About Me

            In my first two encounters with telepsychotherapy, I was the consumer.  The first was in the wide basement hallway of a perfectly maintained, early 20th century tourist hotel in a college town in northern Vermont.  I was attending a writer’s conference on a campus about fifteen miles from the hotel, and had registered for a seminar on the same morning I wanted to set up a therapy session.  Fortunately, writers don’t schedule anything for early morning, so after creating and clearing a checklist and twice clocking my running time from the hotel back to the conference, I felt confident enough to schedule a session.

            A pay phone was mounted low on one wall, above a narrow shelf and opposite an alcove containing a haberdasher’s, handsome oak table.  There was a wide window above the table and a vase of yellow flowers on it.  Flanking the table were two upholstered chairs covered in a polished linen fabric with a floral design of soft reds and pinks and greens on a curry colored background.  The walls were pale yellow.

            It was a light, gentle, masculine space just down a wide, carpeted staircase from the lobby and the dinning room, and next to a comfortable men’s lavatory.  I thought it was perfect.

            I arranged a mid-morning hour hoping to occupy the slack between breakfast and lunch.  At the agreed upon time I dragged one of the chairs over to the phone and placed a small basket of quarters on the shelf.  I had a comfortable, undisturbed, intimate, productive session.  I was very pleased with my initiative.

            So comfortable and pleased, if fact, that I allowed my session to run over, and no matter that I sped along those narrow, twisting, up and down blacktops without center-lines, it was clear I was going to be late for my seminar.  I worried about it. 

            What would I say?  I couldn’t think of a thing.  I calmed myself with the idea that I would just slip into the back of the room, and it would be a non-event.

            I parked as close to the building as possible, which was about a hundred yards away down a medium slope.  (I don’t think there is in Vermont, actually, any flat ground.)  Though I’d been at the conference several days, this was the first time I’d be entering this particular building.  It looked like a military barrack, long and narrow with a dark, wooden skin.  I hurried up the hill.  The entrance was a double door centered in the long side of the building.  I entered into a wide hallway that ran along the front of the building with regularly spaced windows.  On the inside wall of the corridor the doors were ranked irregularly and far apart.  That was it.  No signs.  Nothing that said, This way Bill.

           Still huffing from my climb, my mind innocent of thought and expectation, I turned the knob on the door directly in front of me; it seemed to weigh nothing and swung open so swiftly that I was pulled into the room, hanging onto the handle for balance.

            I was sure there had been talking–that I had heard it in the moment when I first lunged into the room.  But now all I could hear were the soft, rapid expulsions of my breath and the hammering in my heart.  My hand seemed fused with the doorknob.  It was a struggle to straighten up and it happened slowly.

            It was an austere, unfriendly space, twice as wide as it was narrow.  Facing me across the shallow reach were three men and a woman seated behind two conjoined library tables in an attitude of interrupted action, as if they had all been looking down, reading, spreading wisdom, and had been torn abruptly from that state of grace to one of suspicion, eyes raised, heads still bowed.  They were a sampling of America’s literary elites, best selling authors, professors of English, heads of departments, for god’s sake–I should have been a pair of ragged claws, and so on.

            Spreading away from the tables like wings were twenty or more desk-chairs, curving and reaching across the room till they closed in the shape of an egg.  Most all the chairs were filled.  All emotion stilled.  The flight was suspended.

            I had caused an interruption in the universal flight plan.  It couldn’t go on.  I couldn’t go on.  We must go on.

            And then, and I swear this on my mother’s pinafore, my mouth flew open without any command from me, and blurted out, “I’m sorry I’m late, I was on the phone with my therapist.”

            As sudden as lightening, a loud, inclusive crackle of laughter erupted and rolled through the room.  When it slowed and came to a stop, one of the men at the tables smiled at me and said, Have a seat.

            I slid into a seat, and with an air of buoyancy, the whole enterprise resumed flight.

            In my mind, the major events of that morning fold into one therapy session.  During the days that followed many people I didn’t know smiled, and gave me cheerful greetings, when passing on the campus walkways.  I’ve asked myself if I would have spoken so unguardedly had I not come directly from a therapy session.  I’m not sure, but I have remembered the salutary effect of my openness, and used it to change the behavior of a previously guarded man.

            I spent my second telepsychotherapy session inside an aluminum framed, clear plastic paneled, telephone booth, at the edge of a large, vacant, pebble surfaced parking lot, set among the sand dunes of Amagansett, Long Island, while hurricane Bob, a category 2 tropical storm, made landfall.  The parking lot and phone booth were located about 50 yards behind the resort I was staying at, which lacked electricity from early that morning, and thus phone service.  Another hundred or so yards over a big sand dune was the Atlantic Ocean.  The wind was gusting at 100 mph, and I had a dim vision of Dorothy sailing away over Kansas.  When the pebbles rose up from the surface of the lot and drove against the booth I thought of Don Quixote.  When water smashed against the Plexiglas more like a sheet than a collection of drops, I thought of Ahab.  Toward the end of the session, as the wind slacked some, I thought, who the hell do you think you are, Bill? 

When I stepped out of the booth I could just hold myself upright, kind of, against the storm, and I staggered, and slipped, and stumbled my way to the hotel.

            My companion was reading a book by the light of the one candle the hotel had distributed.  She smiled and asked if I’d had a good session.

            I said, Yeah, and felt a surge of energy.  Come on, I said, let’s go to town and find a party.

         Starting a course of psychotherapy for the first time, or switching to a new therapist, is never easy.  So when I first encountered videopsychotherapy I thought, This changes everything.  By then, I’d been working on the telephone for years with folks all over the country.  Telepsychotherapy hadn’t changed the process.  But what did change, was the level of difficulty folks had keeping their appointments. First, because a session didn’t have thirty, or sixty, or more minutes of travel attached to it, they just didn’t get jammed up as often.  And when they did, finding an alternate time was always so much easier.  We’d do Saturday or Sunday mornings, evenings, holidays, whenever, it’s not such a burden to slot in forty-five minutes if you’re at home, or in the country, or baby sitting your grandson, or taking a break on the lawn of a college campus tricked out for Wi-Fi.   And there are some that just need a visual contact to make a therapeutic connection.

          Now, with video, we have all that was gained with the tele­phone: the greater comfort and ability to relax; the enormous time saving; the flexibility; plus the added positive draw of “real” meetings “face to face.”  I think the immediacy of the visual encounter is com­pelling and attractive.  That is, it attracts us to an experience the way an anticipated movie attracts us to the theater.  And while I have be­come adept at reading emotions using only audio cues, I’m grateful for all the help I can get.

         And I do think that video is going to prove itself a boon to psy­chotherapy. In what we call the Eastern part of the world, Repetition is a primary tool of teaching.  A teacher, with whom I studied a Buddhist meditation practice, told me several times a day, Continuity is the secret of our success.

         Continuity is a contributor to every success.  The athlete Jerry Rice told us he spent 365 days a year playing football, or train­ing to play football.  The enormously successful movie, “Rocky,” was about little else but continuity.   See Rocky run: Rocky runs in the rain; Rocky runs in the snow; Rocky runs at night; and so on.  Rocky’s secret of success is the continuity of his training.  Americans love continuity stories.

         In therapy continuiy means not missing a session. And though we may clearly understand this, there can be times during a course of therapy when we are out of sorts and may recall the difficulty of a previous session, and just don’t feel like keeping our appointment.  At such times I believe the involvement offered by visual imagery helps us to overcome the reluctance we may feel to go “once more unto the breech,” and that’s a good thing.

*Shakespeare; Henry V.

Special Sessions & Couples

• By arrangement:  9 am till 11:30 am, or 2 pm till 4:30 pm.  These Special Sessions are often scheduled on Saturday or Sunday.
• If we are meeting regularly for videopsychotherapy, it can be helpful to meet like this once a year.  But it is in no way necessary for the success of our work.  The fee for these meetings is in addition to our contracted rate.
• For people who have completed a course of therapy, it is a good way to confirm one’s progress, and renew one’s commitment to mindfulness.
• For folks who are not in treatment with me, and wish to explore a single, burning issue, a stand-alone session can be helpful.
• For couples, this the only way I go.  We can arrange a single meeting with an option for two more.  A subsequent session could be scheduled after three or four months, and so forth.

Why so Tough on Couples?

         First, it’s exhausting.  After a session with a couple, I’ve always felt underpaid.  Second, it is not possible to do psychodynamic psychotherapy simultaneously with two people.  So, we are left with counseling, which, at best, is a tough slog if the couple is in conflict.  If each party wants me to show the other the light and brilliance of their argument, while they remain resistant to what their partner is trying to convey, a session will quickly go up in smoke.  My experience is that what generally passes for couples’ counseling, wastes a lot of good folk’s money.  That said, if you are wild and crazy enough to want to fight your way upstream into the rush of the spring melt, freezing as it is, and treacherous to breast, we can talk about it.

         On a much less threatening note, what I have found helpful, is to invite the partner of a person I am working with to join us for a session, and a special session is a good way to do this, to help my patient present the case he/she believes isn’t being heard.  I think the difference between this and couples counseling is the lack of ambiguity about my role.  Whereas a couple’s session can easily become a contest for the love and approval of the “mother/father,” here it is clear I am my client’s advocate.  A good result that might be achieved from a session such as this would be a willingness on the part of the guest to acknowledge the legitimacy of the partner’s assertions, and a promise to use certain objective parameters to measure accomplishments, or failures, toward an agreed on goal of reciprocal behavior.  Small potatoes, perhaps, but in a closed world that has been stagnant for some time, no mean achievement.

If You’re Looking

If you’re looking for help,
Perhaps I’m your man.
I know why you’re hurting,
I see how you stand!

You buried your truth,
It was all you could do,
But now you’ve got me
And I’ll see you through.

You’ll deal with your problems,
Not stuff them away.
You’ll think them right through,
You’ll have something to say,

And say it right then.
You’ll be off and away,
It’s your life,
To hell what they say.
There’ll be nothing can touch you
When you’ve learned how to play,

And take care of yourself,
And find your own truths,
Be strong in your mind
And bold in your boots.

Or appear on your screen
Right then, right there,
Ready to work
If only we dare.   

Or you can call me
Whenever you need,
I’ll be your advocate,
It’s your case I’ll plead.

I know how it feels
When you’re likely to crash,
I’m the garbage man,
You bring me the trash

And I’ll clean it right out,
This isn’t a test,
You tell me everything,
I’ll do the rest.

Stuff was acted out on you,
It was never your fault,
But it made you keep secrets
And lock up your vault.

They hacked at your wings,
They stomped on your feet,
You responded to danger
And beat a retreat.

You built up defenses
That worked for a child,
But now you’re grown-up
They cripple your style.

The strength of your bones,
Your clearness of sight,
Got weakened and clouded,
But we’ll make it right.

And find those black burdens
That got stuffed down the well,
We’ll unpack the varmints
And damn them to hell.

We’ll replace them with music,
We’ll light up the night
With dancing and thinking,
Your world will turn bright.

You’ll hike to the future
Putting down as you go
The hatreds and angers
That just make it so…
Hard, to go with the flow.

You’ll deal with your problems,
Not stuff them away.
You’ll think them right through,
You’ll have something to say,

And say it right then.
You are off and away,
It’s your life,
To hell what they say,
There’s nothing can touch you
You’ve learned how to play,

And take care of yourself,
And find your own truths,
Be strong in your mind
And bold in your boots.

It’ll be a great life, kid!