Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.

Thank you for logging on to my premiere blog for Psychology Today. I decided to open blog No. 1 with a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald since so many of the characters in his novels were shaped by the suffering he endured as a victim of excessive expectations born of success.

For example, while a student at Princeton--asked to repeat his junior year because he failed to attend to his studies--Fitzgerald showed of engaging in self-handicapping behavior. Self-handicappers are individuals who go through life with highly favorable, but tenuous competence images. As such, they are often driven (by fears of losing a favorable statuses), to attempt to protect their competency image in paradoxical ways. What self-handicappers do is structure the contexts within which their abilities are judged in a manner that makes it appear as though any and all failures are a result of external factors impinging upon them (e.g. "Were I not suffering from a hangover I would not have made all the errors I did in today's game...") while positioning themselves to claim excess credit for success should it ensue (e.g. "Hey, getting a 90 on today's exam wasn't great, but I was hung-over. Imagine how high my score would have been if I didn't binge last night!?!?).

When asked to leave school he convinced a Princeton dean to write a note for his file attributing his departure to "poor health," not academic failure. Unfortunately for Fitzgerald the dean complied, thereby reinforcing a tendency to seek out external causal agent he could blame for future potential failures. After this incident Fitzgerald abused alcohol throughout his life, and died from complications of this disease at age 44.

My decision to blog stems from a veritable lifetime of studying the question: "They had the world in the palm of their hands...what made them do it?" This question appears in headlines, dominates the airwaves, and passes over virtually every intelligent person's lips, after people like Eliot Spitzer, Bill Clinton, or Martha Stewart engage in self-destructive, career-threatening (or career terminating) behavior. Actually, as my graduate school classmates know, my self-handicapping theory grew out of an awareness of how I personally coped with excessive expectations to excel as a student and an athlete. While my success--and my fall-from--grace, was neither as significant nor dramatic as, say, Eliot Spitzer's was, but I was cognizant of doing things to "screw-up" that I could have avoided and, like Spitzer, should have been able to conceal.

From the introspective analysis of my early "failures," plus intensive study of why superstars expect rules to be broken for them--or break them on their own--I made it my life's work to understand why the brightest and best get caught behaving illegally or unethically when far better options are at their disposal.

A favorite heuristic of mine is contrasting cat burglars with white-collar criminals -a population that I know well. As is commonly known, every cat burglar--so named for his agility, stealth, and ability to avoid detection--flees the scene of his crimes as fast as his "cousin" the cheetah. While cat burglars work for small pickings, their determination to keep working, undetected, is legendary.

Successful people who break laws or violate codes of conduct shock those who witness (or learn of) their crimes by what appears to be a blind-spot regarding how adaptive it is to either flee the scene or cover one's tracks. Typically, when successful careerists stray from the straight and narrow they do so in ways that literally beg detection. It's like they want to be caught, and, in fact, they regularly do.

After nearly 30 years of studying the behavior of high achieving individuals--often firsthand as someone has worked with Fortune 100 CEOs; members of the Forbes 400; billionaires who run privately held enterprises, award-winning professional athletes, Grammy and Oscar winners, and internationally ranked chess Grandmasters-it is clear to me that some of the world's most successful people go out of their way to sabotage their own success. I saw this tendency during my 25 years on the faculty of the Harvard Medical School when I was a practicing psychotherapist, and I see it today in my work as an executive coach to hedge fund managers, senior members of other financial institutions, as well as the "generic" rich and famous.

In upcoming blogs I will identify, and describe in detail, the motives and feelings that explain why certain successful people hit bottom when they reach the top. More importantly, however, I will also prescribe specific courses of actions that can keep high-performers from self-destructing, as well as outlining what companies who employ these people can do to make sure their best workers don't ruin their lives-often bringing the organization with them. These clear-cut prescriptions will be integral part of my blog because successful people prone to self-destruct (or who are in the process of doing so) exhibit massive denial about their motives and actions and are unable to change on their own.

