Dying as a Rite of Passage
There's a Gap Between How We Hope to Die and How We Really Do
By Katy Butler - There’s a gap nowadays between how we hope to die, and how we really do. More than three-quarters of Americans hope to die at home like their ancestors, but more than two-thirds die in hospitals, nursing homes, and other institutions. It doesn’t have to be this way. There’s a pathway to a peaceful, empowered death, even in an era of high-technology medicine.
Daily Blog
Dying Well
Humanizing Our Overmedicalized System
Hospital protocols have replaced the time-honored customs that once enabled the dying to be lead actors in their life’s final drama. Why do we spend so much on last ditch medical treatments while depriving so many of what they need to die with dignity and peace?
Magazine Article
How To Become Your Best Self
A Story About Changing Your Habits
By Katy Butler - In earlier centuries, systems of human transformation were embedded within local life. Today, in a culture freed from communal rhythms, our habits of the heart are nearly forgotten. In this postmodern world of infinite choice and incoherent structure, what practical steps should we take now to become our best selves?
Daily Blog
The New Realities of Dying
A Daughter Struggles with the Medical System's Epidemic of Overtreatment
By Katy Butler - Although many doctors assume that people want to extend their lives, many do not. I believe that my father’s doctors did their best within a compartmentalized and time-pressured medical system. But in the absence of any other guiding hand, there is no doubt that economics helped shape the wider context in which doctors made decisions.
Daily Blog
Hard Lessons in Setting Limits
From Dutiful Daughter to Self-Aware Caregiver
By Katy Butler - Five years ago, my 79-year-old father had a stroke, and my family entered a new life stage. Every family wound I thought I'd outgrown and every trusted defense that had seemed to work emerged again, carrying with it danger, and an opportunity for redemption.
Daily Blog
Turns in the Road
Highlights from the Networker Journey
Out of all the hundreds and hundreds of articles that have appeared in the Networker over the past four decades, we’ve chosen a small sampling that captures the magazine’s most journalistic side, conveying not so much the eternal verities of our profession, but the sense of reading a first draft of the field’s history. Among other things, you’ll find therapeutic methods that, as exciting as they seemed at the moment, didn’t stand the test of time as well as initial forays into discussing complex issues we’re still struggling with today. We’ve also added in a few examples of writing so immediate and compelling that they have an air of timelessness. Prepare yourself for an interesting journey.
Magazine Article
Adopting Healthy Habits for Happiness and Wellbeing
How Therapists Can Teach Habits for Happiness
Once in a while, we may make concerted attempts to be kinder, less impatient, or more attentive to our own self-care. But our chaotic 21st-century lives often lack the structure, discipline, and even the raw physical energy required to make the changes stick. After a few weeks of trying something as simple as swimming at lunchtime, we sag beneath the weight of too much distraction and too little sleep. We know everything except how to live. In this postmodern world of infinite choice and incoherent structure, what practical steps should we take now---a personal trainer? More therapy? Feng shui? Zen meditation?---to become the self we see shining in our best moments?
Daily Blog
Satori in the Bedroom
Tantric Sexuality and the West's Narrow View of Sexual Repair
In the West, we reverberate between sexual obsession and sexual shame. No wonder we feel split within ourselves and from each other. Modern sex therapy helps thousands with simple, effective behavioral techniques, usually focused narrowly on achieving erection, intercourse or orgasm. Yet few of us have much of a clue about the more profound joys of sexuality. Presaged by the popularity in the 1960s of the Kama Sutra, a 3rd-century Indian sex manual, Tantra has become a postmodern hybrid. The goal in Tantra is to move arousal to the brain in an explosion of enlightenment and bliss. In Tantra, sex is not a dirty detour from the path to God, it is the path.
Daily Blog
The Gottman Method: Couples Therapy Under the Microscope
John Gottman Blends Couples Counseling with Science
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, mathematician-turned-psychologist John Gottman performed experiments in which he videotaped ordinary couples in their most ordinary moments---chatting, kissing, and watching TV. But he also recorded how much they brought up painful subjects, how they responded to each other's bids for attention, and expressed emotion. Using complex computer models, he found that he could predict divorce with 91-percent accuracy, simply by analyzing seven variables in a couple's behavior during a five-minute disagreement. What he discovered made him famous, and eventually became the basis of Gottman Method Couples Therapy.
