Relationship counseling may be the furthest thing from your mind this Saturday, what with all the sunshine and the holiday weekend! But if you need it, I’ll be here, and because it’s a holiday I have a couple of openings. Either way, enjoy the perfect weather!

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I got the title (and the idea) of a “Mental health break” post from one of my favorite bloggers, Andrew Sullivan. Most of the time his blog is pretty serious and intense–these days he’s covering the crisis in Iran–so every once in a while he has fun and posts a funny ad, video, or story. It won’t surprise anyone who knows me that my mental health break today is a photo of our second (well, third) dog, Hoku’ala. I’m not a skilled photographer, so I was astonished when I saw this. It’s one of those once-in-a-puppyhood photographs! Click on the photo for a larger view. Enjoy, and happy Friday!

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I think there are two roles a lot of people expect therapists to play. One of them is judge, the other is referee. Sometimes I smile when I think of myself wearing a judge’s robe, or worse, a referee’s striped shirt. Here’s why neither uniform works for me as your therapist:

First, the judge. Your life is filled with judgments. You chose a partner because you judged that person to be a good match for you. You chose a career, or a house. You chose to try to conceive a child. Or you chose not to. And there are thousands of tinier judgments: that person looks drunk, you tell yourself. That bus seat looks dirty. And of course you make a judgment when you come in for counseling: this therapist is the one I think can help me.

I certainly hope that most of your judgments are sound (particularly that last one!). When you come to counseling, we can talk about them. You might know already that you made some pretty bad judgments, or you even know that your general pattern of judgment is flawed–maybe you automatically judge everyone to be untrustworthy, and that prevents you from getting close to anyone. Or you have a hard time with moderation, balance, and self-care. So you come to counseling, and if you’re like a lot of people, you approach the therapist as a judge–and a better judge than you, to boot. You ask me for advice. You check out decisions with me to see what I think. It sounds right. It sounds like what counseling is all about.

But it’s not. Counseling is about you becoming a better judge, not you submitting to my judgments. My cultural background might be different from yours. Or my gender. Or my attitudes, my assumptions, my worldview. If I’m wearing the judge’s robe in our work together, you don’t take command of your own life by focusing on and developing your own good judgment.

And as for referee, well that’s a uniform therapists are often invited to wear when doing couples therapy. The two of you come in, sit down, and start the same fight you have in your living room. And my job is to be your referee, your diplomat, your Voice of Reason. But here we have the same problem: if I’m your referee, then who stands tall in your own living room? And what if I make a bad call? Or what if you don’t like my call, but your partner does? What will become of our therapeutic relationship?

It’s better if I help both of you be your own referee–not necessarily of the fight you’re having, but the referee of your own internal struggles and issues. If you are your own referee, you are making your own calls about your own behavior. Am I being fair? you ask yourself. Am I being honest? Am I blaming my partner for a problem I have?

So…what is my uniform, then? I don’t have a colorful, neat little uniform that signifies what I do, but I will say this: my job is to help you be your own judge, your own referee, and get better and better at it, so that you will have the happiness, satisfaction, and contentment you long for in your life, and in your relationships.

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I posted this in my couples blog because lately it’s been couples in my practice who have needed to work on this a lot, but it’s a universal concept, well worth cross-posting. Enjoy, and happy differentiation!

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Last Friday I went to PLU to talk to a classroom of therapist trainees about ethics, practice-building, getting licensed, and anything else they wanted to talk about. One of them asked about self-care. “How do you take care of yourself when you’re stressed out?” she asked.

Short answer: nonsense and silliness. I noticed years ago that one consequence of my work is a craving most evenings for comedy shows, or frolicking with the dogs, or having my funniest friends over for dinner. There can be plenty of positive energy and laughter in my counseling sessions–believe me, it can really help!–but there is a level of intensity in my work that requires a lot of evening decompression. Go ahead and watch “The Wire” if you want. I’m going to watch this.

As I was talking to the students, I kept thinking of Willy Wonka, that great pop-culture example of a healthy (and, yeah, weird) person who stays emotionally healthy by opening himself up to the silly child within. In one scene, he softly sings a line that I’ve never forgotten: “A little nonsense now and then / is relished by the wisest men.”

I hope you can forgive the gendered language and open yourself up to healthy nonsense, to Willy Wonka silliness, in your life.

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Sorry for the slow trickle of posts lately. Lots of personal stuff has been going on, and as a therapist I feel a natural (and appropriate!) tension about reporting personal stuff on my blog. For most bloggers, personal stuff is the whole point of their blog. But for a therapist, it’s different. When I’m working with people, I have to be careful about what I disclose about myself, mostly because it’s all too easy for therapists to make the therapy hour about them. And even if they’re not going that far, it just muddies the waters to talk too much about the therapist and his personal life.

But today I’ll resolve the tension in favor of personal disclosure, because the personal “stuff that’s been going on” is a fun, exciting thing. A new puppy has arrived in the house. If there’s a topic about me that I’m willing to talk about, it’s my puppy dogs. If you’ve been following my blog, you’ve met both Stella and Hoshi. Say hello to Hoku’ala, an eight-week-old Shiba Inu. The vet cleared him yesterday for a lifetime of health, assuming we protect him, and Stella accepts him (she’s not there yet). It’s going fine, but I’m looking forward to sleeping for more than two hours at a time. It’s always a wild ride!

