The Book has a title now: EMDR Solutions II, for Depression, Eating Disorders, Performance and More. It has a cover photograph, too. and the photo has a story. (Full disclosure–the photographer is my husband.) See it and read it at http://www.dougplummer.com/archives/ireland2/fall9.html

I’m in full-blown editing mode: going through each chapter, attaching a header, reformatting it, and reading for sense, structure, and grammar. All the writers are talented psychotherapists. Some of them are good writers. Some had lousy English teachers. In an attempt to solve the he/she dilemma, a few of my writers have turned "they" into a singular pronoun. "When I talk to a client, I tell them . . ."  Some, even without using "they" can’t keep their subjects and verbs in agreement. Or the verb tense in agreement in one sentence. Some of the sentences are like puzzles. I work hard to understand what the writer means and to make it cogent and "correct". Mostly, I like the process. Sometimes, I whine about it.

Editing seems natural to me because, as a therapist, I listen intently to people. I notice tone, meaning, coherence of narrative, posture, breathing, and monitor my own human reaction to all of it. When I see a discrepancy between, for instance, affect and content, I might intervene. "What do you feel, inside, when you’re talking about the bad thing?" Or "I notice you look kind of hunkered down while you’re talking about something good that happened. What’s going on?" Therapists, the good ones, anyway, sift through a pile of complex information every moment and help bring clarity to murky responses. Through questions and other techniques we help clients create coherent narratives, acknowledge and process affect, and build the neural networks that come only from human response. In the mean time, we see the clients through the eyes of our editors’ brains.