Author: cherylgoldsteinphd

I'm a research clinical psychoanalyst in private practice in West Los Angeles. I use a relational/eclectic approach in session, and work with late adolescents, adults and couples addressing anxiety, relationship issues, as well as working with more serious mood disorders. My educational background as a rabbinical student culminated in doctorate in Comparative Literature with an emphasis in Hebrew literature and psychoanalytic theory. I teach at Cal State University Long Beach in addition to seeing patients.

The Pandemic Challenges Our Mental and Physical Health – It’s Important to Get Support

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The emergence of Covid-19 has forced us to confront so many different kinds of losses.

We have lost loved ones. We have lost our sense of wellbeing. We’ve lost access to physical contact. We’ve lost our work. …

For many of us, the sense of helplessness that has come with the pandemic is not completely new. In communities that have suffered from systemic racism and discrimination Covid-19 has only further exposed the injustices of a system that has repeatedly left people helpless. As people march in the streets, there is a sense that justified outrage and grief might create some change. The cure for systemic racism and inequality should not be as illusive as the cure for Covid. Racism, hate and intolerance aren’t new, novel viruses. We know the cures. We march to bring these social ills into the broad light of day and to obliterate them.

Yet while we march and hope for something better from our society, each of us is touched personally by the sorrows that Covid-19 has brought to our lives. It might be shocking to discover that despite the tremendous pain of losing a loved one, it longer to adjust to the loss of a job than the loss of someone dear to us.

Grieving isn’t a process restricted to the loss of a loved one. We grieve losses to our sense of self, to our sense of wellbeing, to our sense of security, and to our sense of agency and control in the world. Often we don’t feel that we have permission to mourn these less tangible losses. We fear that people will get tired of hearing us “complain.” Or we compare ourselves to others and believe that since they’ve lost “more” we have no right to be so unhappy.

But grief is not competitive. And it is difficult to go through alone. Often it brings to the surface doubts about ourselves and anxieties that we have difficulty overcoming alone.

If it is difficult to keep things in perspective. If you find yourself struggling with the process of moving forward in this difficult time, therapy can offer the support you might need to grieve and work through these losses. Reach out. There are people here to help.

Psychoanalysis, Dreams and The Talmud

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It was my honor and privilege to be invited to be a guest on a wonderful podcast, “Interleaved,” where we spoke about the Talmud’s unconscious, especially as it reveals itself in the dreams in Tractate Brachot. I am so grateful to have been asked to participate, and want to thank Netanel Zellis-Paley and Adina Karp for giving me this fantastic opportunity. Natanel was a delight to speak with. It was a true pleasure to be included.

Check out the podcast using the link below!

https://interleaved.buzzsprout.com/925780/3955049-berakhot-no-3-the-daf-of-dreams

Seeing Sameness… Seeing Difference

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In October I will be speaking at a conference in Vancouver about the importance of difference. While this might sound like a discussion about identity politics, but for me this is not about politics in psychoanalysis or in therapy (I’ll happily talk about that too), but about ethics. The ethical foundation of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy rarely gets discussed directly in the consultation room, but the analyst’s or therapist’s ethics tacitly inform the entire relationship.

Many of us imagine that a sense of being understood, of feeling seen, coincides with a sense of similitude. It feels as if we are “alike,” if we “get” each other, that we can “identify” with one another. There’s no question in my mind that these are really good feelings and experiences. These “moments of meeting” make us feel less alone in the world.

But it has become something of a standard assumption that in order to be understood we have to be sitting with someone who is “like” us. Underlying this assumption is the idea that when we see ourselves in someone, or they can see themselves in us, we will find a foundational “sameness,” a commonality that allows for a closeness and understanding. So, we look for therapist who remind us of ourselves, who we believe will be able to “relate” to our issues because they have shared them. Implicit in this belief is the idea that similarity breeds understanding, that likeness or sameness brings us together. I describe this as the “ethics of sameness,” and it can inform a significant portion of our dynamics with people.

