How Much Should You Know About Your Therapist’s Life?

By Lori Gottlieb (The New York Times, March 30, 2019)

When I was starting out as a therapist, a colleague told me what was intended to be a cautionary tale. After suffering a series of miscarriages, she was in a Starbucks when her doctor called with the news that her pregnancy wasn’t viable. Standing at the counter, she burst into heaving sobs. A patient happened to walk in, saw her hysterically crying therapist, walked out the door, canceled her next appointment and never went back to her.

“You’re not going to keep writing now that you’re a therapist, right?” she said, more a statement than a question.

 My colleague knew that before going back to school to become a therapist, I had been a writer: I had written in books and magazines and newspapers about personal topics such as my childhood, my romantic life, having a baby on my own and being a parent. Maybe she thought that, say, a single woman in her late 30s who wanted to be a parent but would never do so solo wouldn’t seek me out as a therapist, or wouldn’t tell me the truth about how she felt for fear of offending me.

I understood her concern. The therapeutic relationship exists in a certain context. Patients share their lives with us, not the other way around. But even if I stopped writing, the work I’d done was out there, available at the click of a mouse. Now I worried: If patients re ad about my life, would they be more reluctant to see me? Would they bolt like my colleague’s patient in Starbucks?

Therapists, of course, deal with the daily challenges of living just as everyone else does. In fact, this familiarity is at the root of the connection we forge with strangers who trust us with their most intimate stories and secrets. Our training has taught us theories and tools and techniques, but whirring beneath our expertise is the fact that we know just how hard it is to be a person. Which is to say, we still come to work each day as ourselves — with our own sets of vulnerabilities, our own longings and insecurities and our own experiences and histories. Of all my credentials as a therapist, my most significant is that I’m a card-carrying member of the human race. Without this humanity, I’d be useless to help people.

But revealing this humanity is another matter.

Most therapists nowadays use some form of what’s known as self-disclosure in their work, whether it’s sharing some of their own reactions that come up during the session or acknowledging that they watch the TV show a patient keeps referring to. Better to admit that you watch “The Bachelor” than to feign ignorance and accidentally say Colton Underwood’s name when the patient hasn’t mentioned him yet.

The question of what to share gets tricky. One therapist I know told a patient whose child had Tourette’s syndrome that she, too, had a son with Tourette’s, and it deepened their relationship. Another colleague treated a man whose father had taken his own life, but he never revealed to the patient that his own father had done the same. In each situation, there’s a calculation to make, a subjective litmus test we use to assess the value of the disclosure: Is this information helpful for the patient to have?

Outside the therapy room, though, what are the rules? Here are some things you don’t want to do in public as a therapist: Cry to a friend in a restaurant or say, “I know, Mom!” petulantly into your cellphone while in line at Costco with a patient nearby. If you’re a respected child psychologist, like a colleague of mine, you don’t want to be standing in the bakery when your 4-year-old has a meltdown about not getting another cookie, culminating with the ear-piercing proclamation “You’re the worst mom ever!” while your 6-year-old patient and her mother look on, aghast.

The story of my colleague’s patient’s reaction to her crying in Starbucks haunted me, or at least its moral did: When patients see our humanity, they leave us.

And yet, many patients are also curious — including me. I once Googled my own therapist and discovered that his father had died at a young age of a heart attack. Afterward, I began editing myself in sessions, wondering whether talking about my close relationship with my aging father would be painful for my therapist, being careful not to rub it in with an especially moving anecdote. When I finally fessed up, I learned that my assumptions were wrong. What I read didn’t capture his experience the way hearing it firsthand did.

I know that patients Google me, too, not because they necessarily tell me, but because eventually — inevitably — they slip up. An offhand: “Well, you know what middle school boys are like” — despite my never having mentioned my son or his age; or adding “No offense” after making a negative comment about a sorority I belonged to in college and later wrote about.

