Therapy

My search for the perfect New York therapist ended badly

Before moving to New York City, I had a particular vision of what my life as a writer in this fabled land of opportunity would look like. I’d wear sleek, black turtlenecks and skinny jeans. I’d go to diners and eat bagels. I’d defy the caloric calculus and stay svelte. I’d write at my window like Carrie Bradshaw, getting paid at least $2.50 per word. I’d go to book parties and stroll through the West Village, occasionally bumping into a semi-famous friend. We’d spontaneously drink wine. Perhaps most importantly, I’d have an excellent therapist – someone who had many leather-bound books, a calm and reassuring presence that could effortlessly calibrate my mental state. He’d look a bit like Wallace Shawn or maybe Barbra Streisand.

Is conversion therapy free speech?

Kaley Chiles is a Christian therapist who places the Bible at the center of her practice. To many of her patients, religious faith is often more important than Freud. They see Bible readings, prayer and a focus on spirituality along with traditional principles of psychotherapy as essential elements of any treatment plan.  While outside the mainstream of psychoanalytic practice, Chiles’s technique combining traditional psychotherapy with Biblical precepts for years had been deemed non-controversial, if confined to more conservative regions of the country. But that all began to change in 2019 when the state of Colorado enacted legislation banning so-called conversion therapy for minors, a technique that aims to help gays change their sexual orientation.

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Joan Didion’s unedited record of therapy is morbidly fascinating

In Notes to John, Joan Didion’s ostensibly private record of three years’ therapy under psychiatrist Dr. Roger MacKinnon – one memory troubles her a great deal. When her daughter Quintana Roo Dunne was about seven, they watched the (wholly unsuitable) Night of the Living Dead, before Didion insisted Quintana accompany her to the kitchen at midnight. She pretended to be afraid for herself, but really she worried the glass doors of the living room made Quintana vulnerable to intruders. Reading this book sometimes feels like being the imagined predator lurking in the dark: we catch only a slice of the illuminated interior, and Didion behaves as if she isn’t being seen. By the end of 1999, Quintana, who was 33, had reached a new crisis point in her struggle with alcoholism.

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Why the kids are manifesting a Kamala presidency

Chicago “Something wonderfully magical is in the air, isn’t it?” Michelle Obama told the DNC Tuesday night. “America, hope is making a comeback.” The former first lady’s remarks tied into a theme the party theme of the week: with Kamala Harris, 2024 is 2008 all over again. The chrysalis-like flowering of the Harris campaign happened virtually overnight, out of nowhere, as party bosses who had moved to oust President Biden swiftly fell in line behind the vice president to head of the prospect of a messy contested convention. And it worked: in recent purple-state polls: a round from New York Times/Siena College this weekend gave her the edge over Trump in Arizona and North Carolina.

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Is your therapist trying to brainwash you?

Mental health therapists are supposed to be deliberate in making sure that their personal politics don’t get in the way of treating their patients. I was taught during graduate school that separating my “stuff” from my patients’ therapy was essential. After all, their therapy was all about them.   But that has changed in this country — everywhere from college-level classes and professional organizations, to therapy practices both public and private.   Earlier this summer, in a private group of mental health professionals that I administrate, I witnessed how the critical theory ideologues are destroying mental healthcare.

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Scoop: how Critical Race Theory is taking over your therapy sessions

Leaked Facebook messages provided exclusively to The Spectator reveal how therapists are using counseling sessions with their patients to push left-wing ideas of race and gender. Approximately half a dozen licensed mental health professionals in a Facebook group in Indiana had in-depth discussions about how to inject systemic racism into sessions with patients who problems or goals were seemingly unrelated to that topic. The therapists also strategized on how to work with patients who were resistant to the idea that the real source of their issues was societal bigotry or that they might be bigoted themselves.

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A new book and a newborn

One of the most famous lines from the classic 2002 romcom Sweet Home Alabama has leading lady Reese Witherspoon incredulously asking a redneck hometown friend, “You brought a baby... to a bar?” I encounter that incredulity frequently, every time I cart my kids to work events, including those at bars. But a book tour? This was a new one. A book tour with a baby is hard, but babies (and kids) are worth all the hardships. As Scrubs’s wise Dr. Kelso once explained, “Nothing that’s worth having in life comes easy.” That’s a mantra in our home as we wade through the hard times, and it’s a lesson we impart to our kids as we endeavor to raise them into happy warriors and resilient and caring adults.

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Prince Harry is surrounded by victims

In a shocking twist after the last three years of Prince Harry’s perpetual victimhood tour, last night in a live therapy session the prince finally admitted what we’ve known all along: that he isn’t one. Back on the stage for a live streamed Q&A with toxic trauma expert Dr. Gabor Maté, Harry claimed, “I definitely don't see myself as a victim.” You had to pay thirty bucks a head for the pleasure, but boy it was worth it to hear that. Victim, no. Narcissist, maybe. Later in the interview Harry said that sharing his experiences of his terrible life in his bombshell memoir Spare “feels like an act of service.” I’m sure his late grandmother would have different views on what a lifetime of service actually entails.

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Social-justice shrinks: how identity politics infected therapy

In winter 2019, Leslie Elliott enrolled as a graduate student in Antioch University’s Mental Health Counseling program. At first, she found it to be a stimulating master’s program — informative and clinically relevant. Then she took a required course in “multicultural counseling.” “We were taught that race should be the dominant lens through which clients were to be understood and therapy conducted,” says Elliott, a mother of four who’d majored in psychology. Elliott’s professors taught her, for example, that if clients were white, she was supposed to help them see how they unwittingly perpetuate white supremacy. “We were encouraged to regard white clients as ‘reservoirs of racism and oppression.

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Stuck in a love triangle with a shrink

I’ve met someone. The One. And now I’m in love. It’s a lunatic love, driven by insatiable lust. She’s funny. Smart. Sexy. I’d say she was perfect for me but there’s one major problem — she has another man in her life and refuses to give him up. Let’s call him The Other Man (TOM). She sees him five times a week and tells him all her secrets. I only get to see her once a week and she tells me she loves this man because he listens to her. She is in my bed and he is in her head — by which I mean TOM is her therapist. The One talks about TOM when we’re in bed, and he talks about me during her therapy. I talk about him — and her — to my therapist. My life at the moment isn’t imitating art; it’s imitating bad Woody Allen.

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Who needs therapy?

If you pull up Twitter and search for “men will therapy,” you’ll find an endless scroll of jokes, many quite funny, about the things men will do before they go to therapy. There’s one for every current event: “men will buy twitter before going to therapy.” And after Samuel Alito’s draft Supreme Court decision was leaked: “Men will overturn roe v wade before going to therapy.” As with any ironic internet utterance, there are multiple layers here. The (genuinely useful!) website KnowYourMeme.com believes that Tweeter Zero for this meme is someone named @SpencerKlavan, who wrote “Men will literally defend an entire civilization from ruin in two world wars, start and provide for a family, produce masterworks of art and culture, and then just NOT go to therapy smdh.

therapy

When did the left gaslight itself?

Anyone who follows left-wing Twitter, or reads the more exotic NYT columns, might have noticed the rise of an increasingly fashionable new political language: therapy-speak. Just look at the weird self-helpy terms which now seem everywhere in political debate – phrases like ‘validate’, ‘call out’, ‘tone-policing’, ‘trivializing’ or ‘macroaggression’. Others are more specific – like ‘gaslighting’, an obscure psychological term which, as Megan McArdle notes, has become an obsession for the woke left.

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