My patient sounded bewildered.
“It was like I was watching myself going through the motions – repeating the same old pattern.”
He’d just broken up for the umpteenth time with a woman he’d been dating for over a year.
“It’s always the same thing. I do something nice for her. Then she tries to do something for me, but I freak out, and insist she doesn’t like me. Then I do something mean, like flirt with someone else in front of her, just to prove she doesn’t like me, and she gives up and we break up again. So we’re back where we started, and I do something nice again, and off we go. Eventually, even the women who hang on give up. Then I find someone else and start over.”
He was caught in an endless loop – around and around and around. The same thing had played out with every women before this one.
Freud might have called this a “repetition compulsion.” I’ve heard other therapists refer to it as a “learned behavior.”
Whatever it is – it’s very common. Left to your own devices – in other words, acting unconsciously – you will keep doing the same thing over and over again.
What you’re doing is replaying a pattern you learned as a child – clinging to it because no one has woken you up and made you ask yourself what on earth you’re doing.
My patient’s father was a frustrated scientist, trapped in a humiliating job, deeply insecure, very unstable. My patient tried to please him by doing well in school, winning science prizes, trying to be the son he wanted.
Initially, the father would seem pleased and proud.
Then, once my patient allowed himself to relax in his father’s acceptance, disaster would strike.
The father would swing back into a frustrated rage – and take it out on his son.
It probably had nothing to do with the boy – it was the father’s own anger at his work situation – but the effect was devastating.
The pattern played out over and over again. The son would over-achieve, and believe he’d won his father’s approval – then, as he relaxed into acceptance, the old man would turn on him with vicious criticism.
My patient learned it was okay to give his father – or any person – what they wanted. But he could never relax and let down his guard. That’s when the inevitable turn-around came. He expected it – and braced himself for it – so he’d never again get caught by surprise.
You’ve probably heard of “Pavlov’s dogs.”
Ivan Pavlov was a Russian psychologist who performed a series of experiments on dogs at the end of the 19th century. One of his chief discoveries was the “conditioned response.” When a dog – or a person – is trained through repetition to expect an outcome from a certain set of variables, it is difficult to un-train that expectation. It becomes a reflex.
Pavlov trained his dogs to expect to be fed when he rang a bell. Eventually, just ringing the bell would make the dogs salivate, as they came to predict food was coming when they heard it. The bell and the food were firmly linked in their brains.
That’s what happens with people when they get stuck in a loop, like my patient.
He learned he could please his father briefly, but his father’s acceptance would soon be followed by a mood reversal and attacks.
Now, with his girlfriends, he once again sought to please, but then shut down. He was certain the old pattern would play out, so he refused to let them get close.
The problem was obvious: my patient was not a dog – and his girlfriends were not his father.
The instinct that once protected him from the pain of his father’s rages now sabotaged his chances at a healthy relationship. To shed this old conditioned response, he needed to become aware of it.
A psychotherapist doesn’t change you. He creates awareness. If I show you a pattern of behavior that’s not working for you, you’ll figure out how to change it on your own.
If I tell you that you’re standing in a pot of water over a fire, you’ll jump out of the pot.
I show you the situation – you handle the fix.
There’s something psychotherapists call “the observing ego” – it’s like a little guy who sits on your shoulder and watches you from the outside. He represents self-awareness.
My patient was developing an observing ego. He kept having “deja vu” moments. He’d been down this path before, and he knew it.
Now he wanted to change the old pattern – and try going someplace new.
I’ve worked with enough patients over the years to recognize that human beings are flexible – they change. When I meet someone I haven’t seen in a long time, I suspend expectations, because I know people are moving targets.
You can change, too. You don’t have to walk in circles forever.
If you spot a pattern that feels like a loop, take a turn and head someplace new. At least you’ll know it’s really you at the controls – not one of Pavlov’s dogs.
Sarah Palin’s nickname in high school was “Sarah Barracuda.”
Sarah represents insecurity in love. Somewhere along the way, early on, she decided there wasn’t any love out there for her. So she had no love to spare for anyone else.
My patient, a senior associate doing IP litigation at a downtown firm, brought me the bad news.
When gay people come out of the closet, they usually run into some variation of the “but that’s unnatural” argument. This is the apparently sensible claim that it doesn’t make sense to be gay. Isn’t sex for procreation? Why would two males or two females become romantically involved if they can’t have a child together?
You can breed a chihuahua that weighs 2 pounds. Or you can breed an Old English Mastiff that weighs 300 pounds.
I mean raise other people’s children.
That’s why, throughout the world, gays are the unofficial backbone of the adoption system. Without them, many children would suffer terribly, never finding wiling, dedicated adoptive parents.
