therapy

Happy Now?

mandy — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 18:00:00 +0000

Claire’s husband Jay killed himself on Valentine’s Day by jumping off a balcony at a colleague’s party. He didn’t leave a suicide note; he left a binder with detailed information about life insurance, their cat’s veterinary records, and a short, cryptic note under the tab marked “Claire” that revealed almost nothing about his decision. A long-suffering depressive, Jay had never displayed signs he would end his life… at least, not any Claire or his therapist had noticed.

Happy Now? begins in the days after Jay’s death, during which Claire has temporarily moved into her pregnant sister’s guest house to hide from the world until she’s ready to reemerge. Jay’s sister calls to bitterly remind Claire that “there is enough blame to go around,” and Fang, Jay’s cat, is inconsolable and seemingly also attempts to follow her master into the afterlife by eating a poisonous plant. Claire’s father parks outside her temporary home for fourteen hours at a time and follows her everywhere she goes in a strange mix of protective paternalism and stalker-like behavior. At one point, Claire mistakenly attends the wrong group therapy session and ends up telling off its members. At other times, unable to stop herself when asked, she blurts out “Jay killed himself,” often at the least opportune times.

Happy Now? might be what fellow writer Elaine Beale once called a “quiet” novel. The bulk of the story centers on Claire’s relationship with her family, and with herself, blended with flashbacks to the early days of her relationship and the small warning signs that only appear significant in the aftermath of Jay’s suicide. Claire’s ability to reflect on her relationship in the wake of tragedy was fascinating and raw, and even the most basic logistics of how to put her life back together were mesmerizing—perhaps because the experience is quite removed from my own, and yet familiar enough to feel comfortable.

Even without one major incident to lift the story arc in the novel, I was enthralled by Katherine Shonk’s vivid detail and ability to climb inside the mind of a shocked and grieving abruptly widowed young woman. So captivated by the way the novel focused on the particulars of Claire and Jay’s life—and Claire’s parents’ and sister’s relationships as well—I read the book over the course of a few hectic days, a pre-bed ritual of reprieve from the madness of my own life. If fiction is meant to be a journey and as escape, this book succeeds on both counts.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, September 6th 2010

The Horse Boy

admin — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 16:01:00 +0000

Directed by Michel O. Scott

Zeitgeist Films

The Horse Boy is an emotionally stirring, thought-provoking examination of autism and its effects on familial life. Based on the autobiographical book of the same name, this powerful documentary examines the life of Rowan, the autistic child of journalist and horse trainer Rupert Isaacson and his wife, psychology professor Kristin Neff. The film documents Isaacson and Neff’s struggle to understand autism and bring comfort to their son.

Rowan suffers from severe tantrums, but his anxieties seem to disappear when he approaches horses. After countless Western treatments fail to ease Rowan’s symptoms, Isaacson decides to seek Eastern therapies. Isaacson and his wife travel with Rowan into the heart of Mongolia on horseback, seeking the spiritual aid of shamans. The film is, as Isaacson himself says, “a story about how, as a family, we did something crazy…in search of a miracle.”

The Horse Boy follows the family’s journey through the steppes of Mongolia. Their hope is that shaman’s can help heal Rowan—not to ‘cure’ his autism, but to ease his painful and dysfunctional behaviors. At its most basic level, The Horse Boy is about understanding autism, but the film is really about the bond between parent and child. The success of the film (and the power of the couples love for their son) is that the spectator understands why Isaacson and Neff are willing to be whipped by a shaman during a ceremony merely for the hope of bringing comfort to their son. The love they have for their child is evident in every frame of this film.

The Horse Boy offers no solutions or answers, but it does offer hope. Rowan’s transformation during this trip is powerful and real—he returns to the States a happier, calmer child. Whatever the cause of Rowan’s healing, it is clear that he has found some element of peace during the trip. The Horse Boy suggests there is hope of understanding autism and providing healing to autistic children.

