Introduction
Dr. David Freeman (1943-2010), Author, Professor & Family Therapist
In 2010 I was co-authoring a book with my clinical supervisor, Dr. David Freeman. David was an author, professor and well known marriage and family therapist in Vancouver, BC. We agreed to write a book for young therapists in a style similar to “Letters to a Young Poet”. However due to advances in technology, our conversations would take place on Skype. So once a week I would call David via Skype, record the calls and then have the audio transcribed which would be used to write our book. All of this took place during a very busy time for me. In June of 2010, my wife gave birth to our first son, Izzy. Six weeks after my son was born, my father died. In between working on our book, David would provide coaching and warm guidance throughout both of these major events. In August of 2010, David let me know he received the latest transcriptions for our book, and would read them while on vacation. This would be the last time we would speak. Tragically, on September 13, 2010, David died of heart failure while cycling with his wife Judith in Croatia. And while our book was almost complete, it was not finished. And so the raw data sat on my hard drive. And it sat there... for years. In the meantime, I had a couple more kids, wrote two book and grew my private practice.
A few months ago I started to listen to the audio interviews with David. I was struck by how fresh and counter-intuitive his observations were about marriage and parenting. I found myself getting excited about the material, and started sharing his ideas on Facebook and Twitter. A clinician contacted me and said he trained with David in Vancouver - and told me how much of an impact David had on his decision to to do post-graduate training in family therapy. A few people send me private messages on Twitter asking how they could read more of the material. And that’s all it took - I made a commitment to publish the book before the 10 year anniversary of David’s death. The current title is: Where Would Would You Like To Start: A Master Therapist on Beginning Psychotherapy with Families. And the book will be released in the winter of 2020. The second project will be this podcast. Approximately twice a month, I will choose an audio snippet of David riffing on marriage, or parenting - well, something like this:
If you’re trying to change somebody, you’re not going to have an intimate connection. Because it’s not about who they are, it’s about what you need them to be.
And then I will provide a few minutes of commentary about the snippet, and how I have observed it play out with my clients or in my personal life.
While the book and the podcast are built on the same source material, they are seperate projects - the book is written for therapists, the podcast for anyone curious about doing a bit better as a parent or spouse.
For more information about the book, or to inquire about working with Avrum, call 416-319-7865 or email avrum@nadigel.com
To learn more about David and his work: david-freeman.org
Thanks to marriage and family therapist Christina Heymoss for her assistance in choosing the audio snippets for the podcast.
Release date: Winter, 2020