Headaches and goal achieving psychotherapy

_________ J.J. Thiret ___________ One, what made you decide to do what it is that you do and why? And two is: how do you stay passionate about it for so long? _________Ronald Kaiser___________ Ok, well there's kind of two separate answers . uh. I started out working in schools, eventually I moved to working in counseling agencies and then... um I happened to be at that time living next door to a friend who is a cardiologist and got to talking about some of the things that I can contribute in the hospital setting. Moved over to uh what was then German town hospital in Philadelphia. Met some of the people in neurology and we seemed to have a common interest in headache, so uh... it was a way that we could put things together. Neurology, psychovlogy, psychiatry, um other kinds of things. Healthy living, exercise and so on because of the the complexity of the problem and ultimately our headache center was established and eventually moved over to Jefferson Medical College, at Thomas Jefferson University. We're now one of the preeminent headache centers in the world. And one of the things that I've learned along the way is that people can, either accept headache as kind of a disability, or they can accept it as part of themselves but not the central part of themselves and I was... I, I became quite intrigued about how some people really, kept looking forward, they, they refused to accept the fact that this is as good as it's going to get, and about that time, the whole positive psychology movement was starting with things being written. And positive psychology kind of right down the road from us, at the University of Pennsylvania... uh Dr. Marty Seligman was doing the pioneer work on positive psychology and, and it really clicked with me and so I tried to put it all together. I developed my own theory which I called Goal Achieving Psychotherapy I've tried to uh... kind of moving into the second part of your uh question about how do I stay passionate, I try to make changes in people's lives for the better and I think one of the great things about both working with headache patients and working with therapy patients in, in a non-psych hospital setting, is that people can get better. Not everybody wants to get better but they can get better and I've tried to develop some principles that enable them to get better by combining both physical and mental health.