Talking Back to Dr. Phil: Alternatives to Mainstream Psychology

by David Bedrick, Arnold Mindell (Foreword)

Utilizing in-depth research and analysis, this volume debunks the quick fixes and simplistic explanations of Dr. Phil McGraw. While he’s watched and revered by millions, no critique exists for his daytime advice—and like much of “pop psychology,” his counsel is often ineffective, leaving people feeling like failures and that something is wrong with them. Readers will easily identify with the guests and stories from actual Dr. Phil episodes, on topics ranging from anger, sex, addictions, and dieting to domestic violence, race, and gender. A powerful, love-based alternative psychology is then offered, basing itself on the belief that there is profound meaning in people’s struggles. Story after story shows how people’s difficulties are seeds of their unique beauty, power, and intelligence, elevating rather than diminishing their esteem. The insight and compassion for people’s humanity provided here cuts through the easy soundbites and will leave people feeling a genuine love for who they really are.

Genres: Psychology, Self Help, Nonfiction

232 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

David Bedrick, JD, Dipl. PW, is a teacher, counselor, and attorney. He grew up in a family marked by violence. While his father’s brutality was physical and verbal, his mother’s denial and gaslighting had its own covert power. This formative context introduced David early to the etiology of shame and instilled an urge to unshame.

Professionally, he was on the faculty for the University of Phoenix and the Process Work Institute in the U.S. and Poland and is the founder of the Santa Fe Institute for Shame-based Studies where he trains therapists, coaches and healers and offers workshops for individuals to further their own personal development.

David writes for Psychology Today and is the author of three books: Talking Back to Dr. Phil:Alternatives to Mainstream Psychology, Revisioning Activism: Bringing Depth, Dialogue, and Diversity to Individual and Social Change and You Can’t Judge a Body by Its Cover: 17 Women’s Stories of Hunger, Body Shame and Redemption.

The Unshaming Way, published by North Atlantic books is now available in print, Kindle, and audiobook.

Reviews

[Cara · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting book about how pop psychology tends to stay on the surface and reinforce cultural norms instead of going deeper and looking for root causes of problem. The author discusses many situations that people tend to find unpleasant. He shows how pop psychology, as exemplified by Dr. Phil, tend to focus on eliminating the symptoms in these cases. He proposes instead assuming that things like anger or judgmentalism or conflict are actually tools that can show us the path to something deeper that we need or want. Instead of trying to smooth things over and make peace as quickly as possible, he recommends exploring what might be going on beneath the surface and trying to heal or improve those situations.

One thing I haven't been able to stop thinking about is the idea that being judgmental is actually due to pushing away some aspect(s) of yourself into your shadow and projecting them onto other people, to get them as far from you as possible. I've heard many times that the things that bother us most about other people are things we don't like about ourselves. The author takes it one step further and asserts that what you really need to do in those cases is to embrace those aspects and try to become more like the person you're judging! He gives two examples: a guy who dreamed about lions and judged the lion and a bunch of other people for being killers, selfish, irresponsible, etc. To be the lion, the guy needed to be more decisive himself, take action, take risks, and not worry so much about staying in his box or being conventional.

The other example was a pastor's wife, who was very judgmental toward tattooed bikers. For her, it seemed to indicate a need to be more free, more rebellious, and express herself more without having to be so conservative and constantly worried about what other people might think.

How could this apply to me? First of all, I think he's really onto something, based on the fact that I've gotten far less judgmental without trying at all, since I lost my religion and stopped trying with all my might to be good all the time. As I've embraced my lack of perfect love and compassion and grace, it's been far easier to love and accept other people.

But I have found myself feeling judgmental, even hateful, toward two groups of people in the past few days: my boyfriend's teenage son, and the gang of pro-lifers who protest outside Planned Parenthood on Saturday mornings. None of these people really have it in for me in particular--the pro-lifers probably didn't even notice me driving by, and allegedly, teenagers have no capacity to care about anyone but themselves. Yet, they both inspired my fury with their behavior.

