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

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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!’