you should consult your doctor or other professional healthcare provider. This book is not an alternative to medical advice from your doctor or other professional healthcare provider.
Our books represent the experiences and opinions of their authors only. Every effort has been made to ensure that events, institutions, and statistics presented in our books as facts are accurate and up-to-date. To protect their privacy, the names of some of the people, places, and institutions in this book have been changed.
Author’s Note: Behind the Therapy Door was inspired by the stories of many women. Each woman presented is fictitious. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the composites of several women’s stories, products of the author’s imagination, or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. The strategies and skills illustrated within this book are not meant for use in lieu of medical or psychological intervention.
Cover design by The Book Designers
Interior design by Six Penny Graphics
To my beloved Martin, Amy, and Max
Table of Contents
Open the Door to Your Best Self
Acknowledgments
My deepest gratitude to Martin, my loving and supportive husband, who spent countless hours reading, editing, and thinking through ideas with me, and to my Amy and Max, who have taught me my most important lessons about love, parenting, and being my best possible self.
To my dear friend, colleague, and insightful reader, Holly Friedman Glick, LICSW, RYT.
To Jeanne Fredericks, my agent, who believed in the worthiness of this project in its infancy.
To Dan Mager, my editor at Central Recovery Press, whose thoughtful conversations and edits brought this book to its latest and most comprehensive iteration.
To my family, teachers, editors, and friends, whose support made my life sweeter and my work more meaningful, and who helped me bring this book to life: Julie Silver, MD; Virginia LaPlante; Lesley Ehlers; Edie Ravanelle; Sherry Sidoti, RYT; Pamela Romanow; Jill Karp; Cantor Hollis Schachner; Derry Schwantner; Liza Burkin; Lee Rosenbaum, MD; Jane Murphy; Susan Aiello; Lisa Tener; Maureen Strafford, MD; Robin Schoenthaler, MD; David Doolittle, PsyD; Alan Bergstein; Robert Berkley; Jodi Raphael; Dena Judah; Caryl Shaw; Ronni Simon; Peter Simon; Carole Osterer; Lauren Rikleen; Nancy Bergstein; Dianne Silvestri, MD; Susanna Brougham; Cheryl Savit; Ellen Sard; Sandy Jaffe; Susan Benjamin; Janet Wolbarst; Jodi Swartz; Jenna Keith; Sharon Kamen; and Kooper.
Great appreciation and gratitude go out to my patients and students, who have allowed me into their lives and had the courage to look within and share from the deepest place in their hearts.
Chapter One
Open the Door to Your Best Self
Behind the Therapy Door: Simple Strategies to Transform Your Life takes you on a journey into the inner sanctum of a psychologist’s office. From this unique vantage point, you will hear the intimate conversations between therapist and client, witness firsthand the benefits of mind and body strategies, and gain insight from the experiences of six women in the throes of transition. Their treatment within the therapy setting becomes your springboard for learning important life lessons. You will acquire tools and strategies that will help you develop more loving and sustainable relationships, and lead you to your best possible life.
As a psychologist and educator for over thirty-five years, I have listened to a multitude of women who discount their own value and fail to step into their personal power. They talk about feeling disconnected, unhappy, and unable to move forward with their lives. Yet when these same women are equipped with tools to nurture themselves and build stronger relationships and support systems, their feelings of alienation subside, and their lives begin to flourish.
The Framework for Behind the Therapy Door
I chose to use stories and the patient-therapist dialogue as the primary framework for this book. All human beings, particularly women, love stories. They help us make sense of our world and our experience in it. Stories create comfort and connection. Whether with friends, family, a therapist, or a group, women find it healing to talk about their emotional realities. When we are feeling supported, our physical, emotional, and social lives are enriched, and we gain the fortitude needed for times of challenge and transition.
Behind the Therapy Door tells the stories of women whose search to find greater meaning and love paves the way for readers to do