Inevitably, a few times a year, a new patient refers to me as “doctor.”
First, you shake some bamboo sticks from a cup. The ones that fall to the ground have numbers written on them. Those numbers somehow guide the work of the fortune teller, who sits in the back of the temple in a special booth (there may be many fortune tellers working in a large temple.)
I had the clear sense that this “fortune teller” – an old man in a silk jacket at a Taoist temple – was a colleague. Clearly a skillful psychotherapist, he was working in a different modality, but essentially doing what I do – observing, listening, and offering insights intended to create awareness.
Last October, a law school placement director friend of mine forwarded me an email with a juicy piece of big law gossip. A former associate at Sullivan & Cromwell had offed himself. He was 39.
Gerald Lucas, a psychotherapist who runs an institute in New York City, used to tell his patients he regretted he couldn’t make the world a better place – he could only make them better able to handle it the way it is.
The orgasm has been compared to a sneeze – they’re both involuntary muscle spasms.
It’s interesting that a good comedian’s job is to relax us enough that we laugh in the presence of others. The best comedians can make you laugh even if you’re trying not to – it really is involuntary. They do this by surprising us with forbidden communication. Ironically, one of the easiest way for a comedian to get a cheap laugh is by “working blue” – talking about sex in an open way that surprises the audience into admitting truths about themselves.
The People’s Therapist now has fans. Literally.
Most of the Western world seems to have had a good laugh this week at an unidentified Arab ambassador to Dubai.
The worst part is that couples often become hyper-focused on the wedding itself. These affairs can be enormous undertakings nowadays, which grow into monsters that gobble your life. The wedding -essentially a big party for your relatives – can become the shared dream.
Instead of bemoaning the death of family – or whatever you want to call it – how about we face the fact that you can’t judge the quality of a relationship based upon its longevity. You might spend a marvelous three years with someone and decide that it’s time to move on. Or you might stay together for sixty years and be totally miserable.
An adult is a whole person, not a half person. And if the other whole person leaves to try something different, he remains a whole person.
The other day, I was listening to a patient explain to me why he was ugly and no one could possibly find him attractive.
Different eras have held widely varying ideas about what is beautiful. Even now, Americans are only beginning to open their eyes to the beauty of different ethnicities whose images were almost entirely absent from the popular media for centuries.
My patient went on to succeed in his career, against the odds. Despite his parents’ disinterest, he worked hard in school and rose to an impressive position in the business world. But he still felt ugly – nothing special. His physical appearance became a container for all the feelings his parents put in him about himself.
So were you ugly when you were 7?
She never said anything like that.
The People’s Therapist displayed his legendary tact and discretion during a recent interview with the lovely and talented Kashmir Hill, Associate Editor of the esteemed yet tasty legal blog, 
For more juicy brilliance from the lovely and talented Kashmir Hill, you can also check this out 
Children need a lot of attention. When they don’t get it, they’ll often act out – misbehave – in a desperate attempt to be paid attention to, even if the result is negative attention.
We can only hope a father figure – perhaps President Obama could fill in for Judge Zoll? – will arrive to give Brown the attention he needs. Maybe he should be forced to write a 1500-word essay on how his siblings would feel watching him destroy a chance at decent, affordable healthcare for millions of Americans.
Here’s further evidence that Sigmund Freud didn’t invent the concept of psychotherapy out of thin air:
The plot should be familiar to most of us:
That does it. The session with the French guy cracks Scrooge’s resistance, and new awareness arrives fast and hard. He wakes up a new man. With consciousness comes the desire for change. Now that Scrooge can see himself – the roots of his patterns of behavior, the distortions in his current cognition, and the pressing insistence of his mortality – he longs to express his authentic self, his best self – to become the man he truly is.
Prince William, for his part, might choose to marry someone like Princess Diana, or he might not. His mother may well have been a lovely, giving person and the perfect model for a mate.
The couple sitting in my office were clearly in no mood for social niceties. It was strictly down to business with these two.
Christine Daniels was a transsexual sportswriter. For many years, she was known to thousands of sports fans as a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, writing under the byline “Mike Penner.”
The news has been full of reports of Heidi Montag-Pratt and her claim to have undergone 10 separate plastic surgery procedures in one day. That includes rhinoplasty (a nose job), breast augmentation, lip collagen injections, chin reduction, and god only knows what else.
I can’t complain.
Studies have been done of resilient children – kids who have faced down tough times and survived intact. They share one key finding: These kids locate surrogates – replacements – for what is otherwise missing in their lives.
The People's Therapist 