by Claire Adams
Right now, though, that’s little more than a pipe dream.
The door to the therapist’s office opens and an older man walks out, carrying his hat in his hands and waving to the receptionist as he goes. It’s a couple more minutes, but finally, Dr. Sadler comes to her open office door and says, “Mason, you can come on in.”
I’d like to say I had some kind of sophisticated screening process when I was looking for a therapist, but really, my insurance chose for me. Dr. Sadler is the only psychiatrist in town I can afford to visit.
Walking into Dr. Sadler’s office, I’m starting to think I’ve made a huge mistake. There are motivational posters covering nearly every square inch of the walls, with the exception of the space dedicated to her degrees.
They’re not even clever ones, either. If I had to guess, I’d say the posters are homemade.
“Come on in and have a seat,” Dr. Sadler says. “So, what brings you to my office today?”
“Well, I don’t really know where to start,” I tell her.
“Oh, I can help with that,” she says, scratching her forehead.
“What do you mean?” I ask. “I know I filled out that intake form and everything, but…”
As Dr. Sadler is scratching her forehead, her hair moves—I mean all of her hair. Underneath what’s obviously a blonde wig, a little bit of red hair comes into view for just a moment. She stops and smiles at me.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she says, taking her wig off and setting it on her desk, revealing a full head of short red hair. “It can be such a hassle getting ready in the morning. If you’ll excuse me for just one moment…”
I sit and watch as she opens the bottom drawer of her desk. Inside, I can see four different wigs atop four different mannequin heads. She picks the mid-length black one and pulls it out, setting it haphazardly onto her head before putting the blonde wig in the black wig’s place.
“That’s better,” she says. “Now, I think the biggest problem is that you’re not willing to simply accept yourself and the people in your life for the unique challenges you and they face. When we have faulty expectations, our whole world gets thrown off.”
“You got that from my intake sheet?” I ask.
“No,” she says. “I got that from your posture. Please, tell me what’s on your mind.”
I glance past the grainy, nonsensical poster of a duck swimming in a lake with the caption, “Get to it!” to the doctor’s credentials, but I can’t quite make out the schools she went to from where I’m sitting.
“Where did you get your degree?” I ask.
“I did my undergraduate work at Harvard,” she says. “I got my doctorate from the University of Guam.”
“Guam?” I ask. “Why not Harvard for your doctorate?”
“I had a falling out with the dean,” she says. “That’s really not the issue here, though.”
“You know,” I say, standing back up, “I think this was a mistake. I’m sure you’re a fine doctor, but I just don’t think it’s going to—”
“How old were you when your dad left?” she asks.
I stop, halfway between standing and sitting and I look at her.
“I didn’t put anything about my dad on the intake,” I tell her. “How did you—”
“Mom, she was around, at least for the first part of your childhood, but she was never really there, was she?” the doctor asks.
I sit back down.
“Let me guess: you got that from my posture, too?” I ask.
“No,” she smiles. “That, I got from your eyes. Listen, Mason, I understand that you’re not the type to easily trust people, and I’m sure all the time you spent visiting court-appointed therapists has left you feeling like we just don’t know what we’re talking about, isn’t that right?”
My mouth is gaping. “Seriously, how are you—”
She smirks, saying, “That part I got from your intake sheet.”
“What do you think I should do?” I ask.
“How should I know?” she responds, reaching into her purse and pulling out a handful of unwrapped gummy worms. She stuffs about half that handful into her mouth and continues. “You haven’t told me anything yet. What’s on your mind?”
“Uh…” I say, trying to remember why I came here in the first place.
“Girl trouble?” she asks. “That one, I ask most men,” she whispers.
“I guess that’s there a little bit,” I tell her, “but what made me decide to seek help happened a while ago.”
I go on to explain my involvement with underground MMA and the fight where everything just kind of went away. She sits, listening, nodding. I keep trying to focus on her eyes, but mine keep moving upward.
Finally, I come to the argument Ash and I had where she basically laid down the ultimatum and the good doctor is finally ready to offer her response.
“That sucks,” she says.
“How much am I paying you per hour?” I ask.
“Not much, but if you stay with me for about a year or so, I bet I can buy a new car off of what your insurance throws at me,” she answers. I don’t know if she’s joking or not. “Listen,” she says, “the troubles we tend to focus on are often not the problem at all. They’re often the symptom.”
“I get that,” I tell her, “but what’s the cause?”
“Keep talking,” she says. “You’ve got a soothing voice. It’s doing killer work on this raging headache I’ve got.”
“It’s too tight,” I tell her.
“Excuse me?” she asks.
“Your, uh…” I motion toward my own hair with my index finger and she lifts the front of the wig just a little. “Huh,” she says. “I guess I can cancel that MRI. I thought I had some sort of berry aneurism or something.”
I glance back toward the medical degrees on her wall. “…and you’re a doctor?” I ask.
“You get so used to things sometimes, you don’t even realize they’re what’s hurting you,” she says.
It’s strange, but I find myself chuckling. “Did you really put on that wig just so you could make that point and have it seem super insightful?” I ask.
