An Interview with Consultant Leon Seltzer
Leon Seltzer, Ph.D., holds doctorates in both English and Psychology. He recently retired from general private practice with clinical specialties in anger, trauma resolution (using EMDR and IFS), couples conflict, compulsive/addictive behaviors, stress control, and depression.
Jordan Rich: Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for this installment of the The Seattle Psychiatrist interview series. My name is Jordan Rich and I'm a research intern at the Seattle Anxiety Specialists. We're a Seattle-based psychiatry, psychology, and psychotherapy practice with a specialty in anxiety disorders.
For today's interview, I would like to welcome Dr. Leon Seltzer, possessing doctorates in both English and psychology. Dr. Seltzer has previously functioned as an English professor at Queens College and Cleveland State University, and then later, as a psychologist, maintained a private practice for 35 years.
Upon retiring from his private practice, he's continued to offer private professional and personal consultations. In addition to publishing two books titled The Vision of Melville and Conrad and Paradoxical Strategies in Psychotherapy.
Dr. Seltzer has also been an extremely prolific writer on Psychology Today's website, authoring over 550 articles relating to psychology and psychotherapy, particularly on topics such as problematic relationships, compulsive and addictive behaviors, controlling one's anger, suffering from deficits in self-esteem and one's general self-image, and issues inherent in narcissistic personalities. Dr. Seltzer’s blog is titled Evolution of the Self with the subtitle On the Paradoxes of Personality, and his varied articles for Psychology Today have received over 50 million views. Thank you for joining us today, Dr. Seltzer.
Leon Seltzer: And thank you for having me. I'm very happy to be part of your series.
Jordan Rich: So to start, Dr. Seltzer, would you mind telling us a little more about yourself and what drew you to the study of psychology?
Leon Seltzer: Well, I guess one of the things that's most interesting about that is my starting out majoring in English and becoming an English professor for over a decade. And the reason for that was that I had gotten the message, this is many decades ago, that what psychologists did was diagnostic testing, which wasn't a particular interest of mine, whereas psychiatrists were the ones who did the therapy.
And because of that, well, I had basically tried to decide whether I wanted to major in psychology or music because I love music, that I got so much encouragement from English professors that by default almost I majored in English. Which I don't really regret that much now because even though I left the field, it enabled me to really see myself as much as a writer as a psychologist and gave me the opportunity to do a lot of writing as I have on psychology, on psychotherapy once I entered the field. So no regrets there. The only thing I might mention is that I did a human growth training.
And it was interesting because it was during the training that I realized that if I had it to do over again, because my first love even after getting tenure was psychology, that that would be my preference. It was that training that made me realize if I were willing to go through what frankly is the torture, another doctoral program, that it was a possibility. And that's what I did. So I don't know if there's anything more you'd want to know about my past, but that is probably the most curious thing.
Jordan Rich: Yeah, it's a fun little journey back around to your calling. It's very fun to see the kind of cyclical nature of it. So on your blog you describe a lot of your articles as surrounding the paradoxes of personality, which is a very specific phrase. Would you mind explaining to us what that phrase means to you?
Leon Seltzer: It's interesting that Niels Bohr, the physicist, and I think it was back in the 1920s, said something like, "The opposite of any profound truth is equally true." Which would surprise a lot of people, but what I discovered is that there are many different perspectives toward one and the same thing, each of which has a certain validity.
And I think one of the things that most therapists do, regardless of what school they believe in or practice, is basically to have people understand some of their, what? Maladjusted behaviors as behaviors that were once necessary for them, that they weren't mistaken at all. And that the problem is simply that those behaviors based on self-protective mechanisms have basically become less and less adaptive as they've gotten older.
So, just to be able to see how things can be understood in different ways. One of the things I did actually before today was to kind of look at some of my more recent posts, or—and articles for Psychology Today. And I might just want to read some of the titles if I can find this here, simply because almost all of them are imbued with paradox.
