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Posted by Alex Lickerman  Print  Email to a friend  Photo: pichado photography Years ago, I was having lunch with a friend who’d developed a reputation for being difficult. He complained frequently and bitterly, often about things no one else found bothersome. In general, he was perceived as negative and over-entitled. I thought most of the time the points he made were valid but that the way he expressed them was off-putting and prevented others from being open to his ideas. After thinking about it for a while, I decided, for his sake, I should let him know. Continue reading…
Posted by Alex Lickerman Print Email to a friend  Photo: kaibara87 When I was a teenager, I was afflicted with terrible shyness. Not in every context or with all people—mostly just with girls. Not unlike millions of other adolescent males, when in the presence of a girl I found attractive, I would become tongue tied, awkward, and lose all self-confidence.
As I grew older, this reaction gradually diminished, until (luckily) by the time I’d met my wife, it had largely vanished. I’d always explained this to myself as a simple function of maturation, but recently I realized that while growing older does indeed often result in increased self-confidence (we experience more, handle it, and realize we handled it), age wasn’t, in fact, responsible at all. Continue reading…
Posted by Alex Lickerman Print Email to a friend  Every time I’ve written about morality, I’ve received strong, polarized reactions, and I imagine this time will be no different. But as we’ve all been afforded an opportunity to reexamine—and perhaps redefine—our concept of justice with the recent killing of Osama bin Laden, despite my trepidation, I feel compelled to share my thoughts.
For me, the tragedy of 9/11 was perhaps slightly more personal than for many as I knew someone who was in the first plane that struck the World Trade Center. Continue reading…
Posted by Alex Lickerman Print Email to a friend  Photo: pipitdapo The other week, a patient of mine told me he’d recently come to the realization that he has a tendency to become almost embarrassingly needy in certain situations, something he attributed to several early childhood experiences. When he was three, he told me, his five-year-old sister died of cancer. He doesn’t specifically remember her dying but does remember being left alone with a maid for a year and feeling abandoned. His father, an alcoholic, left his family soon after. He counts as his first memory seeing his father’s suitcase lying open across a bed. Continue reading…
Posted by Alex Lickerman Print Email to a friend  Photo: Lance Shields A few weeks ago, a friend of mine told me about a particularly painful breakup he’d gone through recently. His girlfriend had decided she no longer wanted to be with him and had summarily cut him out of her life. Naturally, he yearned for an explanation and some closure, so he confronted her. She explained to him what she perceived to be the problem, that he wasn’t focused enough on her and their relationship, Continue reading…
Posted by Alex Lickerman Print Email to a friend  Photo: Anamorphic Mike In a previous post, The Three Realms Of Confidence, I told a story from my childhood (how I was bullied in seventh grade because I was Jewish) to introduce the concept that confidence exists in three separate realms. In response to that post, a reader commented (on the Psychology Today blog where my posts also appear): “I was periodically beaten up, but I ran away or didn’t fight back because I operated under the assumption that you should always ‘turn the other cheek’ and never fight back, regardless of the circumstances. The moral directive was to allow yourself to get beaten up…” Continue reading…
Posted by Alex Lickerman Print Email to a friend  Photo: Josep Ma. Rosell When I was a fourth-year medical student, I once did a month-long rotation in the ER. One night a woman came in who we decided needed some lab work. When I let her know we needed to draw her blood, she began to tremble visibly. “I’m scared of needles,” she whispered to me. Continue reading…
Posted by Alex Lickerman Print Email to a friend  A few weeks ago, a colleague and I were discussing the devastation in Haiti. He told me he thought he should go down there to help out—but that he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. His heart went out to the people suffering there, he said, but apparently not enough to get him to hop on a plane.
I asked him what was stopping him. He thought about it for a moment and then said: “I don’t have anything left to give.” His answer took me by surprise. I thought his reasons would have been the same as mine: it would have been too disruptive to his life here, too frustrating to go down and be ineffective as a physician without adequate infrastructural support, and too personally uncomfortable or even risky. But what he meant was simply this: he was too tired. Continue reading…
Posted by Alex Lickerman Print Email to a friend  Photo: Hamed Saber The other day I found myself thinking about what would happen if as an adult I encountered some of the children who terrorized me when I was in 7th grade (an experience I wrote about in an earlier post, Breaking Free Of The Past), wondering if I’d be able to forgive them for what they did to me. I’d like to think I would, but the truth is I’m not sure. As a result, I found myself thinking about the nature of forgiveness and of the power and value of being able to forgive. Continue reading…
Posted by Alex Lickerman Print Email to a friend  Photo: Richard0 For a doctor, every patient death is unpleasant. My first thought when it happens to me is always, “What mistakes did I make?” I go back through the sequence of events that led up to my patient’s death and ask myself if, given what I knew at each point along the way, I should have thought differently, acted differently or more quickly, or called for help sooner. Only once I finish this exercise and I’ve thoroughly assured myself my patient didn’t die, or even die sooner than he or should would have, because of me can I then move on to grieve for the person that was lost. Continue reading…
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