Holly shifted on the couch, covering herself with the blanket. We’ve talked in the past about how she uses that blanket to cover up her body, to hide her size.
“So I play innocent, and we start chatting about the clothes and what our jobs are, and as I’m talking, I see this look of recognition dawning on her face. It’s like she’s trying to reconcile her image of me from twelfth grade—you know, pimply, fat, frizzy hair—with me now. I see her brain connecting the dots, and then she says, ‘Oh my God! Holly! We went to high school together!’”
Holly was starting to laugh now. She was tall and striking, with long chestnut hair and eyes the color of a tropical ocean, and she was still a good forty pounds overweight.
“So,” she continued, “I scrunch up my forehead and say, in the same fake-sweet voice she used to use on me, ‘Wait, I’m so sorry. Do I know you?’ And she says, ‘Of course you know me—it’s Liza! We had geometry and ancient history and French together—remember Ms. Hyatt’s class?’ And I say, ‘Yeah, I had Ms. Hyatt, but, gosh, I don’t remember you. You were in that class?’ And she says, ‘Holly! We lived a block away from each other. I used to see you at the movies and the yogurt place and that one time in Victoria’s Secret by the dressing rooms—’”
Holly laughed some more.
“She’s totally giving away that she did know me all those times. But I say, ‘Wow, how weird, I don’t remember you, but it’s nice to meet you.’ And then my phone rings and it’s her high-school boyfriend telling me to hurry up, we’ll be late for our movie. So I give her that condescending smile she used to give me, and I walk away, leaving her feeling how I felt in high school. And then I realize that the ringing phone is actually my alarm and it was all a dream.”
Later, Holly would call this her “poetic-justice dream,” but to me it was about a common theme that comes up in therapy, and not just in dreams—the theme of exclusion. It’s the fear that we’ll be left out, ignored, shunned, and end up unlovable and alone.
Carl Jung coined the term collective unconscious to refer to the part of the mind that holds ancestral memory, or experience that is common to all humankind. Whereas Freud interpreted dreams on the object level, meaning how the content of the dream related to the dreamer in real life (the cast of characters, the specific situations), in Jungian psychology, dreams are interpreted on the subject level, meaning how they relate to common themes in our collective unconscious.
It’s no surprise that we often dream about our fears. We have a lot of fears.
What are we afraid of?
We are afraid of being hurt. We are afraid of being humiliated. We are afraid of failure and we are afraid of success. We are afraid of being alone and we are afraid of connection. We are afraid to listen to what our hearts are telling us. We are afraid of being unhappy and we are afraid of being too happy (in these dreams, inevitably, we’re punished for our joy). We are afraid of not having our parents’ approval and we are afraid of accepting ourselves for who we really are. We are afraid of bad health and good fortune. We are afraid of our envy and of having too much. We are afraid to have hope for things that we might not get. We are afraid of change and we are afraid of not changing. We are afraid of something happening to our kids, our jobs. We are afraid of not having control and afraid of our own power. We are afraid of how briefly we are alive and how long we will be dead. (We are afraid that after we die, we won’t have mattered.) We are afraid of being responsible for our own lives.
Sometimes it takes a while to admit our fears, especially to ourselves.
I’ve noticed that dreams can be a precursor to self-confession—a kind of pre-confession. Something buried is brought closer to the surface, but not in its entirety. A patient dreams that she’s lying in bed hugging her roommate; initially she thinks it’s about their strong friendship but later she realizes she’s attracted to women. A man has a recurring dream that he’s been caught speeding on the freeway; a year into this dream, he begins to consider that his decades of cheating on his taxes—of positioning himself above the rules—might catch up with him.
After I’ve been seeing Wendell for a few months, my patient’s dream about her high-school classmate seeps into mine. I’m at the mall, looking through a rack of dresses, when Boyfriend appears at the same rack. Apparently, he’s shopping for a birthday gift for his new girlfriend.
“Oh, which birthday?” I ask in the dream.
“Fiftieth,” he says. At first I’m relieved in the pettiest way—not only is she not the clichéd twenty-five-year-old, but she’s actually older than I am. It makes sense. Boyfriend wanted no kids in the house, and she’s old enough to have kids in college. Boyfriend and I are having a pleasant conversation—friendly, innocuous—until I happen to catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror adjacent to the rack. That’s when I see that I’m actually an old lady—late seventies, maybe eighties. It turns out that Boyfriend’s fifty-year-old girlfriend is, in fact, decades younger than I am.
“Did you ever write your book?” Boyfriend asks.
“What book?” I say, watching my wrinkled, prune-like lips move in the mirror.
“The book about your death,” he replies matter-of-factly.
And then my alarm goes off. All day, as I hear other patients’ dreams, I can’t stop thinking about mine. It haunts me, this dream.
It haunts me because it’s my pre-confession.
20
The First Confession
Allow me to get defensive for a minute. You see, when I told Wendell that everything was just fine until the breakup, I was telling the absolute truth. Or, rather, the truth as I knew it. Which is to say, the truth as I wanted to see it.
And now let me remove the defense: I was lying.