Written by: Joanna Chlebus, June 2nd 2010

Private Practices: The Story of a Sex Surrogate

admin — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 10:06:00 +0000

Directed by Kirby Dick

Zeitgeist Films

Private Practices is the story of a sex surrogate, Maureen Sullivan Ward, who teaches men with sexual dysfunctions how to improve their sexual communication, physical expression, and experience pleasure.

Maureen "Mo" Sullivan Ward approaches sex in a clinical fashion, seeking ways to make clients more comfortable and assisting them in exploring their personal fears and phobias. The documentary features two men, Kipper, a twenty-five-year-old novice in graduate school who cannot advance beyond verbal communication with a female and John, a forty-five-year-old divorcee who is grieving the reality of his wife’s twenty year displeasure with their sex life.

The beginning of the movie acknowledges the moral and ethical conflicts that may arise with the field of sexual surrogacy, but redirects the viewers to focus on the lives, not the tension, in the film as they confront an underground topic of supreme sensitivity that is sexual awkwardness and hardship.

Private Practices gives peripheral insights from the families, friends, and neighbors who observe Ward in her profession. Naturally, as the film unfolds, questions begin to surface about Ward how her work affects her personal relationships and lovemaking. Briefly, we see the complications of Ward’s own life as it delves into her family dynamics and history.

Initially, I thought the film would primarily focus on the two men and their perceived inadequacies. However, as the story deepened, new revelations came slowly and with compassion. The film is not just about John and Kipper as clients, but rather, they are symbolic of insecurities and problems that most adults face at one time in their sexual development. It is a careful dissection of sexuality and the relationships we build in our families and in childhood that lead us to falsehoods, myths, and assumptions about how we will be as partners and lovers. Ward’s role as a surrogate and her background is every bit explored as Kipper and John, which tantalizes and blurs the lines of right and wrong in these controversial therapeutic relationships.

A psychological and clinical lens frames the three lives and helps keep the story contained and moving. The slight doctor’s office feel helps navigate the explicit scenes that practice caressing in full nudity. With boundaries and directness, the clients are carefully guided, never being pushed or hurried in their process. Each story is unique, but reveals a common truth that Ward sums up with as she reflects on her journey: "We're all in the same boat." They are all searching for a place of understanding, comfort, and healing.

This film, in the field of sexual surrogacy, explores the safety, richness, futility, and dangers of sex therapy. If our societal mental disorder of sexual schizophrenia is as prevalent in 1985 as it is today, Private Practices remains a useful tool and talking point when considering the lines of human relationship and sexual frailty.

Written by: Lisa Factora-Borchers, April 8th 2009

Must Read After My Death

admin — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 17:12:00 +0000

Directed by Morgan Dews

Familial dysfunction is rarely poetic, but archival footage can be visually stunning, especially paired with painfully honest audio recordings of diaries, intimate correspondence, and therapy sessions. After his grandmother Allis’ death in 2001, filmmaker Morgan Dews stumbled upon more than 200 home movies and fifty hours of tape-recorded diaries and Dictaphone correspondence which revealed a complicated story previously unknown to Dews. Until his discovery, despite his close relationship with his grandmother, Dews had no detailed knowledge of his grandparents’ fitful years together and the damage it caused his mother and uncles.

Allis and Charley’s union was unique for their time. After meeting in the 1940's while married to other people, they decided to have an open marriage, complicated further by Charley’s frequent and extended work-related travel, alcoholism, and stronger penchant for affairs than his wife. Allis, who had previously lived in Europe, began staying home in Connecticut to raise the children. The couple had their share of peculiarly imbalanced disagreements—Allis wished Charley would restrict his affairs to unpaid women, while Charley berated Allis for not keeping a tidier, more organized house—and at one point, physical violence erupted in front of the children. Looking for help navigating their unconventional marriage and the ways their idiosyncrasies affect their children, Allis and Charley hauled their family into psychotherapy in the mid-1960's.