She smiles at me, “While being ‘super insightful’ is, indeed my goal, I’m really quite serious. What things from your past do you still hold onto?” she asks. “Yours was a difficult childhood from the sound of things. What haven’t you been able to let go?”
“Chris?” I ask. “I don’t know. Am I just supposed to abandon my brother?”
“You didn’t mention a brother,” she says. “Let’s talk about that.”
“That’s not why I’m here,” I lie.
“From the sound of it, it’s exactly why you’re here,” she says. “That fight you got into—the match where you say you ‘lost your head,’ what happened during the week leading up to that night?”
“I don’t know,” I tell her. “I mean, Chris got arrested and everything, but that can’t be the only thing that went into what happened. I’ve been expecting that my entire life.”
“Maybe you should go,” she says out of nowhere. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe therapy isn’t something that’s going to be a positive for you. Thanks for coming in,” she says. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be more help.”
“What are you talking about?” I almost yell. “We’re just starting to get into this and now you’re telling me that therapy isn’t going to work? What kind of doctor are you?”
“I’m saying this won’t work if you’re not going to be honest with me,” she says. “A lot of people would be happy to have you waste their time. I suppose I can understand the draw of sitting back and collecting a couple hundred dollars to hear someone cover everything, but I got into this because I actually wanted to help people. If you’re not ready to fit into that kind of category, there’s really nothing I can do for you. The only ethical thing for me to do at this point is to say ‘thanks, but no thanks.’ If we can’t be honest with each other, it’s best that you go.”
“In w
hat way am I not being honest?” I ask.
She shakes her head a little, saying, “You’re not being honest with me, but you’re also not being honest with yourself. You’re not here because you want to change. You’re here because your girlfriend might break up with you if you weren’t. Isn’t that true?”
“No,” I answer. “She laid down the law, sure, but I’m here because I realized she was right. I do need something. What happened in that fight—”
“So you’re here because you want to be here?” she asks.
“I don’t know if ‘want’ is the right word right now, but yeah,” I answer.
She nods. “Okay,” she says. “Continue, but this time, let’s focus on the feelings.”
“Oh god,” I groan.
“Hey, finally a real reaction from you,” she says. “I thought the stuff with the wig was the only bit of that I was going to see this hour.”
“Do you have some kind of problem with me I don’t know about?” I ask. “Did I sleep with a relative of yours and not call or something?”
“There’s no need to be hostile,” Dr. Sadler says. “I’m just assessing your mental state.”
“My mental state?” I ask. “What are you even talking about?”
“We’ll come back to that,” she says. “Now, if you had to pick the top three emotions, the three emotions that you felt more than anything else during those minutes or seconds when you said you weren’t in control, what would they be?”
“I don’t know,” I tell her. “I wasn’t feeling anything.”
“I don’t believe you,” she says.
“You know,” I scoff, “at this point, I don’t really care whether you believe me or not.”
Now, it’s just a matter of waiting a moment for her to collect herself and kick me out of the office and I can go back to Ash, telling her that I tried. I tried, it just didn’t work.
“Good,” she says. “I’m glad you’re finally recognizing your emotions instead of just reacting to them. Now, if you could tell me the three emotions—”
“Annoyance, frustration and irritation,” I tell her.
“Three near synonyms,” she says. “Linguistically, that’s mildly impressive, but you’re not talking about what you were feeling that night. You’re talking about how you’re feeling right now.”
“Gee, how’d you guess?” I ask sarcastically.
She actually bothers answering, “You’ve said a couple of times in this conversation that you don’t recall feeling any particular emotion immediately before or at any time during the fight,” she says. “If you were talking about that, I doubt your emotions would be quite so clear. That’s probably why you felt emotionally anesthetized. Do you frequently feel anhedonic?”
I think a beat, but nope. “I don’t know what that is,” I tell Dr. Sadler.
“Anhedonia is the inability to experience pleasure,” she says.
“Oh, that’s not it then,” I say quickly.
“So the things in your life that used to bring you pleasure still do?” she asks.
I think about it for a minute. “Well, I guess maybe not as much, but I still experience pleasure,” I answer.
“Okay,” she says. “There are many different ways in which a person’s body and mind can react to depression. If you’d be willing, I’d like to try something that might help us find out what the best—”
“I’m sorry,” I say, stopping her. “I’m not depressed.”
“Okay,” she says.
I’m waiting for more, but there doesn’t seem to be any.
“Okay?” I ask. “You just sat there telling me that’s what’s going on. Are you really a doctor or do you just like messing with people?”
She snickers. “Why can’t it be both?” she asks. “No, I’ve simply found that it does no good trying to talk a person into believing something they don’t think they have, especially when they don’t think they could have it.”
“I’ve been depressed before,” I tell her. “Growing up in my house, I would have been out of my mind not to go a little out of my mind.”
“Well, let’s try to get you back in,” she says. “Have you given any more thought to what you were feeling that night?”
“I don’t know,” I tell her. “I was feeling detached.”
“Okay,” she says, picking up a pen from her desk and writing something on a yellow legal note pad, slowly pronouncing the word “detachment” while she does.