Daily Blog
The Rebirth of Borderline Personality Disorder Treatment
How Marsha Linehan Revolutionized Therapy with DBT
For decades, most clinicians who had a choice avoided borderline clients, while agency staff (who couldn't) went through the motions with a sense of futility. Therapy consisted of guarding against "manipulation" and mining the borderline's reactions to the therapist for clues to her fragmented inner world. It was hard on clients---and on therapists as well. Then, in 1991, a behavioral psychologist and Zen student at the University of Washington named Marsha Linehan introduced an alternative. Her treatment was called Dialectical Behavior Therapy, or DBT.
Daily Blog
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Dying as a Rite of Passage
There's a Gap Between How We Hope to Die and How We Really Do
By Katy Butler - There’s a gap nowadays between how we hope to die, and how we really do. More than three-quarters of Americans hope to die at home like their ancestors, but more than two-thirds die in hospitals, nursing homes, and other institutions. It doesn’t have to be this way. There’s a pathway to a peaceful, empowered death, even in an era of high-technology medicine.
Daily Blog
How To Become Your Best Self
A Story About Changing Your Habits
By Katy Butler - In earlier centuries, systems of human transformation were embedded within local life. Today, in a culture freed from communal rhythms, our habits of the heart are nearly forgotten. In this postmodern world of infinite choice and incoherent structure, what practical steps should we take now to become our best selves?
Daily Blog
The New Realities of Dying
A Daughter Struggles with the Medical System's Epidemic of Overtreatment
By Katy Butler - Although many doctors assume that people want to extend their lives, many do not. I believe that my father’s doctors did their best within a compartmentalized and time-pressured medical system. But in the absence of any other guiding hand, there is no doubt that economics helped shape the wider context in which doctors made decisions.
Daily Blog
Hard Lessons in Setting Limits
From Dutiful Daughter to Self-Aware Caregiver
By Katy Butler - Five years ago, my 79-year-old father had a stroke, and my family entered a new life stage. Every family wound I thought I'd outgrown and every trusted defense that had seemed to work emerged again, carrying with it danger, and an opportunity for redemption.
Daily Blog
Adopting Healthy Habits for Happiness and Wellbeing
How Therapists Can Teach Habits for Happiness
Once in a while, we may make concerted attempts to be kinder, less impatient, or more attentive to our own self-care. But our chaotic 21st-century lives often lack the structure, discipline, and even the raw physical energy required to make the changes stick. After a few weeks of trying something as simple as swimming at lunchtime, we sag beneath the weight of too much distraction and too little sleep. We know everything except how to live. In this postmodern world of infinite choice and incoherent structure, what practical steps should we take now---a personal trainer? More therapy? Feng shui? Zen meditation?---to become the self we see shining in our best moments?
Daily Blog
Satori in the Bedroom
Tantric Sexuality and the West's Narrow View of Sexual Repair
In the West, we reverberate between sexual obsession and sexual shame. No wonder we feel split within ourselves and from each other. Modern sex therapy helps thousands with simple, effective behavioral techniques, usually focused narrowly on achieving erection, intercourse or orgasm. Yet few of us have much of a clue about the more profound joys of sexuality. Presaged by the popularity in the 1960s of the Kama Sutra, a 3rd-century Indian sex manual, Tantra has become a postmodern hybrid. The goal in Tantra is to move arousal to the brain in an explosion of enlightenment and bliss. In Tantra, sex is not a dirty detour from the path to God, it is the path.
Daily Blog
The Gottman Method: Couples Therapy Under the Microscope
John Gottman Blends Couples Counseling with Science
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, mathematician-turned-psychologist John Gottman performed experiments in which he videotaped ordinary couples in their most ordinary moments---chatting, kissing, and watching TV. But he also recorded how much they brought up painful subjects, how they responded to each other's bids for attention, and expressed emotion. Using complex computer models, he found that he could predict divorce with 91-percent accuracy, simply by analyzing seven variables in a couple's behavior during a five-minute disagreement. What he discovered made him famous, and eventually became the basis of Gottman Method Couples Therapy.
Daily Blog
The Rebirth of Borderline Personality Disorder Treatment
How Marsha Linehan Revolutionized Therapy with DBT
For decades, most clinicians who had a choice avoided borderline clients, while agency staff (who couldn't) went through the motions with a sense of futility. Therapy consisted of guarding against "manipulation" and mining the borderline's reactions to the therapist for clues to her fragmented inner world. It was hard on clients---and on therapists as well. Then, in 1991, a behavioral psychologist and Zen student at the University of Washington named Marsha Linehan introduced an alternative. Her treatment was called Dialectical Behavior Therapy, or DBT.
