Guest Post: Burt Weissbourd, Author of Inside Passage

On Challenges and Motivations – Burt Weissbourd

One of the challenges in, and motivations for, writing Inside Passage was creating an original and compelling psychiatrist as a protagonist.

Early on, I made several decisions about Abe Stein, my protagonist:

• Abe has worked very hard to be comfortable with who he is. He’s self aware. He really doesn’t worry about what others think – about how he looks, how he thinks about things, what he does in his spare time.

• Abe has an intense inner life. He may not have an easy time with practical tasks – he’s always having trouble lighting his pipe; he often tosses his spent match into the waste basket only to find that it’s still burning and he’s started a fire – but he’s a master at navigating his way through psychological complexity. He gets what makes people tick and often thinks about people in unexpected, especially insightful ways.

• Abe is often preoccupied and distracted. Because his inner life is so intense and interesting, Abe will often loose his focus as he follows a train of thought down some winding back road. The judge has taken away his drivers license because he keeps getting distracted with some thought and sideswiping parked cars.

• Abe focuses intently on his patients and genuinely believes that it’s on him to help them in real and meaningful ways. He’ll be sitting in his office staring at the ceiling apparently not listening to what his patient is saying. In fact, he’s turning over every word, doing everything in his power to get inside his patient’s skin, feel what he or she is feeling. He has remarkable empathic capacities.

So I paired this self aware, inwardly oriented, not-at-all good at negotiating his way in the world, master of emotional complexity with a tough, self reliant, not so self aware, literally able to navigate on her own in wild country, extremely able-in–the-world woman, and as they fall in love, we find that there’s very little they can’t do together.

I gave an early draft of Inside Passage to a psychiatrist friend and was touched and honored that she asked if she could give the passage about Abe’s personal experience in therapy to her patients.

The passage reads, in part:

“At first, you work to understand why you feel what you feel. There’s lots of talking about that. Then there’s one failure after another. It’s discouraging. But you just keep after it. The fear is still there, and it’s real, but at some point you’re ready to take a chance again, try a worrisome thing. And little by little you begin to do things you thought you could never do. There are lots of setbacks, but when that happens, you talk about what’s holding you back and how you could handle it differently, and eventually you try it again… And then sometime later, you begin to see how you’ve grown stronger. It’s incremental change, baby steps, but the time comes when you know you can do hard things, even if you make mistakes….”