s no better way to feel better when they’re down than to make someone else miserable. That's just the way it is.

Sometimes bullies are unhappy with themselves because they aren’t good enough students or because their parents demand too much. The most common cause for teenage suicide, the doctor told the boy, is parental pressure about grades, feeling sure that you’ll never make it in life because you can’t do well enough in school.

The doctor, in the end, had the boy come back three days in a row, just to be absolutely sure that he was, indeed, not violent.

The boy didn’t mind at all and welcomed the vacation from school.

School could have been a good place for him, if it weren’t for his class. He was smart enough and had a nice way about him. He wasn’t mean to anyone, not ever, in fact he helped people out when they needed him. Teachers liked him very much.

He focused on the positives in his life and thought to himself that in six months his classmates would all graduate and go off to college, probably marry (not invite him!) and have kids.

At some point a classroom bully would be mean to his wife or maybe their kids, and at some point a woman would say, “That’s it, I’m out of here. I'm taking the kids and going. Bye bye.”

Or maybe the kids who teased him would turn out to be nice, after all, would grow up and feel guilty, even, for having made fun of him as teenagers. That was a satisfying thought, almost as good as becoming rich and laughing at them when they came to his company to apply for jobs.

After that third day away he returned to class.

Surprisingly, no one made fun of him. No one even talked to him, except for one of the nice boys in the class, a boy who had never made fun of him to begin with.

The rest of the class seemed to keep a distance. One of his teachers told him that while he had been away a team of experts had come to the school to discuss violence and what is called “peer rejection.” The kids had a violence prevention workshop.

Just when the boy thought he was spared, one of the kids came up to him and whispered, “Laugh, dude, I love it when girls laugh.”

The boy mustered up his courage and leaned forward so that his face was very close to his classmate’s face and said, “One day you’ll learn to think for yourself. Until you do, you’re just a little boy.”

He walked away as his classmate mimicked him and teased him behind his back.

Another classmate came up to him and said, “Did you really plan on getting a gun and killing everybody?”

“Why?” asked the boy. “Does it really make a difference? Are you going to be nice to me one way or another?”

“Just wanted to know, is all.”

“Oh, man. There's no way I'll ever tell. You’ll never know. The kids in this school don’t deserve to know. They can all think what they want.”

therapydoc, copyright, 2004