Landing at Antioch

Finding Myself in the DSM Criteria

It is Thursday morning. I am standing in front of my computer.

Matthew, my therapist, appears on the Zoom screen. He is an Asian American man with neatly combed dark hair, glasses, and a gentle smile. Over the past few months, I have come to trust him. I can speak openly with him. I don’t feel particularly guarded.

I had asked him for help.

As part of my clinical psychology studies, I wanted to understand CBT and DBT more deeply—not only through books and lectures, but from the patient’s side of the therapy room.

Somehow, our conversation moved toward symptoms I have lived with for many years.

PTSD was not a foreign idea to me. I had used the term before. I had wondered about it. At times, I had even used it to describe myself.

But I had never really stopped.

Never sat with the DSM-5-TR criteria in front of me and asked, one by one:

Does this describe me?

I had never taken the diagnosis apart and examined my own life against it.

Matthew began with the first criterion: exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence. It could mean experiencing it yourself, witnessing it, or learning that it had happened to someone close to you.

Yes.

I know this territory.

He continued. Now he was reading about the ways a traumatic event can return.

Unwanted memories of what happened.

Yes.

Distressing dreams.

Yes.

Feeling as though it is happening again.

I paused at that one.

Intense distress when something brings it back.

Yes.

The body reacting to a reminder, even before the mind has caught up.

Again, yes.

Something was beginning to shift.

Not surprise exactly.

More like recognition.

A slow, uncomfortable recognition.

Matthew continued.

Avoidance.

Yes.

Negative thoughts. Blame. Isolation. Difficulty experiencing positive feelings.

Some more than others. Some in ways I would have described differently.

But I recognized myself.

Then came arousal and reactivity.

Irritability or aggression.

I knew that one.

Hypervigilance.

That one too, very well.

Heightened startle response.

Yes.

Difficulty concentrating.

Sometimes.

Difficulty sleeping.

Sometimes.

Matthew kept reading.

And with each line came the same quiet recognition.

That’s me.

Another line.

That’s me too.

It wasn’t a dramatic revelation. No sudden discovery that I had never considered before.

It was more unsettling than that.

Now, line by line, experiences that had lived separately in my mind were gathering together under one heading.

My temper.

My vigilance.

My need to anticipate.

My tendency to withdraw.

The speed with which my body can go from calm to alarm.

My difficulty letting go when something feels threatening.

I had explanations for all of them.

Personality.

Temperament.

Childhood.

Israel.

The army.

My father.

My mother.

Survival.

Just the way I am.

But standing there on that Thursday morning, listening to Matthew move down the page, those separate pieces began to form a picture.

PTSD.

I stood in front of the screen and let that settle.

There was something sobering about seeing experiences I had carried for decades organized so plainly in front of me.

And something sad.

Not because the diagnosis suddenly defined me.

It didn’t.

Perhaps the sadness came from recognizing how long these patterns had been with me. How much energy I had spent adapting to them. How naturally I had incorporated them into the person I understood myself to be.

I had known the term PTSD for years.

That morning, I began to understand what it meant when applied to me.

And for a moment, the DSM stopped being a textbook.

It became a mirror.

Tim O’Brien once said that “wars do not end when you sign a peace treaty.” He was speaking about the lives that continue after the fighting stops.

I understand what he means.

I left the army more than four decades ago, but parts of it may never have entirely left me. And I carried something older into the army. My parents survived the Holocaust. They spoke little about it, but I knew enough to wonder about what they had lived through. I read, I listened, and I imagined the rest. At times, their war felt almost like a memory of my own.

Standing in front of my computer that Thursday morning, listening to Matthew read the criteria, I began to see how much I had been carrying. Some of it came from what I had experienced. Some came from the silences I grew up with.

The danger passes. Years pass. The body can still be waiting for what might happen next.

Throughout my third quarter at Antioch, I had been studying trauma. That Thursday morning, I saw familiar pieces of my own life gathered together on a single page.

➡️ For a brief overview of PTSD, see: The psychology of post-traumatic stress disorder

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Learning How to “Take It Easy”

I came to the study of clinical psychology with a point of view.

I had read Yalom. I was drawn to psychodynamic therapy. I believed, and still believe, that much of what wounds us happens in relationship, and that much of our healing must also happen there. The therapeutic relationship can offer something different from what came before. A new experience of being seen, heard, understood, and perhaps accepted in places where we were not before.

That is still the kind of therapist I imagine becoming.

But during this quarter, another question became important to me.

A healing relationship may unfold over months or years. What do I do right now, when I go from zero to one hundred at the speed of light?

How do I get from 100 to 90?

From 90 to 80?

Eventually, perhaps, to someplace approaching equanimity.

For years I have heard phrases like Easy does it. Don’t sweat the small stuff. Take it easy.

Wonderful advice.

But how?

If I am already at 100, being told to take it easy does not flip a switch inside me.

Oh. Take it easy. Why didn’t I think of that?

This is where Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) began to surprise me.

I had not expected to become particularly interested in it. My instincts were elsewhere: psychodynamic, relational, existential. CBT seemed almost too simple. Thoughts. Feelings. Behaviors. Identify them. Question them. Change them.

Then I began to use some of those ideas in my own life.

I discovered that simple does not necessarily mean shallow.

When I am agitated, anxious, irritated, or angry, I now have somewhere to begin.

First, I focus on my breath.

Breathe again.

Be here.

Right now. Right here.

Slow down.

Then I ask:

What am I thinking?

Nobody helps me around this house.

Everything is left for me.

I’m being taken for granted.

Okay. Those are thoughts. They may contain some truth, but they are also adding fuel to what I feel.

What am I feeling?

Angry.

Frustrated.

Sad.

