Liebman Walt B EDS LMFT EDS LMFT

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Walt Liebman, Ed.S. LICENSED MARRIAGE AND FAMILY THERAPIST
7600 Red Road - Suite 218 Miami Lakes Medical Center
South Miami, Florida 33143 Pal Med Building
Telephone: 305.665.4177 7150 W. 20th Avenue

waltliebman@famtherapy.com Hialeah, Florida 33015
INTRODUCTIONWelcome and thank you for visiting my website. Hopefully you will enjoy and find
this succinct description of myself and the myriad of services that I provide
edifying. To quote M. Scott Peck, M.D., in The Road Less Traveled, “life is
difficult.” While this may sound quite foreboding, I would prefer to take poetic
license and add the clause “though we may empower ourselves and our
relationships to certainly lessen that degree of difficulty.” How do we learn or
unlearn our conceptual framework of difficulty? In my therapy sessions, I
sometimes use metaphors concerning our adjustment to life’s situations. One that
comes quickly to mind is the metaphor of Leon and Max, nine- year old identical
twins. Leon was the proverbial pessimist and naysayer. Nothing was ever good
enough for him. His glass was always half empty. Max was the complete antithesis.
He normally had a sunny outlook on life. One day after consulting with their family
therapist on how to obtain some balance between them, their mother decided to
follow the therapist’s recommendations and go to the local toy store and purchase
five hundred dollars worth of toys for Leon and place them in his room. For Max,
the recommendation was to go to the local feed store and place five hundred
pounds of horse manure in his room. Upon completion of these tasks, she walked
into Leon’s room and heard him complain that he wanted the toys returned because
the boy next door had bigger and better toys. Completely disheartened she walked
into Max’s room only to see him neck deep in horse manure, slinging it over his
shoulder and gleefully and exhilaratingly shouting, “you can’t fool me – where you
find horse manure you'll find a pony.”

The salient point being, of course, is that we have choices. We have free will
should we exercise that option to utilize it. Psychotherapy often teaches and enables
us to learn that we are ultimately responsible for each and every choice that we
make. This brings to mind a true story that occurred in couples therapy about
twelve or thirteen years ago, which I call, “lumps in the oatmeal.” My daughter
recently married and in the bride’s father’s proverbial first talk to his newly married
daughter, I related this to the very newly married couple and all of their guests. One
day a husband was bitterly complaining to me about his wife’s inability to prepare
oatmeal for breakfast without the lumps. In fact, he would become so angered, that
arguments would often ensue. He became increasingly disgruntled and even
angered as he proceeded to tell me of a morning event that was becoming ritualistic.
Now if a husband is having oatmeal prepared by his wife and it indeed has
lumps…he has choices other than initiating an argument. He may add some milk or
water to it to reduce the lumps. He may use his spoon to “mush” the lump. He may
even use his spoon to flick the lump out of the bowl entirely. He may eat around
the lump, or, he doesn't even have to eat the oatmeal. He may even teach his wife
how to properly make oatmeal, or he may choose to make it himself.

If the same man is having breakfast some morning and his wife sits down with him
and unceremoniously tells him that she just received the results of her mammogram
and they found a lump in her breast, that is what I refer to as the “mountains in
life.” Fortunately, most of our problems both singularly and in our relationships are
not the metaphorical “lumps in the breast but rather, simple little lumps in the
oatmeal”. Though if we continue to exacerbate and exploit them, they may become
as mountainous as the metaphorical lumps in the breast.

Hopefully, the last few minutes that you have spent reading this introduction will
provide you with a perspective of myself and enable you to capture the essence of
my philosophy of therapy. I sincerely appreciate your visiting my website and
encourage you to read the next several pages in which I discuss the following: