Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Revelation of a New Way
Roberta was a new psychotherapy patient who made me feel completely ineffective within fifteen minutes of meeting her. She had come to me with a very specific goal: she wanted to stop obsessing about the idea that her boyfriend was cheating on her. “I go through his messages, grill him with questions; sometimes I even drive by his place to spy on him. I never find anything but I can’t stop myself.” I thought her problem was easily explained by the fact that her father had abruptly deserted the family when she was a child. Even now, in her mid-twenties, she was still terrified of abandonment. But before we could delve into that issue more deeply, she looked me in the eye and demanded, “Tell me how I can stop obsessing. Don’t waste my time and money on why I’m insecure—I already know.”
If Roberta came to see me today, I’d be thrilled that she knew exactly what she wanted, and I’d know exactly how to help her. But my meeting with her took place twenty-five years ago when I was a new psychotherapist. I felt the directness of her request shoot through me like an arrow. I had no response.
I didn’t blame myself. I had just spent two years devouring every current theory of psychotherapeutic practice. But the more information I digested, the more unsatisfied I became. The theories felt removed from the actual experience someone would have when he or she was in trouble and needed help. I felt in my gut that I hadn’t been taught a way to respond directly to what a patient like Roberta was asking for.
I wondered, Maybe I can’t pick up this ability from a book; maybe it can be learned only in face-to-face consultation with someone who’d been in the trenches. I had developed close ties to two of my supervisors—not only did they know me well, but they had many decades of clinical experience. Surely, they must have developed some way to meet these requests.
I described Roberta’s demand to them. Their response confirmed my worst fears. They had no solution. Worse, what seemed to me like a reasonable request, they saw as part of her problem. They used a lot of clinical terms: Roberta was “impulsive,” “resistant,” and “craved immediate gratification.” If I tried to meet her immediate needs, they warned me, she would actually become more demanding.
Unanimously, they advised me to guide her back to her childhood—there we would find what caused the obsession in the first place. I told them she already knew why she was obsessed. Their answer was that her father’s abandonment couldn’t be the real reason. “You have to go even deeper into her childhood.” I was fed up with this runaround: I’d heard it before—every time a patient made a direct request, the therapist would turn it back on the patient and tell him or her to “go deeper.” It was a shell game they used to hide the truth: when it came to immediate help, these therapists had very little to give to their patients. Not only was I disappointed, I had the sinking feeling that my supervisors were speaking for the entire psychotherapeutic profession—certainly I’d never heard anyone say anything else. I didn’t know where to turn.
Then I got lucky. A friend told me he’d met a psychiatrist who didn’t accept the system any more than I did. “This guy actually answers your questions—and I guarantee you’ve never heard these answers before.” He was giving a series of seminars, and I decided to go to the next one. That was where I met Dr. Phil Stutz, the coauthor of this book.
That seminar changed my practice—and my life.
Everything about the way Phil thought seemed completely new. More important, in my gut it felt like the truth. He was the first psychotherapist I’d met whose focus was on the solution, not the problem. He was absolutely confident that human beings possessed untapped forces that allowed them to solve their own problems. In fact, his view of problems was the opposite of what I’d been taught. He didn’t see them as handicapping the patient; he saw them as opportunities to enter this world of untapped potential.
I was skeptical at first. I’d heard about turning problems into opportunities before, but no one had ever explained exactly how to do this. Phil made it clear and concrete. You had to tap into hidden resources by means of certain powerful but simple techniques that anyone could use.
He called these techniques “tools.”
I walked out of that seminar so excited, I felt like I could fly. It wasn’t just that there were actual tools that could help people; it was something about Phil’s attitude. He was laying himself, his theories, and his tools out in the open. He didn’t demand that we accept what he was telling us; the only thing he insisted on was that we actually use his tools and come to our own conclusions about what they could do. He almost dared us to prove him wrong. He struck me as very brave or mad—possibly both. But in any case, the effect on me was catalyzing, like bursting out into the fresh air after the suffocating dogma of my more traditional colleagues. I saw even more clearly how much they hid behind an impenetrable wall of convoluted ideas, none of which they felt the need to test or experience for themselves.
I had learned only one tool at the seminar, but as soon as I left, I practiced it religiously. I couldn’t wait to give it to Roberta. I was sure it would help her more than delving deeper into her past. In our next session, I said, “Here’s something you can do the moment you start to obsess,” and I gave her the tool (I’ll present it later). To my amazement, she seized on it and started using it immediately. More amazingly, it helped. My colleagues had been wrong. Giving Roberta something that provided immediate help didn’t make her more demanding and immature; it inspired her to become an active, enthusiastic participant in her own therapy.
I’d gone from feeling useless to having a very positive impact on someone in a very short time. I found myself hungering for more—more information, more tools; a deeper understanding of how they worked. Was this just a grab bag of different techniques, or was it what I suspected—a whole new way of looking at human beings?
In an effort to get answers, I began to corner Phil at the end of each seminar and squeeze as much information as I could out of him. He was always cooperative—he seemed to like answering questions—but each answer led to another question. I felt I’d hit the mother lode of information, and I wanted to take home as much of it as possible. I was insatiable.
Which brought up another issue. What I was learning from Phil was so powerful that I wanted it to be the core of my work with patients. But there was no training program to apply to, no academic hurdles to jump over. That was stuff I was good at, but he seemed to have no interest in it, which made me feel insecure. How could I qualify to be trained? Would he even think of me as a candidate? Was I turning him off with my questions?
Not too long after I began giving the seminars, this intense young guy named Barry Michels began to show up. With some hesitation, he identified himself as a therapist, although, given the detailed way he questioned me, he sounded more like a lawyer. Whatever he was, he was really smart.
But that’s not why I answered his questions. I’ve never been impressed by intellect or credentials. What caught my attention was how enthusiastic he was; how he’d go home and use the tools himself. I didn’t know if I was imagining it, but I felt as though he’d been looking for something for a long time and had finally found it.
Then he asked me a question I’d never been asked before.
“I was wondering....Who taught you this stuff...the tools and everything? My training program didn’t touch on anything remotely like it.”
“No one taught me.”
“You mean you came up with this yourself?”
I hesitated. “Yeah...well, not exactly.”
I didn’t know if I should tell him how I really got the information. But he seemed open-minded, so I decided to give it a try. It was a somewhat unusual story, that began with the very first patients I treated, and one in particular.
Tony was a young surgical resident at the hospital where I was a resident in psychiatry. Unlike a lot of the other surgeons, he wasn’t arrogant, in fact when I first saw him, cowering near the door of my office, he looked like a trapped rat. When I asked him what was wrong, he answered, “I’m afraid of a test I have to take.” He was shaking like the test was in ten minutes; but it wasn’t scheduled for another six months. All tests scared him—and this one was a big one. It was his board-certification exam in surgery.