One thing I haven’t told Wendell is that I’m supposed to be writing a book—and that it hasn’t been going very well. By “not going very well,” I mean that I haven’t actually been writing it. This wouldn’t be a problem if I weren’t under contract and therefore legally obligated to either produce a book or return the advance that I no longer have in my bank account. Well, it would still be a problem even if I could return the money, because in addition to being a therapist, I am a writer—it’s not just what I do but who I am—and if I can’t write, then a crucial part of me goes missing. And if I don’t turn in this book, my agent says that I won’t get the opportunity to write another.
It isn’t that I haven’t been able to write at all. In fact, during the time I was supposed to be writing my book, I was crafting fabulously witty and flirtatious emails to Boyfriend, all while telling friends and family and even Boyfriend that I was busy writing my book. I was like the closet gambler who gets dressed for work and kisses his family goodbye each morning and then drives to the casino instead of the office.
I’ve been meaning to talk to Wendell about this situation, but I’ve been so focused on getting through the breakup that I haven’t had a chance.
Obviously that, too, is a big fat lie.
I haven’t told Wendell about the book-I’m-not-writing because every time I think about it, I’m filled with panic, dread, regret, and shame. Whenever the situation pops into my head (which is constantly; as Fitzgerald put it, “In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day”), my stomach tightens and I feel paralyzed. Then I question every bad decision I’ve made at various forks in the road because I’m convinced that I’m in this current situation due to what ranks as one of the most colossally bad decisions of my life.
Perhaps you’re thinking, Really? You were lucky enough to get a book contract, and now you’re not writing the book? Boo-hoo! Try working twelve hours a day in a factory, for God’s sake! I understand how this comes across. I mean, who do I think I am, Elizabeth Gilbert at the beginning of Eat, Pray, Love when she’s crying on the bathroom floor as she thinks about leaving the husband who loves her? Gretchen Rubin in The Happiness Project who has the loving, handsome husband, the healthy daughters, and more
money than most people will ever see but still has that niggling feeling of something missing?
Which reminds me—I left out an important detail about the book-I’m-not-writing. The topic? Happiness. No, the irony hasn’t been lost on me: the happiness book has been making me miserable.
I should never have been writing a happiness book in the first place, and not just because, if Wendell’s grieving-something-bigger theory holds water, I’ve been depressed. When I made the decision to write this book, I’d recently begun my private practice, and I’d just written a cover story for the Atlantic called “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy: Why Our Obsession with Our Kids’ Happiness May Be Dooming Them to Unhappy Adulthoods,” which, at the time, was the most emailed piece in the hundred-plus-year history of the magazine. I talked about it on national television and radio; media from around the world called me for interviews; and overnight, I became a “parenting expert.”
Next thing I knew, publishers wanted the book version of “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy.” By wanted, I mean they wanted it for—I don’t know how else to say this—a dizzying sum of money. It was the kind of money that a single mom like me only dreamed of, the kind of money that would provide our one-income family with some financial room to breathe for a long time. A book like this would have led to speaking engagements (which I enjoy) at schools across the country and a steady flow of patients (which would have helped, as I was starting out). The article was even optioned for a television series (which might have gotten made had there also been a best-selling book to go along with it).
But when given the opportunity to write the book version of “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy,” a book that could potentially change the entire landscape of my professional and financial future, I said, with an astonishing lack of forethought: Thanks very much, that’s so kind, but . . . I’d rather not.
I hadn’t had a stroke. I just said no.
I said no because something felt wrong about it. Mainly, I didn’t think that the world needed another helicopter-parenting book. Dozens of smart, thoughtful books had already covered overparenting from every conceivable angle. After all, two hundred years ago, the philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe succinctly summarized this sentiment: “Too many parents make life hard for their children by trying, too zealously, to make it easy for them.” Even in recent history—2003, to be exact—one of the early modern overparenting books, aptly named Worried All the Time, put it this way: “The cardinal rules of good parenting—moderation, empathy, and temperamental accommodation with one’s child—are simple and are not likely to be improved upon by the latest scientific findings.”
As a mom myself, I wasn’t immune to parental anxiety. I wrote my original article, in fact, with the hope that it would be useful to parents in the way that a therapy session might be. But if I eked a book out of it in order to jump on the commercial bandwagon and join the ranks of insta-experts, I thought I’d be part of the problem. What parents needed, I believed, wasn’t another book about how they had to calm down and take a break. What they needed was an actual break from the deluge of parenting books. (The New Yorker later ran a humor piece about the proliferation of parenting manifestos, saying that “another book at this point would just be cruel.”)
So like Bartleby the Scrivener (and with similarly tragic results), I said, “I would prefer not to.” Then I spent the next several years watching more and more overparenting books hit the market and beating myself up with a rotating roster of self-flagellating questions: Had I been a responsible adult by turning down that kind of money? I’d recently finished an unpaid internship, I had graduate-school loans to repay, and I was the sole provider for my family; why couldn’t I have just written the parenting book quickly, reaped the professional and financial benefits, and gone my merry way? After all, how many people have the luxury of working only on what matters most to them?