So, looking at the most recent one, I did an article called Determinism vs. Free Will: A Contemporary Update. And my point was that to think that we have absolutely free will is probably not very accurate for the simple reason that if you believe at all in cause and effect, then it is also true that one cause can have many effects and many causes can have one effect.
Then anything like absolute free will doesn't square with the research that's been done, particularly in the last decade or so. The same thing with determinism. To say that our lives are predetermined is also reductive. It really doesn't get at the fact that there are certain choices that we do have. So it's like it's a paradox, that even people who don't technically, theoretically believe in free will live their lives as though they have free will.
So again, whatever it is, I'm always looking for the paradoxical element because it's a way of going deeper. And when I go deeper, I generally find I have a more profound understanding of whoever it is I might be working with. Let me look at a few other titles. The one before that was Why Discord, Paradoxically, Is Vital in Close Relationships.
And I think the very title is paradoxical because why would you want discord in a close relationship? And basically, what it is about is that, if in fact when we grew up our family, our immediate family disapproved of certain of our behaviors, then if our spouse enacts any of those behaviors, the child part of us will feel threatened. Because if this is our intimate other, our other half as it were, then it's going to feel threatening to us.
So we're going to have to dissociate from our partner. And a lot of times people don't even really understand the basis, the crux of why they've suddenly moved from harmony to disharmony. So it's very useful when they're in a suggestion of discord to realize they're not just talking about money, they're not just talking about how introverted or extroverted the other person ought to be, maybe depending on how introverted or extroverted their parents were, that they're talking about something that is most likely unresolved in their past.
So to give an example of this, let's say that a child by nature is kind of boisterous, asks a lot of questions, always wants to share everything that's going on with him or her. And the parents are both quite introverted, they're quiet individuals and they're made uncomfortable by their child's extroversion.
In a sense, they feel invalidated by that extroversion. It's going to be very hard for them not to be critical of their child, although the child isn't doing anything wrong. But if the child is young and, of course, very susceptible to his parents' ideas about him, he is going to think, “I need to be less loud because they keep saying, shh.”
And that makes me feel ashamed. It makes me feel that my bond with my own parents is tenuous. And I can't think of anything that would be scarier for a child not to feel secure, not to feel safe in their attachment bond with their parents. Now to the degree that the child tries to conform to what the parents need or want of him, then he will be, in a sense, suppressing his essential nature. And I've seen so many adults in the past that felt empty, almost as though some part of them was missing.
And it was a part that they had repressed because it was associated with parental disapproval, maybe even parental rejection. And I won't go into it, but it's the same thing if the child is very introverted and had two extroverted parents who felt that he was too insular, that he was isolating himself from his peers, that basically he needed to be in more group activities even though he enjoyed collecting stamps, whatever it was, or maybe just watching baseball games by himself on tv.
And it's a shame because most parents just want to socialize their kids because they realize that's their responsibility, but they have blinders based on how they were parented. So a lot of the problems that I had dealt with with clients basically had to do with the fact that their parents had blind spots.
And I think one of the things that is so useful about all forms of therapy is to the extent that the client gives the therapist a certain authority comparable or hopefully greater than the authority he gave to his parents and gets the message that who he is is acceptable. It may deviate from the norm, but that doesn't make it unacceptable.
And even if he's engaged in antisocial behaviors, although the therapist would like not to see that kind of behavior, the therapist would help him understand compassionately why he developed those behaviors. And it could be that he had to suppress his anger toward his parents because that would further alienate his parents from him. So that was too scary. But the main thing is if you experience anger and you don't express it, it doesn't disappear.
It just goes in deeper and deeper and then it gets displaced onto other people who don't deserve your anger, your aggression, whatever it might be. And it's the same thing with passive aggression. And on the other side, and this is more true of girls than of boys, what girls may do is try to please their parents because their parents react to them favorably or more favorably or only favorably when they're putting their parents' needs in front of their own.