Daily Blog
Satori in the Bedroom
Tantra and the Dilemma of Western Sexuality
Many of us enter the bedroom now as if we have been told we are about to play a high-stakes game. There is no rule book, or else it's been hidden. Everyone else, we think, knows how to play. We charge down the field. We pass the ball. A whistle blows. The rules have changed. We are given five different rule books and told to choose one that suits us. (We have no idea what book the other team is playing from.) Bleeding from the shin, we strap on our battered equipment again and once more run down the field.
Daily Blog
The Evolution of Modern Sex Therapy
Twenty years after the sexual revolution, in the most sexually explicit culture in the world, a surprisingly large number of people continue to have difficulties with the sexual basics. Psychoanalytic therapy had little to offer them beyond symbolic explorations of their upbringings and "Oedipal" conflicts. But modern sex therapy consists mainly of counseling and "homework" in which new experiences are tried and new skills practiced.
Daily Blog
Dying Well
Humanizing Our Overmedicalized System
Hospital protocols have replaced the time-honored customs that once enabled the dying to be lead actors in their life’s final drama. Why do we spend so much on last ditch medical treatments while depriving so many of what they need to die with dignity and peace?
Magazine Article
Turns in the Road
Highlights from the Networker Journey
Out of all the hundreds and hundreds of articles that have appeared in the Networker over the past four decades, we’ve chosen a small sampling that captures the magazine’s most journalistic side, conveying not so much the eternal verities of our profession, but the sense of reading a first draft of the field’s history. Among other things, you’ll find therapeutic methods that, as exciting as they seemed at the moment, didn’t stand the test of time as well as initial forays into discussing complex issues we’re still struggling with today. We’ve also added in a few examples of writing so immediate and compelling that they have an air of timelessness. Prepare yourself for an interesting journey.
Magazine Article
A Brief History of Psychotherapy
A Mosaic of the Psychotherapy Networker, 1982-2012
Over the years, our front-of-the-book department has not only given readers plenty of tasty factoids to chew on, but also revealed how the seasons of the profession turn, and turn again, over time.
Magazine Article
Unhappy Endings
Death as Technology’s Slave
A perverse set of financial incentives within the medical system too often leads to the promotion of maximum treatment, no matter what. When this happens, patients and families may no longer be the beneficiaries of the war on sudden death, becoming its victims.
Magazine Article
Refeathering the Nest
From Dutiful Daughter to Self-Aware Caregiver
When families become stressed by a member's long-term care needs, it's easy to continue the usual relationship patterns and perpetuate long-standing resentments. But sometimes it's possible to learn new ways of being and interacting.
Magazine Article
Caring for the Caregiver
6 Tips
Those who care for ailing family members often are undertaking a marathon, not a sprint.
Magazine Article
The Art and Science of Love
Can the Gottmans Bring Empirical Rigor to the Intuitive World of Couples Therapy?
After studying 3,000 couples in the past three decades, researcher John Gottman and his wife Julie are combining his research and her clinical savvy in a science-based therapy. Can a nuts-and-bolts approach focused on fiddling with tiny daily interactions bring couples therapy scientific respectability?
Magazine Article
Being There
The Dalai Lama Gets Buddhism and Neuroscience to Go Face to Face
In Washington, D.C., this fall, the Dalai Lama brought together a distinguished group of contemplatives and world-class scientists to explore the links between stress, health, and meditation. The result was a sometimes laborious, sometimes luminous conversation that suggested that spirituality and science may not be so irreconcilable after all.
Magazine Article
Alice in Neuroland
Can Machines Teach Us to Be More Human?
As neuroscience was becoming the topic du jour of the therapy field, we sent Senior Editor Katy Butler to MIT on a mission. The result was, literally, a mind-expanding article that thrust readers into the larger, brave new world of behavioral neuroscience. Nominated for a National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, this piece conveys both the excitement and eerie strangeness of therapists’ plunge into a “new rabbit hole into the psyche.”
Magazine Article
Living on Purpose
The Seeker, the Tennis Coach, and the Next Wave of Therapeutic Practice
In this postmodern world of infinite choice and incoherent structure, what practical steps should we take to become the self we see shining in our best moments? How can we learn to live in consonance with what we value most? What Really Matters? Such questions have long preoccupied the writer Tony Schwartz, who paid a price in the mid-1980s for failing to live in accord with what he valued most. He was a tennis player and a 35-year-old former New York Times reporter when real estate developer Donald Trump offered him a quarter of a million dollars plus royalties to ghostwrite a book that became a bestseller, The Art of the Deal.
Magazine Article
Katy Butler is a features editor for Psychotherapy Networker and has contributed to The New York Times Magazine. She is writing a book, entitled Knocking on Heaven's Door: A Daughter's Journey Through Old Age and New Medicine.
