My Funny Valentine Propaganda from #CheersToSochi

Dear Young Therapist: That Time my House Burned Down

It all started with my StarTAC flip phone ringing. Don't judge. It was 2002.

Without saying hello my friend Tina said "I'm so glad you finally have cell phone service. I got to your apartment a little early. Are you here yet?"

"No," I said. "I'm about 20 minutes away in Concord."

"Okay," she said softly into the phone. I'm having trouble getting to your apartment. There are fire trucks blocking the main entrance to your complex. I'll call you back when I figure out what's going on."

I continued on my way back home not really thinking much of the phone call. I lived in a large complex of apartment buildings and fire alarms went off all the time. Opening the oven door would often trigger the alarm in my apartment. Especially when I attempted to make naan on a pizza stone. 

My phone rang again. 

"Are you still driving?"

"Um, yes," I said.

"Can you pull over?"

My heart sank. "Yes?"

"The fire trucks are in front of your building. There are flames shooting out of the roof."

I accelerated toward home.

La Oroya: Full Metal Air

After a recent chat on Twitter with a grad student doing research in a particular Peruvian town, I learned about the town of La Oroya that has a smelling plant, recently liquidated by the United States company Doe Run. It provides us with a variety of heavy metals that assist our lives. It also poisons the children of the area.

Watch this documentary. These sorts of things happen to people in our name, for our products, and our convenience.

I support love. #DontAskMeWhy

Click here for more.

Here´s Vladimir Putin´s Facebook Movie

George and Martha: Reflections on my Mother's Storytelling

Martha loved to look into the mirror

Today the blogger and extraordinarly talented therapist Martha Crawford wrote about the perils and gifts of mirrors. You should spend some time reading and sitting with her writing. Each post slowly reveals itself to you over time and becomes a little jewel of thought.

When I was young, my mother would endlessly read (complete with theatrical voices) to satisfy my voracious appetite for stories. It's hard to tell who had more fun.

Among my favorites were James Marshall's books about George and Martha, two hippopotami with a complicated relationship. Each story came complete with a lesson of how to deal with the vicissitudes of friendships. Hippopotami, you see, often come into conflict when they don't meet each others needs or have trouble seeing the same situation eye-to-eye.

In one particular story, The Mirror, Martha was shown to be a hippo who was entranced with her own image in her mirror. In fact, she would wake up in the middle of the night and gaze at her beautiful reflection. She'd giggle about how fun it was to see and appreciate herself.

I can totally understand why Martha liked looking at her reflection. Look at that soft gray skin, those pearly white button teeth, and how that tasteful matching bow and tulip brings out the shape of her nostrils. She's down right adorable. Why shouldn't she appreciate her own reflection?

Perhaps Martha was having a vanity crisis and needed a little extra validation? I'm not sure. If she was my friend I would have been sure to tell her how much I appreciated her.

Anyway, George got a little annoyed with all this mirror gazing (perhaps he wanted to be seen too, we'll never know as that action took place off the page). He devised himself a clever little plan to teach Martha a lesson.

George snuck into Martha's room during a rare moment she wasn't gazing at herself and tapped a grotesque picture over her mirror. Martha gasped when she saw the reflection.

How could Martha not have been horrified at such an image? She cried out over her grotesque image wanting to know what has happened to her. George, being the rascal that he was, said this is what happens to us when we spend too much time looking at our reflection in the mirror. Having learned her lesson, Martha made the vow never to look at herself in the mirror again.

As an adult I've learned that mirrors are much more complicated technology. Sometimes I look into them and see imperfections, other times I see distortions, and still other times I see a self-aggrandized view of my own handsome good looks.

Crawford writes in her blog that "the first literal and metaphorical mirror we encounter is the gleam in the mother's eye." My mother likes to tell the story that when I was young I was always sit backward in my stroller to look at her. I couldn't begin to imagine what my experience was. Perhaps I saw her, or found comfort in seeing a familiar and reassuring face, or maybe it was that I saw myself reflected back and was comforted by my own image?

