Month: July 2017

July 30, 2017

Do We Expect too Much from Our Romantic Relationships?

Those who are old enough and wise know every honeymoon ends. “Well, my marriage is still really good, but … ” Hard to give an honest answer here, except to your best friend – perhaps. The question emerges: do we expect too much from our relationships?

The romantic ideal or soul mate is a recent invention. The span of history reveals marriages made for lots of unromantic reasons beginning with simple survival, sex, and procreation. Add the use of marriage to cement political alliances between countries, a big dowry to benefit the receiving family, and the safety net women needed in societies offering them no place as a solo act. Socrates, some suggest, married a woman he didn’t care for because a good citizen was expected to produce males to serve and defend the state.

Such relationships didn’t shoot for sexual compatibility, a like sense of humor, or shared child-rearing philosophies. Bad couplings survived to avoid scandal and church community condemnation. Personal fulfillment, for females in particular, didn’t enter the picture. Happiness as a “right” was not in the conversation.

Times change. We believe in the notion of a soul mate, at least in the West: marriage for love and for life to a partner who completes us. In my parents’ heyday, mid-20th century America, once married you were expected to make public social appearances only with your spouse – other than allowances for amusements like athletics or card games. You were a matched-pair to the world and treated as a unit. Routine presentation of yourself by yourself triggered questions. “Where is Joan?” “Where is Steve?” Whispers followed. Take more steps, and you risked social condemnation and religious ostracism.

The unrecognized dilemma today is this: can any individual fulfill the other over an ever-longer lifetime? Will the marriage grow stale well before the spouse dies? Is love crushed under the drop-hammered pressure to meet expectations? Can the partner be superlative at all the roles we posit as the romantic ideal: sexual wizard, protector/defender, sparkling and encyclopedic conversationalist, comforter, therapeutic listener, and take-no-prisoners bread-winner; matched to you in child-rearing style and devotion, values, religion, and political party? A person who recognizes your uniqueness while acknowledging your status, preciousness, and liberty, too. Providing security and excitement, both.

The assumption I’m challenging is the notion that, if he or she is the “right one,” no one else is needed. He is enough. You will be filled to overflowing by the “everything” bottled within the human container who sleeps beside you, leans over, and pours his understanding, intellect, and emotions into you; instinctively knowing whenever you need to be “topped off” (in the gasoline/petrol tank sense of the phrase).

Perhaps it was easier in my parents’ America. Neither thought about witty intellectual repartee or personal fulfillment. They wanted appreciation from the spouse, a joint effort at financial survival (mostly engineered by the man), and kids (mostly cared for by the woman). Men and women of the time were rarely intimate – sharing feelings, “communicating” – in the way we think of intimacy today. No one even talked about the idea.

Child rearing philosophy? The parents in my boyhood environs imagined they’d do what came to mind when the situation called for it – if they considered the question at all. More is wanted now, especially by the female (who seeks equality and perhaps a career outside the home). Attitudes toward sex have changed, too, an enormous topic. Let me say only that the sexual revolution of the ’60s took us from viewing female desire as “suspected,” dutiful, grudging, reproductive, and passive to “expected,” intentional, pleasurable, recreational, and active.

In sum, too many relationships survive with a surfeit of contempt: the partners linked because of money or the children and not by love, like adjacent members of a chain gang. Many others have companionship and limited or absent sex.

The crippling power of the romantic ideal also can lead to a point where someone else, real or imagined, appears in the mind, like smoke billowing from a magic lantern. “I could do better,” you say to yourself; I need someone “more understanding, more passionate, a better provider.” Abuse needn’t be part of the disappointment, nor infidelity. A bored, unappreciated partner is one who can be won by another; at least, the fantasy of another.

The challenge of changing our cultural model of marriage is, perhaps, impossible. Parents read us fairy tales, and we devour novels and movies perpetuating the dream. Our friends portray more bliss than they experience. Biology has programmed us to be momentarily blinded to the lover’s flaws once Cupid’s arrow strikes, to “feel” the honeymoon will last even if we “know” otherwise.