I thought about the characteristics that I object to: selfishness, arrogance, lack of compassion, nastiness, hurtfulness, rudeness, narrow-mindedness, acting like they know it all, using bullying tactics to try to make other people conform to their ways.

I was surprised to find I was hating the same attributes in both sets of people. Ok, so according to the author, that means I need to be more selfish, arrogant, narrow-minded, mean, hurtful, and rude. Huh???

But after only a few seconds, I realized it was true. I let people walk all over me, tell me what to do, interrupt me, dismiss me, treat me with disrespect, and make me doubt myself. I let them barge in front of me and get their needs met, and then I complain when mine aren't. I leave things unspoken that need to be said, for fear of hurting someone's feelings. (Actually, I don't do these things in most of my life any more, but I still do in one or two choice situations, to my own detriment.) Being a little more selfish and rude is actually called for here.

I'm not saying I should actually go all the way to the other end of the spectrum and start stepping on everyone, belittling them, interrupting them, and acting like I know it all. But I really would have a better life if I went a little farther from the meek and unassuming end of the spectrum. Instead of ceasing to talk whenever someone interrupts me, I could keep talking and ignore their interruption sometimes. Instead of second-guessing myself and acting unsure of things, even when I know darn well I'm right, I could stand by what I know and believe. Instead of letting people mock and insult me, I could speak up.

Bonus: if I acted a little more assertively, I probably wouldn't be so furious that these other people were "getting away with" acting that way, when to me, it seemed completely forbidden.

Go judgmentalism! What fascinating insights!

The part of the book about compromising to avoid conflict vs. exploring what's really going on beneath the conflict was also very illuminating to me. It made me realize that the main conflict in my relationship, which has been a source of unhappiness for months but has seemed impossible to resolve, isn't really about what it seems to be about. There's a lot more to it, and that's probably why we haven't been able to find a satisfactory solution.

The part about dieting was also awesome. It made me realize I didn't gain so much weight over the winter because I'm too fat and stupid to eat right, which had been my unspoken assumption. It was because my life felt horrible, and eating sweets was the only thing I could think of that felt comforting and offered solace that was just for me. It was also one thing I could control, in a life full of uncontrollable forces and overwhelming problems that I was pretty powerless to solve.

My "bad" eating was basically a misguided attempt to take care of myself, when it felt like nobody else was taking care of me and everything else I did was for other people. When you look at it that way, it's sad, but it's not fucked up or even weak, exactly. It's misguided, but it makes a certain kind of sense, and it totally explains why no amount of rationality or attempted self-discipline could overcome it.

The book has some tedious parts, and the author has a habit of making sentences that are way, way too long. But overall, this is a really great book that showed up just when I needed it.

Notes:
(Interpretation: He projected onto the business world, seeing it as a lion killing him, its prey. While logically the answer might be to find a place safe from the lion, psychologically the safest response is to become a lion. He needed to stop projecting onto people and circumstances he judged and claim these aspects of the lion, his own split-off qualities.)Read more at location 711

Simply working to rid this man of his judgmentalism while ignoring who his judgments targeted and what fueled them—denial and a real need to change his life—would not have empowered him to change for the better. To improve he actually needed to embrace the qualities he was judging.Read more at location 717

we understand that our judgments are fueled by our own split-off qualities relegated to our shadows and projected onto others, marginalizing or demonizing them, and we learn to explore our shadows and claim these split-off aspects of ourselves to become more empowered and whole, gain a broader perspective on life, and achieve enlightenment about the commonalities among all people.Read more at location 791

People tend to feel most guilty about doing things they actually want to do. For example, a woman may feel guilty about talking too much when, at a deeper level, she is tired of listening and not being heard. Or a man may feel guilty about getting sick and taking a day off from work when he has delayed his need for a break too long. Or a mother may feel guilty for not being there for her children all the time when, wishing she had help from her partner, she hasn’t been able to ask for it.Read more at location 913

