(Maybe don't) tell the story

Things my (former) therapist told me that I wish she hadn’t:

• Details of a night in the early 1970s when her husband, on a manic binge, picked up a woman at a well-known downtown eatery, got knifed by said woman, and called my therapist to take him to the (mental) hospital

• Her regrets over an affair she had with a friend of her husband, a man who took advantage of her youth and vulnerability in the wake of the knifing

•  “Yes, go back to school now! Better to do it now, before you’re 40!” I was 41.

• The weight issues of her daughter and the daughter’s partner

These revelations, given over a friendly cup of tea as we eased into our sessions, were conversational. My appointment was the first of the day. The husband was long dead. Perhaps her border collie was not a good listener—she needed someone to talk to. Though the conversations always made me uncomfortable, it wasn’t until later that I realized their inappropriateness.

Then there was the marriage counselor (a different marriage, a different state, a different time). Intuiting the relationship’s inevitable breakup, he provided a dramatic narrative to counter our lack of spark. He described a violent scene from his childhood, a habitually abusive parent, the resultant broken arm. You say your childhood trauma affects your ability to trust—it could be worse! he seemed to be saying. I remember nothing else about the therapy except the sandwiches my then-husband and I would eat before session in a park near the office.

And so now I am a therapist. I understand the urge to say too much. A client’s story or situation can activate the churn within. Health history. Family history. Depression history. Family depression history. That sinking feeling. Self-hatred. Fear. Anger. Dread. Shame. Embarrassment. All universally human experiences, all part of me, all tugged upon in session at some point. Yes, I survived what was an objectively traumatic adolescence. I’ve watched people die. I know what it’s like to not be chosen, to feel the hollowness of rejection. I was that age and angry, so angry, too. Does this shared experience–if you accept the premise that there is something shared about it—mean that I truly understand their experience? And if I do “truly” understand, does my expression of this apparent understanding help the person in front of me?

The answer is not straightforward. Sometimes it may help to share. But the potential to cause harm when disclosing is always there. I have self-disclosed in ways that have been appreciated. I have self-disclosed in ways that were more about me than the person in front of me. It helps to take time to think about whether self-disclosure is in service to the client. Very little good comes out of giving in in the moment to an impulse to share.

I don’t remember why we ended marriage therapy. Our time in that city and in the marriage was short. I stopped seeing that individual therapist after she broke her leg, had to change the parameters of her practice, and let me know via text. Both still see clients. Perhaps both continue to be leaky containers, allowing their own pain to spill into their sessions. As for me, I become more careful over time, crafting my boundaries, allowing a little room for sharing when indicated and carefully thought through, not perfect, but human and, hopefully, healing.

The there and now

I was off that evening, off in a way that felt shameful and grubby (and here perhaps I have already revealed too much). My job was to understand the barriers, the projections, the undigested dreck getting in the way. But all I could see were my own struggles. I don’t know how someone could tug both on the here and now and the there and then, but this someone, in that moment, did.

Writing about my work is risky business. I deal with the private lives of others. No one I work with should recognize themselves directly in my writing. But I also write to work through, to play out what is going on inside. An inevitable part of being a therapist is the way the people I accompany through the murk of emotion and personal history often touch the unsolved within me. It’s the unexamined stuff within that is the most dangerous. Like family secrets, it holds the power to obscure truth and mangle thinking. The unthought, the suppressed, muddies my vision and stunts my voice.

I thought this inability to see things clearly that evening was related to memory, to what I remembered too well and what I could no longer bring to life. My experiences with trauma and abandonment overlaid the gaps and obscured the differences between us. Then there is the boy, now entering the dangerous and creative time of becoming, his shift from child to proto-adult foreshadowing an independent life. Take one child in the in-between, others in the fertile pulse-thrumming headiness of change, and an adult with childhood and adolescent trauma constantly and consistently tugged upon… It’s too much to carry without help.

There are other interactions that wrap me in swirls of grief, both the clients’ and my own, the melancholia of time passed and gone, the people missing who can no longer share in the conversation. When the grief comes in session, I necessarily increase the space between me and the client, occupying the territory of observer more completely than usual. This place is dangerous, too, if I don’t return to myself. This was the territory I occupied that evening and much of the next day, a desolate landscape of strangulated grief and an overwhelm of fear, confusion, and self-blame.

It is through writing that I return to myself. And therapy. And in allowing room to make mistakes, to acknowledge that I am robust enough to understand and communicate the truth.

Here I am.

Planned obsolescence

The boy and his friends created a spoof religion. There was trouble in the school yard—proselytizing, competing cosmologies, groups of converts squabbling over truth. A heretic classmate brought a thin metal rod to press his point, accompanied by a fellow traveler with a camera to film the potential violence. Nothing came of it but the frisson of excitement.

I recommended Lord of the Flies to the boy. He got the point. In the last weeks of group supervision, burned out on the whole affair of collaboration, stuck in the atomistic world view formed in my sparse childhood with its crumbling cliff’s edge of connection, I let my crank flag fly. We’re all doomed, I say. The die has been cast for us. Maybe for the planet, too. Nothing gold can stay. I see in shades of gray. At this moment, the cloud cover in my mind is heavy, waiting for a brisk front to wipe the slate clean again.