And then the problem is I have seen adults who when asked, “Well, what do you need?” They didn't know. They had never thought about it. They had never had the luxury of asserting their needs to their parents without being told that they were being selfish. So and again, this goes back to the paradox of it all, that what happens is you end up blending with your defense mechanisms, and people pleasing can be seen as a defense mechanism.
And when you do that, you basically become alienated from yourself. And when you think about it, being alienated from yourself is probably even worse than being alienated from your parents. And the main thing about giving authority to a therapist who can have a deeper understanding of what's unconscious in you and bring it into consciousness is you can't change outdated defense mechanisms without making them conscious first.
And a therapist has to find a way of helping you do that without, in a sense, revitalizing or reawakening defenses that the child part of you still thinks are essential. I'll do one more title and then we can move on to whatever your next question is. Yeah. This is one of my favorite titles.
It's called, The Monster Once Beneath Your Bed May Now Be in Your Head. And this too is about internalizing those things that threaten you from outside. I once had a client who had this dream of being followed by a monster, being chased after by a monster. Maybe she was five, six years old. And she ran into her parents' bedroom and basically wanted to cuddle with her mother, and her mother was really the monster in the dream.
So what do you do with that? And this is how people end up kind of suppressing things and then later repressing them. The difference between suppression and repression is suppression is feeling something but not allowing yourself to express it because it feels way too dangerous for you. Over time what happens is just having that feeling is scary and you can try, and it's amazing that human beings can do this, not to experience the feeling.
This is why a lot of people have anger problems, don't realize that the anger isn't the source so much as anxiety is the source. Boys more than girls may suppress, well, I should say, yeah, girls more than boys, but both genders do this. What they will do is basically, in order not to feel an anxiety, which is disabling. Anxiety is obviously one of the most uncomfortable emotions that anybody could experience because it feels as though you're about to go over a cliff.
What anger does, anger by definition is always self-righteous. So it makes you feel that at least you have reason on your side, that basically the way you're being treated is unfair. You don't deserve to be treated that way. So anger feels a lot better than anxiety. The problem is if anxiety is what's underneath the anger, you never get a chance to work through the anxiety, and that is what would be ideal.
Then you wouldn't need the anger, to the degree that anger is a defense against anxiety. And in my earliest writings for Psychology Today, and I don't know what I mentioned, at this point, I think there's something like 554 articles. And you did mention very prolific, I think in your introduction.
And I'm surprised myself that I wrote that many, but I'm just dedicated to try to share whatever I've learned in all the 35, 40 years I've been doing therapy to kind of disseminate whatever clinical wisdom I have earned so that people don't have to necessarily read a 300-page book, but can maybe just read an article and get a sense of what they might not have realized beforehand. I probably have been talking too much. What's your next question?
Jordan Rich: Never talking too much. So thank you for breaking that down. I had never heard that phrase before. So hearing your explanation and your examples was very helpful. Speaking of your writing on Psychology Today, one of your recent articles is titled, Does Self-Shaming Help You Avoid Being Shamed by Others? Could you elaborate on what you mean by this and what you think kind of gives rise to these defense mechanisms and how while we're still kids, they might serve us in positive ways but might not ultimately be good for us? Could you break that down for us a little?
Leon Seltzer: Yeah. And that itself is paradoxical because the question would be how in the world could self-shaming be beneficial to us? But what we internalize defensively if our parents are shaming us, is to say, "Okay, I must be bad." And I think I also wrote a post saying, Do You Need To Be Bad To Feel Good? If feeling bad in some strange, not to be paradoxical, but perverse way helps you to feel more connected with your parents, then it's going to feel safer.
It's going to feel a lot less dangerous to agree with them on how you think they are assessing your behavior. So it's almost as though in shaming yourself, if they give you the message explicitly or implicitly—and it's actually more dangerous if the message is implicit because then you really can't work with it, because they never actually said it.
