MiXED NUTS - Book finishers - thoughts?

[Martha]

I've just started the book, but here's a thread for any who have finished it already! What did you think?

[Marina]

I finished reading it this morning. I copy-paste my review here, which you can also find at this link: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Rick Cormier is a semi-retired psychotherapist specialized in anxiety disorders, PTSD and relationships. He writes an introduction to the psychotherapeutic job, although I failed to understand who the intended audience is. Is it the layperson? Patients? Students? No idea. Sometimes, if I have to be honest, it just seems a self-celebratory book.

However, we learn that Cormier is, or was, a very good psychotherapist. Some of the techniques he talks about I've tried myself, so I know how successful they can be. For example, I used to suffer from panic attacks, and a therapist taught me diaphragmatic breathing and distraction techniques which were very much the same as those used by Cormier. I never had a panic attack again, and it's been 4 years now. They might seem shallow and silly when you first hear about them, but I can assure you they work. So Cormier is certainly a good therapist in this respect. I can't vouch for the rest of the issues he treats - also because he doesn't really delve into it. Of course, he talks about a lot of things he did in therapy, but he has a tendency to digress. Which I didn't like.

I agree with the author when he says that no therapist is perfect for everyone. I agree with him when he says that therapists have to adapt their strategies to suit the client's needs, instead of blaming the patient for the failure of therapy. I agree with him when he says good psychotherapy is not listening to the patient chatting about his problems - as he says, this is paid friendship, or something like that.

I said Cormier is specialized in some fields. Every therapist should be specialized in some fields, and I believe almost all of them are. I don't believe in generalist therapists. They probably don't understand a single thing.

The author states he only accepts one schizofrenic and one borderline patient at a time, since they are difficult to treat and pose a lot of challenges. This is absolutely fine, not everyone should take on every patient. Only, I feel sorry for the borderlines he treated, since he openly states they are manipulative, over-generalizing in a way that is absolutely out of place. I would like to humbly point out that not all borderlines are manipulative, in fact many are not manipulative at all. They are just suffering, is all. This is not to say there are no manipulative borderlines. Just as there are manipulative depressed people, manipulative sufferers from PTSD, manipulative bipolar people, and manipulative non-mentally ill people.

This is when the book started getting on my nerves. That, and when I started to see the self-celebratoriness and the digressing. I'm not saying this is a bad book. In fact, I gave it 3 stars. Only, I don't see the point, and I believe Cormier's generalizing is completely unacceptable, coming from a professional.

[Martha]

Thanks for your thoughts Marina. I agree with your review, I wasn't sure who it was aimed at and didn't like a lot of the self-congratulation or generalisation. I also could see that he was a good therapist and appeared to have a lot insight and success.

My review

I guess we both reacted particularly to thoughts on our own conditions - I didn't really like how much he talked about how fun it is to treat anxiety, and particularly when it was compared to how seriously he took trauma. While I agree that there may be some techniques you can use with anxiety that you can't use with trauma that may be "lighter", it also painted a picture that anxiety is less serious. Actually I don't believe trauma and anxiety should be compared in this way - having experienced both, I objected to how lightly he seemed to take anxiety when it can have as profound an impact on a life as a trauma-based disorder.

Ah well, I found it to be an interesting read all the same.

[Marina]

Yes, it was an interesting read despite its flaws.

I suffer from anxiety, too, and have had very serious problems with it in the past, so I agree with you that it's definitely something to be taken seriously. Generally speaking, I don't like humor in therapy, although I can see how it can be good for some people. My ex-therapist (who used - inappropriate - humor a lot) once told me I wanted my therapy sessions to be bleak. That's not the point, of course I don't want them to be bleak, I just want for my issues to be taken seriously. It's me who decides when it's the right time for a joke.