"Hi doctor, I've got a problem - whenever I talk to girls my face turns red and I start sweating." It's the kind of question Dr Raymond Hamden has heard many times before. "So you're anxious about talking to girls?" he asks. "Yes!" gasps the young man on the other end of the line.
"Are you a shy kind of a person?" "I am not really shy but whenever I start talking to girls, well, I just get shy, you know." Hamden, a clinical psychologist whose radio programme, In the Psychologist's Chair, has been running for eight years in Dubai, launches into a stream of observation and analysis. "So what is it that you think about girls when they see you, what is it that you imagine they are looking at? You need to be thinking about what is it that you think girls are seeing that you need to hide behind a red glowing face. Take a guess."
"I don't really think about anything." "Well, maybe you should. It's not unusual to hear young men say that they can handle any situation until there's a young lady in front of them and they find her attractive and then they feel reserved and shy. It's normal for a lot of people. But when men stop thinking about naughty things it's more comfortable to be in the presence of women. When you think of women as human beings..."
"Well I definitely think of them as human beings." "Well that's good to know because when you focus on that it will also help you realise that they also have feelings, thoughts and behaviours that are not going to be threatening or revealing or uncomfortable. So when you think of a person that you're dealing with, whether they are a man or a woman, a girl or a boy, you need to also recognise that there might not be anything that would be intimidating or frightening. So taking the opportunity to change your attitude in the presence of a woman will help lessen that shyness kind of reaction you get, so try that OK? Hi! I'm Dr Raymond Hamden and you're live on the air."
The next caller, another young man, has a nail-biting habit. "How often do you bite your nails? Do you bite your nails habitually. Are you aware that you're biting your nails or do you find your hands in your mouth?" Hamden asks. "Whenever I'm wondering about something, whenever I'm listening to someone or talking to them, I find myself biting my nails. Sometimes my friends find me biting my nails and they tell me to stop because it's irritating."
"So it's more of a habitual kind of thing. You do it but you don't even realise you're doing it." "Yeah. Sometimes I'm aware of it and look at my fingers and fingertips and I stop it for around a week. Sometimes I do control it, but my question is why do I do it?" "Sometimes nail-biting can be associated with stress, sometimes it can be associated with just the habit of putting something in your mouth like a pencil or a finger... I assume that it's only your fingernails that you're biting, right? I mean, it would be difficult to be doing that and driving at the same time, although we do see that kind of thing happening around here." The young man laughs.
"Now what I'd like for you to do is to consciously realise that you're biting your nails. The way you're going to do that is you're going to put a substance on your nails, or you can wear gloves or little rubber tips that will be there so that you know that you are biting your nails... There are also some people who react very positively to hygiene, and by having a manicure it can actually stop the nail biting because then you become more impressed with the beauty of your hands - and it doesn't take away from the masculinity, by the way, it actually enhances it."
"Thank you doctor," the caller says. "Thank you for calling, and you have a great night, OK?" It's 11pm on a Saturday night and we are halfway through Hamden's first two-hour show of the week. It airs on Radio 1 and has a listening audience generally aged between 10 and 35; the subject matter includes relationships and drug problems. The second weekly show, which takes place on Sunday nights on Radio 2, is dominated by work-related issues and has callers aged from 17 to retirement. Both nights, however, take live calls on any subject.
Across both evenings, Hamden publicly counsels dozens of callers. Men call with anger management issues, communication problems and random opinions; women call with feelings of insecurity, nightmares, domestic violence and professional ambition. Both men and women call with insomnia and the difficulties involved in adapting to life as an expatriate. Hamden, 58, the child of Lebanese immigrants to the United States, was born in a small town in West Virginia, studied fine art and became a commercial pilot before turning to psychology and running his own practice in Washington DC. He emigrated to Dubai 18 years ago and now runs the Human Relations Institute in Dubai, a wide-ranging organisation offering employee assistance programmes to companies, clinical treatment, health education and counselling. He is also a consultant forensic psychologist and trains academics and law enforcement agencies on the psychology of terrorism. Such a varied and versatile career has led to a faith which Hamden calls "a belief in god-incidence".
