Complaining is Bad for Your Health: “Eat it the Way It Is!” Back in graduate school I had a course in behavior modification design. The first assignment was to set up a plan to alter a self-destructive behavior of our own. Of course, the instructor did not recognize that, just …
The Opposite of Love is Using People How Far Would You Go to Be a Winner? One of the Envied People? **This entry was difficult for me to write. The story is true and disturbing. At least I was disturbed. I don’t know that readers who have grown up blasted …
The Opposite of Love is Not Hate: It’s Using People How to Sell Lots of Books I hunched down in an end seat on the back row of the Century City Los Angeles Hyatt Hotel auditorium. My presence was forced labor, a contract requirement from a publisher. The publisher had …
You Need a License to Eat Here? MysteryShrink Mexico Short Sonia, a new university friend, and I settled into a high-backed, carved wooden booth at the Gran Ancira Hotel Bar. Monterrey, Mexico, was the first night on our Freedom Trip adventure. The day before Sonia had pulled her application with …
Food, Boundaries, and the Fastest Way to Ruin a Lovely Dinner MysteryShrink Short The couple at the next table at Brennan’s in old New Orleans giggled and smiled like newly weds- which they were. Both widowed in their sixties, they’d met a year ago on a cruise and married six …
MysteryShrink Shorts Overdosing on Back Braces “Good afternoon,” I said from the podium a couple of days ago. “My name is Barbara and I’m a back-brace addict.” I didn’t start out as an all-out back brace fiend. Neither of my parents had an unhealthy attachment to medical devices—though my brother, …
“Me Too” and the Greater Truth First, what happened: The first time I was fourteen and working at a dry cleaning pick-up station inside a megastore. I noticed that the forty-some owner, who was the father of a classmate, seemed to hang a lot while I was working and then …