Comes the dawn, we discover we are out of joint with our spouse. Is it then so unreasonable to find partial fulfillment in lots of different places, perhaps compensating for much of the Disney World fantasy that doesn’t exist beyond its gates? Finding friends who “get it,” stimulating our brains by ourselves, having guiltless interests discovered after our marriage, traveling alone or with others to places we want to see, attending shows without the mate, and eating the Thai food our partner hates? In other words, assuming an active role and responsibility for transforming ourselves, rather than viewing the spouse like a bad employee in the relationship store’s complaint department?

This model doesn’t mean giving up on your spouse, but supplementing her instead. Renegotiate the marital contract as needed, go to therapy, look at what is yet possible. Realize that human nature requires fluidity and flexibility in a relationship as time passes, not the worship of a static statue of the two young lovers as they were. Reinvest your emotions, remember the good times, create more of them in the areas where you do match, and recall the struggles surmounted to build a rich if bumpy passage through life. Look at the part of the glass that remains half (or more) full: sweet, aromatic, enchanting. Maybe the magic is not so much gone as gone to sleep. If so, can Prince (Not Always) Charming’s kiss awaken it?

I am asking questions only you can answer.

Meanwhile, beware those folks who claim, “you deserve it,” even if they are referring to shampoo. Worse yet, the promise, “you can have it all.”

No.

I’m not suggesting you must lead a life of misery tied to a cruel, insensitive, dishonest brute of the male or female variety. Vanished love is cause enough to move-on. People needn’t be evil to become less than satisfying.

But, scan the environment and observe: nothing is ideal, dust piles up in rooms ignored, untended bridges collapse, and sometimes the search for the perfect is the enemy of the pretty good; in part because of what we don’t know about the cellophane wrapped, new or imaginary person and what we do know about the shopworn partner.

Perhaps relationships should not be measured only by what happens between the mates. If you have a satisfying job, raise good kids, live in a safe place, and enjoy close friends, might all these be indirect fruits of your relationship? Marital therapist Esther Perel believes perhaps you shouldn’t complain if you have a B- marriage, but get top marks in all the other areas; because the marriage provides a platform for the rest.

Please join me in a toast. Raise your glass to human value despite imperfection, to the worth of a shared road with a loving, sustaining partner who is not a Greek god or goddess (who were frankly more than a little troubled themselves).

Many things are possible in life, but fantasy only takes us so far.

My advice?

Take reality the rest of the way.

—

The top image is a cover scan of a romance comic book, as is the third and final image of Forbidden Love, both downloaded by Chordboard. The painting between them is The Kiss, by Gustav Klimt. All come from Wikimedia Commons.

July 23, 2017

Interview with a Therapist

Who knows what a therapist might say under the influence of truth serum? Well, upcoming are unguarded words from this writer, a counselor retired, but not retiring from the challenge of interrogation. No drugs were necessary, but some background first.

I recently was named one of the 2017 Top Therapy Bloggers by Online Counseling Programs. How nice, I thought. Yet mingled with my gratitude came a second nagging question: why not the one and only Top Blogger of 2017? And then, why just 2017? Why not the top therapy writer of the decade? Or top blogger in the universe? Ah, well, I’ll have to make do. Life is tough.

Oh yes, the interview. The kind folks at Online Counseling Programs asked me nine questions. If you’d like an overview of my perspective on sexual attraction to patients, the training of psychologists, the challenge of maintaining boundaries, how the therapist (not the client) is changed by therapy, and the specifics of my career, you’ll find a good deal in my interview responses.

Another therapist would give different answers, although those currently in practice are careful not to share much about themselves. My retirement gives me the freedom to say a few things active counselors are wise not to touch. Please don’t assume they’d respond in the same way even if they were retired. What I offer is my perspective only, not unassailable truth.

Here are the questions:

  1. When and why did you originally create your psychotherapy blog?
  2. What do you hope to achieve by maintaining it?
  3. We highlighted your recent post, “The Arc of a Therapist’s Emotional Life,” because you offer such insightful musings on the therapist’s emotional life as it informs and is shaped by his professional work. One of the points you make is the difference in sympathizing versus empathizing with clients’ emotional states. How would you recommend that mental health professionals in training maintain emotional boundaries with their clients?
  4. Can you walk us through what motivated you to become a psychotherapist, as well as the educational journey you took to get there?
  5. How have you seen your blog and profession evolve over the years?
  6. During your nearly three decades as a practicing psychotherapist, what would you say were your most challenging and rewarding experiences, and why?
  7. What advice would you offer to aspiring psychotherapists?
  8. Music plays a major role in your blog. What has been the value and influence of music in your practice of psychotherapy?
  9. Is there anything else you’d like to add?

My answers? Click here.

—

The top image is a still photo of Harold Lloyd from his 1920 silent movie, High and Dizzy.

July 16, 2017

What Comes after Grieving? The Challenge of Saying “Yes” to Life

A formal, sarcastic, middle-aged woman, she was not an especially promising therapy candidate. Though very bright, one of her problems was her penchant for closing doors. She needed escape from the confined space of her life, but when possibilities arose, “no” was her usual answer. Even if no joy resided within her narrow neighborhood of known places, the dismissed opportunities existed outside her psychological comfort zone. Instead, she went to work, dutifully visited her adult children, saw her siblings on holidays, and spent lots of time reading and doing crossword puzzles and Sudoku, at which she was adept. Her life was safe, her job secure, her unhappiness guaranteed.

The lady thought she had all the answers, but her sadness suggested otherwise. Widowed for some time, her muted grief could be traced to guilt over failing an abusive husband, not his absent kindness. Until the grieving was completed, however, no manner of persuasion convinced her she was now free. Her fortress against hurt from others – a shelter of  fixed routine, avoided chances, and minimized risk – was self-created.

A luxury room in hell is still in a place you won’t like.

Some therapy clients feel as though the past has stained them indelibly, made them unacceptable. Or that they are tainted, marked “beyond repair” soon after birth. They believe unacceptability pervades everything they are, everything they touch. My patient was such a one.

The therapist faces many challenges here. He must, of course, win the trust of someone untrusting, accept the sarcasm and negativity, understand the part “attitude” plays in defending the individual, and realize the presence of an injured soul under the porcupine spines. A grieving process will take the time it takes, until past losses recede and guilt is shed, the stain less visible. At some point the patient must begin to reenter the world or, perhaps, enter for the first time.

A scary thing.

Life is like a book we write in indelible ink. We can’t erase the past, even though some imagine the ink is still wet and marks everything they touch with words written far back: words like bad, selfish, mean, stupid, and unattractive. Those who think this way believe the pejoratives live inside of them. They attribute superhuman powers to new acquaintances. People will, they are sure, quickly read the words through the transparency of face and body.

The book, however, has many blank pages left. The virgin parchment remains to be filled in, as pristine for you as for another. What will you write? Yes, you possess a history, but how much of it must you endlessly reread and then repeat and recopy on the unfilled paper? How much of the book’s future story must tell the same tale only with different people?

The empty spaces ahead are untainted, pure. If you keep looking back, you will keep getting the wet ink on your fingers, your forearms, your future. The new leaves will be smudged. Thus, the lady with whom I began this story anticipated an unsatisfying, injurious path, closed the gate to it, and only accomplished a reliving of her past in places offering no novel possibilities.

She needed a change of clothes, a shower, even a fresh start at work or new friends; maybe without her siblings or with a changed attitude toward them.

If you are like this patient, too quick to say “that won’t work or “I can’t do that,” well, as the wry aphorism tells us, “If you do what you’ve done, you’ll get what you’ve gotten.”

The art of therapy is, in part, the art of managing the client’s transition from shedding the past to his trying out a new version of himself: a kind of gradual debut of a person partially transformed. Some of the transformation happens in the working through of past injuries, but much develops, too, in taking on the world again. There is danger if you ignore your history, but an equal amount if you don’t venture out.

Each of us carries some version of the book of our life’s saga. For those least fortunate, the incomplete autobiography is heavy, filled with the weight of tragedy. Others own a lighter volume, but not free of disappointments, mistakes, and the harm nature or fate or other people have inflicted.

The past is a place for reluctant therapeutic visits or fond memories. In the middle of life, however, many blank pages still need filling.

The patient I mentioned eventually ventured out of those phases – those pages – already read and reread, lived and relived. She entered the world of the living again, where history is made. She noticed anew a man she’d known for a few years, someone who admired her from a distance. My client took the risk of taking him seriously, instead of treating him with her standard defense: a witty, but sarcastic distancing.

If any of us are to find a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, we must first leave the house in search of it. We remake ourselves, in part, by taking tentative steps, not by waiting until we are fully changed. Change is in the action. Change is never finished, always moving, forever incomplete.

