Category Archives: Therapy

Oct 17

The Secular Therapy Project: No Imposed Religion

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Are you a prospective client seeking a therapist who won’t impose his or her religion or spirituality on you? Are you a therapist who wouldn’t dream of doing that? If so, take a look at The Secular Therapy Project. You can sign up to find a therapist or you can register to be one of those therapists.

If there isn’t a secular therapist in your geographical area, telehealth therapy may be your best option.

I first found The Secular Therapy Project via a more comprehensive resource called Recovering From Religion, an organization that was founded by psychologist Darrel Ray. From the website:

Many people come to a point that they no longer accept the supernatural explanations for the world around them, or they realize just how much conflict religious belief creates. It can be difficult to leave religion because family and culture put so much pressure on us to stay and pretend to believe the unbelievable. If this is you, we want to help you find your way out. Don’t let people convince you that you just didn’t have ‘enough’ faith, or that you just haven’t found the ‘right’ religion.

A list of religious issues (found on the Recovering from Religion site) you or someone you know might be confronting includes such topics as religious harm, Religious Trauma Syndrome (RTS), Scrupulosity (Religious OCD), cults, wanting to understand a loved one who is nonreligious, and mixed belief couples.

In a blog post, Ray further explains his belief about the importance of separating religion and spirituality from clinical work:

If religion was an important key to mental health, then religion would have solved the problem of mental health 2,000 years ago. Jesus’s approach to mental illness was to cast demons out of a mentally ill person, into a herd of swine, and have the swine jump over a cliff. That was the state of mental health knowledge until secular psychological science came along 150 years ago. Only with the advent of science have we learned how to treat depression through talk therapy and drugs….

The bottom line is this; if religion works, then go to your minister, priest, imam, scientology auditor or guru. If psychotherapy works, then go to a secular psychotherapist trained in evidence based approaches and/or go to a psychiatrist trained in good drug therapy. There is no valid reason to mix these two. Religion had its shot for 3000 years or more. The best it could do was find demons everywhere.

My purpose in starting the Therapist Project was to help people with no superstitions find a therapist with no superstitions. If a therapist is spiritual, by definition, they are superstitious.

Ray was asked in an interview: What if someone comes to one of these secular therapists and says they’re having doubts about the existence of god, or questioning their faith? How would a good secular therapist handle this kind of client without pushing them to leave the religion? Ray answers: “Cognitive behavioral approach, I would say. That’s what cognitive therapy does. It asks you to consider a rational approach to dealing with your problems. A lot of our therapists are well trained in CBT. A religious person could still perform that kind of therapy, as long as they kept their religion out of it.”

Want to learn more about Ray’s views? Two of Ray’s books are titled Sex and God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality and The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture.

Oct 05

“I’m Glad My Mom Died”: May Hit a Nerve

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Former child actor Jennette McCurdy‘s bestselling new memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died has been notable not only for its popularity among readers but also for its title alone. She blatantly admits being happy her mother is dead? Who does that?!

 

Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon: “When the book debuted earlier this month [August 2022], it became an instant bestseller and sold out on Amazon. Its success revealed that there is a whole population of survivors who have complicated feelings toward our deceased relatives.”

In the following top quote from the book McCurdy, now 30, contemplates her abusive mom‘s death:

I take a longer look at the words on her headstone.
Brave, kind, loyal, sweet, loving, graceful, strong, thoughtful, funny, genuine, hopeful, playful, insightful, and on and on…
Was she, though? Was she any of those things? The words make me angry. I can’t look at them any longer.
Why do we romanticize the dead? Why can’t we be honest about them?

Well, honesty about this is hard, but it does happen. Google the topic. You will definitely find others confessing a lack of sadness over their parents’ deaths.

I can tell you I’m glad my father died. It’s not that he was abusive, it’s that he just wasn’t there throughout my entire life. I didn’t know him and he didn’t know me, so until he died he was already a ghost anyway—one who made my life challenging at times. (Explaining this further might involve a book’s worth of thoughts and feelings.)

It may be much harder for most to admit similar feelings about their Mother, though. That’s just a thing I probably don’t even have to explain.

McCurdy has done a lot of work on herself to get to the place of being able to write I’m Glad My Mom Died. Previously she had developed a one-woman show of the same title; she also does a podcast called Empty Inside. And, ta-da, she goes to therapy.

As the author told the Associated Press, therapy alone wasn’t cutting it, however. Putting together her show and doing her other writing have also been important. “Processing the events that happened in my childhood took so long in therapy. I needed to do so much of that excavating work on my own.”

