Makeup artist Chris Scott prepares Tara Fields before a segment
‘TV shrink’ dispenses advice on local and national programs
Tara Fields can’t stop the small talk. She’s chatty. She’s talky. She has a million friends and a million stories. She flits from subject to subject, from aside to anecdote, all interspersed with laughs and the occasional “Oy vey!” The focus is everywhere.
And then it narrows to the pinpoint.
The microphone is on.
On this morning, the Mill Valley psychotherapist who calls herself “a TV shrink” is in the KGO radio studios with morning host Ronn Owens. The subject is Mel Gibson’s roadside anti-Semitic outbursts. It’s been the scandal buzz of the celebrity news feed all week and Fields has a lot to say.
She ponders whether the apologies issued through a publicist are sincere. “We can’t tell if he’s remorseful or not.” She questions the source of Gibson’s rage. “Depression is anger turned inward.” She talks to callers. She argues with Owens. She leans into the microphone. She offers hope. “How many people are going into rehab because of Mel Gibson?”
She fills the hour.
And then the microphone turns off, and the focus goes wide again.
Fields doesn’t stop being “Dr. Tara” when she’s not on the air. She just turns down the volume.
The title “TV shrink” is not one that comes up on career aptitude tests. Field is free to mold the definition. She shows up every other week on KRON’s Saturday “Morning Daybreak” show. The spots she tapes with Jack Hanson run on the Comcast “Local Edition” every hour on the cable system’s CNN feed. The week before her hour with Owens, MSNBC sent a limousine to her house to bring her to a taping.
She is a regular on the A&E program “Intervention,” and she taped a segment with Oprah that will air later this month.
She’s busy. She loves it.
She needs it.
Fields: Passionate about her convictions, from social issues to creating a dog park in Mill Valley
Fields is a contradiction moving at blur speeds. She is an obvious extrovert in the world’s loneliest profession. Therapists don’t talk. They listen. And then they can’t talk about anything they hear. A woman who studied acting with Lee Strasberg painted herself off the stage. A woman endowed with, as media mentor Dr. Dean Edell says, “the gift of gab,” found a career that ensured she had nothing to talk about.
“My husband can’t ever say, ‘Honey, how was your day?’” Fields says. “You can’t talk about it, you really can’t.”
So she found a way to talk.
Fields never really strayed too far from the spotlight. She’d come to California from New York aiming for an acting career. She didn’t want to be discovered, she says. She just wanted to act. But the kind of acting she was talking about and the kind of Hollywood she found were not the match she hoped. She recalls an “existential crisis” in her early 20s that took her out of the business altogether.
And into psychotherapy, first as a patient and later as a therapist. She studied psychology at Antioch University in Los Angeles and did her internship at a Beverly Hills clinic. She got her license. She launched a practice. But she was already craving a stage. She got involved in a pilot for a show on the psychodrama therapeutic technique. She got some radio time. By the time she moved to Mill Valley in the early ’90s – “Life’s too short to live in L.A.” -she was comfortable behind the mike and polished in front of the camera.
When she met Edell, she made him a mentor.
Fields was a natural, Edell says. “There are some people you just see instantly that they’ve got it,” Edell says. “That’s Tara.”
The ability to speak on any topic at any moment and sound intelligent made her a welcome commodity all over the Bay Area. Before long she was doing regular spots on KTVU’s “Mornings On Two” and then rushing across the bay to tape segments for KRON. She had a Saturday night radio show in Santa Rosa and became an afternoon alternative to the much-reviled Dr. Laura Schlessinger.
She didn’t just like the attention. It became a mission.
“It felt like it’s a calling,” she says.
The idea of missions and “a calling” is not a surprise to mystery writer Harley Jane Kozak, who lived upstairs from Fields in a Los Angles duplex. “She’s a person of passionately held convictions,” Kozak says.
Fields grew up marching in civil rights demonstrations with her parents. She doesn’t just want to talk. She wants to speak up. “Any place where somebody needs a voice, Tara is that voice,” Kozak remarks.
Kozak says her longtime friend is the kind of person who makes people stop and listen.
