| Profiles |

Are You Telling the Truth?

By Barbara Bensoussan | January 30, 2013

What’s next for New York Times best-selling author and Lakewood resident “Dr. Dave”?

ome people refuse to fit neatly into standard categories, and Dr. David J. Lieberman is one of them. He’s a PhD psychologist who doesn’t want do therapy full-time, a former business major who didn’t want to go into the business world, a polished public speaker who claims to be an introvert, a centrist-leaning baal teshuvah who chose to settle in Lakewood, and an author who abandoned big-name publishing houses and secular fame to publish Jewish books under his own imprint.

A mass of contradictions? Not really, if you know the twists and turns of his unusual career path, which have ranged from consulting for the FBI to constructing personality-based shidduch databases. By staying true to his own interests, adapting them as he veered into Torah Judaism, and applying a lot of savvy on how to market himself, he’s managed to construct a unique and idiosyncratic career, even make himself into a brand.

Many readers may recognize Dr. Lieberman as “Dr. Dave” from the self-help style video clips he does for kiruv website aish.com; he also pens a weekly column for the Jewish Press. Others may know him from his numerous self-help books, such as Real Power: Rise Above Your Nature and Stop Feeling Angry, Anxious or Insecure; Never Be Lied To Again; Get Anyone to Do Anything; Make Peace with Anyone; How to Change Anybody; You Can Read Anyone; and Find Out Who’s Normal and Who’s Not.

On video, he presents with a friendly smile but a focused energy. In person, he’s much more retiring and relaxed, looking young and fresh for his 46 years. While he claims to be a natural introvert — his twin brother, he says, is the extroverted one — today it takes just a few questions to coax him into loquaciousness.

Lieberman was raised in Roslyn, Long Island, a town he describes as “90 percent Jewish, and about 1 percent frum.” His father worked hard in sales and had the kind of progressive vision to get interested in organic food long before it was fashionable. (“We were drinking bottled water 40 years ago,” Lieberman says.)

His mother was the first in the family to pursue an unusual writing career: she wrote gigs for stand-up comics like Kay Ballard and Tubby Boots. “She’s very funny—both my parents have good senses of humor,” he says.

While his family’s observances bein adam l’Makom may have faded over the generations, he characterizes his parents as “morally centered people, who taught us a lot of good religious values.” He still cherishes many of his mother’s oft-repeated phrases, like “Not everyone can have good grades, but everyone can have good manners,” and “If you don’t have your word, you don’t have anything.”

Lieberman attended college at SUNY–Oswego, majoring in business and psychology, before entering a PhD program in psychology at California Coast University. As a student, he did well in the subjects he liked (which did not, for the record, include statistics). He wrote his thesis on the effects of nutrition on obsessive-compulsive disorder.

“My dad had always been interested in nutrition, and even today, when people call me with questions, part of my triage begins by asking them about their eating habits,” he says. “Too much sugar or caffeine can aggravate ADHD, as can lack of sleep. Exercise has shown to be as effective as meds like Prozac or Zoloft in treating mild to moderate depression. The prevailing wisdom holds that it stimulates production of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine, which seems to improve mood.”

As Lieberman neared the close of his doctoral program, he found himself in a bit of a bind; he realized that he didn’t want to work in business (although he’d studied some industrial psychology), nor did he feel himself suited to full-time clinical work.

“To treat people in therapy, you can’t cut right to the chase — you have to let things unfold slowly,” he says. “I’m not naturally well-suited to that.”

He also felt himself philosophically at odds with much of the prevailing psychological ethos, a sentiment that has only increased since he came into the Torah world. Too often, he says, the field of psychology seeks to blame outer circumstances for our problems; the field’s approach has been to label syndromes and treat them as diseases which have to be “cured” by the therapist. But emotional and spiritual ills are not viruses, and Lieberman feels the patient has to participate in his own rehabilitation.

“Most people get better in therapy when they decide to take responsibility for themselves,” he says. “It could be after five minutes, or after five years, but the decision to change has to come from the client.”

Born to Publish

Having decided therapy would not be his main professional pursuit, he realized what he really wanted to do was write. He had already begun writing a book on philosophy in grad school, but was realistic enough to know the chances of ever making a living writing books on philosophy were about as great as winning the $50 million jackpot. Not being independently wealthy, he decided to change course. His father actually gave him the idea for his first book, Instant Analysis, which is a book of observations about human nature and its foibles, such as why we eat when we’re not hungry, why we procrastinate, and why we regularly lose our keys.

