![dan green we dan green we](https://www.rollingstone.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Paulette-McWilliams-marvin-gaye.jpg)
Afraid the patient will have a heart attack, or get worse, or storm out and not come back, or sue.īefore showing the video, Burns warned that participants might find his approach "threatening or even disturbing." That he would challenge deeply held beliefs and the conventional wisdom they were taught. When this patient got out of the hospital, she and the therapist found themselves back at step one, 10 years of therapy down the drain.īurns delivers the hard news gently: If therapists want to get real, lasting results, they need to go hand-in-hand to "the gates of hell" with their patients, as he did with Terri. When therapists buy into a patient's negative thoughts they validate them, Burns says, and eliminate any chance of successful therapy. Burns says this is a perfect example of another situation where therapists are failing: They let patients hypnotize them into believing that their depression is unique, that they are the complete failures they believe themselves to be, or that their anxiety will kill them. She says she had a client who was convinced she was going to "explode" right in her office. When Burns asks the therapists who would have backed off when Terri said she was going to die, almost all raise their hands-despite knowing that the best treatment for most people with anxiety is exposure to the very thing they fear most.Ī woman stands up and takes the cordless mike circulating in the room. She's had only one since Burns taped the session they've just viewed-and that was 20 years ago.
Terri had been experiencing five paralyzing panic attacks a week. Turning from the video to the therapists, Burns says that's the kind of dramatic change he wants them to achieve. "Can you see yourself in an emergency room doing jumping jacks?" Hesitantly, she begins to laugh. "Could you do this if you were dying?" he asks Terri. "OK, well just keep going," Burns says, and then asks her to try some jumping jacks.Īt this, the therapists laugh out loud, not because the scene is funny but because of Burns's quiet audacity. "If you have to feel dumb to get well, it would be worth it." Terri says she feels dizzy. On the video, Terri says "I feel dumb" as she runs in place.
![dan green we dan green we](https://s3.amazonaws.com/static.rogerebert.com/uploads/review/primary_image/reviews/the-green-knight-movie-review-2021/Green_Knight.jpg)
Why? Because he knows their deepest insecurity as professionals: that week in, week out, many are failing to help their patients in a profound and lasting way. To Burns, their reasons don't matter he's determined to help them become better therapists. Others need continuing education credits to maintain their licenses. The author of Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, one of the most successful psychotherapy books ever written, he's had 35,000 therapy sessions with depressed and anxious patients and as many as 50,000 therapists have attended his training programs over the past 35 years. Some of the therapists have come because they want to hear what Burns has to say. It's part of Scared Stiff!-a two-day seminar on fast, drug-free treatment for anxiety and depression that Burns, MD '70, is giving in a nondescript hotel ballroom outside Chicago. Uncomfortable, nervous laughter breaks out among the 100 psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and family and marriage counselors watching the scene unfold on a large video screen. "What's the most strenuous exercise you could do? Jumping jacks? Running in place?"
![dan green we dan green we](https://www.si.com/.image/c_fit%2Ccs_srgb%2Cfl_progressive%2Cq_auto:good%2Cw_620/MTg1MTkxMzg5MzIyNTUyNjAx/dcovdancampbell_v.jpg)
Burns calmly asks, "Do you think you could exercise strenuously right now?" Terri doesn't know she just feels so bad. Listening to this, Stanford psychiatrist David D. She says she can't breathe her lungs are about to collapse her heart is about to stop. She is sobbing, panicking, overwhelmed by anxiety.