Positano

By the time we reached Positano it was almost three PM.  The clouds were closing in rapidly.  There is really only one winding road in Positano; first it goes all the way down one long cliff, then it hits bottom and goes up the other side of a very steep canyon.  Fortunately our hotel, The Villa Franca, was only three 178-degree turns from the top. 

 

The hotel is beautiful and positioned spectacularly.  It sits on the top of a cliff, looking almost 700 feet straight down into the sea.  Every room has a balcony that reaches out over something: the town, the sea, or the beach.  The staff is friendly and helpful, the food at breakfast and at the restaurant, was as good or better than anything in Boston.  Bring money.

 

 

The next day we walked down to the beach and back up again.  Someone told that the winding staircase we had climbed up on consisted of 877 steps.   Since it was now “off-season” the only people in the hotel were American sightseers, German hikers, and a couple of gorgeous models from Albania, with photographers following them around.

view from hotel, looking down at beach

view from boat, looking up at hotel -- white buidling on top of hill on left.

 

 

That afternoon, as my wife treated herself to a massage by the lovely Antonio, I sat on the deck on the top of the hotel with a drink in my hand and realized that I was feeling both marvelous and totally disoriented.  We were here; we were at the place we had set out to go.  I was literally on top of the mountain overlooking the world.

 

I appreciate that I have been incredibly fortunate.  I have had a great career, doing something both fascinating, and something I felt was intrinsically valuable, and it also, for many years, paid the bills.  I have had one, very good, long marriage.  We have two children, who both seem to be in good marriages themselves.  All four of them have very good jobs, doing interesting things. Each couple now has a charming, creative, beautiful, curious, affectionate daughter.  Both these young girls are enamored with their Pop-Pops.

 

I feel, like 70% of the therapists out there, that I am one of the top 5% in my profession.  But I also realize that the most brilliant thing I did with my life was that I was born two years before the big baby boom.  That gave me a step-up in almost everything I wanted to do.  I could get into a good, small liberal arts college, and then into graduate school, partly due to the lower number of applicants.  Three years after I bought a house millions of other people became ready to buy a house. I was part of the first wave of Psychologists to get licensed.  I left community mental health reluctantly, but when I began a private practice the competition was minimal, although the sigma of people going for treatment was still a factor.  I have been in practice in the same city, a mostly working-class mill city, with more prosperous suburbs, for thirty-one years.   I have been totally booked for the last twenty years.

 

But, sitting there, on top of the world, it was also easy to see how much I was a product of my times, and that times have changed.  The little talk I gave at the MPA conference was about how to use technology to enhance psychotherapy, but the real message was that people of this generation are different than the people of my generation.  Their values are different, the outlook and expectations are different, and their minds are different, due to how technology has given them access to information, and to each other.  And that makes the way they manage their relationships different.

 

All of this has made me see how much all theories, concepts and techniques of dealing with human behaviors are a reflection of the times in which they are espoused.  Sometimes it feels as if our profession has more in common with a newspaper than a web -site.  Just look at how kids are raised today, compared to thirty years ago; how many more people are in their lives.  How much they are exposed to. I’m already getting text messages from my granddaughter.  Look at how many subcultures are in the U.S. today, and how strong the effect of living in a Puerto Rican community vs. a Cambodian community vs., growing up in Chinese American family in a well to do suburb of Boston or San Jose. Compare that to the mind-set of a White Morman family in Utah, surrounded by nothing but White Morman families.

Is the best way to deal with the problems they face by meeting once a week for 50 minutes?

 

Yet, I also believe that there is nothing more comforting, and nothing more powerful to foster change, than a structured, face-to-face, well managed therapeutic relationship.  

 

For a while I thought about this while I was there, on top of the world, watching a ferry come in from Capri seven hundred feet below me.  I felt personally very fortunate, but still, as always, worried about the world.  It is not surprising that the world continues to change, now at a much faster pace than it did 1200 years ago when the church down at the beach in Positanto was built.  What is also becoming more apparent is that my life is in transition, as is my profession.

 

But there; at a place we had long wanted to come and see, I decided to try and relax and be in the moment.