Four Therapists
I have had four different therapists throughout my life. Actually five if I count Gordon, but I don’t know if he should be counted. Gordon was a wizened academic who’d become a therapist after his retirement from teaching. We met for about three months over Zoom. He would sit on his couch and rest his computer on his lap, this creating an upward angle that revealed the insides of his untrimmed nostrils.
Gordon seemed to sometimes remember me the way someone at the nursing home might remember you, meaning he knew we’d met before but the details were fuzzy. He once fell asleep in a session. I was mid-sentence when I noticed one eyelid slam down. And then the other eyelid. And then his head drooped to the side. I waited in silence, thinking about saying something but not wanting to embarrass him. He suddenly startled awake and began talking, his first sentence making absolutely no sense, but then one sentence built on another, and he was again saying something coherent about my situation.
He would spend a fair amount of time each session asking me questions from different psychological assessments, promising that this would help us to really “get at the issue.” The issue was my ex-girlfriend, specifically, how deep down I didn’t want to be with her but for some reason felt hopelessly addicted to her.
“On a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being least desirable and 5 being most desirable, rate how desirable you find the thought of using your mouth, lips, and tongue to pleasure your partner’s anus.” He always promised that he would email me the assessment results, something that never happened. He would begin the next session by assuring me that he was committed to “get at the issue” and then start asking me more assessment questions. He would sometimes offer fascinating, although not entirely relevant, lessons about evolutionary psychology.
I don’t mean to turn Gordon into a caricature. I do remember one session in which, too embarrassed to look up at him, I confessed that I had messed up that weekend. “You slept with Renee,” he said. I reminded him that I’d been trying so hard to stay away from her, but then she invited me over for dinner, and while her daughter sat at the kitchen table and chatted with a friend over FaceTime, she led me into her bedroom under the guise that we should go somewhere quiet to talk. “You’re a human being,” Gordon told me, “and human beings like sex. There’s no shame in that. You don’t want to have sex with her again — fine, I understand, and you and I are working to get at that. In the meantime, there’s no reason to shame yourself for being human.”
The following week, he asked if I had again seen Renee, and I admitted that I had. “Did you sleep with her?” I looked down and told him that I hadn’t. “You just looked down,” he observed. I looked back up at him. “Don,” he said, “there’s no shame in that. Remember, you’re human.” So Gordon wasn’t always oblivious, but all the same, I had to eventually admit to myself that he didn’t actually know how to “get at the issue.”
* * * * *
Eight years before Gordon there had been Violet. I remember sitting on her blue velvet couch that first time, silently commanding myself to stop tapping my foot. Violet had cropped black hair and a penetrating gaze, and I had never before met with a therapist and for some reason feared that she would be scrutinizing and drawing insights from everything I did, even the most seemingly inconsequential gesture. Violet asked what I hoped to get out of therapy.
“I’m not happy,” I told her. “I’m married to a wonderful person. She’s wonderful, she’s basically perfect, and I’d be devastated if we weren’t together.” I crossed one leg over the other and wondered what meaning she might discern from this. “But I’m in love with someone else. And this other woman, Renee, is not even wonderful. She’s the farthest thing from perfect. We work together, and she’s always this nervous mess. She questions everything she does, and I always feel the need to come along and reassure her.”
Violet asked more questions, and I responded with verve and intelligence and kept expressing myself with bigger words, wanting to impress her. “Here’s my problem,” I said. “My wife and I are starring together in this Disney movie, but I’ve been miscast. Nothing against my wife, but I should be on HBO.”
“I’m going to give you a homework assignment. You live in your head, you think all the time, and because you’re so busy thinking, you don’t act. So before our next session, I want you to tell Renee how you feel about her.” I clarified her instructions. “You don’t have to do anything more than that. Just tell her how you feel. You need to live in your head less and the real world more.”
Violet was definitely onto something, as I was stuck in my ruminations, and this was making for a miserable existence, but I can see now that her “homework assignment” augured our eventual falling out. It was presumptuous for her, having known me for less than an hour, to give such potentially life-upending advice. But more than just that, it was infantilizing, suggesting that she felt she had the right to tell me how to live my life.
