Posts by Marty Cooper
The Small, Vital, Necessity of Using Your Blinkers
While driving the mean streets of the San Francisco Bay Area, I’ve taken to religiously, nay, even aggressively, using my turn signal; and when I see another driver doing the same, find myself at times crying out, “You, Sir or Madam, are a good human!” A friend of mine once said that society is kept…
Depression and the Burden of Holiday Preciousness
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/300215347″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /] My family had hamburgers for Thanksgiving. In my case, as a vegetarian, I had a veggie burger. We had decided last year that the efforts of turkeypotatoesrollssomethingforthevegetariancranberrysausecornbreadetc was just too much, given that none of the family likes to stuff themselves, and the work takes days and is…
Ten Tips for a Depression-Free Election
This has been the most rancid election cycle I’ve ever experienced, and although I generally have a good working filtration system for mental toxins, this year has hit me a bit like a sudden surge of sewage into the treatment plant. I’ve had to be more proactive in my “detox systems” to allow me to…
Trusting Love on Huffington Post This Week
If this time in history is a Tower of Babel, with twenty contradictory perspectives being dumped into your Facebook feed or cable channels daily, it only stands as a magnification of the human dilemma of what is true, trustworthy, and what is to be believed. We are deluged in perspectives, externally from media, family, culture,…
Taking Responsibility for our Future Selves
We’re going to start here by pinching a concept from the field of economics, being, “Cost externalizing”. This is a term that describes how a business maximizes its profits by off-loading indirect costs and forcing negative effects to a third party. For example, when a chemical plant pours its industrial waste into the river next…
How Therapists Avoid Becoming Depressed, Embittered Burn-Outs
I have been practicing psychotherapy for about 15 years now. I’ve worked with abandoned children, abandoning mothers, schizophrenics, a few sociopaths, folks who want to kill themselves more often than not, and deep, chronic depression and anxiety (which is the center of my private practice). In these years, I’m asked by patients, with some regularity,…
Depression and Faith
I surely would have been dead from depression years ago if I hadn’t had, and eventually cultivated, a basic faith in life. Which is a bit odd, since I grew up without any religious training or interest, to the degree that my mother called us “happy heathens.” Even my decades of Buddhist training and study…
Depression and the Art of Savoring
Richard, a diligent type-A tech guy, who defended against his depression with unending work, sat on my couch and listed what he had accomplished this last week. After that, with barely a pause, he launched into his tasks for, and worries about, the upcoming week. Given his pace, when I asked him which of the…
In and Out of the Void: Pixar’s “Inside Out” as a Map of Depression
[Movie totally spoiled herein: don’t read if you have not yet seen it!] Pixar’s “Inside Out” is so remarkable to my therapist’s eye because it really got the human mind right (which Linda McCabe’s article addresses), particularly in presenting a depiction and map of how depression happens, and what is depression’s cure. It was also…
“Greedy Bastards!”: or, Why Paying for Missed Therapy Sessions is Good for You!
What I’ve found over my decade plus of practice is that the firmer and more unbending my cancellation policy has become, the stronger outcomes my clients get from therapy…
Understanding Depression: Void vs. Emptiness
Depression is a pretty odd thing, different from other “illnesses,” in that it ranges between very grungy and visceral experiences like fatigue, through problems with sleep and eating, and then into the lofty realms of the meaning of life. Well, I suppose to its credit, at least it’s not boring. Understanding depression calls us to…
Stalling Grief: what we are saying when we say, “I can’t believe it!”
I think that virtually everyone I’ve worked with (myself included) at some point (or perhaps chronically) finds themselves saying, “I can’t believe they did that!” It could be specific: “I can’t believe my mother criticizes me about my partner!” Or general: “I can’t believe that people drive like such idiots!” Or very broad indeed: “I…