Find the Right Mentors

How did a blue-collar kid from a poor New Jersey neighborhood not only end up a couples therapist, but writing books, consulting, keynoting, and traveling the world? It’s been quite the journey. I once told my wife, Belinda, that I was the Prince of Precarious Mobility.

Like many people raised in tough places, I had a few guardian angels who periodically reached down to grab me by the scruff and hoist me up. One of them was the legendary therapist Olga Silverstein. Even though she stood barely five feet tall and was well into her 80s when I met her, it was immediately clear that she was not to be messed with. Lower her into the therapy pit with wife-beaters, cheaters, and abusers? They didn’t stand a chance. As a young trainee in my mid-20s, I soon asked her to be my official mentor.

Ten years later, when we were both teaching at Smith College, Olga whispered in my ear one day, “Meet me under the bridge after dinner.” So I did. The meeting felt like a scene out of an old film noir. There we were, standing in the summer heat, shrouded in shadow. “I’m gonna change your life,” she said confidently.

She proceeded to tell me that I was going to write a book on male depression. Her agent had told her when she’d searched for books about male depression (which her husband had been suffering from), she’d found none—and saw an opportunity. “She’s got all sorts of famous therapists lined up to write this book,” Olga told me. “But I told her there’s this kid in Boston…”

“Olga, I’m a family therapist,” I protested. “I’m not one of those psychology types. I know nothing about depression. Why would I write this book?”

Olga shot me one of those steely, grandmotherly looks. “When I wrote my book, they gave me a $350,000 advance.”

“I’m in,” I said.

“Okay,” she replied. “But first, you’ll need to convince the agent this is your book to write.”

A few days later, on a flight to New York to meet the agent, I began to feel a crushing sense of shame. Who am I to write this book? I wondered. I’ve never studied male depression.

As far as I was concerned, male depression was the consequence of our cultural tendency to push boys out of connection, teach them to cut themselves off from vulnerability and feelings, and pull away from others. Depression was a relational disorder. Then, I had a lightbulb moment: Say that!

I grabbed a napkin and began scribbling. The cost of enforced disconnection in boyhood is a disconnected adult. Belinda made me save that napkin. Most of the ideas in my first book are on it.

Over my lifetime, I’ve had many teachers, colleagues, and friends who’ve influenced me professionally. But it was Olga who taught me how to transform a client entirely comfortable with an objectionable behavior or trait into someone with a permanent allergy to it. And while I’d dabbled in writing for decades, it was Olga who opened the door for me to make it a career.

Olga passed away in 2009, and I think of her often. I miss her tartness. She was an immigrant, a mother, a poet, and a genius. No one has ever wielded the therapeutic reframe the way she did, and no one ever will.

When I first met her, years before that fateful night under the bridge, I was a promising but paralyzed man who’d been struggling mightily to write for two years. “I know why you have writer’s block,” she’d said to me during one of our supervision sessions.

“Why?” I’d asked, desperate for the answer.

Olga leaned back in her chair. “Your parents don’t deserve to have a successful son.”

Clever, I thought, but I didn’t fully buy it. I thanked her politely but confessed that I thought her assessment had been a bit off. She just smiled and shrugged, as if to say, “What do I know?” Later, as I was about to catch a flight home to Boston, she called to say that while I’d correctly written her a check for that day’s session, I’d forgotten to sign it. “Interesting slip,” she said, “given our conversation.”

Annoyed, I continued on my way home. But a few weeks later, I began writing again!

Like a brash youngster, I once asked Olga if she believed her own reframes. “Do you think they’re really true, or just useful?” I challenged.

She shot me another one of her textbook tough, grandmotherly looks. “Well, it’s certainly more useful if you think it’s true,” she said, and quietly grinned, clearly pleased with herself.

I imagine Olga with God these days. I know she’s pointing out, with a shrug and in her strategically humble way, a thing or two that God just might want to look into—or not.