I KEEP REMEMBERING the old truism: If every paper on the newsstand has a different headline, nothing important happened today. If there are a dozen different styles of psychotherapy none of them must be that important. If one were, we wouldn’t be teaching the other eleven.

       As a novice therapist, with doubts about what to believe, I encountered patients who had experienced unimaginably horrible catastrophes. I sat with them, holding their hearts in my hands, realizing that psychoanalysis, gestalt therapy, positive thinking, motivational phrases, encouragement, and hypnosis were an insult to the situation. In every case–every case–repressed and unconscious shreds of blame or overt guilt would eventually surface. Simply being there until the sufferer saw that I understood a little but could share no inkling of their shame resulted in their coming to question their self-rebuke as well.

       Those experiences became the core of my style of therapy for the next forty years. Patients told me immediately and after many years that there was lasting benefit to simply a banishment of blame. That banishment had to be based on an understanding of human behavior accessible to psychiatrists that goes beyond what is taught by feel-good therapists, motivational speakers, even psychoanalysts.

        Breaking Blame is different from self-help guides to happiness in that I am not a young idealist or a researcher or a mid-career professional. I am an old man at the end of my career, at the end of my life, looking back a half century at what patients told me, with long term follow-up, actually worked to allay suffering. In this book I have shared the applications of these ideas to every-day relationships, child rearing, job stress, worry, depression, and anxiety.

       These are the applications that I taught for decades, which motivated patients to frequently tell me, “You have got to write a book.”

DAVID SCHROEDER WAS RAISED in Southern California during World War II and the Truman and Eisenhower years. He never left Orange County, but did leave the sexism and racism in that land of milk and honey for white, middle class, protestant, straight, cisgender males of that place and time.

       History was his main interest in school; His BA is in that field. This motivated a lifetime of international travel as he absorbed global cultures. He became a medical doctor because he thought he wasn't smart enough to make a living in history.

       Schroeder's father was a physician, and he grew up with the medical science and ethics of an era which seemed far more imperative than in current times when the ethics and standards of business have taken over medicine. He chose psychiatry as being the medical field in which he was most likely to be able to control his hours and have a quality life with his family. When patients started teaching him what works in psychotherapy, he became intrigued by the power of universal, every-day thinking to magnify symptoms and suffering. A passion to alleviate anguish led him to practice psychotherapy and psychopharmacology in one office for his entire career.

       He always wanted to write about the techniques that he found so helpful but waited until a decade after retirement to see their long-term outcome before doing so.

CREDENTIALS AND AFFILIATIONS:

Distinguished Life Fellow, American Psychiatric Association

Career-long member, American Medical Association

Board Certified in Psychiatry, American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, 1974

Private practice of general psychiatry, 1973 to 2007

Medical/surgical and psychiatric hospital staff memberships in Orange County, CA

Past Clinical Assistant Professor, UCI School of Medicine

Lt. Commander USNR–Camp Pendleton (USMC) Base Psychiatrist 1971 to 1973

Resident in Psychiatry, UCI, 1968 to 1971

Licensed to practice medicine in California since 1968

Rotating O Internship, Orange County Medical Center, 1967 to 1968

MD degree, Loma Linda University, 1967

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