Michael Sawyer, Ph.D., M.P. - Medical Psychologist
What Your Therapist Thinks of You
Follow me, a practicing medical psychologist, as I discuss topics of mental health, therapy, wellbeing, and relationships. My writing is candid and unfiltered—honest and open to discussion.
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Unfiltered professional perspectives on mental health, relationships, and wellbeing.
Completed manuscripts seeking representation and publication
What Your Therapist Thinks of You: The Unfiltered Thoughts Behind the Head Nods
This non-fiction popular psychology book brings readers into the therapy room alongside an experienced medical psychologist across ten distinct therapeutic settings. Therapy dialogue pauses in real time to reveal the therapist’s thoughts, emotional reactions, clinical reasoning, and motives behind interventions, giving readers an over-the-shoulder view of psychotherapy as it unfolds.
Who is Joel?
By day, Dr. Joel Green plays the role of a competent psychologist for his patients at a Medicaid clinic, while after hours he secretly fights a crippling depression of his own. Joel has found an escape from his depression by slipping into the lives of his patients. Whether he is a homeless drunk under the freeway, a charismatic alcoholic-in-recovery frequenting AA meetings, or a transgender prostitute strolling with the ladies down in the 9th Ward, for that time he is free from Joel and his depression.
Being guided through trauma therapy by his own psychologist, Dr. Dawson, Joel begins uncovering memories he has spent a lifetime avoiding. As Joel slowly remembers his traumatic childhood, his sanity frays at the seams. It seems each new memory threatens his grasp on reality.
Between therapy sessions, Joel's characters fall in love, walk the streets as a sex worker, sleep beneath overpasses, and shoplift—leaving Joel to deal with the fallout.
Ultimately, Joel and his characters decide they must escape for good by becoming Dr. Dawson. This leads them to his home with a gun. There can only be one Dr. Dawson.
Group
Dr. Jack Dawson built a life many would envy - an accomplished career, a husband, children, and a beautiful New Orleans life. He is also, quietly, the most dangerous person in any room he enters – he just hasn’t let himself act on it yet. Restless beneath his perfect life, Dr. Dawson decides to pull patients from his psychiatry medication practice to develop a therapy group.
While the therapy group quickly becomes cohesive, Dr. Dawson can’t ignore an attraction to a group member, Patrick. Meanwhile, Patrick demonstrates a darker side. What starts with voyeurism leads to stalking which brings Patrick to the Dawson home. Dr. Dawson doesn’t know about this side of Patrick until he sees him spying on the house. Instead of fear, Dr. Dawson reacts with excitement.
While the group evolves, Dr. Dawson is blindsided by the suicide of one of his beloved patients, who was also in the group. He overdosed by mixing the medication Dr. Dawson had prescribed with alcohol and pain medication that Dr. Dawson warned him not to combine. Or was it instructions on how to kill himself?
Angela is another member who is involved in a risky but passionate tryst with a woman who is engaged to be married. Angela gets off her bipolar medications and becomes dangerously obsessed with her love object. Ultimately, she involves Dr. Dawson in a crime she commits, using him to support a not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity plea. This threatens the relative peace and good reputation of Dr. Dawson, which he won’t tolerate.
When Dr. Dawson finally stops resisting his darkest impulses, he decides to approach Patrick after group. Who will survive the encounter?
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