It was maybe just the look in their eyes. Because I remember one client I saw a long, long time ago who talked about one of her worst memories being when she went into the kitchen, her mother was preparing a meal and needed to talk to her about something. And her mother looked at her in such a way that she basically ran out of the kitchen because she felt so denigrated, so put down. And I think she ran into her bedroom and cried.
Her mother didn't say a word. But basically if a child says, “Okay, they think there's something wrong with me, I think there's something wrong with me.” So it's almost like they're asking their caretakers the question, “Can you accept me now? I think about myself the same way you think about me, doesn't that join us?” And that to me is the saddest thing in the world. And I don't know that anybody has ever written about self shaming being a defense mechanism, but I think that illuminates why it would be.
Jordan Rich: Yeah, that's definitely a very heartbreaking scenario. So looking at the long term, what do you see as some problems that could arise as a result of a person having this harsh sort of judgment of themselves?
Leon Seltzer: I'll give you another example. I worked with a client whose parents basically believed in corporal punishment and the father probably found something to beat him for on, pretty much on a daily basis. And one of his worst memories was he had made a mistake and his father said to him, “Here's $5. I will give you this $5 after you pack your suitcase because you're not welcome to live with us anymore. You keep making mistakes.”
This father also expected him to follow rules that were never described to him. And kids can make mistakes because they don't automatically know what the rules are, and different families have different rules anyhow. And when his father would beat him, and tears came to my eyes when he told me this. His father said, “Take off your belt. I'm going to beat you with your own belt.”
And as he was beating him, this is almost unbelievable, the father said to him, “See, your belt hates you, too.” How can anybody say anything like that to his son? Of course, one of the things I learned that his father was comparably abusive to him. And remember what I said before that basically a lot of these behaviors aren't thought out, they're automatic, they're programmed in.
And the problem is, unless you reevaluate how your parents treated you and recognized that it was abusive, you didn't deserve it. Because you may have thought you deserved it. That's what self shaming is about. “If they're treating me this way, I must be bad and all I can do is agree with them that I'm really a bad kid. So at least that is some way that we will be on the same page.” But in any case, there was one time when he did pack his bag.
He did take the $5 and he went out into the fields. He didn't know where to go, so he just walked as far as he could. It was also cold. And at three o'clock he heard coyotes and that scared him to death. So he ran back to his house, begged to be let in, but feeling an incredible amount of shame because he knew he had to adapt to however his parents saw him.
Now the final irony in this story, which speaks volumes, is he became a renowned surgeon and never stopped seeing himself as a fraud and was just waiting for the other shoe to fall. Because even though everybody told him what a fantastic surgeon he was, he was called in to deal with the most difficult cases the other surgeons frankly didn't know how to handle and routinely he would know what to do.
It's like his hands were an unbelievable gift. But he still had this sense of inferiority. And in close relationships, he had been married more than once, he had difficulty making them work because the passive-aggressiveness that he felt as a child would come out in various ways, he could easily be triggered. The other thing is if you haven't worked through your childhood issues, you are going to be reactive.
And what that means in psychology for a person who's reactive is you are dealing with something that doesn't really exist in the present, but because it's a reminder of what typified your past, it feels like your past is in your present. So you react accordingly. And the main thing is for any therapist is to get people to respond. That puts you a choice.
When you react, it's basically the dominant programs that you internalize that have the final say. So again, working with somebody like that, you give him a message opposite from that person's parents, and you do it with an authority that ideally the person would respect and you go slowly. It has to be incremental. Because there's no way that a person could assimilate a message about himself that's directly contrary to the message that he got earlier.
So in terms of defense mechanisms, I would say all of them are maladaptive once you become an adult. So dissociation is the biggest one. Because dissociation takes you out of the present. And if there's some conflict, if there's something that feels threatening and you can't get hold of that and talk to yourself in a way that in the moment it dissolves, then basically you can't think clearly.
