Chad Schwartzman, M.A. is a Board of Behavioral Sciences-registered marriage and family therapist intern. He earned a master’s degree in psychology from the highly respected MFT program at Phillips Graduate Institute, and a bachelor’s degree in sociology from UCLA. His areas of specialty include creativity, couples counseling, anxiety/depression and Alzheimer’s families. Chad is a partner in the Los Feliz Counseling Group, a successful private practice in Los Angeles. He also leads a support group for young adult children of parents with Alzheimer’s at Leeza’s Place. Chad is additionally a professor of psychology at Los Angeles City College. For more information on his practice please visit his profile on Psychology Today.

About 6 years ago I found myself in the midst of chronic anxiety.  I had enjoyed some early success as a young actor, having appeared as a series regular on a sitcom and numerous pilots, and guest starring on hit TV shows.  I was truly living out my dream.  As I approached my thirties, however, my acting career slowly but steadily lost steam.  I jumped from theatrical agent to theatrical agent to no theatrical agent.  I made ends meet with a commercial or two per year and collecting my full allotment of unemployment insurance.  Not bad, but a far cry from what I had imagined for myself, namely, an Emmy.  I made half-hearted attempts to find supplementary work but thought I lacked the skill set to really do anything else successfully.  Plus, I had convinced myself that working as, say, a waiter would be a public admission of defeat in a town of perception.   I started to wonder if I shouldn’t just ditch my acting career altogether and start over.  But doing what!?  And as most actors can attest to, once you’ve tasted the sweet nectar of success, it’s hard to walk away.  It’s an addiction.  I was stuck.

A chance encounter with a journeyman actor changed all that.  I got to chatting with this man in a waiting room at a commercial audition.  After picking up on my negativity, he shared with me his similar plight at my age.   Hearing his story made mine seem hardly unique; I was merely encountering thoughts and feelings that so many actors before me had experienced.  The actor’s condition, which I will further highlight, was indeed a shared experience (seems obvious now).  The man then informed me he was a licensed psychotherapist.  He saw clients in the early mornings and evenings, and left his days open for auditions.  And he appeared relaxed and happy.  I wanted that.  So, a seed had been planted that afternoon and would fully germinate a year later when I found myself enrolled in a graduate program for psychology.

It took me a while to fully embrace my decision to enroll in grad school and pursue a whole new area of study.  But after employing a heavy dose of “fake it till you make it” in my first year of a two-year program, I eventually came to see how my acting background would serve me well as a therapist.  I was already familiar with the motivations behind human behavior and I was a generous listener.  By the second year of the program, it became quite clear to me that I had a passion for therapy and it was a good fit for my life.  After graduation I was invited to intern in a psychotherapy private practice where I remain to this day.  I have a thriving practice specializing in creativity, while still pursuing my acting career.  Through my education I learned to manage my own anxiety as an actor and provide myself with a viable parallel vocation.  I like to think of it as having my “selfish” career and my “selfless” career.  But most of all, I love the balance I have struck.  Balance.  For me, that is what it is all about.

Now obviously there is no one way to approach a career in acting.  Many people prefer to pour all their time and effort into their acting careers and see any distraction as just that.  Through some combination of privilege, temperament and talent they are able to coast where others struggle.  But, for the vast majority of people trying to make it in this town, pursuing an acting career means dealing with repeated rejection, financial hardship and periods of long stagnation.  It is no wonder most of the actors I see in my practice are battling depression and/or anxiety.   In order to help these clients I take a two-pronged approach.  I arm them with the cognitive-behavioral tools to correct their mistaken thinking and I strongly encourage periods of separation from acting so they might find balance.

Let’s talk cognitive-behavioral.   Thoughts dictate feelings, which dictate behaviors.   If you think negative thoughts, you will experience negative feelings, and you will act out self-defeating behaviors.  However, if you think positively, you will feel optimistic, and you will perform self-enhancing behaviors.  Simple enough?  As a matter of fact (and proven through much empirical research), the majority of our thoughts are untrue or only have a grain of truth.  Don’t believe everything you think!  Actors would do themselves a huge favor by learning to recognize when an automatic thought is inaccurate and negative and then reframing it in a more accurate and positive way.  In other words, learning to replace negative self-talk with more positive self-talk.  So, for example, typical mistakes in thinking that I often hear from actors include:

All-or-nothing:  “If I don’t get the part, all this preparation will have been for nothing.”  Correction:  “Even if I don’t get the part, I still want to impress the casting director so he’ll think of me for the next project.”
Catastrophizing:  “I’m never going to work in this town again!”  Correction:  “It’s likely that I will get another acting gig soon.  I’ve been through these dry spells before.”  Heck, why not choose the thought that gets you what you want!
Personalization/Mind reading:  “That director hated me, she didn’t laugh or look up once!”  Correction:  “Maybe she’s tired or doesn’t feel well.  My god, it’s probably hard to laugh out loud when she’s heard these lines a hundred times.”
Magnify the negative/Minimize the positive:  “I screwed up that line!  Man, I bombed!”   Correction:  “With the exception of that one line, I did what I wanted to do with that audition.  I bet my line flubbing was forgotten cause I finished so strongly.”