A surprisingly feminist film, it quickly becomes obvious how much of the family’s suffering is unfairly attributed to Allis’ supposed shortcomings. Various psychotherapists repeatedly tell her to be more submissive, but not to abandon the family because while she is supposedly the one at fault, the family needs a mother figure. She is alternately praised for giving her children freedom while mothering them too much. These contradictory assessments create immense guilt for Allis, whose self-blame and sadness nearly engulfs her at times. She goes between wishing she could take the children somewhere remote to raise them alone and wanting to end it all—literally. Throughout the course of the film, narrated almost entirely by recordings of Allis’ innermost feelings, it is possible to hear her sanity slowly devolving.

Must Read After My Death is also often an indictment against the harmful early days of experimental psychiatry. Allis’ brutal doctors blame her for “damaging the whole family.” Much of the family’s communication ends up being filtered through doctors and therapists, and eventually, one son is institutionalized for unsubstantial reasons. Perhaps most revealing, after Charley suddenly passes away, the family abruptly ends all therapy and treatment. Allis’ subsequent silence, which lasts until after her own death, speaks volumes about her desire to bury the agony and trauma of those years.

At times reminiscent of Capturing the Friedmans for its intimate view into the personal lives of other families’ disturbing secrets, this film is captivating, depressing, and hauntingly voyeuristic.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, March 15th 2009

Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help

admin — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 17:45:00 +0000

By Eva Illouz

University of California Press

From Freud’s creation of psychoanalysis for curing psychopathology by means of talk therapy, to spilling one’s guts on Oprah’s couch or skyping into her soul series webcast, we all just really want to know (dammit!): who am I and why am I here? Saving the Modern Soul examines the language and practice of psychology, essentially, from an American cultural perspective. The author, Eva Illouz, a Professor of Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, provides a feast of ideas concerning therapeutic values as she tackles the myriad contemporary methods we employ to figure ourselves out, feel better, and find higher meaning.

The demand is huge, considering an ever-surging market of self help books, workshops, advice columns, motivational experts, family life coaches, misery memoirs, corporate programs, and righteous gurus galore. Illouz even discusses our voyeuristic fascination with Tony Soprano’s sessions with Dr. Melfi and the ensuing lessons on narcissism and borderline personality issues. Illouz sharpens her focus on our collective American obsession with navel-gazing to posit that we may too actively romanticize our angst, and this actually serves to complicate our lives with an unbalanced and devotional focus on our pain.

Eva Illouz is a great scholar, and her book has been hailed by many as an important contribution to the field of therapeutic discourse. It is, of course, an inescapable fact that our self-help culture has transformed contemporary emotional life. Reading her book and trying to absorb it all at once is overwhelming The great gusto with which Americans are consuming therapy, pop psychology, new age theories, and every new book that comes down the pike to reveal the “secrets” of the soul is mind-boggling — if not a little bit cringe-inducing.

So I decide to get up and go take a look at my own library to see what a psychology book junky I have personally become. I see books on cult dynamics, narcissism, and sociopaths (the dark side is so scary, so intriguing!), past lives, grieving the loss of a pet, the I Ching, positive thinking, the workings of the creative mind, feelings and how they happen... even, OMG, I see I have The Secret! It’s nestled between Ship of Fools and Conversations of Goethe!

I am pretty much over hearing one more wrenching rehab tale of woe, especially coming from a celebrity, but delving into the twists and turns of what makes humans tick is ever fascinating. It’s like going on a fabulous archeological dig. The great inner journey. Illouz is fascinated, too, and that’s why her books on various facets of the subject keep coming (this is her fifth book).

All in all, I loved the subject matter, but, technically, I found the author’s prose tough-going. Her style is such a series of circuitous sentences jammed with densely clinical words that I frequently needed to take off my glasses and blink my eyes back to clear vision. The other issue I had was point of view. The majority of people seeking help, I believe, are not glamorizing their pain. The pain is real and begs for relief. Any other curiosity one has about the world of psychology - even if it is not one’s own particular problem - what’s so wrong with a little healthy intellectual curiosity? Hmmm?

Written by: Cheryl Reeves, June 16th 2008