I had always had family members — especially my father and grandfather — tell me how to live my life and get upset if I didn’t listen, and this, I can now see, is why I had become stuck in the first place. There were already too many voices in my head, and these voices were so loud and harsh that I had trouble hearing my own voice. What I needed was help making sense of everything happening inside me, not another person telling me what to do.
This is not to say that I did not derive any benefit from my time with Violet. During our first few sessions, I shared how badly I wanted to break free from the endless, suffocating expectations that others had placed on me and start living an authentic life. She would look at me with those penetrating eyes, and I felt that she was on my side, that she felt my frustration and sensed my potential for something greater.
Violet said during our third session that there were answers to be found, real answers, but they could only be found through meditation. I didn’t know how to meditate, so she told me to close my eyes and right then and there explained what to do. Focus on my breath in, and focus on my breath out, if my mind wanders, gently bring it back to my breath in, and back to my breath out. She gave me a new homework assignment, to meditate for fifteen minutes every day until our next session.
The following week I reported that I meditated just one time, finding the whole experience painfully boring. She again said that the answers I sought could only be found through meditation. But weren’t there other ways to get these answers? She said there weren’t. But how would focusing on my breath provide answers? She said this was something I needed to experience for myself. Had she found her own answers through meditation? She had. If I did this every day, just sat there and focused on my breath, would the answers one day just pop into my mind? She said that everyone’s journey was different. But how long would it take? Months? Years? She said everyone’s path was different. Was there really no other way? No, she said, this was the way.
Violet, I was starting to learn, had very strong opinions about how I should be living my life, and she grew increasingly annoyed when I didn’t agree. Shortly after I announced that I’d given up meditation for good, we spent a better part of a session going back and forth over whether some action I wanted to take contradicted one of my previously stated life goals. I don’t remember the specific point of contention, but she took the affirmative position, while I explained that yes, there was a contradiction but only because I now realized that I had an additional, contradictory life goal, and it wasn’t clear which goal should take precedence. Violet, like a perseverating child, kept making the same point over and over.
I entered our next session hoping to summon the courage to tell her I wanted to stop therapy, but she began by saying that she’d talked to her clinical adviser about our previous session and now realized that she’d had a strong countertransference reaction to me, meaning she had responded to me the way she had responded to a person in her past and that I was likely doing the same. She apologized, and I decided to continue working with her.
* * * * *
Although I eventually got divorced, I could never bring myself to commit fully to Renee. I told myself that my ex-wife and I were meant to be friends, not partners, but the thought of moving further away from her and closer to Renee terrified me. If I thought about this for too long, I would start weeping, having no idea what was happening inside of me.
I don’t think that I any longer had faith that therapy could help with these matters, and when I started therapy again it was to learn how to deal with the stress of a new career. Sunflower didn’t wear shoes and would sit cross-legged on her couch. I would tell her about the awful things my bosses had done that week, and she would watch me with her big eyes — big blue eyes the size of sand dollars — and nod and nod, and then when I got to the worst part of the story, the most horrible thing they had done to me, she would crinkle her nose in sympathy, and say something like, “Yuck, that’s a really yuck situation.”
Those words would have sounded ridiculous coming from anyone else, but they were so genuinely Sunflower. Everything about her was so genuinely Sunflower. Sunflower just wanted me to feel better. Sometimes she would let me talk things out, sometimes she would make me laugh, sometimes she would teach me a new coping skill. If I came back the next week and said that the coping skill didn’t work, she would nod and say, “Oh okay, well not every skill works for everybody, so we just need to keep finding what works for you.”
Once when I shared that I kept thinking about my job even after I got home in the evening, she said, “Here’s what I want you to do. When you’re leaving work, right before you get in your car, I want you to shake.” Making that face with the scrunched up nose, she wriggled her entire body. “I want you to shake away all the sliminess of your workplace. Shake away all that sliminess. Leave it lying there on asphalt in the parking lot. And then get in your car and go home.” And it worked. I don’t know how, but doing that shake at the end of the day actually helped.
* * * * *
I then reached out to Gordon, and you know the rest of that story. After him, I met with an older woman who listened and empathized and seemed really goddamn nice, but she wasn’t able to provide the help I needed. I met with her for almost a year, so I guess I would say that she was my third therapist, but there’s really not much more to say about our time together.