It took him four years to complete the book — which he wrote while working on his degree — plus an additional few months of sweating through letters to publishers. Bypassing agents, he sent out about 20 queries directly to publishers, and actually got a few bites.

“Then I got a call from St. Martin’s Press, a prestigious publisher,” he recounts. “I had to rescind my acceptance from another place, but they were pretty nice about it.” The book sold reasonably well in the US, but did even better overseas, where “people aren’t as saturated with self-help books.” It was translated into a dozen languages, and just as he wrapped up his PhD, David Lieberman the writer was born.

That success encouraged him to further pursue writing as a career. His next endeavor was a book called Never Be Lied To Again, which drew on psychological research to help people identify clues indicating when others are being dishonest.

“We hadn’t really evolved much past the old scenario of interrogating suspects in a windowless room with one bare bulb and no clock,” he says. “That kind of pressure to elicit information often does work — that’s why we’ve used it for so long — but there are other ways to picks up cues in conversation and negotiation. I based the book on research in social and industrial psychology, and it was a hit because nobody else had thought of presenting it all together like this before.”

The book came out just as President Clinton was embroiled in a scandal in which the American public questioned whether he was telling the truth. Lieberman found himself sought after for appearances on national talk shows, which he accepted in order to promote the book.

“I wasn’t so comfortable speaking on national media,” he admits. “I was not a natural. In fact, I once saw an early tape of myself being interviewed, and I thought, ‘Oh, boy, if I’d bought the book and then heard me talking, I would’ve returned it!’

But after those initial trials by fire, he gradually grew more at ease (and picked up a few books on public speaking to hone his technique). Today, he admits to enjoying public engagements, and actually teaches public speaking at a Lakewood yeshivah. As for the thrill of all those 15-minute segments of fame, he says that even as a not-yet-frum person, he wasn’t impressed. “I still recognized that the whole entertainment scene is insanity,” he says.

All that media buzz generated yet another unexpected consequence: Lieberman picked up the phone one day to hear a male voice intone, “Hello, Dr. Lieberman, this is the FBI.” The caller then explained he was the director of the Behavioral Sciences Unit; he’d gotten wind of his novel lie-detection techniques and decided his unit could benefit from that expertise.

“He gave me one of those ‘your country needs you’ type of pitches,” he says. “He was very earnest, very nice, and I do feel it’s an honor to give back to this great nation. So I ended up going to a facility in Virginia just outside of Washington DC, helping to train profilers. Those are the people in the violent crimes department who construct profiles of suspects, based on their histories and the evidence at hand.”

He later received requests from the military to come to bases in Texas and Virginia, and requests to speak to judges, police, and state negotiators. While he’s not at liberty to reveal everything he did for America’s national defense, he says it was all about “the signs and signals of lying — how to get the truth out of people, and how to avoid getting false confessions” [see sidebar].

Does having knowledge of such techniques ever make him feel manipulative, or paranoid?

“Quite the opposite,” he replies. “I feel more at ease with people when I’m confident I can see if they’re being honest or not.”

The book became one of a series that included Instant Analysis, You Can Read Anyone, and Get Anyone to do Anything and Never Feel Powerless Again. Later, Make Peace with Anyone focused on negotiations, while Executive Power drew on his training in business and psychology.

Nothing But the Truth

Shortly after finishing his book about sorting out truth from falsehood, David Lieberman found himself contemplating rather larger questions of truth — in fact, of ultimate Truth.

“My twin brother had gone to a Discovery seminar, and he was just blown away by what he heard,” he says. “So he dragged me in too. After that, I started going to parshah classes with Steve Eisenberg at Aish HaTorah in Manhattan.”

He was drawn in willingly. “The truth just hits you between the eyes,” he says. “I’d been brought up a bit left of traditional, although we had a strong Jewish identity, but I knew this was the right way to go.”

About five years later he met his bashert, Shira, through a shadchan — and she turned out to be an FFB from Kew Gardens Hills.

“She’s still being mekarev me,” he jokes.

Shira herself has an impressive resume: she works as the program director at Camp Sternberg under director Rabbi Ronnie Greenwald, was once the principal of the kiruv elementary school Shalsheles, and is currently — in addition to being the mother of their five children — the principal of the special needs school at the Special Children’s Center in Lakewood.

“It was humbling, becoming frum,” confesses this author of New York Times best-selling books. “There’s so much you don’t know, that the four-year-olds have mastered already.”

