Dr. Buckley's Self-Help Book Blog

Moving Your Young Adult Forward

It is increasingly common for parents of young adults to call my practice to try to make an appointment for their adult child.  We have to redirect them to have the young person call for their own appointment, because I want to begin the relationship with the presumption of the younger person's ability to make his or her own decisions.  The desperation in the parent's voice gives away just to what extent good decisions are not being made right now.  Family therapy seems a likely recommendation at some point.

Brad Sachs' Emptying the Nest: Launching Your Young Adult Toward Success and Self-Reliance (2010, Palgrave MacMillan) is a roadmap for parents finding themselves in territory more uncharted than they'd ever anticipated: accompanying a young person whose attitude, direction or behavior is holding everyone's growth back and likely eliciting counterproductive behavior from other family members.

But this book is not simply a how-to.  It is written in the graceful voice of a psychologist who also writes poetry and music.  With many case examples, Sachs illustrates his therapy technique in delicate exchanges that will inspire professionals to choose their own words more carefully.  After all, it takes a great deal of skill and tact to help conflicting parents and their adults children overcome defensiveness and listen productively to each other.  

Another unusual quality of Sachs' approach as a writer is his ability to empathically model alternatives for parents.  He anticipates what parents want to say to/ask of their offspring, and he offers: "Instead of ---, try ---" converting aggressive language to gentle, win-win assertiveness.  Enough examples of this are offered that you can get the hang of it, as though he were rehearsing it with you.

Sachs movingly addresses the issue of coping with the empty nest from the point of view of the couple whose marriage has been geared toward child-rearing and has lost its sexuality, connection, and/or the respective individual identities.  I would add that although he does not address single parents, it follows that you as an individual parent still have much of your own adult development ahead of you, and you need to respect and deal with that head on to be a good role model for your offspring.

Sachs presents relevant theory just to the degree that the reader can see their own family system in it. He makes the important point that the past must be reviewed in therapy to the extent that it can impact current dynamics, but that such history-taking is not likely to take near as long as most families imagine it will.  As a therapist, I can attest that families often want to skip some of this, imagining that they are being diverted into psychoanalysis or exposing themselves to blame.  It can be difficult to trust an outsider, especially when you are wondering if in some way you have failed as a parent.

Sachs' examples follow several families through treatment and present encouraging outcomes.  The intricacy of the changes undergone by the young people leaving home really enables the reader to see that this crucial period during the late teens and early twenties can see some remarkable turnarounds, even if you and your child achieve something very different in life from what you'd imagined.

The empathic coaching mindset modeled in this book can be practiced without engaging in therapy, but don't wait to work on it.  And if you think you need professional support, you probably do.  There have probably been many times over the years that you were glad you trusted your parental instincts.

How to Manage Your Teen

Not long ago, I caught an episode of the sitcom My Wife and Kids starring Damon Wayans (of In Living Color.)  In it, he plays the father of two teens and an elementary-age child.  The story went that he was alone with them while their working mother was away on a business trip.  The teens decide to reject his authority and earnestly request to go without the usual rules.  To their surprise, he agrees.  Gradually it unfolds that he has withdrawn all services provided to them in return.  No car, no meal preparation, no housekeys. It isn't until the curfew-less teenage boy spends a night under the sprinklers on the front lawn that he realizes how the family works.  Following the rules is how you show your appreciation for everything your parents do for you.

Funny as it is--with the demonic glint of Wayans' eyes portending the teens' undoing--this illustrates the ideal foundation of a functional family of teenagers, and author Thomas Phelan (of the 1-2-3- Magic system of discipline for 12 and unders) gives you the how-to in Surviving Your Adolescents:How to Manage and Let Go Of Your 13-18 Year Olds. Phelan's book gives specific guidelines for measuring levels of control to exert, appropriate punishments to hand out, and how and when to approach your teen in the first place, depending on how good your relationship with him/her is.

Parents--and perhaps some therapists--may be surprised at Phelan's recommendation that you stay away from your teen on discipline issues if you have not forged a decent relationship.  Let the parent who has the better relationship work with him/her.  Teens only cooperate fully with those for whom they feel love and respect, and who approach them in that spirit.  Healthy teens are geared toward gaining autonomy, and have delicate defense triggers, Phelan seems to be saying.  Should you surprise them at the wrong moment or try to exert any more control than necessary, you will be met with passive resistance or serious pushback.