“Where I want to just fade into the woodwork, Tara is out front demanding a better table at restaurant and demanding equal rights for everybody,” Kozak says. “If she had not gone into psychology, she would have made a really great lawyer or politician.”
Not all the causes are earth-shattering social issues. In the ’90s she was part of a Mill Valley crusade to establish dogs and their owners in the town’s Bayfront Park. She’s near militant on the subject of dog rescue, condemning anybody who buys from a breeder when there are so many dogs that need homes.
The passion makes her convincing. It’s not just that Fields can talk on camera, on cue. She is sincere on no shortage of subjects. Ross McGowan, who hosts KTVU’s “Mornings on Two,” praises Field’s ability to come off as a caring human and not some jargon-spouting psychology theorist. “You an always count on her,” McGowan says. “She comes in and she knows the story.”
Watching her shift gears when the mike goes live, it would be easy to doubt that sincerity. When she leans forward in her chair, the posture looks almost too professional.
Comcast’s Hanson has watched that transformation and he’s come to understand Field’s sincerity. “She’s got multiple personalities and I don’t mean that in a negative way,” says Hanson, who hosts “Local Edition” segments in Comcast markets around the Bay Area. “When she comes on, she knows she’s a performer but she’s not a performer who is acting. It’s just a different part of her personality.”
Fields has personality to spare. She’s at the dog park every day, consulting with the canines and their human counterparts (she met her husband there). She goes to Spirit Rock at least once a week – “That’s one of the many communities I’m plugged into,” she says. She has patients most afternoons. She has an agent, and he’s still maneuvering for a “dream TV thing.”
For a woman who entered the world’s loneliest profession, she’s never far from an audience.
The audience is everywhere, as wide as her off-the-air focus. She can talk. And she does.
To anybody who will listen.
Whether the microphone is on.
Or off.
The High-Stakes Price Children Pay When a Parent Sneaks Around
/in Affairs, Blog, Featured, Parenting, Relationships /by Tara Fields Ph.D., M.F.T.After all, as adults, they possess the freedom of choice, and in choosing to cheat, one presumes that the participants are also cognitively choosing to suffer the consequences. Read more
Shrink To Fit
/in Featured In The Press /by Tara Fields Ph.D., M.F.T.“Um, hello, Doctor? Um, I’m seven months pregnant and I found out my husband has been having an affair with a neighbor. But it’s usually only after he’s been drinking more than usual. I quit my job when we got married, and I really love him. But now I don’t trust him and don’t know what to do.” Read more
House Calls
/in Featured In The Press /by Tara Fields Ph.D., M.F.T.Dr. Tara Fields says her “psych-talk” show is entertaining and helpful, but should not replace formal therapy sessions
“Radio psychologists provide listeners with a therapeutic blend of sympathy and insight”
Read more
The Doctor Is On The Air
/in Featured In The Press /by Tara Fields Ph.D., M.F.T.“Start me up and I don’t stop,” says, Marin based therapist Dr. Tara Fields from the offices of KPIX-FM, where she hosts the new call-in “Dr. Tara Fields Show” for the all-talk radio station.
Fields couldn’t be better suited for the job. Hot off her three-hour afternoon gig giving advice, reality checks, comfort and a motivational prod to caller who seek her psychotherapeutic know-how, the doctor is riffing like a guitar hero in the spotlight. Several times during the interview, she brings her bullet-train of words to a sudden halt – to apologize for her talkativeness.
“Just jump in,” she suggests with manic glee. “I talk. That’s why they hired me.”
While Dr. Tara Fields of KPIX-FM is in some ways like Frasier, TV’s top radio-shrink, she insists: “I have more hair and a better relationship with my dog.”
While watching Fields do her insta-shrink thing behind the glass of her studio booth; it’s not hard to be blown away by her skill at practical chat. Calls come in concerning every domestic situation you can name – from a wife concerned about her long-time husband’s declining standards of personal hygiene to a woman stood up by her fiance just before the wedding – and Fields has something pithy to say about it. Snippets of advice roll off her tongue as if coated with Teflon.