One of my teachers, Dr. Max Schupbach, said that when individuals can’t find their way home they usually find a hotel that reminds them of home. And sometimes they will even forget they are not home or be too scared to stray from a place that feels like home for fear that their lives will get lost. Addictions are a hotel; they are not home but can remind people of home so powerfully that they won’t easily abandon them without knowing where their real home is and how to get there.Read more at location 1886

Mindell asked the man what would happen if he didn’t hold back at all. The man immediately began to uninhibitedly rant and curse. Mindell then asked the rest of us to make our own sounds. A sound of great joy arose as we all yelled out such phrases as “I don’t agree!” “Shut up!” “I need a break!” “What about my problems?” “Let’s get on with it!” The man with Tourette’s syndrome roared with laughter and happiness. We had joined his culture; we had stopped seeing him as the sick person who needed to be cured and had integrated his disturbing qualities by interrupting with disagreements and vulgar language. After this initial experiment, Mindell proposed that over the next few days we all speak up more, interrupt spontaneously if we were not satisfied, and generally be less polite and more demanding about what we wanted from the seminar. Much to the group’s amazement, not only did the seminar become more lively but the man with Tourette’s syndrome hardly made a peep.Read more at location 2162 --Tourette's Syndrome guy was expressing the restlessness and impatience on behalf of the whole group. Once they joined in, he didn't have to carry the whole load any more.

[Aberjhani · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a condensed version of the 4-part article recently published in Examiner:

COUNSELOR CALLS FOR BIG CHANGES IN BOLD NEW BOOK: TALKING BACK TO DR. PHIL

“We each have lessons to learn and to teach, and healing is something we all do together.”—David Bedrick (Talking Back to Dr. Phil)

The task David Bedrick undertakes in the book Talking Back to Dr. Phil is not a small one by any means. The mission, which he clearly has accepted, is to infuse modern psychology with “new blood” by taking mainstream psychology and its current golden-boy television representative, Dr. Phil McGraw, to task.

Is such a thing as flipping the switch of critical thinking and automatic acceptance in regard to Dr. Phil’s celebrated “get real” approach to problem-solving––so frequently endorsed by media queen Oprah Winfrey herself––really possible? If it is, then the strategy employed––respectfully so–– in Talking Back to Dr. Phil is perhaps the best one to accomplish such a formidable job.

The 206-page book is comprised of 6 parts containing a total of 17 short essay chapters and a foreword by Dr. Arnold Mindell, who in the 1970s pioneered the development of process-oriented psychology. The major sections address these critical issues:

Labeling, Lies, Judgment, and Anger
Relationships
Diets and Body Image
Addictions and Obsessions
Diversity
Domestic Violence

The basic difference between Dr. Phil’s approach to psychology, as articulated by Bedrick, and his own approach to it is also fundamental to his discussions of the above topics. In short, the mainstream approach to psychology is one more designed to help people viewed as out of synch with dominant modes of conduct or thinking adjust their behavior to accommodate the expectations and emotional comfort of others. Among its primary failures, Bedrick maintains, is that it “ignores the role psychology can play in helping people find meaning and power in their difficulties…”

By contrast: utilizing principles of process-oriented psychology and his extensive work as a counselor, educator, and attorney for a springboard, Bedrick presents his Jungian-influenced alternative in the form of a “love-based psychology.” Does this mean he’s suggesting his compassion for the sufferings of humanity are greater than the esteemed Dr. Phil’s? No. But it does mean he is suggesting his approach to psychological healing takes into account serious factors that mainstream psychology generally does not.

Principles of Love and Healing

Bedrick in fact provides a set of 7 principles that define a love-based psychology. Many undoubtedly will consider each of them controversial to one extent or another.