Because anybody whose emotions get hold of them is going to be, in a sense reduced to a childlike reactive state. So denial is similar to dissociation. It also takes you away from the present, which is what all defense mechanisms do. And the only defense mechanism that it occurs to me is always adaptive is sublimation.
Because what sublimation is about is defined in earlier, the earliest psychoanalysis vision with Freud is that basically the impulses that you have that are destructive, that are anti-social, that are overly libidinous, whatever you want to call them, you know at some level would be inhumane to express, dangerous to express, probably illegal.
So Confucius said something like 2000 years ago that if you embark on a journey of revenge, first build two pits. Is it pits, what would it be? Or burial sites. And the whole idea is you end up killing yourself even as presumably you're killing someone else. So it is normal, I think it's really in our DNA to have nasty vengeful thoughts about somebody who's exploited us, taken advantage of us, deceived us.
But to seek revenge on them, it's like giving them a taste of their own medicine, doesn't really resolve the problem. We somehow have to say, “Okay, what is it that I can learn from this? Revenge is not the answer.” And then move forward. The problem with somebody who is really immersed in getting revenge on others, retribution, if you will, is that they're really not focusing on what their personal welfare is.
I don't think that anybody can really be fulfilled by getting revenge because they're still back in the past. So sublimation is basically saying, “Okay, let me take up a musical instrument. Let me color a mandolin or something like that.” That basically you're trying to use that energy, and this is what sublimation is, transform it into something positive and something fulfilling.
So any form of play might be seen as a healthy return to childhood because I think that the healthiest adults are childlike. Not childish, but childlike. And that's one thing about having children, when parents play with their children, they are childlike and they can play a game with the children. And as much as the children love having their parents play with them, they are in a sense restoring something that may have been lost with all the adult obligations that on a daily basis they need to fill.
Jordan Rich: Yeah. So thank you for diving into some healthier means of self-defense. I think that's going to be very helpful for our audience. So you've touched on reprogramming the self-defense mechanisms you've developed, specifically self-deprecation. Is there any specific advice you would give as to how to reprogram those behaviors or any therapies you would recommend to help someone through that process, any specific therapies?
Leon Seltzer: The main thing is ultimately all healing comes from within, that therapists need to facilitate the process, they need to kind of guide it. Because basically, people who go into therapy go into therapy because they're stuck. It's not as though they need to have schizophrenia to go into therapy. And schizophrenia is handled as much by medications as anything else because it's considered a brain disease mostly.
And in terms of getting unstuck, some people can do it through what's called bibliotherapy. If you look at my background, you can see that I am pretty much enamored of books, and I stopped buying them when I realized that there was absolutely no more room on my bookshelves to put them. You can see how crowded they are.
I have to really work hard to extricate one book from the book on the left side and the right side. And I probably would not have anywhere as many books if I didn't start buying them before I knew how to use computers or there was all this information available on the computers. I know one thing I do in terms of consulting is I basically recommend books and articles and even videos they can read or they can see, because there's so much psychotherapy material now just on YouTube.
Basically, I'll want them to get a sense of what outdated defense mechanisms may be getting in their way. So sometimes I would explain core concepts to them. Given the fact that I function as a psychotherapist for so many years, I don't want my accumulated clinical wisdom if we can call it that, to go to waste. So I make myself available.
And generally I consult with people who've read one or more of my articles for Psychology Today and have questions. And if the questions are simple, I'm happy, gratis, to answer them, whether it's email or on the phone, maybe 5, 10 minutes. What I find sometimes is that they're complicated and without knowing more about their past, I wouldn't want to be glib and suggest something that would be untenable for them.
So then I make myself available, say for a more formal 60 minute consultation or more than one if that's necessary. But basically the model that I suggest to them is called Internal Family Systems Therapy. And what that means as opposed to Family Systems Therapy, is we have a family inside ourselves, and that internal family can easily give us different messages. So the essence of ambivalence.