“I’ve been doing this as a licensed therapist with a private practice for 12, 13, 14 years, so nothing really surprises me,” she says before hitting up the interviewer for a single snack chip. (“I can eat just one. Watch me.”) “The real challenge is to sift out people who really need to be referred somewhere else. I try to be sensitive to the fact that I don’t know who they are and then get them on the right path.
“I’m different from a lot of on-the-air therapists in that I try to get people to come to their own answers, which I think most of them have. Forget about what Aunt Tilly’s telling you or what society thinks.”
“I’m different from a lot of on-the-air therapists in that I try to get people to come to their own answers, which I think most of them have. How many of us grew up with someone saying, ‘You can trust yourself?’
Forget about what Aunt Tilly’s telling you or what society thinks.”
Judging by a short visit to the station, Fields’ read on things seem sound. The woman with the stinky husband, for example, was left to ponder the possibility that her partner’s infrequent get-to-gethers with Mr. Soap might be an indirect method of communicating his dissatisfaction with the marriage and an incredibly effective way of telling his wife to literally keep her distance.
“People call in because they’re stuck, they’re helpless, they’re crying and they think they’ve lost Prince Charming,” she recalls. “And by the end of the show Wes (Hendrix, her engineer) is playing ‘Sisters Are Doing It for Themselves’ and the caller is saying, ‘Yes! I’m so glad he’s out of my life.’ “It feeds me and I can’t deny that some of this is entertainment. When I was auditioning for this job, I decided that I had to acomplish three things. I had to help people. I knew I had to be entertaining or it wasn’t going to work. And I had to have fun doing it.”
Through the conversation, Fields repeatedly brings up the topic of ratings and what she won’t do to get them – belittle callers who are already suffering from poor self-esteem, tell women to get or not to get abortions, take advantage of extremely vulnerable people. If someone is struggling with something as extreme as suicide, they won’t get on the air. Instead, Fields’ producer and phone attendant Allyson Geller will refer the troubled soul to the appropriate agency. Fields – also a resident therapist for KRON-TV’s “Saturday Daybreak” – strives to keep her ethics sound and her ego in check.
She puts it this way several times throughout the interview: “If I wanted to be cult leader of the world, I’d want them to depend on me.”
But the frequency with which Fields alludes to ratings suggests that regardless of her status as a mental health care professional do-gooder, there is a bottom line: Fields must bring in loyal listeners. Her advertisers wouldn’t have it any other way.
Ordinary therapists see clients for 50 minutes at a time, often weekly, over months or even years. Most psychologists are keen to let their patients do most of the talking. Although both parties must watch the clock, neither must pause for commercials. If Fields behaved over the air in the time-tested prescribed fashion, the result would be radio-shrink C-Span. You can imagine how many fans that would attract.
Instead Fields is more like a real-life equivalent of “Frasier” – a personality to help the psychologically needy and chase big ratings.
“Frasier’s also not afraid to be human,” she says of the sit-com sensation. “You see behind the scenes that he cares and has a good heart. But let’s acknowledge that I have more hair and a better relationship with my dog.”
Before studying psychology, she pursued a life in the theater and even studied with the famous Method acting guru Lee Strasberg. Her current day career skills were honed in Los-Angeles, where she established a thriving therapy practice and facilitated women’s groups.
Her theatrical experience shows. Fields looks and speaks more like a movie star then you average Berkely-based touchy-feely type. And one gets the sense that Fields might just be a better talker than she is a listener.
“What people hear on this air is me,” says Fields. “But they may be surprised to know that there are moments in my life when I’m not talking.”
The Gift of Gab
/in Featured In The Press /by Tara Fields Ph.D., M.F.T.Makeup artist Chris Scott prepares Tara Fields before a segment
‘TV shrink’ dispenses advice on local and national programs
Tara Fields can’t stop the small talk. She’s chatty. She’s talky. She has a million friends and a million stories. She flits from subject to subject, from aside to anecdote, all interspersed with laughs and the occasional “Oy vey!” The focus is everywhere.
And then it narrows to the pinpoint.
The microphone is on.
On this morning, the Mill Valley psychotherapist who calls herself “a TV shrink” is in the KGO radio studios with morning host Ronn Owens. The subject is Mel Gibson’s roadside anti-Semitic outbursts. It’s been the scandal buzz of the celebrity news feed all week and Fields has a lot to say.