I finally ended up on Laura’s couch. Actually, first on Laura’s chair, sitting across from her one day a week. And then two days a week. And then three and then four. And then finally I was lying on her couch five days a week.
I’ve been seeing Laura for fifteen months now, and I’m not sure how long this will last. What I do know is that this is what I needed all along. Laura shows endless curiosity. There’s never judgment, never an attempt to change me, just inquiry. She wants to know me, and no matter what I reveal, she never shows shock or revulsion. She can tell when I feel embarrassed by something I shared, and when that happens, she will simply say, “Uh-huh,” that word and her soft tone letting me know that I’ve said nothing wrong, nothing abnormal, that I’ve said something that, given the context, makes all the sense in the world.
Laura pushes me further and further into my unconscious. She gives no indication of being clairvoyant and almost never tells me what she thinks is happening inside me. What she does is give me the space to share my inner life. My task here, to quote Freud, is to say whatever goes through my mind, to act as though I’m sitting inside a train, looking out the window and describing “the changing views” I see outside. Sometimes she will call my attention to a particular thought, this being her way of encouraging me to think more about it, to see what else is there.
Gordon seemed to sometimes remember me the way someone at the nursing home might remember you, meaning he knew we’d met before but the details were fuzzy. He once fell asleep in a session. I was mid-sentence when I noticed one eyelid slam down. And then the other eyelid. And then his head drooped to the side. I waited in silence, thinking about saying something but not wanting to embarrass him. He suddenly startled awake and began talking, his first sentence making absolutely no sense, but then one sentence built on another, and he was again saying something coherent about my situation.
He would spend a fair amount of time each session asking me questions from different psychological assessments, promising that this would help us to really “get at the issue.” The issue was my ex-girlfriend, specifically, how deep down I didn’t want to be with her but for some reason felt hopelessly addicted to her.
“On a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being least desirable and 5 being most desirable, rate how desirable you find the thought of using your mouth, lips, and tongue to pleasure your partner’s anus.” He always promised that he would email me the assessment results, something that never happened. He would begin the next session by assuring me that he was committed to “get at the issue” and then start asking me more assessment questions. He would sometimes offer fascinating, although not entirely relevant, lessons about evolutionary psychology.
I don’t mean to turn Gordon into a caricature. I do remember one session in which, too embarrassed to look up at him, I confessed that I had messed up that weekend. “You slept with Renee,” he said. I reminded him that I’d been trying so hard to stay away from her, but then she invited me over for dinner, and while her daughter sat at the kitchen table and chatted with a friend over FaceTime, she led me into her bedroom under the guise that we should go somewhere quiet to talk. “You’re a human being,” Gordon told me, “and human beings like sex. There’s no shame in that. You don’t want to have sex with her again — fine, I understand, and you and I are working to get at that. In the meantime, there’s no reason to shame yourself for being human.”
The following week, he asked if I had again seen Renee, and I admitted that I had. “Did you sleep with her?” I looked down and told him that I hadn’t. “You just looked down,” he observed. I looked back up at him. “Don,” he said, “there’s no shame in that. Remember, you’re human.” So Gordon wasn’t always oblivious, but all the same, I had to eventually admit to myself that he didn’t actually know how to “get at the issue.”
* * * * *
Eight years before Gordon there had been Violet. I remember sitting on her blue velvet couch that first time, silently commanding myself to stop tapping my foot. Violet had cropped black hair and a penetrating gaze, and I had never before met with a therapist and for some reason feared that she would be scrutinizing and drawing insights from everything I did, even the most seemingly inconsequential gesture. Violet asked what I hoped to get out of therapy.
“I’m not happy,” I told her. “I’m married to a wonderful person. She’s wonderful, she’s basically perfect, and I’d be devastated if we weren’t together.” I crossed one leg over the other and wondered what meaning she might discern from this. “But I’m in love with someone else. And this other woman, Renee, is not even wonderful. She’s the farthest thing from perfect. We work together, and she’s always this nervous mess. She questions everything she does, and I always feel the need to come along and reassure her.”