“That’s not really an emotion, though, is it?” I ask.
“Oh, absolutely it is,” she says. “What else?”
I’m not sure if I trust her, but I’m already paying to be here. The least I can do is get my money’s worth.
“I don’t know,” I answer. “I just felt really numb.”
“What about just before the fight, before you started feeling this sort of disconnect. Was there anything that triggered your response immediately beforehand, or had it been building for a while?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” I answer. “I really don’t remember.”
“All right,” she says, writing something else on her paper. Just like with the word detachment, she slowly speaks the word that she’s writing. “Hypnosis,” she says.
“You think someone hypnotized me?” I ask.
“Not yet,” she says. “Hypnosis has been shown to aid with memory and can even put you back to another time in your life using a process called age regression. The brain is a pretty interesting thing.”
“So you’re going to hypnotize me to find out what I was feeling?” I ask.
She ignores the question. “So, tell me more about your relationship with Ash,” she says. “I’m assuming that’s short for Ashley or Ashton?”
“Ashley,” I answer. “She’s great. We get along really well, and we seem to get each other. Things haven’t been easy, but a lot’s been going on over the past few months. Apart from the thing with her mom, there’s really nothing I’d change about her.”
“Okay,” Dr. Sadler says. “When would you say was the last time when there wasn’t a lot going on—when things were more normal?”
“I don’t think things were ever normal,” I tell her.
“That’s why I used the modifier ‘more,’” she says. “When was the last time you really felt like yourself?”
“I don’t know,” I answer. “I know it’s been a while.”
“That must be very difficult,” Dr. Sadler says.
I look at her. “It is what it is,” I tell her.
“And what it is must be very difficult,” she says.
“Look, I didn’t come in here to be judged, okay?” I ask, getting out of my seat yet again.
The doctor doesn’t move. She barely blinks. “Where did that come from?” she asks in a surprisingly soft tone.
“You’re sitting there trying to be empathetic or sympathetic or whatever it is that you shrinks do to get people to trust you, but you don’t have any more answers than the idiots they put me in a room with when I was a kid!” I shout.
She just sits there observing, watching.
“Look, this was a bad idea,” I tell her. “I told Ash that I’d come see someone, and now I have. I’m out of here.”
“All right,” Dr. Sadler says and turns to her desk. She picks up a file and starts leafing through it.
I haven’t moved from my spot in front of the leather chair that has been my seat for the last half hour or so.
“All right?” I ask. “You’re really something, you know that? I come in here asking for help and you don’t even care that I haven’t gotten it yet?”
She shrugs, but doesn’t look at me.
“Fine!” I declare and go for the door.
“If you’d ever like to turn the anger you’re feeling into a psychological breakthrough, you’re almost there already,” she says. “Come back when you’re ready to start taking this seriously and we’ll get you all fixed up.”
“Just like that?” I ask. “You
expect me to believe that you just figured out what’s going on, right when I’m threatening to walk out of here?”
“No,” she says. “I don’t expect you to believe anything, though for the record, I would just like to let you know that I pretty well knew what was going on the last time you threatened to leave. I’d love to help you—it is my job after all—but I made a rule a while back: When a person tries to leave the office more than once, just let them go. Nobody changes until they become willing to change. The reason so many people say they can’t change is that they’re not willing to do it. So, until you’re there, I’m just wasting my time and there are people in that room out there who’d love the extra time to delve into their psyches.”
“Reverse psychology,” I say. “That’s what you’re doing. You’re trying to convince me to stay by telling me you don’t care.”
Finally, she sets her file down and turns toward me, saying, “I wouldn’t rule that out completely, but everything I just told you is true. If you want to stay and finish the appointment, we can do that, but I’m going to have to insist that you be willing to listen, that you be willing to be open enough to hear what you’ve known for a long, long time.”
“Oh? And what’s that?” I ask, crossing my arms, smirking.
“You don’t think you deserve her,” Dr. Sadler says. “It’s not your fault. Your whole life has been all about you finding out just how limited your choices are. I get it,” she says. “I mean, if I were in a relationship with someone I really cared about after avoiding that sort of thing for so long, I’d probably be scared, too. Add fear to the anhedonia, and we’ve got two of the three emotions you were feeling that night.”
“Why three?” I ask. “Is there some part of the brain I don’t know about that makes sure you feel exactly three things at all times, or—”
“Not that I’m aware of,” the doctor interrupts. “People feel what they feel. Sometimes it’s nice and clear-cut, but most of the time it’s a jumble of often-contradictory things. When a person’s graduating from high school, they could very well be feeling pride in their accomplishment, but most of the people I’ve talked to on the subject mention this overwhelming sense of dread that they’re one step closer to being on their own. Then there’s the excitement for the future, the nervousness about what’s to come, the sadness of knowing a lot of the people who have been such a big part of your life are going to start going their different ways. You can feel anger that you didn’t focus better on your school work, or you could feel anger because you never got out and did anything. There’s never a single emotion going on, even when it feels like there is. The mind has to navigate a whole lifetime of experiences, and it’s this process that gives us our emotions in the moment.”