Now open in Long Beach!

My new office is now open for business in Long Beach!

I'm conveniently located at 4000 Long Beach Blvd, Suite 247, close to the 405-710 interchange. (Click the link for a Google map.)

I'll update this post early in the week when the new phone number is active. In the meantime, please feel free to contact me at ben@bencaldwell.com to schedule an appointment! I am currently accepting new clients, so please email for current availability.

It's great to be back in Southern California!

Headed to LA

It is with a mixture of excitement and sadness that I announce I will be moving to the Los Angeles area this June. My university has appointed me the Site Director for the MFT program's expansion to our Los Angeles campus, where I will be stationed for at least the next three years.

This is a wonderful opportunity in so many ways. It also means my time in Sacramento will be coming to an end, and sooner than I had thought. I have tremendous appreciation for the people I have known and worked with in my time here. So, let this be an early thank-you to each and every individual who deserves it -- I care for and will miss all of you.

More information on my move, and some big changes to the web site, over the next few weeks...

Warning: Psychiatry Can Be Dangerous to Your Mental Health by William Glasser, MD

Americans are notoriously overmedicated, and in no area is this more true than mental health. Millions of Americans spend billions of dollars a year on prescriptions to control relatively mild symptoms of anxiety and depression, symptoms that could be cured--not just controlled, cured--if people would take the time to see how they are choosing their symptoms. So goes the argument in Warning, and to be sure, the words “choosing” and “symptoms” in the same sentence can provoke skepticism, if not outright hostility, from many therapy clients. But Glasser spells out the underlying theory clearly and unaggressively, through the vehicle of a (fictionalized) series of Choice Theory “Focus Groups” where an assortment of symptom-bearers all look for relief. Warning is highly readable, if scientifically lightweight, and concludes with a pair of powerful (and not fictionalized) articles by other authors, each describing their encounters with modern psychiatry. You may be best served to start there.

Mind Wide Open by Steven Johnson

Neuroscientists are a heady lot (no pun intended). They tend to write in dense, uninteresting ways. Luckily for us all, Steven Johnson is not a neuroscientist. He is a writer, one who has made a very successful career out of taking dense scientific knowledge and transforming it into something dramatic, emotional, and important. In Mind Wide Open, Johnson goes through brain scans to try to make himself more creative, plays video games with the goal of improving his attention span, and walks us through the biology of emotions by connecting it all to a window crashing in on his home. If you want to know how the mind works on a neurological level without having to trudge through a textbook, this paperback will remind you what it is like to enjoy learning.

Mean Genes by Terry Burnham and Jay Phelan

Infidelity, gossip, debt, materialism, road rage: Each of these problems appears at first to be a diversion from our natures, a modern problem resulting from modern life. Not so, say the researchers behind Mean Genes, who argue compellingly that each of these and many more of the common difficulties we encounter can be traced to our genetic roots. Concise and loaded with fascinating examples, Mean Genes is a great read. In spite of its subtitle, however (“From sex to money to food: Taming our primal instincts”), it is largely deterministic, arguing that these problems are indeed imprinted on us genetically and may be inevitable. It offers only token lip service on how these problems can be solved. As a therapist, I tend to side more with the free will crowd.

Buy it at amazon.com

The War Against Boys by Christina Hoff Sommers

Boys in America do significantly worse in school than do girls. Boys are now outnumberd by girls in college enrollment and in graduate education, even in many fields once dominated by males. Boys remain much more likely than girls to engage in violence and drug use throughout childhood and adolescence. Yet we don’t hear about a crisis among boys in this country. We do hear about a crisis among girls, that they need saving, that their self-esteem is, collectively, at a dangerously low level. There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence for this, but surprisingly little science backing it up. In fact, most research indicates that girls are receiving more support and feeling and doing better than they have in decades. In The War Against Boys, Sommers delives boatloads of science--most of it from Europe--that shows boys may be in much more of a crisis, and that programs to help them work, if only anyone would take the time to notice them. While we hear often in the US of the success of girls in single-gender math classes, for example, rarely do we hear that boys in Europe do much better in single-gender classes in a variety of subjects. The War Against Boys is thorough and detailed, and I was fully prepared to dismiss its arguments as an addition to the “everyone’s a victim” collection. Then, at halftime of a professional soccer game, I watched as a local team of 9-year-old boys played a short exhibition against a local team of 9-year-old girls. Developmentally, the girls were farther along then the boys, as is typical of the age: the girls were significantly taller and better coordinated. When the girls scored, the crowd appropriately voiced its strong approval. When the boys scored, the crowd booed--evidently for no reason other than their maleness.

Buy it at amazon.com

How to Know God by Deepak Chopra

Deepak Chopra has a penchant for bringing ideas of various religions together with science to create a model of consumable spirituality. Here he leans heavily toward the “consumable” part, peppering an otherwise solid text with lists (“Seven Stages of God”) and outlines that take more away from his direction than they add to it. Chopra is a master of the spiritual, and there is a great deal of insight to this book. The fact that it reads more like a series of magazine articles may put it at the top of many a reading list. It may also leave you with questions unanswered.