Perhaps it is too much to say my client found her innocence again, but in a way she did, and the joy of a second first love. She and her admirer married.

Life does not always permit a happy ending, nor do we get to write our whole story free of fate jostling our hand as we move the stylus.

Still, the blank pages beckon.

—

The top photo is called, Afraid of Water, by Jaka Ostrovršnik

July 9, 2017

The Arc of a Therapist’s Emotional Life

I am not the man I was when I became a man. Nor am I the therapist I was on the first day I treated a patient. My question, then, is how did I get from letter A to whatever letter of the alphabet I’m now standing on?

More importantly:

  1. Is there a pattern to the emotional life of a therapist?
  2. Must he change himself in order to do the work?
  3. Is he changed by the work?
  4. Does he change again after the work?

In the absence of clarifying research on these questions, I’ll offer my own anecdotal observations, both of other therapists and my own journey through therapy’s emotional thicket.

I’ll begin by suggesting that counselors choose the field for one of two reasons:

  • They are touched by the torturous path of humanity and wish to ameliorate suffering.
  • They are fascinated by the human condition, the myriad forms of personality, and want to learn more.

Many of us chose our occupation for both of these reasons and, of course, to make a living.

Let us assume, then, that the future mental health professional comes to his work sensitive to the pain of others. Perhaps he is attuned to some portion of this by his own nature or experience. I was.

Although I do not pretend to be like all therapists, I was a bright youngster with questions about life. One of my earliest questions was, “Why am I me?” I wondered why my particular consciousness was not in someone else’s body! I also displayed awareness of racism before wide-spread marches, sit-ins, protests; before the 1955 national emergence of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr.

My parents survived the Great Depression, my mom the victim of malnutrition and tuberculosis. She was further marked by a chaotic childhood home, a stewpot for mental disorders, including an alcoholic father and a paranoid mother. Dad survived a heart attack in late 1958. He, too, lived with the indelible tattoo of the 1930s worldwide economic drama and worked multiple jobs simultaneously into his seventh decade, both to define himself and arrest those youthful financial insecurities.

Beyond the particularities of the family, I came to an early awareness of the murder of the European Jews, though I experienced only occasional and mild anti-Semitism. I believe this consciousness preceded and heightened my recognition of racism and other forms of unfairness and mistreatment. Here was a youthful lesson that bad things can happen to good people. Thus, the stories I heard as a therapist, however harrowing, did not surprise me.

This was my emotional inheritance, the legacy shared with my brothers Eddie and Jack.

More generally, all children (including tiny therapists-to-be) need to master their emotions. We cannot cry at every setback. We discover this necessity in school, if not earlier. Those men born at the leading-edge of the post World War II “baby boom,” as I was, were raised to suppress their feelings, lest they be thought unmanly. The prohibition against male hyper-sensitivity or “softness” still is alive today, if somewhat muted.

What constitutes a “sensitive” person, however, is complicated. One can be easily hurt, moved by the pain of others, or both. If he is the former, the potential counselor must immunize himself against his own vulnerability before he can help anyone else. To do otherwise sets him up to become as needy as his client within session.

Even if the therapist is not “too sensitive,” he typically begins his therapy career with an overdeveloped sense of responsibility to “cure” his patients – extend himself to the point of riding their emotional roller coaster with them – and risk burning out. Moreover, the new counselor, by definition lacking a track record of success, uses the improvement of his patients as the scorecard of his self-worth. To desire your client’s well-being is much more fraught if your equanimity and self-concept are too closely tied to the trajectory of the patient’s treatment.

Good therapists finally do acquire a sense of competence and confidence. They achieve this, in part, by finding the proper “therapeutic distance” from the person sitting across from them. You become sympathetic, not empathetic. In other words, you offer sympathy (compassion) rather than empathy (feeling as if the other’s pain has jumped inside you and taken you over).

The counselor is privileged and enriched by witnessing the fragility and strength of his clients. He listens to their stories: all the pain and challenge of life’s stage played out in a small room. I am certain I became more humane, a better person, because of the good luck of serving others. They served me, too – made me more comfortable with my own emotional expression, to the point of throwing-off some of the strictures required to “be a man.”

Nonetheless, I now wonder whether the distancing I mentioned might come at a cost. Does the therapist’s role above the roiling turmoil of his client persist when he is with friends or relatives? Can he set aside the now automatic tendency to “ice” his feelings at work and thaw himself elsewhere? Is the therapist’s responsiveness to those in his personal life limited by the practiced program of his profession? I’m not sure.

