Last March I set about building this website. In the "age of the internet" I figured I'd write a lot to give prospective therapy patients in NYC a real taste of what my psychotherapy and group therapy practice has to offer. I wrote about therapy for depression, dating, drugs and alcohol, anxiety therapy--I covered the usual psychotherapy bases (and of course talked a bunch about the merits of group therapy).
I also wrote about anger--a common therapy topic. Generally speaking, those with "anger issues" are sent to
"anger management therapy" for the purpose of, well, getting their anger "managed." And, being rather fond of the rhetorical approach in writing wherein I point to the common way of doing something and then talk about everything that's wrong with it, I decide to approach a sharing of my therapeutic view on anger by talking about everything that's wrong with anger management therapy. You can read that here.
The whole incident was innocent enough.
Incident?
Somehow, one of the Goliath search engine's curious little spiders stumbled upon my hastily written prose and, recognizing no subtlety or meaning but only abstracted words and combination of words in a succession consistent with their secret algorithm, that too-powerful search engine recognized my rant as worthy of the TOP placement in search results of Googlers who happen to enter the words "anger management group therapy nyc" or something like it.
It turns out, there are more than a few people typing in the words "anger management group therapy nyc" into Google, and some of them called or sent emails asking, of course, "How do I join the anger management group?"
At first I politely mentioned that I didn't, in fact, do anger management groups, and even explained the misunderstanding to those who seemed interested. A few people thought that was great, and we discussed the process for coming into therapy with me (regular old, not-specified-by-any-diagnostic-or-categorical-modifier therapy). Other people were, well, angry.
Understandably.
But then I got to thinking...
Maybe I should, you know, start an anti-anger management group. Or an anger development group.
After all, it's not that I'm not interested in helping people who are anger (and it's not as though I don't already do that, all the time, in my practice.)
I'm undecided, so I thought I'd solicit some responses. What do you think?
Oh, and this blog post--it's probably going to make things worse. I've used the words "anger management," "group therapy," and "NYC" at least a dozen times.