I recommend this book most for the variety of topics covered: chores, sex, drugs, whether to make them go on family outings with you, and more.  Further, he gets specific with age sub-categories.  In fact, you may want to consider making yourself a chart to reflect his recommendations for what to permit by age (perhaps a future edition of the book could include something like this.) 

So how do you forge that good relationship that gives you relationship capital to spend?  Hopefully you've been doing it all along.  But if not, the principles of active listening, timing, and good environments for conversation are discussed.  Phelan has clear guidelines for when to seek professional help, as well.

If you read this book and are still having problems with your teen, it is probably a good idea to seek support for yourself with a therapist.  A professional can then help you decide whether a secondary referral for your teen is advisable.  I would add that in my experience, this sequence of intervention is especially appropriate and effective for single mothers struggling with sons, or fathers with daughters, whose children may need a same-sex role model to replace an absent parent for a time.

 

Need a Reason to Clean? Try Feng Shui.

Many of us are not by nature organized or efficient in various areas of our lives.  The popularity of television shows about hoarding attest to the widespread struggles people are experiencing around material acquisitions they have no clue what to do with.  Watching--or knowing--a serious hoarder can put your own more 'average' mess in a different perspective.

But it isn't comfortable or normal to live in a mess, even if it is common.

And for those with diagnoses of Attention Deficit Disorder or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, medications and therapy 'homework' may only address the problem in part.

What makes neatness sustainable is, in my opinion, a lot like what makes healthful eating sustainable:  it has to make some kind of philosophical sense to you, and even fit in with your spirituality or culture somehow.

Take, for instance, the way the French deal with food in their every day lives (pre-McDonald's, anyway.)  There is a cultural code governing their meal choices:  you eat something easy and delicious (butter and sugar are welcomed) for breakfast, something substantial and seasonal--eaten one course at a time for appreciation and digestion--for lunch (after which you'll work/nap/work for several hours, and just enough to sustain you overnight for dinner, which is relatively late.

So it is with the rational take on Feng Shui presented by Connie Spruill, FSII and Sylvia Watson, FSII, co-directors of the Feng Shui Institute of America, in their book Feng Shui with What You Have: Maximum Harmony, Minimum Effort (2004, Adams Media.) How you use the system of Feng Shui to declutter, organize and decorate your home has to come out of the meaning you make of your life and the principles you intend to live by, whether you're conscious of these yet or not. The authors take you through exercises early in the book that focus you on what your real wishes for your life are, and guide you through the feng shui system of clearing out and reorganizing your space to reflect your genuine intentions... without buying a lot of expensive stuff, Chinese trinkets or other superstitious clutter.  You might even say it's just good design. 

But the authors have used the Chinese code for the physical environment to guide this effort, just as the French have codified eating to get maximum aesthetic, spiritual and nutritional benefit from food in a way people from other cultures may never understand (I mainly understand it from having spent a summer with a traditional French family when I was a young adult.)

Mostly, however, the Western reader will likely be impressed with the common-sense translation of this code for us beginners.  Think about it: how do sharp edges versus soft, rounded edges make you feel?  Red versus blue?  The connotations are mainly the same across cultures, but have we as Westerners been trained to think of the impact on us of these things in our environment?  You can't even get to enjoy these subtleties until you make a practice of decluttering first.

Americans have become increasingly aware of the mind-body-spirit connection as Western scientists 'validate' it.  But there's a fourth dimension that we have yet to really embrace, and that is the effect of even the smallest changes in our environment on our functioning.

I'll give you another example, and then leave you to hunt up this wonderful little book.  My younger son, now 8, tends to wind up before bed instead of winding down.  The tired-er he is, the more wound up he gets, until it can turn into a real battle.  But since a professional organizer suggested a few years ago that we paint his room different shades of blue, with dark brown flooring, he gets to sleep in half the time.  Deep blues represent the water element of feng shui, and chosen carefully (blue can be depressing), they connote sleep for a restless child.  Or as the authors put it,

"Learn from Water's introspection, acceptance, and stillness: Honor what lies within, meditate, and remain still."

Who could resist?

Testimonial of a Well-Divorced Mom

Cook Fight Re-ignite?  I am sorely tempted to retitle author Jessica Bram's Happily Ever After Divorce: Notes of a Joyful Journey (2009, Health Communications, Inc.)  You see, it isn't what I'd call joyful (and as a psychologist, I'd like to think I have an idea what joyful really feels like) but it is a fast, absorbing read because of her deep self-observation and appreciation for the full range of experience around her gradual emergence from a bad marriage.  Overall, I'd characterize her experience of leaving as a relief, and without significant depression.  This, of course, keeps the reader feeling excited for her, even when her experience is bittersweet or naive.

For therapists, this is a good book to recommend to people with children who are trying to muster the courage to leave a psychologically abusive marriage.  In my opinion, the key problems leading to this divorce were: getting married without love or intention, her husband's workaholism and her corresponding giving up of her positive work identity to be primarily a mother and a "support" to her husband's business, materialism, and a growing active dislike of each other. 

It's difficult to tell whether the author's husband unilaterally abused her.  She alludes to mutual betrayals, admits to contributing plenty to "recriminations" during the marriage, and clearly doesn't have much patience for his emotional remoteness, even if she achieves a growing affection for him as a dedicated father, post-divorce.

The picture this book paints is of an empty shell of a marriage, appearing perfect and whole, with its religiosity (Jewish shabbat observed regularly), upward mobility, three children, a love of domesticity on the author's part and success in the field of commercial real estate on the part of her husband (do I hear a crash in the distance?), with no warmth emanating except that between between mother and sons.

The divorce itself is moderately hostile, punctuated in her retelling by icy rationality on the part of her husband, and remarkably uninformed idealism on her part.  One wonders, if these people had ever really been in love with each other in the first place, whether they might have been quite complementary. Alas, the question is moot, and the charade is over.  It was that kind of mistake.

Like Eat Pray Love--the childless version of the same kind of bad marriage tale--the story does arrive at a sensibly happy conclusion.  This should impart hope to the reader looking for a lifeline when it seems letting go of a dead marriage could set one terminally adrift... alone.

Can a person in a less moneyed marriage relate to this story?  Given what many people are willing to sacrifice to separate, I would say that yes, there is universality to this story.  The author has to downsize, start a new career, and learn how to date.  Perhaps the most poignant and gratifying moment in the book is when--after a few strange attempts at vacationing on a tiny budget while her ex-husband goes upscale with frequent luxury vacations for the kids--the author figures out that her kids are just as happy budgeting a little cash at the arcades on a Jersey shore boardwalk every day while she cooks dinner at the inexpensive rental condo nearby.

So, some money can buy happiness, as we've been hearing lately in the news.  But perhaps there is, indeed, a limit to that.

Organization for Parents with ADD

A little flighty, are we?  

Embarrassed around other parents who obviously have it together?

ADD-Friendly Ways to Organize Your Life (2002, Routledge) is a great handbook for those of us who can't even count the many ways inattention has interfered with the smooth functioning of our households and cost us precious time and energy.  This book was presented to me by a client staying home with several children. She boasted a graduate degree and the associated dreams, but the usual ADD medications had done little for her.  This book, however, had made a difference.

The authors of ADD-Friendly Ways did several things right.  

First, they narrowed down the problems to tackle to just the most common areas of concern for ADD parents: for example, how to make to-do lists, making school lunches efficiently, and letting go of unrealistic housekeeping ambitions when you work outside the home (and most parents do work outside the home now.)  

Second, they remind you not to try to change too many things too quickly, lest you burn out.  Every single new habit takes two to three weeks to take root, after all. 

And third, they recommend working with your inattentiveness rather than against it.  For example, if there's something you forgot to put on your to-do list, stop and put it on right then while you are thinking of it, even if it isn't convenient.  You are less likely to lose track of it, and won't spend unnecessary mental energy trying to remember what you wanted to write down later.

Finally, three other problem areas are covered very pragmatically, while identifying the ADD ways of thinking that create and sustain them:  packratting, overcommitment, and paperwork avoidance.  When to get friend(s) or family to help, versus hiring a professional organizer, is also usefully covered.

Co-authors Judith Kolberg and Kathleen Nadeau, Ph.D. are, respectively, a professional organizer and a psychologist.  They have written a guide to sustainable lifestyle changes for adults with ADD that can not only make the parenting era of life easier, but increase confidence for midlife functioning and beyond.

I would like to say at this point that as a therapist, I am currently rather ambivalent about the phenomena associated with ADD being classified together as a medical disorder, per se.  I see more and more in my practice that a certain temperament and personality style tends to be associated with these phenomena, generally speaking (my favorite anthropologist, Helen Fisher, refers to such people as Negotiators.) Inattentive people have a lot of positive experiences/qualities associated with them (imagination, multitasking capacity and generosity are just a few examples.) Nonetheless, inattention can certainly impair someone in a given context, and many individuals do benefit from the medications designed to treat it. 

Soothing iPhone Apps

Every now and then, I look for other media as resources for self-help besides books.  Why not?  After all, even books are changing:  For example, no longer do we love the clutch and ripple of the cover and pages of a new book for their exclusive power to contain literature.  No, we might even be pondering the relative physical feel of the theoretical iPad versus the Kindle for reading.

And darn that iPad, it hadn't arrived at the Apple store--not even a demo model--in Atlanta, when I was there again a couple of weekends ago.  They're talking... some time in March? (update: it's going to be April)

But all was not lost in Atlanta, since I got to spend time with my singer-songwriter cousin Buck and his wife, artist and singer Patrice Eastham.  Patrice introduced me to some delightful and calming iPhone apps that I can definitely endorse here as fun--and non-addictive--self-help.

First, there's Bebot.  Bebot is a synthesizer who initially appears static onscreen, a do-it-yourself 1950's modern-style robot standing on the right side of the screen, with vertical lines of static as background.  Double-tap the bottom right of the screen and you have access to the synthesizer functions and can change all aspects of the sound Bebot and his background make when you tap, rub, or hold your finger(s) to the screen.  With that, he croons and sways like an extraterrestrial opera singer.  Try not to laugh, I dare you.  It's soothing in the way a cat purrs when you pet her and then stop to listen, or when a dog catches a toy you throw and gets off on it in a comical way.  It's cathartic in the way it forces you to be silly for a minute and then take a deep breath and let it out, refreshed and ready for something more serious.

And then there's Koi Pond, a lovely spot of water that gently sloshes beneath your finger as you move it across the screen.  It's a wonderful trick played on your senses as you watch and feel the 'resistance' of the water.  Fish come out and startle away from the disturbance, then return shortly to check out your finger and nibble on it (the phone vibrates to tickle you.)  You can control the density of the fish population, color of the pond, weather, sounds and other less conspicuous elements.  It also has a sleep timer that lasts up to 11 hours, in case your environment is otherwise too quiet for sleep and you benefit from ambient nature sounds.  I must admit, I have put my iPhone on the floor and stuck my big toe 'in the water."  It feels cool and satisfying, but after the fish scatter and return to check me out, they just sort of swim under my toe or look a little uncertain and swim away again.  No nibbles, hmmm?

Ocarina turns your iPhone into a musical (wind) instrument.  You either blow into the microphone while placing your fingers on the dots ("holes") on the screen, or in "touch" mode, just play by doing the fingerings.  It's a bit of work to get started if you are not musically trained, but not much more work than learning the recorder.  As a former sax/bassoon/flute player, I found it delightful to pick up my phone, blow into it and make in-tune sounds without reeds, saliva or sticky old pads.  You can change modes and keys, as well.  The other soothing and satisfying part of Ocarina is the listen-around-the-world feature.  This allows you to cure your loneliness and have a smile as you watch the globe rotate, and bubbles of someone's Ocarina tune rise up hauntingly in the dark from their current geographic location.  You can transmit yours, too, and see if anyone shows you some "love" by favoriting your tune.  

Ambiance is a sound library that seems to have an endless selection of 'massage music', nature sounds, and other ambient or esoteric noises. Almost anyone could find something they find soothing to listen to here.  Each day, different sounds are featured.  Evening nature sounds from a particular region, wind chimes, chewing gum, and emergency ward are some recent offerings.  A quickstart feature allows you to go straight to your favorite sound after pressing the app button.  Importantly, these sounds are rated by listeners, so if you care what others think, you can skip the less popular selections.  This app has timer features including cycling through a list of sounds, categories for sorting your selections, a mixer to combine sounds, and the ability to share sounds on social networking sites. Obviously this app has many uses, particularly for musicians and other people who use sound effects for their work.  But perhaps its ability to enhance focus or counteract auditory problems (such as tinnitus) are the most striking. Otherwise, have fun exploring the astonishing variety of auditory experiences here, and find one or two sounds that relax you.

Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers' Bloom is the most accessible musical app we looked at.  If you like space music and a set-it-and-forget-it musical creation to listen to, this one's for you.  Bloom suggests a flower, and indeed, the visual image is one of a pastel backdrop with contrasting color spot appearing and growing like an opening bud when you tap a location to try a tone.  Musical intervals have a spatial logic here, although I haven't quite intuited it yet.  You can change the mood (visual and auditory), mode, scale, shake to clear, and set a nap timer.  Saving and shuffling are options, too.  The most earnest and New Age-ey of the apps reviewed here, you could probably enjoy it during a massage, too.

If you're a parent with spiritual leanings, I recommend iZenGarden2 for--among other purposes--its ability to occupy a school-age child peacefully during a long wait.  My seven-year-old arranges his garden (it's like one of those mini zen gardens in a box that you put on your desk) rather elaborately, with lots of nature and other elements.  He rakes the sand--available in a variety of colors--a different way each time.  For your own grown-up use, this app has a meditation timer that can be set to end with a bell.  You can also have ambient sounds going as you meditate, such as Tibetan singing bowls, or rain.  You can share your garden on social networking sites, or by camera and email.

If you share our sensibilities and enjoy any of these apps, then also check out Patrice and Buck, in The Buck Buckley Band (think American/Roots music, Emmylou Harris...)  Sometimes soothing, sometimes toe-tapping, they have a CD and play in the Atlanta area.

One Inspiring Couple

For the New Year, and the end of the old, I wanted to present a positive example of a couple that seems to make things work in many of the ways the problem-solving books I've discussed this year recommend.

Their story is not a conventional one, so if your sensibilities are offended by flawed people being held up as an example, read no further.

But, it's likely you enjoy reading regardless, since you're still here.  So I'd like to discuss the 'twin' memoirs of Michael Chabon and his wife Ayelet Waldman. 

Michael Chabon is a fiction writer inspired by the countless comic books of his childhood (he's 46.)  His memoir, entitled Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son (2009, HarperCollins Publishers), is the more artfully and subtly composed of the two works.  He was a writer first, before they met.  She was a Harvard-educated public defender first, and after experiencing the clash between the pull of motherhood and the demands of her career, became a stay-at-home-mother and then a writer. 

Waldman's memoir, entitled Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace (2009, Doubleday) is direct prose that engages you transparently. Waldman attracted significant media attention when in a piece called "Modern Love," she discussed loving her husband more than her children.  While this couple is quite liberal in their politics and willingness to expose their mistakes, the idea that you attend to your own needs first, then your marriage, then your children, then everyone else is one I not only espouse in my own psychotherapy practice, but have seen talked about by rather conservative social commentators.  Nonetheless, many people found this idea shocking in the age of child-centered education, parenting and everything else.

It's been said that the success of a marriage depends more on the maturity of the husband than anything else.  If he still wants to be cared for the way his parents did in his childhood, he can never properly take his place as equal caregiver alongside his wife.  As you read Chabon, you see how his father leaving the family taught him how to be alone, to appreciate and respect the support of his mother, who had to go back to school after her divorce, and how to share himself with his own children--indeed, to want to share himself with his children.  When he (briefly married once before) meets Waldman--according to her memoir--he had already envisioned himself a stay-at-home-writer-father.  In other words, he had thought out his adult family role by himself instead of leaving the construction of his family to some future mother of his adulthood.

Waldman, for her part, discusses how her dissatisfied, pre-feminist mother pushed her to seek equality with men in all things and sexual self-expression.  Her resulting strength swung her between the extremes of boring, passive boyfriends and mutually exploitative one-night-stands.  Meeting Chabon broke the cycle.  (It is particularly funny to compare the couple's different accounts of the incentives they were given to go on a blind date together.)  Her ambitiousness in nailing him down with an early marriage proposal was a counterpoint to his big-picture consideration of the usefulness of being a househusband.  There was lots of chemistry (in anthropologist Helen Fisher's terms, she is probably a DIRECTOR/Explorer and he a NEGOTIATOR/Explorer, a highly complementary personality combination.)

Because Chabon was raised with the same 1970's gender equality education she was, Waldman found a man who cooks, cleans and nurtures the (four!) children naturally.  So, she's not angry with him, and voila, she still desires him.