Which is not to discount her therapy’s impact. Therapy has helped her significantly, for example, with her eating disorders. “…I don’t obsess about food at all. I say this because I want people to know that I do believe it’s possible to not have it haunt you for the rest of your life. I feel great in my recovery. I consider myself recovered. For anybody who might be struggling now, I want them to know it’s possible to recover.”

Are you grappling with the death of an abusive or toxic parent? Dr. , Certified Grief Counselor, has a pertinent article at Join Cake.

You might, of course, also be interested in I’m Glad My Mom Died. 

Sep 28

Comedy As Therapy: Five Notable Examples

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Comedy as therapy is a widely supported approach. See the selected examples below.

I. Stand Up for Mental Health

Counselor and humorist David Granirer created a program called Stand Up For Mental Health in which people with mental health issues can learn how to do stand-up comedy as therapy. In the video below called “Cracking Up,” participants introduce us to it.

You’ll need over six minutes to watch this—but it’s worth it.

If this whets your comedy appreciation appetite, clips of individual routines that have emerged from this program are available on their website.

Below Granirer himself riffs to an audience on the topic of mental health stigma:

II. Comedy Warriors

Another program, Comedy Warriors, was designed to aid soldiers who are injured physically and mentally.

Five veterans who were hurt in combat—four men and one woman—are featured in a documentary about their experiences of learning stand-up comedy from some well-known comedians, including Bob Saget and Brad Garrett.

As stated on their website, “As any comedian will tell you, the most poignant comedy comes from pain. And no one knows this better than a service member with a life-changing injury.”

Comedy Warriors: Healing Through Humor was released in 2013.

III. Taylor Glenn: Reverse Psycomedy

The show of comedic performer Taylor Glenn titled “Reverse Psycomedy”—about her former life as a therapist—has been performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland.

Glenn spoke with Mark Smith about her therapist humor (click here for the article):

…’I learned to yawn through my nose, for example, which is the kind of thing they never taught you at university,’ she says. ‘They don’t tell you if you have to yawn don’t let your patients see that because they’ll be devastated so you learn to yawn and look really interested.’

Being honest about therapy in this way has been hard for Glenn because she was a conscientious psychotherapist; she took it very seriously. ‘I would never break my ethical code or anything like that but I have to be honest about what it was like on the other side of that chair. And I think it’s refreshing for an audience to see that therapists are just normal people who swear and have weird thoughts and have a sense of humour.’

Below Glenn offers bits of help and advice—“Fringe Therapy”— to fellow comedians:

IV. Dr. Lisa Levy: Faux Therapy Sessions

Dr. Lisa Levy is “a Bebe Neuwirth type with Ashleigh Banfield glasses—combined common sense, dry humor, and a winning feeling that anyone can be an analyst if they want to, as long as they never actually studied being one,” Michael Musto once said.

In one article/interview, Levy noted that she traces her interest in therapy back to high school when her father experienced severe depression and was hospitalized. Later, when she was in college, she went to therapy herself to deal with her own depression.

Below is one of her live faux sessions with comedian Eugene Mirman:

V. Tig Notaro: As Funny As Cancer

Maybe at some point you’ve heard or said something along the lines of, “That’s (you’re) as funny as cancer.” Obvious meaning: “Cancer funny? Not so much.”

But, maybe you can be funny about cancer? And maybe it’s therapeutic? Not only for others but also to the comic who actually has cancer.

The dryness of Notaro’s style and delivery is a comedic tone that works well. Here’s a brief snippet of her routine:

Sep 14

Confidentiality: Keeping Secrets (Or Not) In or Out of Therapy

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Most people, whether ever in therapy or not, are aware of the code of confidentiality. As therapist Daryl states to a client in my novel Minding Therapy, “Keeping secrets about you not keeping secrets is one of the therapist’s main obligations…”

From GoodTherapy.org:

Confidentiality includes not just the contents of therapy, but often the fact that a client is in therapy. For example, it is common that therapists will not acknowledge their clients if they run into them outside of therapy in an effort to protect client confidentiality. Other ways confidentiality is protected include:

    • Not leaving revealing information on voicemail or text.
    • Not acknowledging to outside parties that a client has an appointment.
    • Not discussing the contents of therapy with a third party without the explicit permission of the client.

For licensed mental health professionals, confidentiality is protected by state laws and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)…

One of the main reasons it’s so important not to breach confidentiality is because therapy may be the first, maybe the only, place one’s confidences are disclosed. And people need to feel their secrets are in good hands.

This is not to say that everyone divulges all their private thoughts to their shrinks. For good or for bad, often there are things kept out of sessions. What to divulge is an individual choice based on any number of factors.

