Psychologists at Home Part I

Depression. Job loss. Marital conflict. Rebellious kids. Midlife upheaval.The nation's top psychologists and psychiatrists are not immunne to life's problems. Does their professional expertise give them an advantage in finding solutions in their own lives? We sent an award-winning writer to seek answers. Eight experts spoke-with remarkable candor. Here, in Part I of two-part series, is what they said.

JOSEPH BARBER, PH.D. A clinical pychologist with a psychodynamic point of view, Barber, 44, recently picked up stakes from the clinical faculty at UCLA, found replacement therapists for his large practice, and relocated to Seattle, where he is on "extended sabbatical, living off savings and not really working, just thinking." Barber is incoming president of the Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis and has done what many only fantasize about-taken a midlife leap.

As a child, Barber says he wanted to be a physician, an ambition sidetracked when, at 12, he read On the Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud. "I saw a way to understand a lot of things about why people are the way we are," he says. "At the time, it didn't occur to me that I mostly wanted to know why my family was the way it was." Nevertheless, 25 years into his career, he seems to have dropped out of it. Midlife crisis? Not really, says Barber.

Yet there are consequences to major life changes. Barber says friends and colleagues "thought I was kidding. But when it was really clear I was leaving, many said how much they envied me. What they said evoked sadness and sympathy in me because we all get ourselves into a set of contingencies we think we can't get out of," he recalls "Here were people whose lives looked good from the outside, but in truth held a lot of struggle and helplessness.

Most people work too hard. There so much cultural support for working hard, making money, and buying things that it puts people on the old gerbil wheel.

"For many years I saw that as a major problem in everyone but me. I encouraged people to work less." It took him a long time to take his own advice."

Divorced, with a son who's 25, Barber feels "circumstantially lucky" to be able to make the break. Ha he stayed in L.A., he says, "I would have felt trapped." Midlife crisis? "I had my midlife crisis when I was 25 That's when I thought I had to make all my life choices."

His relationship with his son is "great, I see him a lot." He's grateful for that. "It's not a typically happy story to be the child of a therapist," he says, and mistakes were made.

"I remember at age nine or 10 he asked me why I couldn't just hit him like other fathers did and not just terminally lecture him. Later, I consciously tried to listen more and talk less, to grow in him the idea that he should do what makes him happy."

His son is currently crewing on a Greenpeace ship in Australian waters. "I don't like it," Barber admits. "It worries me. But I'm proud of him."

Barber views psychological health as a learning process involving loss, recovery, and growth, rather than as a state of constancy. His strategies for coping with major and minor life problems rest firmly on reaching out to others. "I talk to friends, most of whom are therapists. I may even seek therapy for myself. One skill I have is knowing where my resources are.

"My experience in therapy has taught me how to step outside myself and see objectively what there is that may be contributing to the difficulties in a given situation, and to try to remain calm in the face of perplexities."

While he finds it psychologically unhealthy to tolerate bad behavior, he says it's healthy to seek out people who are enjoying their lives to the fullest and to spend as much time around them as possible. "They are most rewarding to me, and one of the ways I have of helping myself is to work on seeing more of those kind of people."

As for popularized stress reducers, Barber hasn't much nice to say about the self-help movement's tendency to cast people in endless categories of victimhood. "We have become a nation full of victims, always in need of something we can't supply. Alcoholics Anonymous is an exception, but the proliferation of support groups brings a sense of entitlement about victimization.

"That's an understandable consequence of a country whose principles include protection of the individual and that has a hair-trigger focus about being stepped on by a majority. But the trouble is we're so sensitized, we tend to victimize people just to protect their rights. The unfortunate consequence is that it disempowers people and they really do become victims.

PEPPER SCHWARTZ, PH.D.

Schwartz, a social psychologist and president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex, frequently writes for popular magazines and is a widely quoted source in articles on feminist social psychology and gender conflicts. A Yale University graduate, she wrote her thesis focused on mating and dating behavior "at a time when my mentors would have preferred one on statistical oddities in Great Britain." In 1983, she coauthored "American Couples," a landmark study on relationships.

Schwartz views the mental health of her profession with a sympathetic but skeptical eye. "I've met folks on both sides of the line. Some go into our field to sort out their own lives and it becomes an extremely dangerous part of their work; our personal experiences may color our perception rather than provide insight, and that makes our work analytically inaccurate. That makes me nervous.