This is why therapists don’t Google their patients — we want to know about your lives, but only as narrated by you. We’re interested not just in the information but in the process of sharing that information: what you leave in, what you leave out, at what point you choose to share something that makes it seem as though you buried the lede, as when a patient might appear happily married but one day say, “There’s this guy at work I’ve been flirting with for months.”

Not one person I know — well, maybe the very narcissistic — wants to talk to a therapist without a deep inner life, the human equivalent of a brick wall. When my colleague lost her pregnancy, she had the reaction any of us might have — and that’s a good thing. If I’d been her patient, would I want her to take that call in my session? Of course not. But if I had seen her in Starbucks that day, it would have made me feel even safer with her, trusting her all the more to understand me and my own sources of pain.

I hope that my patients feel this way, too.

Вариант 3

Задание 1. Напишите академическое эссе на русском языке (темы на выбор предложены в приложении 1).

 

Задание 2. Оформите результаты вашего диссертационного исследования 1) в виде научных тезисов на русском языке (требования представлены в приложении 2) в виде речи на защите диссертации.

Задание 3. Подготовьте на русском и английском языках текстовую часть социальной рекламы, призывающей широкую аудиторию к помощи социально уязвимым слоям населения.

Задание 4. a ) Прочитайте информационное письмо о проведении конференции, данное ниже.

Location: California, USA

Date: 19-20 October 2019

The aim of this two-day conference is to highlight emerging concepts, methodologies and applications in the study of culture, the mind and the brain, paying particular attention to:

■ cutting-edge neuro science research that is successfully incorporating culture and the social world;

■ the context in which methods are used as well as the assumptions that shape research questions; and

■ the kinds and quality of collaborations that can advance interdisciplinary research training,

email: [e-mail]

b) Напишите небольшое электронное сообщение формального характера в организационный комитет (100-120 слов) на английском языке. Перечислите свои профессиональные, научные достижения и поинтересуйтесь, соответствуете ли Вы критериям участника. Следуйте четкой структуре делового электронного сообщения и используйте изученные клишированные формулы.

Subject
Opening
Stating the aim	I am writing to you…
Giving information
Describing the actions you expect
Closing
Signature

 

Задание 5. Прочитайте научно-популярную статью на английском языке. Отметьте особенности научно-популярного подстиля. Проанализируйте особенности композиции статьи. Соответствует ли она данной структуре: введение, описание эксперимента, научные выводы, перспективы дальнейшего исследования. На основе статьи создайте тезисный доклад для выступления, используя стандартные речевые клише.

 

It’s Dangerous to Be a Boy

They smoke more, fight more and are far more likely to die young than girls. But their tendency to violence isn’t innate.

By Michael C. Reichert (The New York Times, March 30, 2019)

 

Early in my first go at being a father, I was hijacked by ancient impulses. Our family lived in a rowhouse neighborhood in Philadelphia, and right down the street was a small playground where gangs of boys gathered for games of stickball and basketball. My son loved playing sports. But he was unprepared for what developed as his friends grew older.

After years together laughing and riding their tricycles and then bikes up and down the block, several of the boys grew angry and mean. Ultimately, they turned on my son, taunting him, leaving him out of their games. He began to trudge home, tail between his legs. And I felt called to action.

At first, I tried to bolster his confidence so he would give the playground another go. But one Saturday morning I met him at the front steps and told him he could not come into the house. “You have to figure this out,” I said. “I’ll stay with you as long as you need, but I cannot let you just give up.”

He tried to push past me, his humiliation becoming frantic. He melted down, screaming and crying. I kept saying: “You can do it. You don’t have to give up.” A neighbor poked her head out, concerned about what must have sounded like child abuse.

Did I do the right thing? Even now I’m not sure. He did go back to the playground, and eventually managed some kind of truce with the other kids. He grew up into a fine man, a teacher, and understands I was trying to help, in my clumsy way. But while teaching him to stand up for himself, was I also passing along the prejudice that a boy should override his pain and never back down from a fight?

