February 07, 2020

History Schmistory

February 07, 2020/ James Cole Abrams Therapy/ James Abrams

From its very invention, therapy has been inextricably intertwined with personal history. Freud began with a technique of free association designed to elicit hidden feelings his patients had towards their parents. Though his writings are extensive, his basic theory is very graspable: people are ashamed and afraid of how they feel about their parents, so they’ll go to great, often destructive lengths to hide it. By this tenet, the next step writes itself; If you can get patients to say their secrets out loud, they’ll be cured of the burden of carrying them. It made sense at the time. So much sense, in fact, that it has been carried forward to this day. But is it right?

June 27, 2016

Resistance is Fertile

June 27, 2016/ James Abrams

One of the biggest questions in modern therapy is how to most-effectively work with what’s known as a “resistant” client. The idea of resistance is a simple one that belies a complex reality: some clients wont respond well to what the therapist is doing, and progress will be slow or nonexistent. It’s a little hard for me to write about any of this - resistance, progress - without throwing quotes on every other word, but since that looks awful in print please assume I view all of this askance. It’s worth noting that the question of resistance is a question that has only shown up in the modern era of therapy; Freud and the analytic gang not only weren’t worried about “resistance”, they didn’t have even have a concept of it. Why is that?

June 12, 2016

How to Keep Your Heart Beating

June 12, 2016/ James Abrams

Before I went to sleep last night I reminded myself that I had a blog to write, and ran through the general outline of my idea for this week. I woke up, enjoyed some breakfast, sat in the sun for a bit, and checked facebook. Suddenly I didn’t have a plan anymore - my calendar was immediately and coldly cleared, as my hopes for the day were suddenly pulled and distorted into the black hole of tragedy. Lucky as I am to not know anyone personally involved in the shooting at Pulse, I can’t keep the pain of such a horror from entering my chest. This is the reality of tragedy, that it is impersonal in its ability to cross boundaries, insatiable in its ability to demand attention, and implacable in its ability to cause pain...

June 05, 2016

Path of the Snake

June 05, 2016/ James Abrams

I have a friend who recently dropped out of a grad school he had been wanting to attend for years, and which I thought he was a perfect match for. It was a program in somatic therapy, and he is a person who is naturally in tune with himself and always expressing himself through movement and dance. When he told me he was dropping out, I couldn’t believe it - it was like The Flash quitting the track team. We got to talking, and he told me the reason he was leaving the program was that it was too hard. He said he loved the focus on dance and movement therapy, but that the pressure to turn inwritten papers every couple weeks was just too much. He wondered what was even the point of all this writing when the focus should have been on somatic awareness, and he left...

May 30, 2016

Questions of Medication

May 30, 2016/ James Abrams

As a non-prescribing therapist, I find myself being asked to counsel people on using medication to effect their mood very, very often. People want to know if I think medication might help them, if it might harm them, what kind of medication might be useful, as well as how much. The most frequent question I get from clients and others, though, is simply about whether or not I agree with the idea of medicating a person’s mood. Make no mistake, this is a very popular topic in the therapeutic community. And while I think the answer is simple, I don’t think it’s obvious...