People, she often feels, are far too literate in therapy-speak. She supposes it comes from television, from books or magazines—media suffused with the smooth dialectics of trauma. Patients come to her to talk about feelings of inadequacy stemming from an unsatisfactory homelife, about generational trauma and buried emotions and displaced panic at the thought of the end of the world. None of it incorrect, exactly, but it can sometimes be difficult to tell what they need her for, if they’ve already figured this out.