"I'm not governed by fate, I just believe in a higher power in life that helps us all co-ordinate with each other," he says. "When there is conflict and confusion, it's because we choose to get off that pattern, because we think we know better than the process." Hamden's approach is animated but less judgemental than most other radio advice programmes. In America, the popular Dr Laura Show, presented by the conservative commentator Laura Schlessinger, admonishes callers for having sex outside marriage, getting divorced or complaining about their problems. Hamden's style is more similar to that of Anthony Clare, the Irish psychiatrist who presented the long-running BBC series In the Psychiatrist's Chair until his death last year.
Hamden's accepting approach stems at least in part from his unusually pluralistic upbringing. A Druze who was raised as a Christian "because there were no places of worship for the Druze in America at that time", Hamden says he "believes in everything." "We were raised to be very respectful of all religions and never to have prejudice of any sort. For us to worship with anyone in their house of worship strengthens us as Druze, it does not take away from us. We believe that knowing everyone's faith and believing in everyone's beliefs is actually one of the answers to universal peace because once you can effectively communicate at different levels, there is a level of understanding among people that in itself will foster co-operation."
Such an enlightened upbringing seems to be what allows Hamden to tread a delicate path, sometimes on-air, between warring partners or people, usually women, who are being bullied by their friends or partners, and to reach a positive outcome. "I'm a gutsy kind of a guy but I'm also diplomatic about being gutsy", he says. "I'll have careful boundaries to make sure that people are not going to get hurt by what is done or said. Even with that there are going to be misinterpretations, but enabling people to understand various interpretations of the same system opens them up to less aggression and less frustration."
Hamden's approach sits particularly well in the UAE, which he says, "has become the definition of globalisation". "I used to think New York was a big, scary place, but after living in Dubai, New York is just another American city with a lot of foreigners. Dubai is a truly globalised city as it's people coming together without losing their identity. In places like New York, Paris, Tokyo and even London, people tend to integrate into a national system. Here you maintain your identity but co-ordinate as part of a large community. We've had callers in Dubai who have been victims of political trauma, as well as of events like the Asian tsunami or Hurricane Katrina."
Listeners of In the Psychologist's Chair come from almost every continent and include a high number of Emiratis. "We are particularly proud of the Emiratis and the Arabic community who call in, because they've become much more crystallised in their thinking in recent years, in terms of their attitude and their mission statement in life. They are very fluid in the way they discuss matters, which has enabled us to have people of both genders, various religions and all nationalities willing to express their opinions and give help to others. We've had people call in who said they didn't want to live any more, but because of the programme and the topics discussed, decide that they do."
Not that things are always easy. As well as thwarting suicide bids, Hamden's programme has rescued several women from abuse. "In a couple of cases we've had to call the police and involve them in rescuing people from a hostage situation. We've also helped people by calling their embassies and getting them involved. So In the Psychologist's Chair is not just about entertainment. We've had people call us to threaten us, who say that they are going to kill us for airing this kind of stuff."
Hamden also tries to educate his audience about domestic violence. "We know that this kind of behaviour is not unique to Islam or to the Gulf states; we know that even in American or British cultures there are families and home situations that are quite stringent and fundamentalistic." And countering extremism is Hamden's number one aim. "What happens with fundamentalist thinkers is that when they hear something, they don't hear what the facts are, they only hear the element that causes them controversy. So if you use the word 'sex', even if you're only talking about gender, they insist that you mean intercourse."
Still, by keeping the tone professional and scientific, Hamden claims that no topic is taboo on his show. "We help people to find a practical way of handling their situation. A positive way of doing it is to lighten up. So whether people want to talk about sexual disorders or substance abuse, homosexuality, religion or politics, as long as it is in the respected field of psychology and how it affects them, their family and their community, they can."
Hamden says there has never been any interference from the government over his programme. "We keep it professionally correct. There has never been any time where anybody felt threatened that this programme was going to hurt our country's mission or our city's mission." Indeed, it seems to have helped it. The biggest need today, Hamden says, is the need for cross-cultural awareness. "We're getting a lot more calls today about relationships that are cross-religious, cross-national, cross-cultural in general. There has to be communication, understanding, co-operation and co-ordination among families, because when you have one person from one religion and one person from another, one person from one nationality and one from another, you've not created a divide that should lead not to divorce, you've created a difference that can also be a balance."
@Email:rbehan@thenational.ae
