Hollywood therapists share their tools for a creative life

Hollywood may be a dream factory, but the machinery of show business looks like an unethical psychology experiment.

It’s a one-industry town full of gigantic egos, deep insecurities and an abusive pecking order — the talented and passionate people making bitter compromises, or seeing their life’s work shelved in a studio vault. Not surprisingly, therapists are ubiquitous.

Phil Stutz and Barry Michels are Hollywood psychologists with a roster of A-list clients. 

“Especially among the actors, you have people where no one’s told them the truth ever for the last eight years, 12 years,” Stutz said. 

“We tell them the truth about who they are, both the strong points and the weaknesses,” Michels added. “And we’re pretty brutal about the weaknesses, because we want people to change.”

Stutz and Michels have shared what they’ve learned with the stars in a book geared to the rest of us called “The Tools.”

Their tactics combine Jungian analysis with cognitive behavioral therapy. One chapter deals with what Carl Jung called the Shadow.

“Everybody has a piece of them that’s insecure,” Stutz said. “It’s not particularly rational and you can’t get rid of it.” 

When, for example, a screenwriter sabotages his pitch at an important meeting, it may be because he or she is trying to hide the shadow. Instead, Stutz and Michels say, the screenwriter needs to visualize this “shameful” persona, make friends with it and enlist its aid in judgmental situations.

“Although most people think of their shadows as the source of their insecurity, if you can change your relationship with your shadow, it becomes the source of your confidence,” Michels said.

The pair started their careers about as far from celebrity as you can get: Michels as a lawyer with political ambitions, Stutz as a prison psychiatrist at New York’s Rikers Island.

In prison, Stutz explains, what you say is nowhere near as important as what you do and how you communicate non-verbally.

“There’s a whole level of communication that, within psychotherapy, is not usually dealt with,” he said.