Among these principles is the author’s contention that the dominant culture within society––in the form of social prejudice and/or injustices––often plays a contributing but unacknowledged role in debilitating personal anguish. This particular observation may be a big part of the reason Americans seem less than eager to confront head-on the current epidemic of murders stemming from a lack of effective gun control measures. It is well known that a tremendous problem behind the more ostensible disgrace of murdered human beings is the lack of resources committed to mental health; yet relatively little has been done to correct this.

Another principle derived from David Bedrick’s meditations on process-oriented psychology suggests treating “the powers behind difficulties or disturbances as allies instead of enemies.” That could be a tough sell for people dealing with issues such as spouse abuse or drug addiction, but the author makes his case well enough. Moreover, the debatable nature of his love-based manifesto in its entirety is not lost on Bedrick. In his own defense and that of those he would help to heal themselves and their communities, he notes the following:

“Like the US Constitution, I do not adhere to majoritarianism, but rather protect marginalized people and forms of expression from being seen as ‘problems’ and subjected to the shame of psychological labeling and cultural prejudice, and I explore people’s difficulties to seek the seeds of their positive transformation.”

Each section of Talking Back to Dr. Phil describes an episode of the popular Dr. Phil Show that goes a long way toward helping Bedrick make some vital points. Just as importantly, these episodes are followed by precise explanations of how they represent applications of mainstream psychology, and, how love-based principles could have taken those who were in distress a step or two further toward resolving their problems.
Crisis and Bias

In truth, there is any number of episode examples where, although Bedrick politely declines to describe it as such, the Oklahoma- and Texas-raised Dr. Phil seems to allow personal cultural bias more than objective professional assessment to inform his counsel. That may very well be part of the reason for his popularity and success.

The question is what does this “cut-the-BS” tough-love strategy actually do for those who turn to him for help when genuinely in crisis? Very possibly not as much as needed, and the solution to that dilemma just might reside in the pages of Talking Back to Dr. Phil.

by Aberjhani
co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
and ELEMENTAL The Power of Illuminated Love

[Ubiquitousbastard · Rating 3 out of 5]

First off, this book started off way too strong with MLK Jr. quotes. Okay, sure, you admire the guy, but not all of us are such fans (dude cheated on his wife, a lot. Not a good example of positive relations or psychology). And this did feel like it was written by a lawyer, several examples of straw man arguments and a lot of over-simplification. Dubious statistics, and case histories that are unique and probably not applicable to most people. I also disagree on the chapter on weight. I know that there is too much emphasis on thinness in society, but if people are vastly overweight, they really should try to lose it for their own health.
However, I think the author did make several good points, and was most successful in showing that Dr. Phil is using (also) over-simplified psychology, and does not always address the reasons for negative behaviors.
I think this book could have been improved with more editing and proofreading (found a few errors).


I received a copy for free through Goodreads First Reads.

[Diane Whiddon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing read. The way he reframes a lot of Dr. Phil's bumper sticker advice goes way beyond the superficial humor you might expect from the PR-stunt-themed-title. The author really gives some powerful perspective shifts on popular psychology and the common thoughts and beliefs we visit when we talk about trauma and abuse. Mostly, I found this book to be a refreshing dip into self-acceptance and self-forgiveness. Loved it.

[Mitch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Insightful

Bedrick has written a very insightful and human book about approaching the various issues we all face in this increasingly chaotic thrill ride we call life. He, rightly, turns conventional psychology on its head, and shows to lead with the heart and not the head.

[Judy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some useful thoughts are in this book, I think, but can we really find the meaning behind everything in order to heal and grow? Yes, we need to embrace diverse parts of ourselves etc. etc. but without Dr. Bedrick alongside each of us to help us figure it out, we may have a hard time! And somehow I doubt that embracing the diversity of a person who doesn't want to work is going to heal a family. Or make the lazy person want to work. Maybe sometimes, though!

[Camellia · Rating 5 out of 5]

David Bedrick really is such a compassionate person and his wisdom and kindness come through in this book.