Violet asked more questions, and I responded with verve and intelligence and kept expressing myself with bigger words, wanting to impress her. “Here’s my problem,” I said. “My wife and I are starring together in this Disney movie, but I’ve been miscast. Nothing against my wife, but I should be on HBO.”
“I’m going to give you a homework assignment. You live in your head, you think all the time, and because you’re so busy thinking, you don’t act. So before our next session, I want you to tell Renee how you feel about her.” I clarified her instructions. “You don’t have to do anything more than that. Just tell her how you feel. You need to live in your head less and the real world more.”
Violet was definitely onto something, as I was stuck in my ruminations, and this was making for a miserable existence, but I can see now that her “homework assignment” augured our eventual falling out. It was presumptuous for her, having known me for less than an hour, to give such potentially life-upending advice. But more than just that, it was infantilizing, suggesting that she felt she had the right to tell me how to live my life.
I had always had family members — especially my father and grandfather — tell me how to live my life and get upset if I didn’t listen, and this, I can now see, is why I had become stuck in the first place. There were already too many voices in my head, and these voices were so loud and harsh that I had trouble hearing my own voice. What I needed was help making sense of everything happening inside me, not another person telling me what to do.
This is not to say that I did not derive any benefit from my time with Violet. During our first few sessions, I shared how badly I wanted to break free from the endless, suffocating expectations that others had placed on me and start living an authentic life. She would look at me with those penetrating eyes, and I felt that she was on my side, that she felt my frustration and sensed my potential for something greater.
Violet said during our third session that there were answers to be found, real answers, but they could only be found through meditation. I didn’t know how to meditate, so she told me to close my eyes and right then and there explained what to do. Focus on my breath in, and focus on my breath out, if my mind wanders, gently bring it back to my breath in, and back to my breath out. She gave me a new homework assignment, to meditate for fifteen minutes every day until our next session.
The following week I reported that I meditated just one time, finding the whole experience painfully boring. She again said that the answers I sought could only be found through meditation. But weren’t there other ways to get these answers? She said there weren’t. But how would focusing on my breath provide answers? She said this was something I needed to experience for myself. Had she found her own answers through meditation? She had. If I did this every day, just sat there and focused on my breath, would the answers one day just pop into my mind? She said that everyone’s journey was different. But how long would it take? Months? Years? She said everyone’s path was different. Was there really no other way? No, she said, this was the way.
Violet, I was starting to learn, had very strong opinions about how I should be living my life, and she grew increasingly annoyed when I didn’t agree. Shortly after I announced that I’d given up meditation for good, we spent a better part of a session going back and forth over whether some action I wanted to take contradicted one of my previously stated life goals. I don’t remember the specific point of contention, but she took the affirmative position, while I explained that yes, there was a contradiction but only because I now realized that I had an additional, contradictory life goal, and it wasn’t clear which goal should take precedence. Violet, like a perseverating child, kept making the same point over and over.
I entered our next session hoping to summon the courage to tell her I wanted to stop therapy, but she began by saying that she’d talked to her clinical adviser about our previous session and now realized that she’d had a strong countertransference reaction to me, meaning she had responded to me the way she had responded to a person in her past and that I was likely doing the same. She apologized, and I decided to continue working with her.
However, things never again felt good between us. I had reached the conclusion that she didn’t really like me, and nothing she said over the next few months disabused me of that idea. One day I sent her a text message saying that my life was better and that I didn’t think I needed therapy anymore. At her behest, I agreed to come back for one final session.
Our last time together felt like an exit-interview, she asking different questions to help me reflect on our work together. At one point I made a passing comment about wishing I better understood some particular aspect of myself. “If you want to find the answers,” she said, “you need to be willing to put in the work.” Her parting shot. Damn. The following month, my life became suddenly tumultuous, but the thought of reaching back out didn’t seriously cross my mind.
* * * * *
Although I eventually got divorced, I could never bring myself to commit fully to Renee. I told myself that my ex-wife and I were meant to be friends, not partners, but the thought of moving further away from her and closer to Renee terrified me. If I thought about this for too long, I would start weeping, having no idea what was happening inside of me.