Her interest in psychology arose over the impact of sex-education courses on women at Yale, then a mostly male school. "The Course discussions were full of prejudice, innuendo, and horrible opinions. I kept thinking 'this can't be right.' Most of it was outdated or without data, and I set out to try and know better."

She says her "feelings as a woman and feminist at a time when my own sexuality was in a revolutionary phase" also played a role in deciding her career. "But there was no abnormal psychology. I wasn't preorgasmic or anything like that. I was a free spirit, but psychology allowed me to look at things instead of pretending I knew things." She was drawn to a field that refused to see human behavior in terms of right and wrong, good and bad, or accepted anything with perfect certainty. Anything can be changed or modified, including behavior, and that has indeed colored her approach to her own life. "Formulas are a big red flag to me and I stop myself whenever I find myself bending to them."

Throughout her adult life, Schwartz has used her special knowledge and respect for psychotherapy to work through "a lot of hard things," including an unhappy first marriage. Today, she says, her "ex" and she are pretty good friends," but "back then we were both loathsome." Her way of coping was to "look for clues to what produces good relationships, good behaviors, rather than what undermines them. I took on my divorce like any problem. I finally figured out that I was only 24, had all the righteous anger of the women's movement, was working 40 hours day, consumed with my need to accomplish, and with no room for anyone else. I needed leveling."

Her training and self-analysis paid off- when she began living with her boyfriend-now her husband of 13 years-an architect. Stopping our interview to counsel him on the proper grilling of a turkey she was clearly comfortable having him overhear that she had been "very antimarriage. Up to that time, living together was the closest I could get. But he wanted marriage. I mean he couldn't pass a jewelry store without making a statement. I finally made up mind to marry him because of my own research on American couples, which showed me that couples who stay together but don't marry have a certain lack of generosity of spirit. Keeping all options open severely limits chances for real partnership."

Schwartz says most of her colleagues care about their work and believe in the ability of people to change. "We're not usually cynics," she says. "When you're playing with people's lives, it's a big responsibility and you take it seriously. Therapists who play the game scare the hell out of me, and I wish there was more consumer education for people who use psychotherapists or read their books. The single most worrisome signal is the level of pontification and certainty. If someone has the answers, get out of there."

Schwartz says her particular stress problem is usually of her own creation-saying yes to everything. "It's swell for a while and makes me feel great, but I end up a nut case from time to time. I tell too many people I'll write or speak, or work with too many students. I have days when I'm running figuring out when I'm going to have time to reach and I ask why am I living like this?"

Her advice for major and minor life, problems is activist and creative. "I think its important to live a life other than your main life. One way to cope well is to break with your everyday world, to put yourself on unfamiliar ground; get out of your major identity. It's a relief and an extension and it evens things up with partners. It also helps to not be too overconfident in your own psychological or analytical powers."

Schwartz has "trouble changing my own behavior and sometimes I have to outsmart myself." She has done that on a grand scale.

"When we got married, he was divorced too and moved into my house, but it was mine, and we wanted a place together." So they got a weekend getaway on an island with horses. When the kids (a boy, now 10, and a girl, 8) came, the farm became the real home, a place to get away from the crazy weeks at first, and then, over time, our full time place. This January we sold our city house altogether." On their 25 acres, everyone has chores; they breed llamas and Rocky Mountain horses. "My version of a mid-life crisis is to train, not just ride, horses. My husband cares for the llamas. There's a Zen component here. We've found a way to be a family and pull our life down to a different set of criteria. I needed to create a world where I had to reduce the stress or I couldn't live in it."

Schwartz recognizes that not everyone can "create their own world" in luxury. But the strategy, she says, is worth working for. "The farm gets the credit for making great kids; they have a lot of freedom, but a lot of responsibility. It's the Waltons. Really.

"My son makes hundreds of dollars selling rabbits at the Safeway. We've foaled together. My daughter is learning so much independence she walks over your face sometimes. We're working on it."

And yes, she says, she's used psychological wiles to control and manipulate her kids, but backs off when the problems are too acute. "There is some truth to the idea you can't be your own doctor or lawyer. You can be aware of what Your own triggers are and have insight, but you may not have the will or desire to do your own therapy. We need to call in fresh, outside troops, too. I couldn't trust myself as the objective judge of my own behavior. I have a good take on things, but I don't always act well or justly. I'm not that cool."