She ponders whether the apologies issued through a publicist are sincere. “We can’t tell if he’s remorseful or not.” She questions the source of Gibson’s rage. “Depression is anger turned inward.” She talks to callers. She argues with Owens. She leans into the microphone. She offers hope. “How many people are going into rehab because of Mel Gibson?”
She fills the hour.
And then the microphone turns off, and the focus goes wide again.
Fields doesn’t stop being “Dr. Tara” when she’s not on the air. She just turns down the volume.
The title “TV shrink” is not one that comes up on career aptitude tests. Field is free to mold the definition. She shows up every other week on KRON’s Saturday “Morning Daybreak” show. The spots she tapes with Jack Hanson run on the Comcast “Local Edition” every hour on the cable system’s CNN feed. The week before her hour with Owens, MSNBC sent a limousine to her house to bring her to a taping.
She is a regular on the A&E program “Intervention,” and she taped a segment with Oprah that will air later this month.
She’s busy. She loves it.
She needs it.
Fields: Passionate about her convictions, from social issues to creating a dog park in Mill Valley
Fields is a contradiction moving at blur speeds. She is an obvious extrovert in the world’s loneliest profession. Therapists don’t talk. They listen. And then they can’t talk about anything they hear. A woman who studied acting with Lee Strasberg painted herself off the stage. A woman endowed with, as media mentor Dr. Dean Edell says, “the gift of gab,” found a career that ensured she had nothing to talk about.
“My husband can’t ever say, ‘Honey, how was your day?’” Fields says. “You can’t talk about it, you really can’t.”
So she found a way to talk.
Fields never really strayed too far from the spotlight. She’d come to California from New York aiming for an acting career. She didn’t want to be discovered, she says. She just wanted to act. But the kind of acting she was talking about and the kind of Hollywood she found were not the match she hoped. She recalls an “existential crisis” in her early 20s that took her out of the business altogether.
And into psychotherapy, first as a patient and later as a therapist. She studied psychology at Antioch University in Los Angeles and did her internship at a Beverly Hills clinic. She got her license. She launched a practice. But she was already craving a stage. She got involved in a pilot for a show on the psychodrama therapeutic technique. She got some radio time. By the time she moved to Mill Valley in the early ’90s – “Life’s too short to live in L.A.” -she was comfortable behind the mike and polished in front of the camera.
When she met Edell, she made him a mentor.
Fields was a natural, Edell says. “There are some people you just see instantly that they’ve got it,” Edell says. “That’s Tara.”
The ability to speak on any topic at any moment and sound intelligent made her a welcome commodity all over the Bay Area. Before long she was doing regular spots on KTVU’s “Mornings On Two” and then rushing across the bay to tape segments for KRON. She had a Saturday night radio show in Santa Rosa and became an afternoon alternative to the much-reviled Dr. Laura Schlessinger.
She didn’t just like the attention. It became a mission.
“It felt like it’s a calling,” she says.
The idea of missions and “a calling” is not a surprise to mystery writer Harley Jane Kozak, who lived upstairs from Fields in a Los Angles duplex. “She’s a person of passionately held convictions,” Kozak says.
Fields grew up marching in civil rights demonstrations with her parents. She doesn’t just want to talk. She wants to speak up. “Any place where somebody needs a voice, Tara is that voice,” Kozak remarks.
Kozak says her longtime friend is the kind of person who makes people stop and listen.
“Where I want to just fade into the woodwork, Tara is out front demanding a better table at restaurant and demanding equal rights for everybody,” Kozak says. “If she had not gone into psychology, she would have made a really great lawyer or politician.”
Not all the causes are earth-shattering social issues. In the ’90s she was part of a Mill Valley crusade to establish dogs and their owners in the town’s Bayfront Park. She’s near militant on the subject of dog rescue, condemning anybody who buys from a breeder when there are so many dogs that need homes.
The passion makes her convincing. It’s not just that Fields can talk on camera, on cue. She is sincere on no shortage of subjects. Ross McGowan, who hosts KTVU’s “Mornings on Two,” praises Field’s ability to come off as a caring human and not some jargon-spouting psychology theorist. “You an always count on her,” McGowan says. “She comes in and she knows the story.”
