Make a Move – One Course of Action at a Time

– This is a fascinating one, which deals mostly with physical problems. Where the guy has been in AA and he’s now out. Well in this, this fellow, has, he’s a lawyer, he has about six or eight kids, I don’t know how many, they’re grown, married, and all that stuff, and he has been separated from his wife, at least twelve years. He’s been providing her, paying her bills, she doesn’t even know what her bills are, he’s been paying them, you know, he makes enough money that he just pays off, pays off. Well this guy’s hung in limbo. He’s living in a little old, he’s living in an office in town. He’s making enough money. And he goes home, most of the time he’ll go home to fix the darn furnace or something like that. He’d pretty much quit that and he’s had somebody go to do it. But he’d just, he would go home occasionally and see the kids occasionally. Over time, I began saying why doesn’t he make a move one way or another? If he wants to go home, won’t he go home, or if he wants to get a divorce, won’t he get a divorce. I don’t care. But he’s hung in limbo. He’s not moving either way. And he say’s, well, right thinking would say get a divorce, but I’m a Catholic and I can’t do it. He said, would it be okay for me to go see a counselor in the local diocese? I says, well of course. See whoever you want if you want to move toward a divorce. So he goes to see a local counselor who is one of the best therapists I’ve ever seen. She didn’t stick to counseling, she stuck to therapy. And he kept going along and now she’s got him stuck. So he come and see me, he’s going to see the counselor, he ain’t making a move on nothing, and I said, essentially, that I am not going to continue a relationship with two therapists in it. She was spending more time on feelings and phobias than she was on counseling. And I thought, boy with two therapists he’s got to make a decision. He’s got to go with her or go with me. And this woman incidentally’s been trained at Georgetown. And she wandered off her counseling and got into therapy. I told him he’s got to go one way or another, I’m not willing to go along when he’s keeping it up with two. I don’t care which one, if he wants to go with her, go. The next time he came back and he said, doctor I want to see you, I’ve terminated with her. I say fine, whichever, just make up your mind what you want to do. He is now proceeded directly on a divorce and that man has not lived at home in a dozen years. Now that gets on this whole question of permitting people to see two therapists. My luck with that has been so lousy that I refuse to develop, to put more of my life into it. Because all I do then, and I believe it’s the other therapist, I’ve worked hard at this, but I wouldn’t just take me out of it, and to put more than two people into it at once condemns the future. That requires people to make a decision one way or another and that has worked pretty good. This is important enough I’ll take it up in my next session, this has to do with a principle of therapy. This has to do with referring people for therapy, this has to do with two therapists working in the same family, and I say those, and I am aware that the mental health world has done a lot of this, I’m aware a lot of it still goes on. I certainly cut my teeth on this one back in the old days. That would be in which three or four different therapists are working with the same family and the therapists gotta meet together once a week. It brings togetherness in a group of therapists. The only problem is then you don’t have once a week meetings with the supervisor, or the supervisors. And then you’ve got to have once a week meetings or twice a week with the supervisors of the supervisors of the supervisors. And then you run out of supervisors and the family goes to hell. Any time you’re going in any direction, I don’t give a damn what the direction is, what you’re studying, you cannot take up two courses of action at the same time. When you take up two courses of action at the same time one is suffering. This has to do with the training program in Georgetown, and I cut my teeth on that one. That would be people who are involved in getting a PhD and they want to take a training program at the same time. We got involved in that in the early years with some people that did both. They either flunked out of the post graduate program or they did poorly at Georgetown. So we know longer, and it doesn’t have to do with an evaluation of one or the other, it has to do with the human phenomenon of being able to go two ways at once. I think it is kinder to that person to say, finish your PhD and come back or come here and take the PhD after. Your head cannot go in two directions at once. That is one thing that you as a human being cannot do, is direct your thinking time. I don’t care who you are, I’ve tried it. I’d say the average in psychiatry would be people that say, I want to do half time research and half time clinical practice. Impossible. Because if you’re doing lousy research you might be doing a pretty good job at practice. If you’re doing a good job at practice you’re not doing well at research. In other words, you’ll go to research and your practice will be on your mind. Or you’ll go to practice and research on your mind and you’re doing a poor job, and you cannot direct your thinking. You cannot split your thinking time up into compartments because you’re a human being. This is the kind of thing that gets into all of us, to be able to carry on two different programs at the same time. Let me put in one more, which was a big one. Back in the early days when I was starting family, and I knew most of the people in psychoanalysis in Washington, and it was real common for them to have one person in analysis, this was par for the course, one person in analysis, they’re either going to run into trouble in the marriage, or they’re going to do poorly with the analysis. So for these people I agreed to see the two of them together. I never had one that did any good. And I would say that that was a product, as far as I could tell, of me getting involved in two kinds of therapy with the same person at once. So I routinely said, finish your analysis and then bring your marriage here. That would be the only way that I would be willing to see you. Or give up your analysis now and I’ll see you together. Which ever way you wish to go. My success with those has been absolutely superior. The success of seeing one person as a family in which one is already in analysis has been almost totally nil. All I do is unwittingly perpetuate the problem. I don’t know whether that makes any sense on this or not, but I would say these are real, critical little things. And that would be where I am on it.