The above examples illustrate how the meaning we give to any particular situation makes all the difference.  And what really matters most is our self-perception, not others perceptions of us.  If we choose the less disastrous conclusion and are kind to ourselves, we tend to feel less anxious and more hopeful.  Not to mention, when we are hard on ourselves, and pessimistic, people tend to pick up on that.  The journeyman actor in the waiting room picked up on my negativity because my behavior was a “tell” as to how I was thinking and therefore feeling that day.  I most likely was fidgety and probably inadvertently made some self-deprecating comment–hardly the mindset to be in prior to an audition.

I believe we model for others how to treat us.  If we treat ourselves with compassion and remain optimistic we will most likely be treated similarly.   No casting director is going to hire us for a role if they consciously or unconsciously detect low self-esteem.   Learning the techniques of cognitive-behavioral therapy in order to combat Automatic Negative Thoughts, also referred to as “ANTs”, greatly improves your chances of creating a lasting career as an actor.  So, kill those ANTs or they’ll ruin your picnic!  Or, if you don’t want those ANTs to die in vain, perhaps you’d prefer to be like an ANTeater and devour those ANTs!

Sometimes we reason with our emotions.  We think something must be true because we “feel” (actually believe) it so strongly, ignoring or discounting evidence to the contrary.   A good example that illustrates this is the feeling of stage fright that many actors experience.   You’re sitting in the dressing room before a performance and you feel sick to your stomach.  You run to the toilet and vomit.  Your hands are shaking and you can’t for the life of you recall your first line.  You have yourself convinced you are going to give a horrific performance, assuming you get out on that stage at all.  Waiting in the wings for your entrance you feel like you’re about to pass out.  And then you finally make your entrance…and you get your first line out… and it gets a laugh… and suddenly everything is all right with the world!  You even manage to get a standing ovation at the end.  How you felt before the play had no bearing on the brilliant performance you gave.  This proves that feelings don’t predict the future.  Stage fright does not equal bad performance.  Feelings are fleeting and not a reliable indicator of anything but your current state.  Another emotion is right around the corner, a good thing to keep in mind as actors.

Now let’s talk balance.  I have shared how my work as a therapist provides me with the separation I needed from constantly eating and breathing acting.  Spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle speaks about the importance of not becoming overly identified with a role.  He says, “to do whatever is required of you in any situation without it becoming a role that you identify with is an essential lesson in the art of living.”  Like many performers, I had lost my power as an actor because I stopped doing the craft for its own sake but rather as a means to protect and conform to the role identity of actor.  This approach to my career created suffering because it was devoid of true purpose.   When I was finally able to return to acting from a more balanced place, I rediscovered its joys.  My childlike enthusiasm for the craft returned when I no longer made it so important.  Before I felt like was always asking, in a way begging, for the part.  If I didn’t get the acting gig I wouldn’t be able to afford my lifestyle or feel a sense of accomplishment from my work.  That caused desperation.  Now, since I have another source of income and self-esteem, I am able to approach auditioning from a healthier mind-set.  I no longer feel like I’m “asking” for the part because I’m more focused on those areas of my life in which I have something to offer (including my talent as an actor).   This paradigm shift is essential to achieving a sense of balance.

One doesn’t necessarily have to find a parallel vocation in order to achieve the healthy separation from acting that I’m speaking about.   There are many ways to achieve balance.  Volunteering is perhaps the greatest way to be “other” focused and put the urgency of your acting career in perspective.  Volunteering gives you a greater sense of who you are and what you want.  By discovering the world around you, you eventually discover the world within you.  That in-sight might provide you with answers to whether acting is your sole calling in life and it definitely will unleash talents you never knew you had.  These talents and the emotions that volunteering helps you tap into will have the added benefits of making you an actor of greater range and scope.

Exercise and meditation/relaxation are also great ways to achieve balance and separation.  Intense aerobic exercise helps combat the situational depression and anxiety associated with a career in acting.  It also helps increase energy and concentration.  Likewise, practicing meditation and learning relaxation techniques is imperative to combating stress.  Quieting your mind, finding stillness, taking measured breaths and being compassionate with yourself are all essential skills to learn.

Lastly, it’s vital to call upon your support systems whenever you need a break.  Friends and family provide a necessary distraction.  Social engagement is one of the keys to a happy and healthy life.  Promote your friendships, show gratitude toward others, choose to have fun and repair relationships that still hold meaning to you.  I think it’s also helpful to have some friends that are not associated with the industry, or at least don’t spend all their time talking about it, so you can get further separation when need be.

I leave you with this final thought.  The great poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote about how 10 years is nothing in the life of a creative person.  I agree.  Life is a marathon, not a sprint.  As the journeyman actor/therapist imparted upon me, a successful career in acting requires balance, patience, flexibility and the awareness of mistaken thinking.  If you can master these cognitive-behavioral techniques, I am quite confident your dreams will come to you!