Where his parents were concerned, he had enough psychological training to know you don’t present your new life choices to your parents in a jarring, insensitive way. In return, they have been supportive and respectful. “Of course, before the bris of my son, my father whispered to me, ‘Just name him something I can pronounce,’ he says.

Becoming Torah observant caused Lieberman to consider that perhaps his writing should reflect his new value system. He’d been working on a new book, entitled Get Anyone to Do Anything and Never Feel Powerless Again, and took it upon himself to bring it to a rabbi and ask him to vet it for anything that wasn’t kosher.

“I could’ve brought it to somebody more lenient, but I didn’t,” he says. “The rabbi really tore it apart — he went at with a machete, not a scalpel. It was very hard for me, but I followed his direction and revised the book to insure that every hashkafah was Torah-true. In the end, that book became a best-seller. It felt like Hashem was showing me I’d done the right thing.”

Having produced six secular books, he now felt impelled to write something for the Jewish community, despite the smaller market potential. Real Power: Rise Above your Nature and Stop Feeling Angry, Anxious or Insecure was his first attempt. It received approbations from Rav Shmuel Kamenetsky and Rav Dovid Cohen. Since then, his writing has been Jewish writing, produced under his own imprint, vetted by Rabbi Moshe Goldberger and distributed by Feldheim; he also speaks and contributes to Aish.com.

What’s next in line? “I’ve just finished a book about free will,” he says.

View from the Couch

Although he’s primarily a writer and speaker and not a counseling psychologist, since moving to Lakewood, Lieberman does squeeze in an occasional referral from rabbis. He feels it’s important for frum people to seek help from frum professionals when the problems involve issues like shalom bayis or chinuch.

“There are nuances there, sensitivities that a nonreligious therapist might not understand,” he says. “A therapist has to be able to speak to the client in his own language.” (On the other hand, he qualifies that for certain disorders, such as addictions and OCD, a client simply has to get the best treatment possible, even from non-Jewish professionals if no frum one is available.)

A religious therapist also knows how to distinguish when an issue requires psychological counseling and when a sh’eilah is in order. “For example, people will come to me for help dealing with an elderly parent who is difficult or abusive,” he says. “I can help on the psychological end, but sometimes we have to ask a rav about handling issues of kibud av v’eim.”

As a psychologist, he incorporates the influences of Abraham Maslow’s self-actualization theories, the cognitive approach of Albert Ellis, the contributions of Martin Seligman on helplessness theory, and the psychological profiles laid out by Jung. From William Glasser (whom he quotes as saying, “People do not act irresponsibly because they are unwell; they are unwell because they act irresponsibly”), he derives his conviction that one of the greatest tasks of psychotherapy is to help clients start taking responsibility for themselves.

“Shlomo HaMelech said, ‘A problem shared is a problem halved,’ and there’s unquestionably great value in having someone listen to your problems,” he says. “But sooner or later, you need to get beyond feeling sorry for yourself.” He expounds on this philosophy in Real Power. “We only gain self-esteem when we are able to make responsible choices, and do what is right, regardless of what we feel like doing or how it appears to others … embracing the knowledge that we are responsible for our actions eventually prompts our soul to act more responsibly, and therefore transform ourselves.”

Lieberman encourages people to take responsibility for their own roles in relationship problems. “People are always trying to change others when there’s a problem in a relationship,” he says. “They’ll come into therapy with a list of things their spouse needs to fix. But just blaming the other person doesn’t get you very far. You have to ask, ‘How can I change? What can I do to turn the situation around?’ That’s an angle many people are reluctant to consider, but making a small change in your behavior can do much to turn someone else around.”

He likes giving parenting talks, because he feels they give “the most bang for the buck” — it’s easier at that point to undo any damage that has been done in the relationship. Dr. Lieberman feels that the current trend towards helicopter parenting is destructive to both parents and children.

“The liberal mentality today is to micromanage kids,” he says. “They’re overscheduled, and the parents intercede for them — for example, if the five-year-old is bothering the seven-year-old, they’ll jump in to bribe the seven-year-old to be tolerant, then they’ll monitor the situation. But sometimes you have to let kids learn to resolve things themselves, even if they end up fighting a little.”

One woman recently told him she wakes up 45 minutes early to drive her child to school, so he won’t have to go with the carpool. What’s the problem with carpool? She replied, “It’s too squished for him.”

“There’s this constant coddling, this emphasis on keeping the kids always happy and pacified,” he says. “For me, the ultimate symbol of that is those minivans with the DVD player in the back to keep the kids quiet.”