What happened in my son’s peer group was perfectly predictable. Boyhood immerses boys in violence and the bullying that leads to it. High school boys are more likely than girls to have been in a physical fight in the past year and male children are more likely to have been victims of violence. Three types of male violence — violence against women, violence against other men and violence against themselves — are deeply interwoven.

Violence springs from what boys learn about what it means to be a man. One researcher observed a small group of preschool boys and noticed how, over two years, they adapted to cultural cues. The ways they dressed, played and related to one another and to their parents changed significantly. They even formed a “Mean Team” to harass girls in their classroom. Another researcher interviewed elementary-school boys and captured their brutally frank stories of punishing other boys who failed to conform.

Boys take their experiences to heart, feeling weak and ashamed when they need comfort. Plan International USA, a nonprofit group focused on children’s rights, commissioned a study among 10- to 19-year-olds that found nearly three-quarters of boys said they felt pressure to be physically strong and nearly half of the 14- to 19 year-old male respondents felt pressure to be “willing to punch someone if provoked.”

The link between masculine norms and misconduct has been clearly established. A 2017 study of 18- to 30-year-old men from the United States, Britain and Mexico found that the young men who subscribe most to traditional gender identities were unhappier and more prone to bullying and sexual harassment. Nearly 60 percent of the American respondents said their parents were the primary source of these restrictive cues.

Boys don’t come into the world with some inborn tendency toward domination or violence. As the Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura explained: “People are not born with preformed repertoires of aggressive behavior. They must learn them.” The problem is rooted in boys’ socialization, which is characterized by physical discipline, control and disdain for weakness.

With this template for relating to themselves and to the world, it is not surprising that, compared with girls, adolescent boys and young men abuse tobacco at higher rates, drive more recklessly and engage in riskier sex. In the United States, 75 percent of deaths among 15- to 24-year-olds are of boys and young men. Males are more likely than females to die from injuries sustained in car accidents or falls, and from homicides. Especially when the risks of masculinity are compounded by racism and poverty, too many boys do not survive into manhood.

When I was young I went to an urban, all-boys’ high school where the bigger and more violent guys ruled. One spring, after a school dance, the electric charge of a fight surged and a crowd rushed to one of the gym exits. I could make out some of the guys from my lunch table. One of them, an older boy others said was “crazy,” was hauling off and kicking another boy, who died that night from head trauma.

I have never forgotten that scene. As a psychologist, I have spoken with many young men who have had similarly harrowing experiences, and I have heard from many parents about the effects on their sons. In the grip of stressful experiences like these, boys often pull away from their families. They become accountable not to those who love them but to a brotherhood they seek to impress.

The parents, understandably, feel anxious. Their sons behave a certain way — lackadaisical in school, unkind toward their siblings, anxious or angry or shy — and parents intervene, with concern, irritation, with a hand heavy. They try to give advice and become even more frustrated or alarmed when their sons cannot hear them.

Fathers, especially, may feel that times have changed so much since they were boys that their counsel amounts to outdated clichés. And it’s true that this generation of boys is in a much better position than we are to assess the future. But it’s not true that we are not needed — far from it.

What parents can do, must do, for their sons is never underestimate the power of listening to them, knowing them, and standing by while they navigate the rough waters of boyhood. Behind every boy who avoids being swept away in the current is someone who holds him — and believes in his ability to hold his own.

Вариант 4

Задание 1. Напишите академическое эссе на русском языке (темы на выбор предложены в приложении 1).

 

Задание 2. Оформите результаты вашего диссертационного исследования 1) в виде научных тезисов на русском языке (требования представлены в приложении 2) в виде речи на защите диссертации.

Задание 3. Подготовьте обращение к подросткам на русском языке, посвященное проблеме суицида. Составьте тезисы данного материала на английском языке для его представления в виде презентации.

Задание 4. a ) Прочитайте информационное письмо о проведении конференции, данное ниже.