And, when she needed to make a career change, he was responsive and supportive of that which would make him the primary breadwinner for awhile.

To top it all off, Waldman is bipolar, given to extreme mood changes that make her at times rather unpleasant to be around.  The couple, as couples researcher John Gottman would approve of, have found a way to fight "bombastically", get it out of their systems and then get back to liking each other before bed.  There are 'repair attempts', and she takes her bipolar energy outside the house for awhile until she is "bored or tired."  They have found "what works" for her bipolar contribution to the relationship.

Without using the exact words, Chabon credits his wife's extraversion with getting him (the introvert) out in the world.  He works conscientiously to try to understand his two daughters' emerging femaleness, but in the end hands over what feels like an overwhelming difference to his wife ("go ask your mother.") While he silently takes himself to task for this, his wife remarks on just how different things are for her daughters than they were for her, although she still wants to support their sexual self-expression as her mother did hers. 

Perhaps it is self-awareness in each of these writers that has made as much of a difference in creating an adult marriage as anything else.  But clearly there is also the humor on both sides (comical descriptions of the changes in Waldman's body through childrearing, for example, that have nonetheless done little to diminish the couple's physical affection for each other.)  And most of all, there is the element of having chosen well to begin with. 

The Abusive Man

When my elder son was about six years old, he would ask me repeatedly how you could determine if someone is a "bad guy."  Before I could answer, he would supply his own:  "You can always tell, because they wear black."  It saddened me to have to explain to this innocent boy that appearances don't tell you much, the main thing is not to talk to strangers, except some in uniforms, and so on and so on...

Author Lundy Bancroft draws on his extensive experience counseling abusers and their families to answer my son's question, in a way. If it were that easy to tell if men are going to be abusive, no one would give them a chance to do it, or they'd all be in jail.  

Bancroft's Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men (2002, G.P. Putnam's Sons) is a Bible-sized, beautifully constructed resource for people who think they may be in a relationship with an abuser (he speaks to gay men and women here, too), and need to be walked through the process of discernment by someone with penetrating insight.  It's also a good reference for therapists, who generally receive only an hour's worth of continuing education on the subject of domestic violence every two years.

According to Why Does He Do That?, abusers are generally defined by their negative attitudes toward women, from which their manipulative behavior arises.  The type of abuse they perpetrate often mirrors what was done to their mothers by their fathers, and has the flavor of whatever socio-cultural background they were raised in.  Cheaters beget cheaters, wife-beaters produce other wife-beaters, and the male children of mousy, passive-aggressive men may act the same way with their female partners when they grow up.  White men may tolerate their women having male friends, but not a 'smart mouth.'  Latino men may not mind being yelled at by a woman, but any attention she pays to other men may enrage them.

About half the time, Bancroft says, abusers seem to have been influenced not by their families, but by negative attitudes about women expressed by their peer group, music they listen to, pornography and other sources in the culture at large.

Bancroft outlines nine types of abuser: The Demand Man, Mr. Right, The Water Torturer, The Drill Sargeant, Mr. Sensitive (the "male feminist"), The Player, Rambo, The Victim, The Terrorist, and The Mentally Ill or Addicted Abuser.  This last, 'tenth' type is really one that can superimpose itself on the previous nine, leading to increased dangerousness. 

Abusive men can combine more than one of the nine types.  For example, the sexually exploitative behavior of The Player is common across many other types, as heightened sexuality may be used by an abusive man to lure women in and give this man a sense of his own awesomeness.  Once a new partner gets to know him, his prowess as a lover may fade as his self-absorption takes over and his moodiness reveals itself.

Of course, it is not just the type, but the intensity of negative behaviors that varies.  Some abusers may never become physically threatening or violent, but--through their unpredictable moods and twisted communication styles--they succeed in keeping women anxious and off-balance in order to get their way. 

Bancroft spends the (long) last part of the book carefully discussing safety and exit planning, as well as how to view 'the system' and all of the professionals in it.  He has suggestions for how to relate to an abused woman (and her children) helpfully, and makes an appeal for community involvement in working toward "an abuse-free world."

I highly recommend this thoughtful book, with its myriad case examples, to anyone who needs a more thorough exposure to, and understanding of, the subject of domestic abuse.  I do not accept domestic violence cases in my practice (it is considered a specialty area,) but abuse issues do crop up with some frequency in established clients, anyway.  For this reason, I am certainly grateful to the 'survivor' who came in and told me about this book, and how it helped her to begin to move on.