This why I am going to present detailed courses of action for dealing with success: So that both high achievers-and the people who manage, work with, have influence over, or simply care for these distressed souls-can best confront and defeat the demons born of success.

Where my ideas come from.

Studying and working with superior performers has been my life's work. I first wrote about the subject in book form more than 20 years ago in The Success Syndrome: Hitting Bottom When You Reach The Top. (Plenum Publishing.) Since then, I have gained an increased understanding of why successful people are driven to engage in self-sabotaging behavior. This understanding came about the old-fashioned way... I earned it.

On August 24, 1986, a front-page story in the Business Section of The New York Times titled "The Strange Agony of Success" reported, using the publication of my book as the "hook," that I was a specialist in the field of treating executives who become "unhinged" following career success. What happened after the article was printed was astounding: I was flooded with calls from CEOs suffering, as they put it, "from success" asking if we might work together.

Although I had written The Success Syndrome based both on laboratory research I had carried out, and my years of clinical experience treating successful people, prior to 1986 I did not have a clinical practice overflowing with CEOs. Suddenly, in 1986 however, I did.

With all possible humility I must confess that the CEOs I worked with between 1986 and today taught me more about the drives, fears, and conflicts that occur in the minds of these extremely accomplished people than I knew when I wrote The Success Syndrome. Today, after two decades of having had the luxury of devoting myself full-time to working individuals who self-destruct after success, I now have significantly more insight into how to address these tragedies, should they occur, and equally important I know what needs to be done to prevent them.

This why a central focus of my blog will be devoted to showing high performing men and women how to "success proof" their careers. Simply stated, I will explain -and discuss with readers--how to entrench the internal sense of gratification you should derive from their achievements, in order to pre-empt the need to seek "highs" in maladaptive or self-destructive ways.

This discussion is vital because successful people have a penchant for ignoring warnings about unfavorable outcomes. Their history of overcoming obstacles, prevailing against the odds, or simply never tasting defeat--as the research of Christopher Argyris demonstrates--makes them oblivious to the problematic circumstances they create for themselves. They need to be kept them from putting themselves in harm's way in the first place. Warning them that something will go wrong will not work.

Successful people thrive on overcoming challenges. Just think of Julius Caesar: Despite numerous portents-a soothsayer's cautionary notice and his wife's dreams of his murder, to name two-he ventured into a public square on the ides of March and was assassinated by a group of conspirators.

One wonders if a soothsayer or anyone else warned the former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer about the ides of March or the dangers posed by his hubris. I am sure they did because their was a time when Spitzer was amassing so much political power that many Washington insiders assumed he would become America's first Jewish president.

If he was offered words of caution, Mr. Spitzer clearly ignored them: In March of 2008, a few days before the ides, and decades before he could realize his presumed potential, the political career of Eliot Spitzer ended when it was disclosed that he broke banking laws in an effort to disguise the fact that he was paying for prostitutes' services. As the press corps tore at the flesh of his public persona-once it was revealed that he was the now infamous "Client 9" heard on FBI tapes used to indict a high-price call girl ring-a startling level of ineptitude on his part came to light.

Spitzer was the man who came to prominence-aided by a fortune created by his real estate mogul father-as "The Eliot Ness" of Wall Street. That makes the fact that he was brought down by the very laws he vigorously enforced all the more paradoxical. How could a man with an Ivy League education, great personal wealth, and tons of influence, be unable to indulge in the "victimless crime" of employing hookers without detection when "Average Joes" do it all the time?

The reaction most people had when they heard the news was: How could he be so stupid? But from the perspective of someone who has studied successful men and women for over 30 years it seems that Eliot Spitzer's downfall was pre-ordained.

As I present my views on men and women who suffer fates like Spitzer's, I trust that readers will guide me to shed light on aspects of the profound paradox of "hitting bottom when you reach the top" that concerns them. I know I will learn from the comments this blog generates. I promise to be as informative as humanly possible.