Writing – Page 51 – Inside The Mind of a Psychiatrist

The mind can be played with the subtly and grace of a Stradivarius violin or as bullishly and aggressively as a bass drum.

Listening to the voices from our unconscious is not an easy task. It means taking time to evaluate rather than just react. Listening and letting feelings percolate is what good therapists do, and it’s exactly what you can do for yourself. Then, when you know what you feel, and maybe even where the feeling originates, you can choose to take action or not to take action.

But sometimes, even a psychiatrist has no clue where certain feelings are coming from. In Skin Dance, a mystery, Dr. Jake Robb is miserable after Jennifer, his wife, leaves. His brother Ken tries to help.

“Jake, I know you’re the shrink and I’m the attorney, but you have to admit that what’s really bothering you isn’t that crazy patient you were telling me about, but Jennifer. Hiding out isn’t going to bring her back. If you were treating yourself, you’d never advocate a treatment of social withdrawal and overdosing on carbs.”

Sighing, Jake felt himself sinking lower and lower into a puddle of depression. Mose Allison’s melancholy voice coming from the stereo wasn’t helping the situation.

“Listen Bro. We’re going out tonight. I’m not taking no for an answer.” Ken’s tone was insistent, undercurrents of worry lacing his words, like scotch through soda. “You won’t believe where we’re going…”

So Jake, like most of us, wasn’t clear on why he was feeling so down. He’d have to work hard to figure out the source of his depression. In Jake’s case, his life would depend on it. For us, our happiness and piece of mind may not be a life or death situation, but it will be an essential component to having a satisfying life.

So how do you do it?

Write down your dreams, fantasies, feelings, and the way you’re behaving in stressful situations. Then try to connect the patterns. Are the patterns a repetition from the past? Are you displacing feelings from your childhood and aiming them at a spouse or friend or child? It’s certainly not easy to discover what’s hidden in the unconscious, and a therapist might be necessary, but I assure you, learning to play a Stradivarius is a much better choice than battering your way through life. Except maybe if the bad guys are closing in…

Art Smukler MD is the author of Skin Dance, a mystery, Chasing Backwards, a psychological murder mystery, The Man with a Microphone in his Ear, and…drum roll… The popular blog, Inside the Mind of a Psychiatrist.

A liar is a person who willfully deceives others. Lance Armstrong and Bernard Madoff lied to protect themselves, and in the process deeply hurt innocent people.

A person who lies to himself is just a person, a regular human being like you and me, who doesn’t want to hurt anyone, including himself. We all grow up with a set of beliefs that by the time we become adults, are so embedded that it takes extraordinary methods to remove or modify them.

Jake Robb, a 41 year-old LA psychiatrist, and protagonist in Skin Dance, a mystery, had a long overdue fierce argument with his father. Jake always knew how angry he was at his father, but had never directly dealt with him. When he did, an amazing thing happened.

It was morning, sun shining through the space between the drapes, the aroma of fresh coffee, someone moving about in the kitchen. What was extraordinary to Jake, maybe even a considerable miracle, was that he had slept through the night. The endless awakenings and constant early morning arousal that had been going on for two years hadn’t happened.

Jake spent years lying to himself, not about his anger, but about the other side to all this rage, his love. It gets pretty convoluted, but most of us live with ambivalence, the existence of love and hate that lie side by side.

We’re supposed to love our parents. Judeo-Christian-Islamic-Buddhist-Bahaian beliefs make that very clear. But, what if we can’t love them, and the anger or love is hidden deep inside us? It can effect all aspects of our lives — who we choose as a mate, how we relate to peers, the pain or sense of disconnect that we experience when we’re around the parent or parents that are the object of all this feeling.

Knowing the truth about ourselves is essential. Taking Prozac or Zoloft etc., can help you feel better, but it won’t give you the information that’s hidden in your unconscious. Psychotherapy can be a very useful tool to help you tease out the threads of the past. It won’t do a lick of good to a liar. (Listening to country western music is giving me a whole new vocabulary.)

Art Smukler MD is the author of Skin Dance, a mystery, The Man with a Microphone in his Ear, and Chasing Backwards, a psychological, murder mystery.