Public Biography
Dr. Judith Fenn-Caraway is a licensed clinical psychologist in Ridgewood, New Jersey, specializing in marital and couples communication. She has maintained a private practice in Bergen County for an estimated twenty-two years and holds an adjunct appointment in the Department of Psychology at Rutgers University, where she teaches a graduate seminar titled “Language, Silence, and the Domestic Interior.”
Dr. Fenn-Caraway received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2002, where her dissertation examined what she termed “conversational non-sequiturs as relational strategy in long-term cohabitating couples.” She is the author of You’re Not Listening and Neither Am I: Communication Failures in the American Marriage (Basic Books, 2018), which spent three weeks on the New York Times paperback nonfiction list and was described by Psychology Today as “the most depressing book about marriage that is somehow also the most accurate.”
She has been quoted in numerous publications on the subject of domestic communication breakdown and has testified as an expert witness in four divorce proceedings in Bergen County Superior Court, each of which she has described as “entirely preventable and completely inevitable.”
Since June 2026 she has treated Phil Amato of Paramus, a retired housing inspector whose decades-long practice of talking to himself has given way to ranting to himself. She has said the case falls squarely within her practice and that, lacking an appropriate intake form, she used the couples form and filled it out twice. She attributes the change to the loss of a shared project at retirement, and has described asking the quieter partner what he wanted. “He had a great deal to say,” she said.
Dr. Fenn-Caraway lives in Glen Rock, New Jersey, with her husband, whom she has described in interviews as “a good man who occasionally says things that have nothing to do with what we are talking about.”
Articles
- Man, Told by Wife to Stop Using Bidet After Stinking Up Bathroom, Asks Whether She Has Ever Stood Next to a Distant Wall and Listened to the Echo of Her Voice — Mrs. Hagerty confirmed that she has not, in fact, ever stood next to a distant wall and listened to the echo of her voice.
- Man Who Once Talked to Himself Now Only Rants to Himself, and Says He Tries Not to Take It Personally — Asked how it felt to be on the receiving end, Mr. Amato said he knew it wasn't about him, because he knew where he was coming from.