I was honored to kick off the Parenting Lecture Series at the Swedenborgian Church last September 26, 2007, hosted by Rachel Rivers and organized by Marshall Bush. My talk was on "Why Kids Do the Very Thing That Drives Their Parents Crazy", a topic that is the subject of a new book that is hopefully soon to be published. When kids push their parents' buttons, one of the main reasons they keep doing it is because it pushes their parents' buttons. Parents always feel targeted and victimized when their kids do this because they sense the kids are doing it on purpose. The kids seem to want to drive their parents crazy which is very upsetting to parents who may overreact and act badly. This often leads to a terrible cycle where everyone feels hurt, takes things personally, and fights with each other. Kids and parents start to hate each other. Mothers and fathers fight and undermine each other. This is a very common problem, which occurred in many of the kids and parents I have treated. Read On

We are beginning to prepare for the March workshop and are considering having a workshop on how Healthy Spirituality and Religion may help disconfirm pathogenic beliefs - perhaps this spring. Anyone interested should contact me about it.

We are working to improve our marketing of our workshops and series - perhaps hiring a part time marketing person to create a more effective infrastructure for promoting our events.

Denny Zeitlin's Couples Therapy Workshop was a tremendous success. Forty-five people showed up, many of them new to Control Mastery who had received emails about the workshop and were curious enough to attend. Denny kicked the workshop off with a superb overview of Control Mastery theory that was well worth the price of admission. He ended with a 45 minute experiential process group that apparently had everyone spellbound. The workshop received absolute rave reviews from most of the participants. Way to go Denny!!

I am interested in any ideas members/readers have about research proposals that could further develop or extend control-mastery theory. My Friday afternoon (2- 3pm) research group is developing patient-specific measures of therapeutic progress that can be used to track progress session by session over the course of a treatment. All members and students are welcome.

I also have a recommendation for an audio book that all creative thinkers will enjoy. It is called "The Fabric of the Cosmos" by Brian Greene. The narrator is superb. Greene describes the revolutions in physics, particularly relativity theory and quantum theory, that have transformed our understanding of time, space, reality, and the origin and workings of the universe.

I am delighted with the way we have blossomed into our new year at SFPRG clinic and training program. We're off to a great start with much eagerness among the interns, teachers and supervisors! We have just begun a didactic that will run through December on trauma with Janice Cumming, Patty Rosbrow, and Ginger Rhodes. Marshall Bush and George Silberschatz have submitted research proposals to Patsy Wood and the clinic committee that we hope to implement.

Most of the interns have room in their caseloads for individuals and couples, adolescents, children, families and parental guidance. We would love to have referrals from our membership for low fee patients. Please keep us in mind. Also any ideas you have about marketing our clinic are appreciated.

Please feel free to call me at 415.332.6533.

As one of five new interns at SFPRG, I am thrilled to report for the "Intern's Corner," a regular feature of the newsletter intended to keep the SFPRG community connected with the next generation of Control Mastery therapists-in-training. As a fourth year student at the Wright Institute, I can say without hesitation that this is by far the best placement I've been in thus far and it's such a great relief to finally be around people who are so mutually supportive, unabashedly pro-patient and full of good humor. Read On

As chair head of the SFPRG Membership Committee I welcome our new newsletter subscribers. We are pleased that you are getting our publication which has become a rich forum for sharing ideas, research and events in our community.

In case you are not familiar with Control Mastery the following is a very brief synopsis. Control Mastery is a theory originally developed by Joe Weis and Hal Sampson, in conjunction with the San Francisco Psychotherapy Group, approximately 25 years ago. It is an empirically based theory which posits that clients have an unconscious plan, that they test the therapist to help them disconfirm their pathogenic beliefs based on early trauma and that the passing of tests in therapy is what allows clients to move forward toward their goals and experience relief from symptoms. For a more detailed description please click on the Presidio picture and go to our website which has links to articles, publications and books that will further your knowledge of Control Mastery Theory.

We invite new subscribers to join our organization. Membership has many benefits such as reduced fees for classes and lectures, inclusion in the SFPRG Directory, the opportunity to engage in ongoing research to add to our base of empirically supported theory and the added benefit of becoming part of a community and associating with like minded professionals.

Each year we hold a number of events where we get to know each other better and build a sense of community. We hope you will consider joining SFPRG and add your ideas to ours.

COMMENTS ON "THE NECESSARY AND SUFFICIENT CONDITIONS OF THERAPEUTIC PERSONALITY CHANGE" - George Silberschatz

Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training 2007, Vol. 44, No. 3, 265-267

This publication describes the impact of Carl Rogers' classic article on the field of psychotherapy in general and on control-mastery theory and research in particular.

Control Mastery Theory and Family Therapy - Steven Kanofsky and Robert Lieb

Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training 2007, Vol. 44, No. 3, 316-332

This publication describes the principal constructs of control-mastery theory and the rationale and procedures for its application to working with children and adolescents in family therapy. Altruistic motives and efforts to adapt to the family environment are emphasized, leading to a humanistic, nonpathologizing and collaborative approach to treatment.

