Publications
Since 1973 I have been in private practice in Washington, DC, doing in
depth individual and group psychotherapy. My humorous and insightful
essays on family interaction have been published in over 60 newspapers,
and in numerous magazines, including Harpers, the Smithsonian,
Washington Post Magazine, Sports Illustrated.
|
|
Excerpts: All are Born
Mad and Some Remain So 
Waiting for
Godot, Samuel Beckett
The huge crowd
who remain so need help. Madness perhaps is not too
strong to describe the emotional pain that visits many of us.
Deprivation is the thief here, robbing one of what is needed. What is
needed is a normal portion of affirming nurture and a like portion of
good luck, that charm we undervalue and whose opposite we could wisely
blame for 80% of our trouble, such a much more deserving resource than
our self. We are shaped by those who loved us and those who did not and
by those traumata that visit us. So much of happiness is determined by
our response to the bad luck sent our way.
Honoring personal bad luck is curative and cheaper than medication.
Some wounds leave us wandering and are worth crying about each day.
Tears are a gift worth pursuing, a noble gift from the gods to reduce
pain. Therapy is another medicine, helping us see the obstacles that
life and our denying self are contributing to our hurts. Beckett
reminds us that whatever struggle of life you are living, it is more
normal than otherwise.
“ The tears of the world are a constant quality. For each one who
begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the
laughter.”
Beckett had a reputation of being full of concern for others, he fought
in the French resistance, sent money to friends, worked to help
many beginning writers; personal traits that do not support how some
see his view of humanity as forlorn and hopeless.
“ I know your sorrow and I know that for the likes of us there is not
ease for the heart to be had from words of reason and that in the very
assurance of sorrow’s fading there is more sorrow. So I offer you only
my deeply affectionate and compassionate thoughts and wish for you only
that the strange thing may never fail you, whatever it is, that
gives us the strength to live on and on with our wounds.”
-Beckett’s words of consolation to his friend, Alan Schneider
|
Bibliography
I will suggest some books and readings personally connected to the
issues arising in our consultation. Each life has an inner fingerprint,
as uniquely personal as ones DNA. The process of psychotherapy defies
facile definition. We can only offer shadows of what occurs when a
skilled therapist joins another to form a team on a journey to deepen
the riches life offers. We look to poets and writers who offer words
that stir emotion, one of the goals we strive for in the psychotherapy
journey.
Where there is sorrow there is holy ground.
-Oscar Wilde, De Profundis
We can make our minds so like still water
that beings gather about us that they may see,
it may be, their own images, and so live
for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with
a fiercer life because of our quiet.
-WB Yeats
When you are real, (loved) shabbiness does not matter.
-Velveteen Rabbit
Come to the edge, he said.
Were scared. they said.
Come to the edge, he said.
They came. He pushed them. They flew.
-Guillaume Apollinaire
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant
Tell all the truth but tell it slant Success in Circuit lies Too bright
for our infirm Delight The Truth's superb surprise As Lightning to the
Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually.
-Emily Dickinson
... and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain where
I put the rose in my hair as the Andulasian girls used or shall I wear
a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought
well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes and I
said yes and his heart was going like mad and my breasts all perfume
and I said yes, I will, Yes.
-Molly Bloom ending Ulysses, James Joyce
It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.
-Herman Melville
ON COUPLES
Marriage is one of the most remarkable and most courageous of human
acts, the promise  of two human beings to share life together on all
levels - physical, economic, spiritual - a promise made in the face of
the certainty of death, the certainty of change, and the uncertainty of
everything else. There is nothing else quite like this act, nothing so
foolish, nothing so profound.
A couple is talking to the surgeon who has just operated on a tumor for
the 30-year-old wife. " Will my mouth stay like this? ", she asks.
" Yes, I had no choice but to sever the nerve. "
She is silent, then begins to weep. Her husband says.
" I kinda like it. Its sorta cool."
He approaches the bed, bending, he forms his lips to match the shape of
hers, and kisses her.
The surgeon casts his eyes down, instructed by the ancient Greeks, to
show respect in the presence of a god in human form.
T S Eliot, unhappily married for many years, grew to so fear his wife
he would go out the back door when she approached. At 70, he finally
left the marriage and married a 30-year-old secretary and discovered a
repressed side of himself.
This last part of my life is 
the best, in excess of anything
I could have deserved.
Eliot never wrote about love or
happiness except for a description
of this relationship.
No peevish
winter shall
chill/ No
sudden tropic sun shall
wither/ The
roses in the rose
garden which
is ours and ours
alone.
Welcome O life! I go to
encounter for the millionths
time the reality of
experience and to forge in
the smithy of my soul the
uncreated conscience of my race.
Old father, old artificer,
stand by me now and ever
in good stead.
-Last words of Stephen Dedalus, Portrait of the Artist, James Joyce
FATHERS
 My writing was all about you. All I did there, after all,
was to bemoan
what I could not bemoan on your breast.
-Franz Kafka
My surprise is even greater when I remember my fathers view of me as an
ordinary boy with less than ordinary intelligence.
-Charles Darwin
The deepest search in life, it seemed to me, the thing that in one way
or another was central to all living was mans search to find a father,
not merely the father of his flesh, not merely the lost father of his
youth, but the image of a strength and wisdom external to his need and
superior to his hunger to which the belief and power of his own life
could be united.
-Thomas Wolfe
I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate
him.
-Booker T. Washington
Revenge is a way to stay close to someone you hate.
-Groucho Marx
Have you ever noticed how you can learn more about other people-more
about how they feel, how it would feel to be them-by hearing them cough
or make one of those inner noises, than by watching them for hours?
Sometimes if another person hiccups, particularly if you haven't been
paying much attention to him, why you get a sudden sensation as if you
were inside him-you know how he feels in the little aspects he never
mentions, aspects which are, really, indescribable to another person
and must be realized by that kind of intuition. Do you know what I am
driving at? Well... that's what I quite often want to get into poetry.
-Elizabeth Bishop
Mans youth is a wonderful thing;
It is so full of anguish and of magic
and he never comes to know it as it is
until it has gone from him forever.
-Thomas Wolfe
Men are made for happiness, and anyone who is truly happy has a right
to say to himself, " I am doing Gods will on earth."
-Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Our revels now are ended, These our actors
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
the solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve;
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind, We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
is rounded with a sleep.
-W. Shakespeare, The Tempest
 Time does not bring relief; you all have lied Who told me
time would
ease me of my pain! I miss him in the weeping of the rain; I want him
at the shrinking of the tide; The old snows melt from every
mountainside, And last year's leaves are smoke in every lane; But last
year's bitter loving must remain Heaped on my heart, and my old
thoughts abide. There are a hundred places where I fear to go so with
his memory they brim. And entering with relief some quiet place Where
never fell his foot or shone his face I say, "There is no memory of him
here!" And so stand stricken, so remembering him.
-Edna St. Vincent Millay, Time Does Not Bring Relief from Collected
Poems (Harper Collins).
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and
--try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms
and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.
Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given
you because you would not be able to live with them.
And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions
now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing
it, live along some distant day into the answer.
-Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To a Young Poet
|
A single consult can begin a self help journey that will enrich your
emotional life.
Contact us
for more info
|
|
|