Oh, and Hoku’ala is a Hawai’ian boy name that means “rising star.” (Stella = Latin for star; Hoshi = Japanese for star; this time, in the wake of Hoshi’s untimely departure from the house, we needed the star to be rising.)

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If you’re a client of mine, you’ll recognize this metaphor. You’ll recall that I’ve used it at least once in our work together. It’s the metaphor of falling off a cliff. Here’s how it works: imagine your life being lived on a large plateau. As you roam the plateau, you encounter green countryside, rivers, patches of desert, rocky wilderness, lush groves of trees. Your life is rich and complex. And on one side of the plateau is a large cliff.

And sometimes you fall off that cliff.

What’s your cliff? Is it a difficulty you have controlling your temper? Or is it the opposite–a difficulty expressing anger? Is it a tendency to give up your life for the sake of others? Or a habit of self-centered behavior? Do you have trouble being authentic and truthful with the people you love? Or are you too blunt and crass for your own good?

Sometimes the cliff people go over is alcohol, or overeating, or anxious worrying. It’s the thing you struggle with that keeps coming back to haunt you, keeps throwing you. I don’t have a hard and fast belief about this, but I tend to think that people usually have only one cliff–or maybe two–in their lives.

I like this metaphor because it allows you to de-personalize your struggle. You have an anger problem? Okay, but if you look at it as your “cliff,” you can make a separation between yourself and your problem, so you can avoid an unhelpful cycle of frustration, defensiveness, and guilt. You can gain insight about your “cliff” and actually do something about it.

What’s the cliff you tend to go over?

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Back in October I posted about a technique that helps you say what you need to say in your relationships, and ask for what you want and need from your partner, friend, or family member. If you feel like you get locked in old patterns of conflict and frustration, this might be a good way for you to improve your approach. Just take it step by step, and be flexible when you run into trouble!

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I just returned to Seattle after a week-long service project in New Orleans. Our group worked on homes in the Gentilly and Upper Ninth Ward areas of the city, north and east of downtown. We managed to get to the French Quarter a couple of times, since the trip wasn’t all work and no play. (That just wouldn’t go over well in the Big Easy.)

I was glad to do this. It was the first time I’ve done several things–hanging Sheetrock on a ceiling, nailing siding on a house, mudding and sanding and priming walls, laying ceramic tile. I was glad to make a small contribution to the cause. The homeowners we worked with are proud of their city and see their return home as a way to honor their heritage. After all, New Orleans is a city where generations of families spanning three hundred years have chosen to stay and flourish. To move to Houston (or Seattle, for that matter) in the wake of a hurricane is a momentous decision for a New Orleanian. The culture of the Crescent City is not big on the notion of diaspora.

And yet, I had a divided heart about our work. The map below, from 1728, roughly thirty years into the history of New Orleans, shows how the city was wholly confined to what we now call the French Quarter. There’s high ground around the Quarter, hugging the north bank of the Mississippi, but fully 80% of New Orleans was devastated (or completely destroyed) by Katrina. And that 80% was built on drained swamps. When you walk up to a levee, you can see the river (or Lake Pontchartrain) standing high above the streets and neighborhoods behind you. It’s unsettling. It’s not unreasonable to ask why–even in light of the great heritage of the New Orleanians who long so desperately to come home–we rebuild here.

One of my work partners was insightful about it. She said that it’s obviously much harder and less sensible to build houses below sea level, but it’s not really an unusual thing for humans to do. Across the world we’ve built cities in the unlikeliest of places–scorching desert, frigid tundra, and atop earthquake fault lines, to name just three. New Orleans is no different. It’s harder to build here than, say, Lincoln, Nebraska. But not everyone wants to live in Nebraska.

Whatever my thoughts and feelings about all this, it was gratifying to go to another part of the world and lend a hand. And I also had this thought: it may not have been as much about the actual work as much as simply being present with our fellow citizens in New Orleans. A catastrophe like Hurricane Katrina is a once-in-a-century body blow to a city, and whether or not you want to lay bathroom tile, your simple presence (and yes, the money you spend on a sazerac), is treasured.

But if you’re like me, you won’t go until later in the year. It is *muggy* down there right now!

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I’m spending a week in New Orleans volunteering on a rebuilding project. I’ve never been to the Big Easy, so suffice it to say I’ve been learning a lot, and seeing a lot! On our first workday I helped lay kitchen tile, which involved spreading glop all over the floor, fitting the tiles, and prepping the tiles for grout. What a mess! At one point my friend and I were obsessing about the exact measurements of the tiles. We were worried that they were just a little bit off. But then our contractor/supervisor came in, saw what we were doing, and said, “Don’t worry about it. We’re not building a new house, we’re restoring an old one. And you need to know–there are no right angles in New Orleans.”

New Orleans culture is a far cry from my Midwestern upbringing, and even my lifestyle in Seattle. But it seems to me that it’s healthy to live and work (at least for a while) in a part of the world that doesn’t get anxious about the teeny tiny details. There are lots of right angles in my life. New Orleans gives me just the perspective I need.

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