Divorce Gently

What's your vision for your family's life beyond the end of your marriage?

Sociologist Constance Ahrons' The Good Divorce (1994, HarperCollins) addresses this question with her own vision based on her research and--as we learn slowly through the book--her experience negotiating her own tumultuous separation and custody struggle to a happy ending.

How would you like to look back on how you handled the process of separation and divorce?

This is the second--more spiritual--question addressed in this thought-provoking book.  Although the author herself cannot go back and do better in her own life, her typology of divorcing relationships (from permanently non-communicating "Dissolved Duos" to high-functioning "Cooperative Colleagues") is a gift to those seeking to 'raise the bar' for their own behavior and provide the optimal environment for their children in a changing family structure.

The ideal family structure proposed by Ahrons is the "binuclear family": a group with two centers (each biological parent of a child/children together) that eventually will include step-parents, possibly step- and half-siblings, and a multitude of extended family members all around.  The family "begins and ends with the child," so everyone is called on to let go of blame and live as harmoniously as possible, even if not together.

This certainly permits a positive view of divorce.  It argues that--done well--divorce does not have to injure anyone, and can be quite life-enhancing in the end.  It does not attempt to deal with the more internal upheaval of divorce transition that you or (if you are a therapist) your client will inevitably feel and have to cope with.  More to the point, it provides a structural, bird's-eye view of the changing family landscape of a divorce without judging or trying to anticipate emotions for the reader.  Other divorce books address these latter issues directly.

As a therapist, I would recommend this book to a client with dependent children who is having trouble admitting to wanting a divorce, but is feeling internally driven in that direction.  In other words, this person is in the very early stages of thinking about divorce, when one is thinking, "is it even okay to be thinking about this?"  The book provides solid, scientific argument for the generally positive welfare of children in binuclear families that is very reassuring.

The book is also geared to people who are unhappy with the way their divorce has unfolded, and would like to retool their vision and direction.  As the author points out, it is never too late to have a good divorce.

When Housework Takes Flight

These days, household management is one of the most common areas of conflict and disappointment brought into my office by either individuals or couples seeking therapy.  While there are a number of books available on decluttering and home organization (and if you're flush, you can always hire a professional organizer), the way we care for our homes has complex roots in our histories and it can take more than reading a good book on the subject to really transform lifelong habits.

This is not to make excuses for pack-ratting.  On the contrary, poor housekeeping is--for the vast majority--one of those imminently 'solvable problems' we have a lot of power over, unlike sexual incompatibility or a longstanding character problem.

Becoming a better housekeeper is a dynamic commitment that can benefit from guidelines, coaching and support over time that are available at little or not cost.  This is why I often recommend the website FlyLady.net. This website is piloted by Marla Cilley, who has a history of recurrent depression and the accompanying difficulty with taking care of her home.  She has taken all she learned in her therapy and beyond and shared it with the world via her website, books, and a set of housekeeping tools that are for sale to cover costs. 

Subscribe to FlyLady.net, and you will receive daily e-mails in small or large numbers (your choice) that will reorient you to the space in which you live, truly a how-to for those who either never learned to keep house, or need a serious re-boot.  For therapists: this may be particularly helpful to those clients with Attention Deficit Disorder.  

I have seen it said that FlyLady writes for 'a certain audience.'  Presumably this means Christian stay-at-home-moms.  It has been my experience, however, that she emphasizes adapting her principles to your own lifestyle and needs, and makes no judgments about cultural differences.  

FlyLady's 'system' takes time to build and incorporate fully into your life, but it is indeed adaptable (write down your routines in pencil--it's likely you'll revise them at some point.) It's a great tool in fighting the destructiveness of perfectionism (I won't do it until I can get it just right, and I'll never get it right, so...)

There are, of course, extreme cases of hoarding that need professional mental health consultation right away.  These would include the compulsive saving of unsanitary items, and the creation of dangerous conditions through overcrowding the home that is accompanied by resistance to change.

At the other end of the spectrum, you may wonder after you peruse her website, should you really "shine your sink?"  I think of this as a symbol of the willingness to fully clean up after yourself, rather than a compulsory part of the system.  But that's just me trying not to be a perfectionist, so try it anyway and see what you think.