Ask Yourself This: What’s Inside? |
Healthcare > Psychology
Ask Yourself This: What’s Inside?
If you want to know what a person’s about, you can’t content yourself with just his outward appearance.
Joan Swirsky | May 22, 2026
Decades ago, I remember reading an article in Newsday, a newspaper based on Long Island and at that time the eighth largest daily in the country. It was a first-person admission of the writer’s irresistible attraction to morbidly obese women. After several family members and friends encouraged him to figure out his obsession by going into therapy, he assented and entered not typical once- or twice-a-week therapy, but five-times-a-week psychoanalysis.
In the article, he described the immense benefits he derived from his 20-year commitment to this form of therapy and how it helped his relationships with his parents, his job, and his self-confidence. He relayed all the valuable insights he experienced over the years.
And then he ended the article by telling his spellbound readership that — um — he was still overwhelmingly attracted to morbidly obese women!
This story did not influence me to apply for a Master’s degree in psychiatric nursing, but it was significantly influential in my choice to specialize in behavioral therapy instead of the colossally endless amount of time that talk therapy takes — and often wastes — in a person’s life. Not that talk therapy cannot be effective. Even if you’re sitting on a stoop or park bench or long train ride and airing your feelings, fantasies, wishes, frustrations, or grievances to a friend or even a stranger, talking to an empathic person can be immensely therapeutic, even curative.
But when talk therapy turns into years of talk talk, talk...blame, blame, blame...act out, act out, act out, act out...and then you get older and maybe or maybe not wiser — why is it, so many therapy patients wonder, that they are still phobic about getting into an elevator, still suffering from pulling every hair out of their heads (trichotillomania), still counting every tile on their bathroom wall (obsessive-compulsive disorder), still salivating over morbidly obese women?
Yet, to be my own Devil’s Advocate, I know legions of people whose lives continue........