I don’t think that I any longer had faith that therapy could help with these matters, and when I started therapy again it was to learn how to deal with the stress of a new career. Sunflower didn’t wear shoes and would sit cross-legged on her couch. I would tell her about the awful things my bosses had done that week, and she would watch me with her big eyes — big blue eyes the size of sand dollars — and nod and nod, and then when I got to the worst part of the story, the most horrible thing they had done to me, she would crinkle her nose in sympathy, and say something like, “Yuck, that’s a really yuck situation.”
Those words would have sounded ridiculous coming from anyone else, but they were so genuinely Sunflower. Everything about her was so genuinely Sunflower. Sunflower just wanted me to feel better. Sometimes she would let me talk things out, sometimes she would make me laugh, sometimes she would teach me a new coping skill. If I came back the next week and said that the coping skill didn’t work, she would nod and say, “Oh okay, well not every skill works for everybody, so we just need to keep finding what works for you.”
Once when I shared that I kept thinking about my job even after I got home in the evening, she said, “Here’s what I want you to do. When you’re leaving work, right before you get in your car, I want you to shake.” Making that face with the scrunched up nose, she wriggled her entire body. “I want you to shake away all the sliminess of your workplace. Shake away all that sliminess. Leave it lying there on asphalt in the parking lot. And then get in your car and go home.” And it worked. I don’t know how, but doing that shake at the end of the day actually helped.
Sunflower helped me get through that slimy job, and then I stopped seeing her for a couple of years. I reached back out when things got especially bad with Renee. I knew more assuredly than before that I needed to finally break free from Renee, but my addiction to her felt chemical, physiological, unbreakable. Sunflower listened, crinkled her nose, nodded her head in sympathy. She tried her best to help, but what I needed was someone to help me go deeper into my psyche, to trudge into the abyss of the unconscious, and that’s just not something she knew how to do.
* * * * *
I then reached out to Gordon, and you know the rest of that story. After him, I met with an older woman who listened and empathized and seemed really goddamn nice, but she wasn’t able to provide the help I needed. I met with her for almost a year, so I guess I would say that she was my third therapist, but there’s really not much more to say about our time together.
I finally ended up on Laura’s couch. Actually, first on Laura’s chair, sitting across from her one day a week. And then two days a week. And then three and then four. And then finally I was lying on her couch five days a week.
I’ve been seeing Laura for fifteen months now, and I’m not sure how long this will last. What I do know is that this is what I needed all along. Laura shows endless curiosity. There’s never judgment, never an attempt to change me, just inquiry. She wants to know me, and no matter what I reveal, she never shows shock or revulsion. She can tell when I feel embarrassed by something I shared, and when that happens, she will simply say, “Uh-huh,” that word and her soft tone letting me know that I’ve said nothing wrong, nothing abnormal, that I’ve said something that, given the context, makes all the sense in the world.
Laura pushes me further and further into my unconscious. She gives no indication of being clairvoyant and almost never tells me what she thinks is happening inside me. What she does is give me the space to share my inner life. My task here, to quote Freud, is to say whatever goes through my mind, to act as though I’m sitting inside a train, looking out the window and describing “the changing views” I see outside. Sometimes she will call my attention to a particular thought, this being her way of encouraging me to think more about it, to see what else is there.
Our work together is largely focused on my defenses. If psychoanalysis is a journey into the unconscious, then defenses are roadblocks that need to be deconstructed. My particular roadblocks do not distort reality as much as they keep certain thoughts and feelings out of my consciousness. By bringing them back into awareness, I’ve come to know myself more fully. To give but one example, I can now see that my addiction over Renee seems to have been more about my father and grandfather than Renee. I needed to come to terms with my feelings for these two men, to acknowledge my profound love for them as well as the terrible pain I felt over their rejection of me. Coming to terms has meant, not just acknowledging all this, but also allowing myself to feel my love and to feel my pain.
There’s much more to say about my analysis with Laura, but I’ve written about that elsewhere, and my real purpose in writing this essay was to talk about my other therapists.
There’s much more to say about my analysis with Laura, but I’ve written about that elsewhere, and my real purpose in writing this essay was to talk about my other therapists.
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