Buy it at amazon.com

The 30 Secrets of Happily Married Couples by Paul Coleman

Published in 1992, this collection and the research it is based on are both now a bit dated. However, the truths couples will find within have stood the test of time. Coleman effectively takes the best research on couples available at that point and breaks it down into easy-to-understand secrets, each one by itself enough to revitalize a failing relationship. The clear language and real-world examples of what happens to couples who don’t know these secrets make this book a must for any couple looking to improve how they relate to one another. Okay, so they aren’t all really secrets... most anyone you meet on the street could tell you that “Effective Problem Solving” is important to making a relationship last. What makes this collection special are Coleman’s guides on exactly how to put the secrets into practice. Those methods are the real secrets.

Domestic partnership law may expand

The Sacramento Bee has an interesting story today on a proposal to expand the state's domestic partnership law. It would allow any heterosexual couple to register a domestic partnership. They would then get all the legal rights of married couples.

The current domestic partnership law gives the legal rights of marriage to gay and lesbian couples.

There's the standard the-sky-is-falling reaction:

Randy Thomasson, president of Campaign for Children and Families, which lobbies for conservatives causes, warned that if SB 11 becomes law, "marriage will be functionally abolished" in California.

...aaand the standard this-is-about-equality response:

Jessica Heskin and Bob Stephens, who live in an unincorporated area of Sacramento, are typical of the couples [Sen. Carole] Migden has in mind. Heskin and Stephens, both 41, have lived together for two years and are raising Heskin's 11-year-old daughter, Alyssa, by a previous marriage. Heskin, who testified earlier before a Senate committee in support of SB 11, said "it's not only taxes, it's basic rights" equity the legislation would ensure.

As someone who tends to be poth pro-marriage and pro-domestic-partnership, this proposal feels weird to me. I like the idea of expanding the law to include hetero couples, but... practical reasons for getting married do seem to be getting gradually more sparse. I don't know. Your thoughts?

It's not whether you fight, it's how

Hat tip to SmartMarriages and Diane Sollee. -bc

How a Couple Fights is a Strong Predictor of Divorce
Baylor University - Feb. 5, 2007
by Matt Pene

While all couples may have conflict in their relationship, a Baylor University researcher has found it is not if a couple fights and argues, but how they communicate during their conflict that can determine whether a couple will stay together for the long haul.

Dr. Keith Sanford, a clinical psychologist and an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Baylor University, studied hundreds of couples as they communicated through a fight. Sanford and his research team focused on what determines whether a person will use positive or negative communication during an argument. He found that emotion and the types of thoughts a person uses are especially important.

Perhaps the most interesting finding is that negative emotion can actually be a good thing. Sanford distinguished between two types of negative emotion, "hard" and "soft." "Hard" emotion is associated with asserting power, whereas "soft" emotion is associated with expressing vulnerability.

Sanford and his team consistently found that hard emotion escalated fights, but they also found that soft negative emotion is generally beneficial for relationships. Soft emotion appeared to increase a couple's motivation to address a conflict and often led to productive approaches toward resolving the conflict.

"There is a notion that all negative emotion is bad and we found that simply isn't the case," Sanford said "As humans, we are very sensitive to 'is this person going to fight against me or cooperate with me.' If you say more things that signal that you willing to cooperate, that can make all the difference."

Sanford also found that men and women approach arguments differently. His research focused on predictions that men and women make regarding what they think their partners are likely to do. He found that couples often appear to be driven by their expectations during a fight. For example, if a wife thinks that her husband will refuse to listen to her viewpoint, she is likely to use negative communication, and she is likely to do this regardless of what her husband actually does. Sanford said he was intrigued to find that wives' expectations are a stronger predictor of communication than are husbands' expectations. Specifically, wives expectations are based on what is currently taking place in the interaction with their husband.

Husbands' expectations are based on their global feelings toward the relationship as a whole.
"It's a tendency that women are more event-dependent and men are more schematic," Sanford said. "The simple take home message is be aware of your thoughts and how you are interpreting things because it could have a negative bias and that could lead to further escalation."

The results of Sanford's studies have been published in the Journal of Family Psychology and also will appear in a forthcoming article in Personal Relationships.

Love Lost and Found

The following is excerpted from a beautiful article appearing in the Wall Street Journal last week:

In the late winter of 1999, Amy and I filed for divorce.

As is obvious, we never followed through on the paperwork. This weekend, in fact, we are celebrating our 15th wedding anniversary. And based on how close we've grown in the past seven years, I have no doubt we'll be together for the duration.

A near-divorce will do that to you: make you recalibrate your life and work in a
way that allows you to see what really matters with a renewed passion. But we did separate for a while, and it's in that separation -- that near-divorce -- that the moral of today's story rests.

And here's the punch line: Love never dies; it just gets lost behind life's debris, including the money and the career, that we pack in front of it.

See the full article here.

Happiness = Marriage + Money

So says an article posted yesterday on WebMD. According to a recent Gallup poll, 64% of married people say they are very satisfied with their personal lives; only 43% of single people felt the same way. Money helps, too--a large majority of those with high incomes reported being very happy with their personal lives. Safe to say that good marriage and good money will lead to happiness. It's an interesting article, and WebMD is a great resource. But they did leave one thing out: good marriage leads to good money.