She also avoids playing psychologist with her spouse. "He'll accuse me of unfair advantage and I back off. I level the playing field. I'm used to arguing with depth of knowledge about personal processes and if someone else doesn't do this for breakfast, it really isn't fair."

JOYCE BROTHERS, PH.D.

With bases in New York and Los Angeles, Brothers is a relentlessly cheerful popularizer of psychology whose frequent appearances on television and radio have brought her fortune and fame. Brothers' husband of 39 years died in 1989. His death triggered a benchmark life crisis and became the subject of her ninth book, Widowed (Ballantine).

Brothers says "although it's true that some people are drawn to psychology because they had or have psychological problems, the majority are thoughtful people who have a desire to help others and in the course of learning about human behavior learn about their own. It defies common sense to think that psychologists can't deal with their own relationships." At 12, she worked at a camp for problem children, which helped her decide her career. "I got lots of very pleasant feedback from helping others and still do."

Brothers says, "One of the things my training has given me is understanding of others' motives; I don't get bent out of shape to any great degree. When I feel stressed, what I do depends on the situation. My daughter recalls that when she was a toddler I had her in a stroller and was crossing the street and a car came at great speed. The light had changed and the driver nearly ran her over, then stopped. I was so angry I took off my shoe and banged on his car! It was totally irrational."

She says she learned early in her career-and the hard way -not to experiment psychologically on her family. She recalls that when her daughter was born, she tried to teach her to speak at an early age. Babies babble and one of the most universal babbling sounds is the "m" sound, so some version of "mama" is colloquial for "mother" in almost every language. "Every time she made this sound I picked her up and cuddled her, and repeated the sound and rewarded her. Then I decided she had to progress to where it was a 'ma' sound and I worked on that, And so on. One day, when she was three months old, I was in the kitchen, and heard my baby crying in her crib. But instead of being a baby and just crying, she yelled 'Mom!' 'Mom!' It was so unnatural and unnerving, And I thought, 'What a monster I am! 'That was the end of all that.

"Once at a Christmas party a coworker had too much to drink and said, 'You know Joyce, when I work with you I always feel as if I'm standing in my underwear.' One of the ideas people have about psychologists is that we're always reading their minds and manipulating. That's no way to build trust."

Brothers says her husband's death brought on her worst psychological crisis. "My first reaction was no more capable than that of anyone without training. I thought I had adjusted to it very well. But I hadn't." She discovered that behind the wheel of the Porsche she had bought for him before he got sick. "I had done a very Hollywood thing and bought him the car for his birthday, something he had wanted all his life.

"After he died, it seemed that I ought to drive it at least once before I sold it. I was in California and when I took it out of the driveway and drove away, I began to weep. And for the first time in my life, I wanted to die. I thought of killing myself. There was this embankment and I could suddenly see myself driving over it and stopping the pain. As I drove, the pain came flooding in. I'm crying now even as I'm telling you this four years later. Isn't that amazing? That I can still cry after four years?"

What stopped her. she said, was the thought of the impact of her behavior on her daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren; the knowledge that she had love and support. What helped her in the long run was turning to her habit and training of a lifetime, applying what she had learned to helping others.

"I had never really experienced grief before. And although the pain was enormous, I became much more sensitive to others. This was a sea change for me. Up to that time, I'd lived a golden life.

"I realized after this episode that everyone who loses a loved one has this fleeting moment and most of course conclude as I did that life can go on. I've gotten literally thousands of letters from people who said how my experience had helped them feel they weren't going crazy. That made my own pain not only bearable but worthwhile."

Brothers says that nothing very much stresses her these days "except boredom. But two things that clearly stressed her years ago were the absence of financial security and the need to do things she didn't want to do to earn it. When she won big on the TV game show 'The $64,000 Question' in the 1960s, she says, "I had enough to promise myself I'd never do things I didn't want to do again. And I don't.

Moods, she says, aren't a problem "because when things don't go well I find another route. And I use work as my way of dealing with blues," She has several lines in her New York apartment and answers all distress calls. "My daughter calls me 'the queen of busy.' I keep rolling. I take intelligent risks. At my stage of life, what can they do to me? Really?"