This Reading Course will examine aging issues for both our clients and ourselves. Michael Ventura puts aside pop bromides to look at what it means to move past "middle-age" and become old. Walter Lowe explores the difference between aging therapists who get better and those who don't. Terry Hargrave offers a model for helping clients become more effective caregivers for aging parents, while Marian Sandmaier looks at what it means for grown-up children to confront old wounds with their parents. Jay Lebow looks at what research tells us about both facts and fictions about aging, while feminist pioneer Betty Friedan confronts the broader social issues involved in "the age mystique."
Course Readings
When You’re 64: You May Be Ready to Retire, But What about Mom and Dad? by Terry Hargrave
Across the Great Divide: Middle Age in the Rear-View Mirror by Michael Ventura
In Praise of the Older Therapist: Probing the Heart of Clinical Wisdom by Walter Lowe Betty Friedan Takes on the Age Mystique by Richard Simon
Aging: Fact and Fiction by Jay Lebow
War Stories: Helping Old Soldiers Find the Will to Live by Barry Jacobs
Healing the Family’s Oldest Rifts by Marian Sandmaier
Learning Objectives
1. Identify interventions to help clients who are caregivers
2. Name 3 ways that aging adds to the older therapist's skills
3. Discuss the research evidence that counters myths about aging
4. Describe the role of the therapist in overcoming family rifts with aging parents




By Rich Simon As therapists, many of us practice in two different worlds. In the first, we see polite, well-behaved, articulate clients with solid values. They engage fully in therapy, talk cogently about their problems, listen attentively to our responses, make reasonably good-faith efforts to follow our suggestions, and sooner or later get better. No wonder we genuinely like these people!
By Rich Simon A thousand years ago, during the palmy days of generous insurance reimbursement, therapists could maintain the illusion that, since therapy was paid for by an unseen hidden hand, clinical practice was somehow untouched by the tacky subject of money. Even the style of therapy reflected this disjunction: 