The regret I felt about having not done the parenting book was compounded by the fact that I continued to get weekly reader mail and speaking-engagement queries about the “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy” article. “Will there be a book?” person after person asked. No, I wanted to reply, because I’m a moron.
I did feel like a moron, because in the interest of not selling out and cashing in on the parenting craze, I agreed instead to write the now-dreaded, depression-inducing happiness book. To make ends meet as I launched my practice, I still had to write a book, and I thought at the time that I could provide a service to readers. Instead of showing how we parents were trying too hard to make our kids happy, I was going to show how we were trying too hard to make ourselves happy. This idea seemed closer to my heart.
But whenever I sat down to write, I felt as disconnected from the topic as I had from the subject of helicopter parenting. The research didn’t—couldn’t—reflect the subtleties of what I was seeing in the therapy room. Some scientists had even come up with a complex mathematical equation to predict happiness based on the premise that happiness stems not from how well things go but whether things go better than expected. It looks like this:
Happiness (t) = w0+ w1
γt−jCRj+ w2
γt−jEVj+ w3
γt−jRPEj
Which all boils down to: Happiness equals reality minus expectations. Apparently, you can make people happy by delivering bad news and then taking it back (which, personally, would just make me mad).
Still, I knew I could put together some interesting studies, but I felt I’d just be scratching the surface of something else I wanted to say but couldn’t quite put my finger on. And in my new career, and in my life more generally, scratching the surface no longer felt satisfying. You can’t go through psychotherapy training and not be changed in some way, not become, without even noticing, oriented toward the core.
I told myself it didn’t matter. Just write the book and be done with it. I’d already botched things up with the parenting book; I couldn’t botch up this happiness book too. And yet, day after day, I couldn’t get myself to write it. Just like I couldn’t get myself to write the parenting book. How had I gotten here again?
In graduate school, we used to watch therapy sessions through one-way mirrors, and sometimes when I’d sit down to write the happiness book, I’d think about a thirty-five-year-old patient I’d observed. He’d come to therapy because he very much loved and was attracted to his wife but he couldn’t stop cheating on her. Neither he nor his wife understood how his behavior could be so at odds with what he believed he wanted—trust, stability, closeness. In his session, he explained that he hated the turmoil his cheating put his wife and their marriage through and knew that he wasn’t the husband or father he wanted to be. He talked for a while about how desperately he wanted to stop cheating and how he had no idea why he kept doing it.
The therapist explained that often different parts of ourselves want different things, and if we silence the parts we find unacceptable, they’ll find other ways to be heard. He asked the guy to sit in a different chair, across the room, and see what happened when the part of him that chose to cheat wasn’t shoved aside but got to say its piece.
At first the poor guy was at a loss, but gradually, he began to give voice to his hidden self, the part that would goad the responsible, loving husband into engaging in self-defeating behavior. He was torn between these two aspects of himself, just as I was torn between the part of me that wanted to provide for my family and the part of me that wanted to do something meaningful—something that touched my soul and hopefully others’ souls as well.
Boyfriend appeared on the scene just in time to distract me from this internal battle. And once he was gone, I filled the void by Google-stalking him when I should have been writing. So many of our destructive behaviors take root in an emotional void, an emptiness that calls out for something to fill it. But now that Wendell and I have talked about not Google-stalking Boyfriend, I feel accountable. I have no excuse not to sit down and write this misery-inducing happiness book.
Or at least tell Wendell the truth about the mess I’m in.
21
Therapy with a Condom On
“Hi, it’s me,” I hear as I listen to my voicemails between sessions. My stomach lurches; it’s Boyfriend. Though it’s been three months since we’ve spoken, his voice instantly transports me back in time, like hearing a song from the past. But as the message continues, I realize it’s not Boyfriend because (a) Boyfriend wouldn’t call my office number and (b) Boyfriend doesn’t work on a TV show.
This “me” is John (eerily, Boyfriend and John have similar voices, deep and low) and it’s the first time a patient has called my office without leaving a name. He does this as if he’s the only patient I have, not to mention the only “me” in my life. Even suicidal patients will leave their names. I’ve never gotten Hi, it’s me. You told me to call if I was feeling like killing myself.
John says in his message that he can’t make our session today because he’s stuck at the studio, so he’ll be Skyping in instead. He gives me his Skype handle, then says, “Talk to you at three.”
I note that he doesn’t ask if we can Skype or inquire whether I do Skype sessions in the first place. He just assumes it will happen because that’s how the world works for him. And while I’ll Skype with patients under certain circumstances, I think it’s a bad idea with John. So much of what I’m doing to help him relies on our in-the-room interaction. Say what you will about the wonders of technology, but screen-to-screen is, as a colleague once said, “like doing therapy with a condom on.”
It’s not just the words people say or even the visual cues that therapists notice in person—the foot that shakes, the subtle facial twitch, the quivering lower lip, the eyes narrowing in anger. Beyond hearing and seeing, there’s something less tangible but equally important—the energy in the room, the being together. You lose that ineffable dimension when you aren’t sharing the same physical space.
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone Page 14