Even therapists in therapy might hold back. Andrea Rosenhaft for one. She’s a clinical social worker who calls her own years of omission “living heavy” and states on her Psychology Today blog:

I regret all the deceit, the secrets, and the manipulation. The blatant lies, the lies of omission have come back to hurt me in the form of the hands of the clock making endless rounds. I alienated psychiatrists, therapists and nurses with my calculating actions designed to mislead.

If I had been forthright, as difficult as that would have been, if I had simply told the truth, my treatment would have progressed much faster and perhaps I would not still need to be in therapy.

The jaunty song “Secrets” by singer/songwriter Mary Lambert (of “Same Love“ and “She Keeps Me Warm”), on the other hand, is about things she would appear not to be keeping under wraps. These include personal tidbits involving such matters as the status of her mental health, her family issues, and her personality weaknesses.

She’s saying, in fact, that she doesn’t care if the whole world knows her secrets. (Which makes them no longer secrets, of course!)

The first verse and chorus of “Secrets” by Mary Lambert are as follows. See the rest at Genius.com or watch the lyric video above.

I’ve got bi-polar disorder
My shit’s not in order
I’m overweight
I’m always late
I’ve got too many things to say
I rock mom jeans, cat earrings
Extrapolate my feelings
My family is dysfunctional
But we have a good time killing each other

[Pre-Chorus]
They tell us from the time we’re young
To hide the things that we don’t like about ourselves
Inside ourselves
I know I’m not the only one who spent so long attempting to be someone else
Well I’m over it

[Chorus]
I don’t care if the world knows what my secrets are (secrets are)
I don’t care if the world knows what my secrets are (secrets are)So-o-o-o-o what
So what
So what
So what

Aug 29

Journals: Writing for Therapeutic Purposes

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Journals and journal writing have been proven to be therapeutic. But how should you go about it? Do it your own way? Or follow the advice of such experts as social psychologist James Pennebaker? His “rules” (per Susan David, The Cut) include the following:

  • Set a timer for 20 minutes and write freely.
  • “Write just for yourself, and not for some eventual reader.”
  • After a few days or whenever, discard it. Or decide to do something bigger with it.

“It doesn’t matter. The point is that those thoughts are now out of you and on the page. You have begun the process of ‘stepping out’ from your experience to gain perspective on it.”

One long-term keeper of journals, Jamie Friedlander, found that entering therapy automatically decreased her reliance on the form, however. “Speaking to someone about my problems, it seemed, had all but replaced my urge to write about them” (The Cut).

Writing still helps me cope with the little stuff that becomes overwhelming. And jotting down the things I’m grateful for always brings me joy. But I know that for the big stuff — being laid off, feeling frustrated with a close family member, obsessing about my weight — I need to speak, not write.

Therapist Ryan Howes (Psychology Today), on the other hand, emphasizes the benefits of journaling while in therapy:

First, you’ve just taken some time to look at yourself, which continues the flow of therapy and makes you more aware. Second, you’ve begun to organize what can seem like a bunch of disjointed material. Writing forces you to funnel disparate thoughts into one linear stream. Finally, you’re keeping a record of your progress. People who journal for a few months are amazed when they look back to see where they were. Sometimes they’re amazed at how far they’ve come. Other times they’re surprised to find they’re barking up the same tree.

A common resistance among clients is the fear of others finding their words. What I usually say in response is that you don’t actually have to get over this fear. Write stuff anyway, then destroy it; you still get the same effects. Ephrat Livni, QZ.com, agrees:

That final act, tossing the journal, is painful but liberating. Letting go is a Zen exercise. It’s practice in detachment, forcing me to face facts, the simultaneous truths that everything matters and yet, ultimately, nothing does. Shit happens. We keep going. Tomorrow there will be more news.

Another resource is Susan Borkin‘s The Healing Power of Writing: A Therapist’s Guide to Using Journaling With Clients (2014). Although targeted to therapists, anyone can benefit.

One of the author’s suggestions is a guide for keeping track of various internal changes. It’s called ATTEND, an acronym standing for Awareness, Thoughts, Emotions, Intuition, Dreams, and Distractions.

While some are afraid to write in a diary or journal,  Sarah Manguso is one who’s been afraid not to, she explains in Ongoingness: The End of a Diary (2015).

I wrote about myself so I wouldn’t become paralyzed by rumination—so I could stop thinking about what had happened and be done with it. // More than that, I wrote so I could say I was truly paying attention. Experience in itself wasn’t enough. The diary was my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing I’d missed it. // Imagining life without the diary, even one week without it, spurred a panic that I might as well be dead.

What Manguso reports, by the way, is that the original anxiety is now gone.