Now retired, I find myself (and a few other ex-therapists) experiencing a wider emotional range than before. At one end, I accept personal losses more easily (the recent death of a wonderful friend, Joe Pribyl, for example). The other extreme finds me more distressed by the fraught state of the world. Is this because I am no longer in the business of creating therapeutic distance? Might it be due to emotional changes that come with aging? Is the ratcheting-up of worldwide intolerance the cause? Maybe those reasons and more.

What then is the arc of a therapist’s emotional life? Here is one possible four-staged outline:

  • The child’s natural high sensitivity (amplified by the particular circumstances of his nature and experience).
  • A gradual mastery, to a degree, of his emotions, at least in public.
  • The essential development of therapeutic distance from the client, without losing sympathy.
  • A possible thaw, after retirement, in this automatic distancing. That is, an increased tendency toward empathy rather than sympathy in leading a life beyond the shuttered office. Paradoxically, an enlarged ability to accept most losses: to roll with the punches of life.

—

In the end, regardless of our personal trajectory, we hope our clients will be happy – “reasonably happy,” as the pianist, Rudolph Serkin wished for his student, Richard Goode.

The counselor’s universe of experience – vicarious exposure to the lives of his patients, as well as his own private emotional journey – is a sometimes dissonant, raw, thick, lumpy, unprocessed necessity for his work. He manipulates it and sings the words his effort evokes, searching for melody in the discord. He churns it – and it churns him. Only by refining this material can the healer transmute pain into the remediation of pain.

Perhaps, like the dream of suffering that Schubert wrote about in 1822, “to sing of sorrow, it turn(s) into love.”

——————————————————————————————————–

The top two images come from the collection of Christopher B. Steiner and date from 1915/20 and the 1920s, respectively. The final photo is called Self-portrait, by W. Helwig and is sourced from Wikimedia Commons.

July 5, 2017

How to Assert Yourself: A Guide to Dealing with Unfulfilled Promises

The knob fell off my hotel room door. The room had the wrong number of beds, the mattress sagged, the shower would have made an Eskimo’s teeth chatter, and the restaurant included pieces of glass and wire in the food. A nearby hospital demanded payment for an expensive test they improperly submitted to my insurance company.

OK, not all events were on the same day or in the same place, but these unpleasantries happened over a period of years at a variety of locations.

They were opportunities to become assertive and I became pretty good at taking on poor service and unfulfilled promises.

I had not always been adept, however.

I did not deal with such matters from strength as a young man, but I learned by doing. We don’t become confident waiting for the emergence of the ability to assert ourselves, we become confident by asserting ourselves. We get better gradually. That said, this particular kind of “training” isn’t fun.

In all the cases described – and more – I received compensation, usually enough to satisfy me.

I’ll share some thoughts on the potential trepidation of this type of challenge, as well as what I learned about the best way to succeed in dealing with these difficulties.

ATTITUDE (YOURS):

  • You are paying for a service. You are entitled to the service for which you are paying. The company is not doing you a favor by providing it. Indeed, you have been inconvenienced by needing to prompt the vendor to fulfill his obligation to you.
  • Think of your relationship with the provider (the merchant or hotel or restaurant) as if it were a written contract: they do something for you and you pay them for what they do.
  • You are providing the owner or CEO with valuable information: what is wrong with his business. Consultants earn high fees telling ailing companies about their mistakes. Some of the organizations to whom you complain will, indeed, be grateful for the information provided. Example: a restaurant that is over salting the food needs to know its patrons don’t like it or will soon have empty tables .
  • Self-assertion doesn’t make you a bad person. Requiring things be put right shows self-respect. You can be a good man or woman and also stand up for yourself.
  • Be direct, but civil. Don’t lose your temper, but speak unequivocally. Your tone should convey seriousness. Phrases like “I think” and “I’m pretty sure” undercut your complaint.
  • The person who you are talking to is not always the one who failed to provide adequate service. Be direct and strong in dealing with him, nonetheless. Consider saying, “I realize this is not your doing, but I am unhappy with your company’s failure to _____.”
  • If you admit error when the failure is not yours, your argument will not succeed.

