Today's Reading
INTRODUCTION
Maybe you're here because you read The Tools or because you saw me in the Netflix documentary called Stutz. I've become known as the "psychiatrist to the stars," a descriptor that bothers me as much as it likely bothers you. The best thing I can do to refute that misconception is to tell you what I've learned as a psychiatrist over the last forty years. Along the way, with my partner, Barry Michels, I developed a new kind of psychotherapy. It differs from the old model in one crucial respect: it works.
I grew up in New York and I attended City College of New York and NYU medical school, which is where I received my medical and psychiatric training. After that, I was a prison psychiatrist at Rikers Island for five years, as well as carrying on a private practice. But I was becoming increasingly demoralized about the inability of psychiatry to really help patients.
A move to Los Angeles did nothing to make me more hopeful. I was still determined to find a better way, but with no one to turn to for advice, I felt rudderless. Out of pure stubbornness, I kept looking, anywhere and everywhere, for ideas, for answers, until I finally found them in the one group I never thought to search: my own patients.
I found that if I threw out the rule book and treated them with the respect any human being would want—rather than as a collection of genetic or psychological anomalies—they were willing to go wherever my instincts led me. This was fortunate because the only way to proceed was through trial and error. With my patients' encouragement, I began to develop something I called the Tools.
The Tools were very different from psychotherapy as it was practiced at that time. I had grown so frustrated because I felt as if traditional therapy was designed to make it impossible for patients to change. The patient was either trapped in a past that no longer existed or living in fantasy about a future that hadn't arrived yet—and might never. Only the Tools could open the door to the infinite wisdom of the present.
There were three qualities that identified someone that was in Tools therapy.
1. Homework: It is naïve to think your experience in a therapist's office is enough to change your life. Life isn't a static thing that you can cover over with a fresh coat of paint. Life is a process. If you want to change a process, you need to work on it daily.
2. Forward Motion: Old-school therapy kept you in the past. The highest value is placed on understanding what happened to you back then. When you use the Tools, the highest value is in taking the next step into your future.
3. Higher Forces: We are only a tiny part of an infinite universe. On our own we can do nothing. But, in a silent miracle, the universe puts its energies at the service of human evolution. This is most obvious when a person's life is falling apart (financial ruin, emotional rejection, low self-esteem, etc.). It's in desperation that we become willing to go beyond our limited view of the universe. If we don't recognize the presence of higher forces, they can't help us. We need to feel them in the present. The Tools give us the ability to embody higher forces.
Barry and I knew that this information was too important to keep to ourselves. Together we wrote The Tools and its follow-up, Coming Alive. Both of them were well received and opened the door to a wider audience. The books represented an approachable way to bring higher forces into our lives. But we also knew there was an aspect of the Tools that couldn't be conveyed in the how-to model those books were written to be. There was a whole other level to the concepts, but I couldn't figure out how to get it across.
Time passed.
One day, I was looking around my office and came upon a bunch of short essays I had written in the 1990s and early 2000s sitting on a shelf. I had written them after I had developed the Tools as a practice, but before Barry and I had written The Tools as a book. I had forgotten about them; they were essentially lost to time.
I had written them for a health and wellness newsletter called A Real Life, which was ahead of its time. This was pre-internet. The newsletter was an actual paper, locally distributed.
Its publisher, Barbara McNally, had been interested in my work and gave me the opportunity to write a column presenting some of my ideas. Each essay was about a common problem, like depression, rage, and loneliness. Finding them on my shelf, I remembered that the feedback we got from the newsletter readers, even those who devoured self-help books, was that these pieces felt like something totally new.
...
