Roger Marum’s collection of essays offers encouragement and hope, even as it is fraught with the uncertainty and doubt of the author’s spiritual journey. His quest for answers to questions regarding God’s existence and relevance in his life often results in unexpected God-embracing epiphanies. Marum believes the uncertainty embedded in faith is a foundational part of belief, a disconcerting cornerstone, but a necessary one. These essays will make you smile, question, even shed a tear. You may even find your own deep experiences reflected in his stories.
Roger has the ability to link faith, doubt, relationship, and deep spiritual/psychological insights into relatively brief essays that allow me to explore how and what I think and feel about the world. I find him accessible and down to earth. He is willing to use his brokenness, often with funny and touching anecdotes, to help make my brokenness more acceptable.
Gus Jordan, Ph.D. Director of Health and Counseling Services, Middlebury College
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Seasons of a Psychotherapist’s Soul is the story of a fictionalized clinical psychologist, Dr. Bob, a psychotherapist whose approaching retirement, after nearly 50 years of work, cause him to reflect on his life and practice. There’s an honesty to these stories that stems from the author’s own experiences as a therapist. His fictional Dr. Bob encounters a panoply of quirky characters (from drug addicts to traumatized children to a woman afraid of dispensing her own gasoline) and faces an astonishing array of challenges, which includes a few intriguing female clients, one of whom he wished he could have dated, if only he’d met her at a bar. But for Dr. Bob ethical lines are clearly drawn and any such desires must remain fantasies. In his fictional obituary, he asks that his life be celebrated “by listening to each other, striving to be patient in all things, and trying to bring light whenever possible into the dark nooks and crannies of life.”
“I loved these stories, reading about the evolution of Dr. Bob, a man who felt like flesh and blood and not some idealized version of a psychologist. Like many of us, he began as an angry, rebellious, and confused young adult, threatening to self-destruct, then through his own therapy began to understand and learn about himself. His father pressured him to be a doctor, then grew angry and disappointed when Bob’s path diverged from medicine. I loved that Dr. Bob chose a profession which would continue to teach him as much as he was able to pass along wisdom to others. Moving through the “seasons” of his life, Dr. Bob grows and softens, loves and loses, succeeds and fails, just as we, the readers, do.”
– Herta Feely, Author, Saving Phoebe Murrow
“Doctor Roger Marum is an interesting and effective storyteller. His stories wrestle with real-life issues. The stories are often situations with which we can identify…we recognize something of ourselves in stories told by others.”
– Dr. Alan Forsman, Coauthor, Crescendo: An Ascent to Vital Living
“Marum has written…about…the hard-scrabble path our complicated humanness often lays out for us…”
– Nancy Aronie, Author, Writing from the Heart, and Memoir as Medicine