This coming Wed Oct 24th Patsy Wood will be presenting at the Parenting Lecture Series on what the psychological literature tells us about parenting and you are all welcome to attend. The presentation will take place at the Swedenborgian Church located at the corner of Lyon and Washington in SF from 7pm to 8 pm. Childcare will be available. The talk will cover a discussion of parenting styles, discipline practices and situations that make parenting more challenging for all parents such as the way advertisers target children in order to sell their products. Practical solutions will be offered and there will be plenty of opportunity for questions and discussion. Please let your patients, friends and family know. We look forward to seeing all you there!

Dennis Zeitlin, M.D. has been notified of a promotion to Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCSF, from his former position as Associate Clinical Professor. Congratulations Denny!!

Colleagues: The SFPRG intern training program is off to a great start. We have several new interns and they are all waiting for new clients to fill up their schedule. If you have occasion to refer to our sliding scale clinic, we would appreciate it! 415-677-7946 ext 1 is the intake phone number.

There will be a memorial service for Linda Tetzlaff on Sunday December 16, from 3:00 PM to 6:00 PM at #10 Funston in the Presidio. Her husband, Bill, will be providing food, wine and beer there, as well as wonderful pictures of Linda's life. Please let everyone that they are invited to share in this memorial to a wonderful colleague.

What I learned from Joe Weiss' discoveries in psychotherapy and my own discoveries treating children for over 20 years is that when kids do the very thing that drives their parents crazy, they are inviting them to go crazy but hope they don't. Just like patients invite therapists to mistreat them in the transference relationship but hope they don't, so do kids invite their parents down a particular road they hope the parents don't take. The primary thesis is that kids are wild scientists and self-sacrificing altruists. They worry about their families, and feel omnipotently responsible for all the problems in the family. When kids push their parents buttons, they assume too much responsibility for their parents' suffering and then test their pathogenic beliefs about their exaggerated responsibility by compulsively pushing their parents' buttons again and again.

Eventually, when kids and parents fall into a death spiral of torture and suffering, the kids start to believe they truly are as evil and powerful and their parents come to believe. What started out as a test of a pathogenic belief becomes a compliance. If the pattern goes on, the child becomes fairly convinced of what a monster he truly is. These are the kids and parents who often come into therapy, full of despair that anything can help.

Therapy involves working with the child and parents. The child can test out his theories of omnipotence by talking and testing in the therapy. The parents need a lot of coaching shifting from viewing their kids' behavior from self-serving sadism to testing and compliance. Parents are always shocked to hear that kids actually worry about them and feel too responsible, rather than not responsible enough. When parents begin to reluctantly shift their view of what the children are doing and why, they experience a paradigm shift, which allows them to let go of their anger, guilt, and over-reactivity to their child. As they realize that their intense suffering is a necessary part of why the child is misbehaving, they allow themselves to do less, not more, to worry less, not more. The proof is in the results and as their children start to get better, parents gain some confidence, which relieves their child of the compulsion to test. What was a negative spiral in the making becomes a positive spiral in the unmaking.

Understanding their children as caring and testing helps parents get on track. It's very much like teaching Control Mastery principles to therapists who can start to view their patients more kindly, thinking of them as people with plans to get better, rather than as adversaries who are struggling for power and pleasure.

The first lecture of this series was a big success. About 50 people attended and they are excited about the rest of series. Patsy Wood will speak on October 24 about parenting research. Susan Badger will speak November 28 about kids' worry about their parents. Jessica Broitman and Jack Davis will speak January 23 about kids with Learning Disabilities. In February, Josh Coleman will talk about the hidden costs of parenting. On March 26, Jan Schreiber will talk about mothers and daughters. Jack Maslow will tackle the topic of teenagers in April. Alexandria Leedy will talk about grandparenting in May and Barbara Sapienza will discuss limit testing and setting in June. It's a very exciting program on parenting and I hope many of you and those in the general public will take advantage of this free lecture series. I hope to see you there. Steve Foreman

Our group has met six times thus far and we've already learned a great deal. We meet for case conference and didactic training every Wednesday from 11-2:15 and then have the opportunity to take part in one or more case conferences led by Peter Schumacher ( Mondays 10:30-12), Steve Foreman (Wednesdays 2:30-4) and Michael Lowenstein (Fridays 9:30-11am).

These are attended by therapists throughout the Bay Area and are particularly fun because we are treated as colleagues and get to feel what it's like to be "real" therapists while we build our professional network and community.

Some of us are also participating in Marshall Bush's research on how patients test their therapists in the first few sessions of therapy. We are also given three supervisors EACH for a caseload of 10-15 clients (which we newbies are building slowly). Needless to say, all of the attention is quite nice....

Thus far, we've been getting acquainted with the ins and outs of the clinic and have received didactic training from Alan Rappoport on intake philosophy and Janice Cumming and Patty Rosbrow on Trauma.

We have free access to all of the trainings that SFPRG puts on, including Denny Zeitlin's recent training on couple's therapy. Every couple of weeks different therapists from the C-M community come in voluntarily to share their wisdom with us and keep the program fresh and exciting.

I feel extremely lucky to be a part of this group and am in no rush to get through the program. For the first time in quite awhile, I feel lucky to be a student.

Deborah Kory is a fourth year student at the Wright Institute in Berkeley who will be at the SFPRG clinic part-time for the next two years. She will be writing her dissertation on Love and Psychotherapy and hopes to finish her degree in June of 2009. Before starting at the Wright, she was managing editor of Tikkun magazine and continues to write about politics and social activism for Tikkun, the Huffington Post and other online publications. She can be reached at debkory@gmail.com.