I suspect Martha the hippopotamus was lost in her own funhouse mirror of reflections. I'd like to think that through George's practical joke, Martha was able to shake herself loose from those distortions and help her see something more important: how she could see herself through her impact on those around her.

Mirrors aren't so bad. It's just they are complicated and we are never really sure what is looking back at us. The mirror is a great place to start looking if you are looking for change.

Dear Young Therapist: Don't Call People Names

The liberatory potential of psychotherapy is immense. Conversely, without careful thought or reflection, our tools can rapidly become an oppressive force that perpetrates violence rather than forwarding the potential of humanity. We can do so much damage to fellow human beings through carelessly (or willingly) referring to patients as categories of diagnostic representation. Individual and institutional violence can be perpetrated against our patients when we collapse our understandings of the complexities of our human experience into a label. It is so easy to lose sight of the dangers of misusing our power and position.

It is important to deeply consider the way in which we speak and think about the fellow human beings who we are privileged to share a portion of life with us.

In 1974 David Hawkins wrote an essay about the dialogue of I, Thou, and It. Extending his writing from education to psychotherapy, we might think of our work as a dialogue and interplay with these three points of an interconnected triangle. The I is therapist, Thou is patient, and It is the complex tableau of sexuality, race, culture, ethnicity, gender, family, theories of change and psychopathology, and scores of other factors.

I think a good psychotherapist is a reflective psychotherapist: one who constantly reflects and learns from what has happened and what is happening; who is continuously open to incorporating the experience and ways of knowing of their patients; who reflects on the interplay of I, Thou, and it; who constantly cultivates space for a voice that has not been heard to be heard. As an invitation to this reflective dialogue, I ask myself a lot of questions. Here are a few that are often in my mind:

• What are the effects of labeling people transgenders, schizophrenics, borderlines, and narcissists? 
• How are our diagnostic categories reflections of societal values that are rooted in male, European, middle/upper middle class, heterosexual centric values? Does it matter? Why or why not?
• In what ways do we knowingly and unknowing remain ignorant of our implicit biases? How is are practice and impacted by knowing or not knowing (and believing or not believing) in implicit biases?
• Do our interventions and theoretical orientations reflect our personal needs or the needs of our
  patients? How? Does it matter? Why or why not?
• How do we help others make sense of a punishing world where the experience of the other is often demeaned, denied, or dismissed? How does our practice change if we do not acknowledge or agree with notions of microaggressions and institutional racism?
• Are we willing to examine how we demean, deny, or dismiss the experiences of others?
• Are we awarded special power by society as licensed therapists to categorize, describe, and label people? 
• Do our patients have the power to name, describe, and understand their own experience? 
• Do we share the power to name and understand experience? Do we keep the power for ourselves?
• How does our theoretical understandings dictate our use and understanding of power?
• Are we aware of how our position in society influence our ability to perceive our uses of power?
• In what ways are our interventions designed to force people to conform to our expectations?
• How do our answers and understandings of these questions (and the ones not asked) influence, limit, and expand our abilities to be helpful for any given patient?

What questions have I forgotten to ask? What questions don't I know to ask?

The other day I came across a disturbing trio of blog posts (here, here, and here). This blogger's posts are problematic on a variety of levels. Most notable is an apparent lack of awareness of how easily a therapist can abuse their position of power by enforcing their own personal heuristic of understanding a particular phenomena as the only heuristic of understanding a phenomena. The blogger appears to have no interest or ability to engage in any form of reflection that allows the experience of the other to be heard.

The final line of my of my previous letter to a young therapist is a good place to end once again.

Can you let a person sing their song and make meaning of it without encumbering them with your notions of what music should be?

Be reflective in your practice, young therapist. Keep asking questions. Keep listening to the other. Keep learning how to get out of the way to let the voice not yet heard be heard. Dare to let the tools of psychotherapy to bring liberation. Do not become a tool of control and colonization.