On the other hand, he acknowledges that today’s parents are often very squeezed for time and stressed. (He himself is fortunate to have a schedule that’s not rigidly structured, allowing him to be a hands-on dad who does carpool runs and makes sandwiches in the mornings.)

Dr. Lieberman points out one of the pitfalls for today’s parents: they expect parenting to be easy, but it isn’t. It requires an outlay of time and effort that this generation finds difficult to produce. For example, a mother once came to see him, troubled because her ten-year-old daughter was overweight and seemed to have low self-esteem.

“I want you to help her,” she told Dr. Lieberman.

“First, you have to help her,” he replied. “You can help change her diet, you can go with her to exercise, and the self-esteem will follow.”

But the mother was resistant, and when Dr. Lieberman explored why, she finally admitted, “Doing that would take up too much time.”

“If you don’t put in the time with your kids now, you’ll end up putting it in later,” Dr. Lieberman warns. “If your child feels like he’s a chore for you, of course he’s going to end up with low self-esteem. You are your children’s emotional umbilical cord, and the time you spend with them has to be spent with joy.”

Matchmaker

Ever enterprising, and not content with dispensing advice for rearing young children, Dr. Lieberman is currently hoping to employ his business acumen to help solve the shidduch crisis. He’s working with a partner, Daniel Schneierson, on putting together a worldwide shidduch database, using his work in personality profiling.

“Part of the problem is a failure of management,” he claims. “If we could better organize the shidduch system, perhaps we could succeed in creating more matches.”

Not only more matches, he says, but matches that won’t fall apart after six months. His new approach involves matching people up based not only on hashkafah, but on personality traits. He has devised and trademarked a personality inventory, based on the Jungian-based Myers-Briggs personality assessment tool, which can identify personal tendencies and pair people up accordingly.

So, is it better to match two people who have a similar personality profile, or should you follow the principle that opposites attract, and that marriage is meant to involve a balancing of different natures?

“The research states that opposites attract initially, but in the long term, relationships last longer when people have more things in common,” he says. “Although in some areas, you’re better off with complementary personality. For example, you wouldn’t want to pair a worrier with another worrier.”

Dr. Lieberman feels this sort of system would be good both for young women and men; it would narrow down the choices in a situation where people (or at least boys) are overwhelmed by too much choice. He cites Barry Schwartz’s book The Paradox of Choice, which demonstrates that having an overabundance of choices leads to less satisfaction, not more: people become debilitated by the number of options, and feel more regret if their choices don’t produce the results they’d hoped for.

Well, if David Lieberman can solve the shidduch crisis, that alone would be stellar achievement surpassing all his books, video appearances and lectures. But this soft-spoken, unassuming man doesn’t hesitate to charge ahead full force when he’s got an idea he believes in. We’ll keep hoping, as “Dr. Dave” continues to pump out fresh ideas and input into resolving the social and psychological challenges that face our community.

Sizing Up in a Snap

Dr. Lieberman developed a method he calls SNAP, or Strategic Noninvasive Analysis and Profiling, in his books on detecting falsehood and eliciting reliable information from people. Most of his techniques involve the careful observation of people’s reactions, often in deliberately set-up situations.

For example, if you want to see if somebody is aware of the name of a particular person during an interview, Lieberman suggests leaving three files on the desk, one of them marked with the name of the person in question. “The interviewee will stare longer at that file than the others if he already knows the person,” he says.

Or a detective could read the alleged facts of a case to a suspect, changing one detail, for example: “The suspect shot the teller, left in a green sedan with California plates, crashed into a car [the false fact], got out, jumped over a fence and got away.” If the suspect says, “It couldn’t be me! My car doesn’t have a scratch!” he reveals his knowledge of the entire story through having focused only on that one untrue detail.

Most people who are guilty of an infraction will strive to appear innocent, “so if you ask them about something they did wrong, they’ll try to appear very calm about it — although sooner or later they usually trip up,” Dr. Lieberman explains. “But an innocent person won’t react calmly. He’ll become indignant and upset if he’s falsely accused.”

Body language often betrays the statements that leave a person’s mouth. If there’s a disconnect between the expression in the voice and the words spoken, that’s a signal something is off. So are clues like trembling, difficulty swallowing, flushing, or blinking frequently. Guilty parties may bluff or stall for time by pensively stroking their chin, or may feign being calm or relaxed by yawning or stretching.

As techniques for extracting information, these methods are certainly more subtle, clever, and a lot less controversial than waterboarding. In fact, it’s hard to believe they come from a guy who claims not to read detective fiction.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 849)

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