BE PREPARED:

  • Read any signed contract with care. Even if the document suggests the service was not unconditionally guaranteed, websites and sales staff often convey the sense that the service will be provided, thereby implying an assurance or promise. Read the website and come prepared to quote from it, if necessary.
  • Try to manage the issue face-to-face, if possible. It is easier to be told “no” if you use email or phone.
  • Write down what you want to say. You can even read from your notes or script, though it is best to look at the representative most of the time.
  • Your written material should include the dates and times when events went wrong, the names of those with whom you spoke, whatever they said, etc. These details convey veracity (truthfulness) even if one cannot prove what happened.

MEETING WITH A CUSTOMER SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE OR MANAGER:

  • Make and keep eye contact. My adult children call this, “the Stein Stare.” You needn’t display the controlled ferocity and x-ray vision my kids seem to imply in this “tribute” (a sort of family joke, both exaggerated and true), but people do take me seriously when I want them to.
  • Introduce yourself by name and, if possible, shake the agent’s hand firmly. You are attempting to establish a relationship, convey civility, and demonstrate the importance of the matter. Looking down most of the time will not help your case.
  • Since you may be speaking to a person with little authority, ask him to follow through on reaching a “decider” and request follow-up concerning the company’s intentions with regard to your complaint. Ask when you should expect to hear back and whether notice will come in writing or by phone.
  • If you don’t get satisfaction, request the attention of someone still-higher in the chain of command. A Vice President of Customer Satisfaction or similar individual stands on the top rung. You can find his name on the company website.
  • At some point you may need to ask for what you want. For example, a poorly cooked dish should be sent back to the kitchen and prepared to your liking or removed from the bill. A hotel problem might require you to request a room change, a reduced rate, or both. In hotels I’ve received a free day, a free meal, free parking, etc. Sometimes you will be offered a form of compensation without asking, but be prepared whether to accept the proposition or ask for more. Don’t say, “that’s OK,” unless you mean it.
  • Be persistent. Multiple contacts are often required. It took me six-months to get a hospital to submit a corrected insurance claim. I spoke with a nurse, a doctor, obtained the proper procedure code for the test that had been performed, wrote emails, and made regular telephone follow-ups with the hospital’s billing department.

A FEW OTHER CONSIDERATIONS:

  • You needn’t always make an issue of things. Pick your fights. The world is imperfect and you can drive yourself batty demanding justice at every turn. Some problems are best allowed to pass unchallenged.
  • Be aware of what your “default” tendency is when it comes to the kind of assertion described here. Some of us demand perfection as customers and enjoy fighting. Some are meek, prone to cowering in the face of anyone in authority. Others are easy-going and accept life’s occasional disappointments with a good-nature and plenty of tolerance.
  • If you are prone to fighting you might need to ask why. If you are avoidant of anything portending conflict, confrontation, or disappointment, you risk transforming yourself into the world’s doormat. Think about who you wish to be and how much emotion you are willing to spend in obtaining the service you expected or compensation for a failure or delay.
  • Most service providers hope to satisfy you, want your return business, and look forward to word-of-mouth advertising from you.
  • The vendor dislikes negative publicity. It is sometimes necessary to let the company know of your intention to tweet or blog your story to others if you aren’t satisfied.
  • If you do make such a threat, recognize this is the only “arrow” in your quiver. Once you have used it and tweeted your unhappiness to the world, your leverage with the vendor is gone. If at all possible, keep any such actions in reserve unless negotiations reach a dead-end

FINAL THOUGHTS: 

  • Consider all that I’ve said as free advice, with the usual warning: no guarantees and you get what you paid for it.
  • You will feel better about yourself if you challenge some of the personal injustices life offers and stand up to those who might take advantage of you, whether intentionally or due to incompetence or negligence.
  • What you prove to yourself is more important than proving anything to others. Knowing you can face difficult situations is worth the unpleasantness required to obtain such knowledge. You won’t always get what you want, but you will build an internal psychic muscle. Like the proverbial 99-pound weakling who enlarges his body by lifting weights, your newly found internal strength will be worth the hours spent in the gym of life.

—

The top image is A Snowball Fight in China by 大雄鹰. The second photo is a Giant Snowball, Oxford by Kamyar Adl. The final painting is Three Lawyers in Conference by Honoré Daumier. All are sourced from Wikimedia Commons.