Unappreciated.

Helpless.

And then comes perhaps the most important question:

What am I about to do?

I want to check out. I want to run. I want to leave. Sometimes I want to say something cutting. To make the other person feel what I am feeling.

But thoughts and feelings are not yet behavior.

I can be angry. I can feel hurt. I can even have the thought that nobody appreciates me. And I can still choose what I do next.

Usually, for me, that choice comes down to something remarkably simple:

Keep my lips together.

Don’t send the text.

Don’t make the cutting remark.

Don’t prove my point.

Don’t turn my anger into somebody else’s injury.

Just don’t act yet.

Once I have stopped myself from acting, I can go back to the thoughts that brought me to 100.

Is it true that nobody helps? What evidence do I have? Am I seeing the whole picture, or only this moment through my anger?

I may still conclude that something needs to change. But questioning the thought can soften the feeling, and a different feeling may leave room for a different behavior.

None of this solves the problem. The house may still need cleaning. I may still feel unappreciated. There may still be a conversation that needs to happen.

But perhaps it does not need to happen while I am at 100.

That has become a practical meaning of Easy does it for me. It does not mean I suddenly feel at ease. It means I can slow myself down, one small choice at a time, until “easy” becomes possible.

I am only beginning to understand CBT. There is much more for me to explore, including how it can work alongside the relational approach I value. What I have experienced so far has made me curious.

And perhaps given me a few more tools for the journey.

Looking Back with Different Eyes

Family Systems gave me another way to look at my past.

In my Family Systems class, we were asked to construct a genogram and write about the patterns running through our families. I knew before I began that the Holocaust would be there. How could it not be? Both of my parents were survivors. Its presence in our family was sometimes spoken and sometimes silent, but it was always there.

As part of the paper, I returned to a memory I have carried with me for more than forty years.

I am a young soldier, driving a Jeep along a rough, unpaved road in the Golan Heights, not far from the Syrian border. I am in uniform. My red beret is with me. My M16 is lying in the back.

My father is sitting beside me.

A flock of sheep begins crossing the road.

I slow down.

My father watches them.

Then, almost out of nowhere, he says:

“That’s how we walked.”

I knew immediately what he meant.

To the gas chamber.

I don’t remember what I said.

Most likely, nothing.

For years, when I returned to that memory, I judged myself.

Why didn’t I ask him something?

Why didn’t I reach toward him?

Why didn’t I say something?

My father died in 2007. There would be no opportunity to return to that Jeep and ask the questions I didn’t know how to ask then.

I included the story in my family genogram paper. When Eleanor, my Family Systems professor, read it, she saw something in that moment that I had never seen.

Perhaps it was precisely my ability to tolerate that thick silence, to not fill it with questions or words, that allowed my father to say what he said.

That possibility stopped me.

I had spent years looking at the young man driving that Jeep and thinking about what he had failed to do. Eleanor invited me to look again and see what he had done.

He stayed.

He let the silence remain.

And perhaps, in a way neither of us could have articulated at the time, sitting beside me gave my father room to say something he had rarely said.

Suddenly, the memory looked different.

What I had carried as regret could also be seen as something to be proud of.

At that young age, without any training in psychology, without knowing terms like holding space, attunement, or therapeutic presence, perhaps I already knew something about simply being there with another human being.

Nothing about the event itself changed.

The Jeep was the same.

My father was the same.

His words were the same.

My silence was the same.

Only the perspective changed.

And yet, somehow, that changed everything.

The Body Knows Something Too

There was one more place where this quarter gave me a sense of direction.

I have long been interested in what happens when healing moves beyond words. For my final presentation in Trauma class, I chose something that has been part of my life for many years: dance, particularly 5Rhythms. I explored its connections to somatic approaches to trauma, especially Peter Levine’s work. Then I invited my classmates to get out of their chairs and dance with me.

For five minutes, the classroom became a dance floor.

Most of them joined.

I felt alive, and, to my surprise, free of my usual shyness and inhibitions. I was bringing together two parts of my life: my clinical studies and something I deeply love.

In preparing the presentation, I looked for peer-reviewed research on 5Rhythms and trauma healing. I found one small study based on the experiences of nine participants. It interested me, but it also left me wanting to know more.

Could I help design a study with a larger group? I have been part of the dance community in Los Angeles for many years, and I know people beyond it. Could I ask careful questions, listen to dancers’ experiences, and contribute something useful to our understanding of trauma healing?

I don’t know.

When I entered this program, I never imagined that I might want to conduct research. Now I find myself considering it.

For now, it is a question I want to keep following.

Landing at Antioch

When I look back at this third quarter, something feels different.

During my first two quarters at Antioch, I often felt like a student learning psychology. I was reading theories, learning diagnoses, writing papers, taking exams, and trying to understand a new language.

This quarter, the distance between what I was studying and who I am began to narrow.

The DSM became a mirror.

CBT became something I could actually use when I am at 100.

Family Systems allowed me to return to an old memory and see both my father and myself differently.

And the Trauma class brought me back to the dance floor and opened a question I may want to follow much further.

For the first time since beginning the program, I feel as though I am landing at Antioch.

Not because I suddenly know where this journey will take me.

I don’t.

If anything, I have more questions now.

But they are becoming my questions.

The theories are beginning to connect with my history, my relationships, my body, my recovery, my curiosity, and the kind of therapist I may eventually become.

I came here to study clinical psychology.

Somewhere during this third quarter, it began to feel less like something I am studying and more like something I am becoming.

👉 Here are links to my reflections on my first and second quarters at Antioch: Q1 Becoming a Psychotherapist: Between Diagnosis and Relationship in Therapy and Q2 I Came to Learn Psychotherapy

September 2026