While I understand the attraction of this position, I want to advocate for an “ethics of difference.” What does that mean, and what does it look like in the consultation room?

In my work I speak to and want to know about what each one of my patients sees in him or herself, what they want me to see about them. We work to find a way to build bridges of meaning and relationship between those places in each of us that are not so easily matched and met. My ethical responsibility is to listen from a place of respect for the integrity and absolute individuality of each person who sits with me, to try to understand them as they want to be understood. This means I cannot assume that I will understand because we are “alike,” or because I can “identify” with them, but that I must learn to understand because we are not alike and it is my responsibility, on a profound ethical level, to find that understanding.

It is easy to look for how we are all alike. It is hard for us to live with the ways that we are often very different. Psychoanalysis and psychotherapy help us make life better… we need that help when things are hard. Difference is hard. Finding a way to think about difference, to allow it into the consultation room so it can find productive expression in the lives we live, is one of the goals I share with the people I work with.

Helplessness and Loss

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Loss and grief are so scary…

I was looking for a piece of art that would capture the despair at the heart of loss. My daughter directed me to Van Gogh’s “At Eternity’s Gate.” On its own, without knowing the title, the image captures the isolation and removal from the external world that pervades us when we’ve suffered a loss. Gripped by grief, we pull into ourselves. Face covered, nearly doubled over with an emotional pain that explodes beyond the mental into the realm of physical hurt, we try to hold ourselves together in the midst of feeling horribly and irreparably torn apart.

Then, there’s the title of the painting. “At Eternity’s Gate” speaks to how we are left, abandoned, as the one we love leaves us. Despite what we may have shared, we come to a point of finitude. We cannot join. We are not invited. We are left out, on the other side of the gate. Even though there may be others who are with us, the feeling of being left behind emphasizes how alone we are in the world.

The radical quality of this experience challenges us when we are in the position to empathize with those who are suffering. We know that what we will say will not and cannot be sufficient. Each person suffers grief in his or her own deeply individual way. For one person, being physically comforted may help to mitigate the feeling of aloneness. For another, being touched may be unbearable as it inadvertently emphasizes the fact that emotional pain cannot be externally soothed. In our desire to offer comfort we feel our own sense of helplessness. We too may be “shut out” despite our honest and sincere efforts.

The process of grieving our losses often involves being able to accept our helplessness against these experiences. Working with someone who can be present with the reality of suffering, who can resonate without trying to eradicate the experience of loss, allows us to move from a position of radical isolation to a sense of mutual presence in our aloneness as we stand at the various thresholds and losses that we will inevitably encounter throughout our relational lives.

Living, Loving and Aloneness

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“I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.” – Rainer Maria Rilke

It’s very difficult to come face to face with our own aloneness. Yet the nature of human existence is that we are, in fact, very much alone. Our experiences, whether physical or emotional, belong solely to us. No one else will ever really know what we experience. Every one of us lives in this situation of radical aloneness. Rilke suggests that what love creates is a shared respect for that aloneness by loving the other’s aloneness, their singularity, a love for what is most uniquely and completely their own.

It can be difficult to find this kind of love, and often difficult to feel it for another. We often value the sense of merging and seek a kind of “filling up” from the people in our lives. We look outside ourselves for a way to manage our anxiety. And in the process, we confuse feeling lonely with being alone.

Getting to know yourself in your singular uniqueness, growing and working to become the person you most want to be is a process worth celebrating. It can make it possible to be alone without being lonely, to feel love without loss of self. And it helps you “stand guard over” and value the solitude of those you love as well.

What Are the Themes of Your Story?

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As strange as it often seems to people, there are many ways that my work as a professor of Comparative Literature and my work as a psychoanalyst coincide and inform one another. I encountered one of those places of meeting recently when I asked the students in my Introduction to World Mythology class to write a paper about a myth or myths that are central to their own personal stories.