Watching her shift gears when the mike goes live, it would be easy to doubt that sincerity. When she leans forward in her chair, the posture looks almost too professional.
Comcast’s Hanson has watched that transformation and he’s come to understand Field’s sincerity. “She’s got multiple personalities and I don’t mean that in a negative way,” says Hanson, who hosts “Local Edition” segments in Comcast markets around the Bay Area. “When she comes on, she knows she’s a performer but she’s not a performer who is acting. It’s just a different part of her personality.”
Fields has personality to spare. She’s at the dog park every day, consulting with the canines and their human counterparts (she met her husband there). She goes to Spirit Rock at least once a week – “That’s one of the many communities I’m plugged into,” she says. She has patients most afternoons. She has an agent, and he’s still maneuvering for a “dream TV thing.”
For a woman who entered the world’s loneliest profession, she’s never far from an audience.
The audience is everywhere, as wide as her off-the-air focus. She can talk. And she does.
To anybody who will listen.
Whether the microphone is on.
Or off.
“Frasier” Type Takes Dr. Laura’s KPIX Slot”
/in Featured In The Press /by Tara Fields Ph.D., M.F.T.Kelsey Grammer plays Dr. Frasier Crane on "Frasier."
The final topic on the Dr. Tara Fields show this day: sexless sleep-overs. “This is apparently a trend right now, and it makes a lot of sense to me, says Fields, a Marin County therapist who took over Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s old time slot from noon to 3 p.m. on KPIX-FM (95.7) two weeks ago.
Fields, whose soft and friendly style is in sharp contrast to the opinionated Schlessinger, now on KGO-AM (810), is finding her way. Think Oprah or Phil Donahue.
“Some people like to be told what told do, others want advice,” said KPIX general manger Blaise Howard. “Tara is more liberal, she fits in with the Bay Area lifestyle.”
Two weeks ago she made what she calls a huge commitment when she took the job at KPIX, filling the daily three-hour slot.
“I’ve never signed a contract in my life,” she said. “This is really my first full-time job and I’m taking this very seriously.”
She and Schlessinger do not know each other and Fields does not take the opportunity to bash her rival, who is fast becoming a household name. “My style is not as black and white,” she says. “Laura has an agenda; I treat each person as an individual.
Joseph is on Line 4. He wants to talk about infidelity, an earlier topic this day. Cheating, says Dr. Tara, sounding a little like Dr. Laura, is always wrong. The caller admits he’s cheated on his girlfriend, who knows about his dalliances but doesn’t want to hear the details. Joseph feels vindicated. “I’ve cheated, but not openly,” he says.
“What does that mean? You’ve never cheated in wide-open pastures? Fields replies. “Please don’t tell me you are trying to justify this.”
He interrupts her. “Let me finish,” he snaps. “OK, I’ll shut up,” Fields says. Later, she scolds him, gently as can be. “Joseph, can I talk now? You sound like a smart guy, but you are acting like a jerk.”
Fields press release heralds her as the “Frasier” of the Bay Area. It’s not far from the truth, and she’ll buy it. “But I have a better relationship with my dog and more hair.”
By Sylvia Rubin
Chronicle Staff Writer
A Nutty Nutcracker
/in Featured In The Press /by Tara Fields Ph.D., M.F.T.Tara Fields, KRON-TV psychotherapist, rehearses at the Paramount Theatre.
Except for his missing ballet slippers, Tony La Russa looks at home on the Oakland Ballet’s Nutcracker set.
His eyes focused on the dancer in front of him, the former A’s manager matches the famous score, looking every bit the part of the toy soldier heading for battle with the Rat King and his legions.
Too bad the dancer in front of him can’t stop giggling long enough to remember her steps. The dancer is none other than Tara Fields, KRON-TV Channel 4’s resident psychotherapist.
Field’s partner in mischief is KMEL-FM (106) radio’s house party DJ Renel, who’s cracking jokes faster than you can say “Merry Christmas.”
In a unique community effort, the local celebrities donned dance slippers Tuesday afternoon at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland to rehearse for their Friday night performance, the ninth annual All-Star Night at the Nutcracker.