All I have to offer is humanity bound in imperfection, a tug on your sleeve, a whisper as you pass, a glance that you may or may not catch as I brush by. I’m in love with this language and how it flows from the source, that ache in my chest and the memory of minds gone like my mind and all the rest will eventually go. I work one human to another, the self in all its crenulations and battered glory meeting another self. We’re doomed. We’re problematic. Let’s create meaning and connection in the face of eventual nothingness while we still can..

I think about this a lot.

The boy coughs upstairs, hiding away after being away, recovering from an intensity of civics and civility. I had a life before him and will have something different after he leaves. This leaving happens in bits and pieces, in independent moves and symbolic pushes. What is now shall dissipate. What comes after will endure the same fate. Time creates us. If we’re lucky, it will allow us to become memories. Eventually even that status shall go.

It is a life’s work to accept this disappearing, to live in the moments we create. I do what I can.

Transmission

I was a bit down yesterday. There have been shifts in my practice, must be goings and almost goings and those who slip one foot out the door before sidestepping back in. I’ve been blindsided. I’ve had hunches confirmed. I plan difficult conversations that go in unexpected directions and I am simultaneously relieved and unsettled.

My work requires me to hold other peoples’ psyches. I carry the ambiguity and ambivalence, the unconscious urges and unexpressed thoughts, for all of us. There is guilt and indirectness. There are hidden messages and agendas. There are my own blind spots and tired places. Sometimes I just want to let sleeping thoughts and feelings lie, even when it is my job to keep them in mind.

I felt melancholy and used up. It was rainy and gray and I had work to do. I made a fire because fire soothes me. I worked through it. People will come and go and maybe there are things I could have done and maybe there are not. I pride myself on my faith in the process, on this weird optimism that makes my work feasible. Holding a space, grasping the threads of hope in the fabric of unprocessed experience, feels useful. But sometimes the threads slip through my fingers. They break. They sever. Maybe I was the one who did the cutting. Maybe I was the one who looked away while someone else wielded the shears.

I let the emptiness fill me. I took comfort in the fact that I shared this alien, alone feeling with others, the apprehension that there is nobody and we are nobody and nothing is worth anything. That’s a sort of thread, too, a melancholic line so slack that we don’t know we’re woven out of the same loose cloth.

I thought of the versions of me across time, the unbearable lonely eras that I bore and now give witness to.

I am not alone. I have you, for this moment. And in the moments when you are not here, I will remember you and the time we shared, one mind to another.

Of blank slates and sleeper sofas

I moved offices almost two months ago. My previous office, aka “the coffin” was an ok-enough rectangular room with dim lighting, two windows facing on a hallway, and a mysterious therapy couch that turned out to be a sleeper sofa complete with sheets and blanket (something I never would have suspected had one of my kid clients not removed the cushions one afternoon). My new office has skylights, a window with a glimpse of cloud and sun, and furniture (no sleeper sofa!) and artwork of my choice. Oh, and a door that I can lock and unlock with a key, which my previous office lacked.

The (open) coffin was located in a building downtown with downtown problems, including expensive, hard-to-find parking and a ubiquitous, generally mentally ill contingent of folks who were homeless and sometimes difficult. My new office is not completely inoculated from urban issues, though the parking situation is better. The building itself is homey, from the bathrooms with post-it notes (“Baby, it’s cold outside,” read one by the window lock, “use incense.”) to my suite’s comforting aura of herbal teas and reheated casseroles. Even the therapeutic naïveté that allows clinicians to leave a lighter by that bathroom incense charms me. There are apparently no fears of clients with pyromaniacal tendencies putting it to a less altruistic use, such as lighting the rice paper that lines the window or creating a conflagration of paper towels. Here we are all in pursuit of self-knowledge, our inner demons keeping a curious, respectful distance while we politely and thoroughly fumigate bathrooms after use.

It’s a building that engenders affection in me for my adopted hometown and my chosen profession, strange as the job feels at times. And the ability, the privilege, to decorate my office from floor to window has been wonderful. I have a room of my own as a grown-up, a neat and tidy space that houses my working life and provides a physical frame for my sessions.

But it’s also very “me.” While I don’t think any office decorating decision is neutral, some are more personal than others. My choices reflect my quirks, known and unknown. I am aware of the potential for clients to respond to my furnishings in a variety of ways and have done my best to choose inoffensive items that also do not appropriate from other cultures. Still, reactions are inevitable. What happens when a client has a strong response to my décor and art?

It happened (out loud) in a recent session and it was fascinating. And unnerving. I wish I could tell you about it. Instead, I’ll file it away in the “grist for the mill” category, recognizing that no interaction—and no therapist—can occupy absolutely neutral ground. We take a stance through how we look and how we talk, through the artwork on our walls (even when that artwork is not of our choosing), and the clothing we wear. The client forms an idea about us based on their own experiences, assumptions, associations, and memories. It’s what we do with this stuff of the mind, how we hold room to talk about and reflect on it, that creates the space for meaning and connection.

But I can give you one piece of advice. If you are a therapist in the market for an office couch and find yourself contemplating a sleeper sofa, go ahead and buy it if you’re getting a good deal. But don’t outfit it with sheets and blankets. Don’t use it for sleeping. A nap stretched out on an office couch is one thing. A sleep in between the sheets on a pull-out couch in your office is another. One is restorative. The other is a bit creepy. Yes, even the supposedly neutral act of sleeping is not without meaning, but make meaning of this one with your therapist on your own time.

(This post originally had a picture of my office, but with privacy in mind, I decided to remove it and put up a vibrant picture of rhododendrons in bloom instead.)