A recent AP article suggests psychotherapy is on its way out. I'll debunk that notion and give you five reasons why I believe it'll be around a while.

July 29th at 11:42am Pacific Time, a 5.4 magnitude earthquake hit Southern California. This being L.A., there were probably 1000+ people in therapy sessions who were shaken out of their chair. What thoughts raced through therapist's minds?

Anyone who knows the comic will know about the characters and what they represent: 1) The Joker = chaos, 2) The Batman = order; 3) Two Face = pure chance. There are many lines in the film which "spank your face" with these metaphors, and if the acting was not so good, the joker's lines could have easily been over the top in making the deeper, existential questions within the film too obvious and contrived for most moviegoers.

Therapy is one place you can talk about anything you want. There's no need to censor yourself, be overly polite or avoid conflict. Still, many clients have a lot to say and don't. Why?

Cognitive-behavioral therapy is a perfectly good treatment. But if you think that research has proved CBT is special — I would want to suggest that the new emperor needs a new wardrobe.

Many of you will have heard of the concepts of: "Chaos Theory" "The Butterfly Effect" or maybe even "Emergence" "Fractals" "Complexity" or "Catastrophe" theories. Each of these is an example of a nonlinear dynamic. My challenge in this blog will be to make nonlinear dynamics understandable and interesting to you. My experience thus far has been that everything in psychology is a part of a nonlinear system. So we will be able to talk about nearly any topic here. That will help to keep things interesting.

A sure-fire way to destroy your relationship is to diagnose your partner with a personality disorder or other character disease. Unfortunately, a cottage industry of self-help books exists to encourage you to do just that.

A common misunderstanding about therapy is that it's supposed to help us feel better each week. Many equate psychotherapy with the day spa where we enter with tension and leave feeling relaxed and refreshed. But we don't always feel better; sometimes we feel worse.

Perhaps more than anything else, our mental and emotional well-being depends on our willingness to confront obstacles in life. The all-too-common alternative, of course, is simply to retreat from them. If, however, we're genuinely to progress and feel good about ourselves, we need to resist the ever-present temptation to withdraw from whatever we'd prefer not having to deal with.

Do you believe in fate? Destiny? If fate does exist, how much responsibility must we accept for our lives? Are we responsible for everything that occurs to us--even choosing our own birth, as some suggest--or do we bear little or no responsibility for a cosmically, theologically or genetically preordained destiny?

Daily I look around me and observe how people shy away from genuine, self-revealing communication--almost as though to embark on such a path would be like walking into a minefield, where a single misstep might be fatal. But the communication we all long for--a powerful, expressive dialogue that might spiritually connect us to each another--is in fact fraught with danger and uncertainty. So almost all of us experience the need to carefully monitor just how much of ourselves we divulge to others.

Perfectionism has taken a bum rap. Were it not for perfectionism, we would be in short supply of all those myriad human activities we deem extraordinary, excellent, outstanding or great in quality. Indeed, if truth be told, without perfectionism, we would be--and already are here in America, as some may have noticed--suffering from a dearth of competency in general, a virtual epidemic of incompetence at all levels of human endeavor. How has perfectionism and its virtues come to be so devalued and vilified in our day?

We've covered who goes to therapy and how to find a therapist, so welcome to your initial appointment. I hope to demystify what can be an anxiety provoking experience and help get your treatment off to a good start.

Just when I think significant progress is being made toward increasing the
acceptance and positive perception of counseling, something will occur to lead
me to question that. The latest occurrence was a recent interaction I
had at a bank. Upon seeing my checks made out to Dr., I was asked by the bank
teller "What kind of doctor are you?" I'm a psychologist, I said. He then asked, "A clinical psychologist?" I said yes, then, "You must deal with a lot of crazy people."

Here is a super quick, easy and, in my view, fairly accurate way to determine your own basic typology: When you're down, stressed, burnt-out, overwhelmed, drained or exhausted, what do you want to do to feel better? What works best to recharge your battery? Typically, there are two kinds of responses to this question. What's yours? Note it now. We'll come back to this soon.

Last week the New York Post featured an announcement of the publication of “Life with My Sister, Madonna” by the Material Girl’s brother, Christopher Ciccone. “Brutal, graphic, and devastating are among the descriptives of this tale of family estrangement. The buzz spread quickly in the media and given the public’s obsession with celebrity, the book is already on its way to being a best seller.

At one pole of communication stands passivity: not speaking out for fear of adverse consequences. At the other end stands aggressiveness: voicing negative sentiments without restraint or regard for their effect on others. In between passivity and aggression lies the golden mean: asserting one's thoughts and feelings, wants and needs, while at the same time showing appreciation and respect for the other's viewpoint.

How much charisma do we want in our psychotherapists?