Take Therapeutic Walk With 'Harriett'

An unhappy, frustrated and fearful woman who thinks her husband is having an affair lunges at him with a kitchen knife.

Meet Harriett – and walk with this fictional woman through a Barrington psychotherapist’s first self-help book, “Harriett’s Walk,” which reads like a novel.

“Harriett is a composite,” said Lucia Matthews, a licensed psychologist. “The name Harriett has nothing to do with any client I have ever had.”

The book, though, has a lot to do with how Matthews works with her clients to help them maker wiser choices for a better life.

“I present the same nine skills in the book that I teach clients,” she said. “The book matches my therapeutic approach.”

“There is a big difference between acting emotionally and behaving wisely,” Matthews said. “You can be overwhelmed by emotion, and it causes us to do unwise things.”

Such as lunging at someone with a kitchen knife.

“I got that idea from Barrington police logs,” she said.

A woman threw a remote control at her husband, causing some injuries, she said. It was not a very pragmatic way to handle a situation.

“You can’t change the situation,” she said. “The best we can do is control the external world by behaving wisely. You need to knock emotion out of your brain.”

The book leads readers through the nine skills Harriett uses to deal with her behavior. Each skill can actually stand alone in helping people move toward a better life, said Matthews.

Matthews came to psychology later in life, she said, after working as an industrial engineer. She earned a Ph.D. at 45 and didn’t start her practice in Barrington until about six years ago.

“It’s the wisest choice I ever made,” she said. “When I turned 50, my husband gave me my practice.”

It was her mentor and the chairman for her dissertation, though, who kept asking her to write a book every year for 10 years. She finally said she would do it shortly before he died from cancer.

“I did not want it to be like every other self-help book,” Matthews said. “That was my fear.”

Matthews has dedicated the book to her clients.

“Their perseverance inspires me,” she said.

Matthews describes herself as an “unorthodox” therapist with a cognitive-behavioral approach that's "the foundation of everything I do.”

Matthews will launch her self-published book at the Lobster Pot in Bristol on Jan. 14 because the fictional town in her book, Bay View, is a bayside community.

She will do a book signing at Center ACE Hardware on County Road on Jan. 21.

A hardware store?

“I call my skills my tools,” Matthew said.

She is also good friends with George and Susan Tamer, who own the hardware store, and they get a mention in her book, she said.

“Harriett’s Walk” is in print or you can download it as an ebook on her website: harriettswalk.com.