And most people who go into therapy are ambivalent. I remember a cartoon I saw many years ago, I think it was called Cathy, it hasn't been in there for a while. But Cathy said something about the fact that she wants to be totally different, but please don't ask her to change.
Because change is very scary. What happens with change is you immediately find your level of anxiety elevating. Of course, because you're asked to change in different ways that your parents that are also inside you have been telling you, or you think they've been telling you not to change because it would endanger this core relationship that you have.
But in any case, with Internal Family Systems Therapy, it's interesting because Schwartz has written at least three or four books for lay people. Richard Schwartz is basically the originator of that particular model. And more and more people are seeing it as state of the art, although it's a very eloquent, elegant theory at the same time that it's not that easy to implement.
But basically, his second book for lay people. I love the title, is called You Are the One You've Been Waiting For. And what he talks about is a person's essential, authentic self, liberated from all these protective mechanisms that he refers to as protective parts. And those are parts of you, spontaneous, playful, wise even, that we all have.
And when we're feeling emotionally overwhelmed, because maybe we're in an incident that's shaming. And anything that's shaming to a child really is traumatic for that child because what defines it as trauma is they feel that their bond with their parents in the moment is being endangered, and they know that they're not self-sufficient, they're not mature enough to live on their own.
They can't run down to the Jones' house at the end of the street and say, "Would you please adopt me? I'm having problems with my parents." So they have to make all these adaptations that I've already talked about. So the main thing about IFS, Internal Family Systems is basically to get more and more in touch with the behaviors that really inhibit you from realizing who you truly are.
And basically, when I advise people, what I advise them to do is to think about how they needed to adapt to their parents' orders. It'd be one thing if the parent made a request, but it was okay if the child refused the request. But frequently, if the child feels that they have to have certain unalterable rules for the child, then the child doesn't have any sense of choice.
So even in self shaming, the protective part inside the child says basically, "You have to do this, otherwise you'll just constantly feel anxious." And I think the saddest thing is I've worked with people in the past that basically would engage in all sorts of extracurricular activities when the school day was over or would go to their best friend's house and come back only when they knew they had to come back for dinner, because as soon as they walked through the front door, their anxiety level would escalate.
And I can't think of anything more disturbing, more horrible than to never feel safe in your own house. And that hardly reflects the majority of people who are in therapy, but to some degree, they had to change who they authentically were in order to adapt. It's not always to the parents. It can be to an older sibling. It could be to kids in the neighborhood.
It could even be to their teachers, because teachers unwittingly can shame students very easily without even knowing that they're doing it. And it's not as though the child can go up to them after class and said, “You just shamed me.” No, they bear that burden inside. And basically what therapy is about, particularly in IFS, Internal Family Systems Therapy is basically to release those burdens, to integrate that wounded child part of you with your adult, and basically bring that child into your present life.
Have the child remind you when it's time to play, maybe even when it's time to get silly. Because being an adult really isn't that much fun. If you think about it, when we think of our adult selves, we think of being conscientious and responsible and productive, and that definitely has its place. But if that's all our life is, then our adult life becomes as burdensome as maybe our childhood was.
Jordan Rich: Well, thank you for that advice, Dr. Seltzer. That actually concludes my questions for today. So to close, are there any final words of advice or anything else you would like to share with our listeners?
Leon Seltzer: Well, I don't know that I can say anything that I haven't already said, or I could speak for another 10 hours, one or the other. So we should probably leave it as it is right now.
Jordan Rich: Right. Perfect. Well, thank you again for meeting with me today, Dr. Seltzer. And thank you to everyone else for tuning in.
Please note: The views expressed by the interviewee are for educational and informational purposes only, are not meant to diagnose or treat any condition, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Seattle Anxiety Specialists, PLLC.
Editor: Jennifer (Ghahari) Smith, Ph.D.