I pursued therapy with skepticism. I had the impression that most therapists hide behind sycophancy to deliberately slow-walk treatment, merely facilitating you to discover your own insights rather than pulling them out of you themselves. If I were able to get myself unstuck, why would I need a therapist in the first place? Frankly, all of the therapists I screened seemed to fall into this archetype. That is, except for Dr. Mandelbaum, who couldn’t be further from this. He is a differential thinker who treated our sessions with urgency.

Over the years, he has built up an enormous library of therapeutic and educational heuristics and tools. Every session, he would share as many of them as possible within the allotted time. His advice was concrete, immediately actionable, and (most importantly) extremely effective. We probably made twice the progress I had hoped for in half the time I expected it to take.