Renel, leading the haphazard dance troupe of stars with Field’s at her side, looks out at the audience and poses with a wide smile — promptly stopping the procession.
“Whoops!” she says before she and Fields break out in another round of giggles.
Looking tired, Oakland ballet’s artistic director Ronn Guidi can’t hold back a laugh. Certainly his other dancers wouldn’t get away with such shenanigans, but directing 11 celebrities, including A’s pitcher Todd Van Poppel and KTVU -TV’s Doug Murphy, in “the Nutcracker” ballet, isn’t something Guidi does every day.
It’s more like once a year. Formally called A’s night at the Nutcracker, the event is eagerly anticipated by both the audience and the celebrity participants as a Bay Area holiday tradition. The popular event has sold out every year.
Celebrities slated to perform alongside Oakland ballet company members Friday include KTVU- TV Channel 2’s Dennis Richmond, KPIX-TV channel 5’s Doug Murphy, retired Warrior’s player Nate Thurmond and KRON-TV Channel 4’s Henry Tenenbaum.
Former A's manager Tony La Russa rehearses with Oakland Ballet and other celebrities for the "Nutcracker."
“The biggest thrill for me is getting to be with Tony La Russa, because I am the world’s biggest A’s fan,” Renel, a proud Oakland native, confides backstage.
Though La Russa left in the A’s this year to manage the St. Louis Cardinals, his commitment to the community based festivity hasn’t faded. His daughters, Bianca and Devon, who are both accomplished ballerinas, Bill dance by his side Friday night, with Devon as the lead, Marie. La Russa has let his support to the program by helping organize and participate in the event since 1987.
“Both the Oakland ballet and to the Oakland A’s target the community (in their work), so it’s only fitting that they join forces,” says Kathy Jacobson, former director of media relations for the A’s.
“Athletes work so hard training, both mentally and physically. And it’s the same with the ballet (dancers),” she says. “(The celebrities) were amazed at how hard the dancers worked, and the two groups developed a mutual respect. It has worked out to a wonderful partnership.”
Which is why Fields agreed to participate. She just didn’t count on having such a good time.
“It’s so much more fun than I thought it would be,” Fields says, pulling on her bonbon costume for her next scene.
Van Poppel, who danced in the event two years ago, had one reservation about returning — he didn’t want such a tight costume this year.
“His parents split right up the back last time because he was too big,” Jacobson says of the player, who flew in from Dallas to participate. “So when I asked him to be in it this year, he said, ‘could you please tell them to get bigger pants?’ “.
It’s a motley crew, that’s for sure. Van Poppel marches next to Bay Meadows jockey Luis Juaregui, trying not to trip over the flustered KFRC-AM (610) DJ Cammie Blackstone, who’s unsure if she’s got her steps down correctly.
But the Oakland ballet company is on hand to lend its expertise. The dancers smile with amusement, watching the celebrities stumble through their scenes.
“The dancers have been so wonderful,” Fields says.
“Yeah, but I think there communicated with us,” Renel notes. “They think were big geeks.”
The Buzz 100.7 FM
/in Featured In The Press /by Tara Fields Ph.D., M.F.T.Dr. Tara Fields brings her entertaining psychotherapeutic know-how to listeners in the Puget Sound region on the area’s FM talk station, The Buzz 100.7 FM.
Fields is young, bright, has a quick wit and is very hip. She is a psychotherapist and her local show takes on issues like finding and keeping a healthy love relationship, parenting, marital issues and balancing careers.
Fields is not afraid to be human, something she sees in common with her “Frasier” TV counterpart. “You see behind the scenes that he cares,” says Fields, “and that he has a good heart. But let’s acknowledge that I have more hair and a better relationship with my dog.”
Fields says she isn’t doing therapy on her show and believes it’s unethical to give listeners snappy answers or glib criticism.
“I give some strong opinions, but the ball is in their court,” Fields says. “My intent with the show is just to get people on the right path, to open up about their problems. There are no quick fixes and I remind my listeners they need to seek help for tougher problems.”
For Lovers Only
/in Featured In The Press /by Tara Fields Ph.D., M.F.T.