Each of us has a story that we have created about who we are and about what we hold dear. Our beliefs and our interactions with the world and the connections with  people in our lives are profoundly influenced by that narrative. At the same time, those beliefs are quite often left unspoken. Sometimes, they aren’t even really thought. They are, as Freud recognized, unconscious. That means that ideas and ideals that we hold most closely and that deeply affect the way we think about ourselves in the world can remain unknown to us. They are like ghost-writers of our internal stories.

When I gave this assignment, my students were a bit baffled, I have to admit. Because we often think of “myths” as stories involving Greek gods or vengeful spirits, my students paused when they were asked to think about stories they use to explain their worlds. Isn’t the way we deal with the world simply “reality”? Well… yes. But at the same time, we don’t always experience the same reality. Or we can share an experience, both agree about what happened, but understand that experience differently. What accounts for that difference? The way we understand experience is deeply affected by the way our internal stories, our personal mythos, ground, organize, and narrate our external experience.

As a professor, I asked my students to think about the way they are potentially literary individuals without being aware of it. As an analyst, I help patients articulate their stories, speak about them, and think about how those internal narratives influence their external and internal experiences. By looking at how we tell the stories of our past we can begin to think about and understand the way we tell the stories of our present. This is one important way to think of transference. The work of the therapy process involves opening up those internal stories and offering new ways of understanding and making meaning of them.

Psychotherapy cannot change what has happened in the past. It can, however, uncover the beliefs that shape the way we think about and make meaning of the past. And working together, the analyst and the analysand find a way forward by thinking about that past differently, less painfully, less critically, and more consciously, so that the future presents the possibility of a better story.

The Importance of Difference

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So often clients and students come to me expressing their wish to “be like everyone else.” Something is missing from their lives — a romantic relationship, an exciting social life, a sense of success and achievement. These are things we all want. Often what seems to be missing is a sense of connection, especially if the connection we seek raises our sense of esteem, not only our sense of self-esteem, but the esteem we receive from others.

But do we recognize the valuable qualities we already have? Are we able to appreciate and recognize our inherent distinctiveness?

I asked my students to write a brief paper about social and cultural norms as they define ideas of beauty or sexuality. A number of my students who identify as  bi-cultural wrote about their experiences within their own families and the difficulty of being fully accepted in either familial culture because of their mixed backgrounds.

One young woman’s experience was particularly striking.  She self-identified as half white and half Latina, and wrote about the way her family privileged white/Anglo beauty norms. She wrote about other bi-cultural members of her family who, had “colored-eyes” as opposed to hers. It took me a moment to realize that for my student “colored-eyes” were blue eyes. In her mind, her brown eyes were color–less, and therefore unattractive. Brown eyes, the eyes that “everyone” has, do not stand out, do not make a difference.

My students experience of her colorless brown eyes made me think about how important difference is to our sense of identity. We want to be able to see ourselves as distinctive individuals. We want, in some way, to be set apart. While the imposition of aesthetic and sexual norms marginalizes those who fall “outside” artificial cultural ideals of “normal,” falling within those norms can flatten our ideas about what can make us valuable. For my student, having brown eyes just made her like everybody else. Her brown eyes paled in comparison to those light blue eyes of her lighter Latina sisters.

We struggle with this tension that exists between community and individuality. So often we look outside ourselves for acknowledgement and validation, wanting to have what “they” have, to be like “they” are. And so often we “pale in comparison,” losing sight of the qualities that we have that are unique just by virtue of being our own. Is it possible to be “with” the majority but not have to be “like” them, to be a part of the whole and still remain somewhat apart from it?

My clients struggle with this question as well. Who defines success? What is a “good” relationship? What does it mean to be a “good” mother, a “good” husband, a “good” son? What will happen when someone really gets to know me? We struggle with getting lost in being like everyone else. We struggle with someone discovering that we’re not like everyone else. We live in an ongoing negotiation with difference….