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It’s impossible to get to know people deeply and not come to like them.
It’s not as if we’re going to peer in those darker corners, flip on the light, and find a bunch of cockroaches. Fireflies love the dark too.
hours spent surfing the internet (an activity my colleague calls “the most effective short-term nonprescription painkiller”).
(Be forewarned: therapy will always take you into uncharted territory, even if you choose to preserve the status quo.)
But people don’t care about inflection points when they come for their first therapy session. Mostly, they just want relief. They
But I understand where these responses come from. It boils down to fear—of being exposed, of being found out. Will you spot the insecurities that I’m so skillful at hiding? Will you see my vulnerabilities, my lies, my shame? Will you
see the human in my being?
I’ve always been drawn to stories—not just what happens, but how the story is told. When people come to therapy, I’m listening to their narratives but also for their flexibility with them. Do they consider what they’re saying to be the only version of the story—the “accurate” version—or do they know that theirs is just one of many ways to tell it? Are they aware of what they’re choosing to leave in or out, of how their motivation in sharing this story affects how the listener hears it?
I know that often people create faulty narratives to make themselves feel better in the moment even though it makes them feel worse
over time—and
In idiot compassion, you avoid rocking the boat to spare people’s feelings, even though the boat needs rocking and your compassion ends up being more harmful than your honesty. People do this with teenagers, spouses, addicts, even themselves. Its opposite is wise compassion, which means caring about the person but also giving him or her a loving truth bomb when needed.
People often mistake numbness for nothingness, but numbness isn’t the absence of feelings; it’s a response to being overwhelmed by too many feelings.
In time, they find out that they aren’t at war after all, that the path to peace is to call a truce with themselves. Which is why when
Flannery O’Connor quote: “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
“Your feelings don’t have to mesh with what you think they should be,” he explained. “They’ll be there regardless, so
you might as well welcome them because they hold important clues.”
The things we protest against the most are often the very things we need to look at.
There is a continuing decision to be made as to whether to evade pain, or to tolerate it and therefore modify it.
Therapists talk a lot about how the past informs the present—how our histories affect the ways we think, feel, and behave and how at some point in our lives, we have to let go of the fantasy of creating a better
past. If we don’t accept the notion that there’s no redo, much as we try to get our parents or siblings or partners to fix what happened years ago, our pasts will keep us stuck.
When the present falls apart, so does the future we had associated with it. And having the future taken away is the mother of all plot twists.
But if I live in the present, I’ll have to accept
the loss of my future.
But I’d forgotten that people are often at their most interesting when they’ve got a proverbial gun to their head.
People tend to dream without doing, death remaining theoretical.
We think we make bucket lists to ward off regret, but really they help us to ward off death. After all, the longer our bucket lists are, the more time we imagine we have left to accomplish everything on them.
I’ll bet right now you’re glad that I’m not your therapist. Who wants to think about this? How much easier it is to become death procrastinators! Many of us take for granted the people we love and the things we find meaningful, only to realize, when our deadline is announced, that we’d been skating by on the project: our lives.
Until very recently, most mental-health practitioners believed that personality disorders were incurable because unlike mood disorders, such as depression and anxiety, personality disorders consist of long-standing, pervasive patterns of behavior that are very much a part of one’s personality. In other words, personality disorders are ego-syntonic, which means the behaviors seem in sync with the person’s self-concept; as a result, people with these disorders believe that others are creating the problems in their lives.
Or consider the narcissist. Who doesn’t know somebody who fits the bill to varying degrees—accomplished, charismatic, smart, and witty but alarmingly egocentric?
Many patients secretly wish to be their therapist’s only patient. Or, at least, the favorite—the funniest, most entertaining and, above all, most beloved.
“In your work as a therapist,” he begins, “have you ever sat with somebody who’s grieving?”
Then there’s the fact that losses tend to be multilayered. There’s the actual loss (in my case, of Boyfriend), and the underlying loss (what it represents).
often it’s just as much about what the change represents—failure, rejection, betrayal, the unknown, and a different life story than the one they’d expected.
We all have a deep yearning to understand ourselves and be understood.
He’s as mysterious to me as I am to him, and yet here we are, joining forces to unravel the story of how I ended up here.
It’s Wendell’s job to help me edit my story. All therapists do this: What material is extraneous? Are the supporting characters important or a distraction? Is the story advancing or is the protagonist going in circles? Do the plot points reveal a theme?
Therapists delve into a mind rather than a brain, and we can see from the subtlest gesture or expression if we’ve hit a nerve. But unlike neurosurgeons, we gravitate toward the sensitive area, pressing delicately on it, even if it makes the patient feel uncomfortable.
That’s how we get to the deeper meaning of the story, and often at the core is some form of grief. But a lot of plot stands in between.
People want to be understood and to understand, but for most of us, our biggest problem is that we don’t know what our problem is. We keep stepping in the same puddle. Why do I do the very thing that will guarantee my own unhappiness over and over again?
Did I just pay somebody to watch me cry for forty-five minutes straight? Yes and no. Wendell and I had a conversation, even if no words were exchanged. He watched me grieve, and he didn’t try to make things more comfortable by interrupting or analyzing the issue. He let me tell my story in whatever way I needed to today.
Honesty is stronger medicine than sympathy, which may console but often conceals.
Generally what happens between therapist and patient also plays out between the patient and people in the outside world, and it’s in the safe space of the therapy room that the patient can begin to understand why.
“What you feel on the receiving end of an encounter with a patient is real—use it.” Our experiences with this person are important because we’re probably feeling something pretty similar to what everyone else in this patient’s life feels.
The hardest patients are the ones, like Becca, who keep coming but don’t change.
“Breakups are awful,” Claire says, popping some grapes in her mouth. “But we’d be negligent if we didn’t do them.”
Therapy is hard work—and not just for the therapist. That’s because the responsibility for change lies squarely with the patient.
you expect an hour of sympathetic head-nodding, you’ve come to the wrong place. Therapists will be supportive, but our support is for your growth, not for your low opinion of your partner. (Our role is to understand your perspective but not necessarily to endorse it.) In therapy, you’ll be asked to be both accountable and vulnerable. Rather than steering people straight to the heart of the problem, we nudge them to arrive there on their own, because the most powerful truths—the ones people take the most seriously—are those they come to, little by little, on their own. Implicit in the
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“Most things worth doing are difficult,” he replied. He said this not in a glib way but in a tone and with an expression that made me think he spoke from personal experience. He added that while everyone wants to leave each session feeling better, I, of all people, should know that that’s not always how therapy works. If I wanted to feel good in the short term, he said, I could eat a piece of cake
Many patients wonder if they bore us with what feels to them like their unremarkable lives,
“I’m telling you this by way of invitation,” Wendell says, and I think about how many invitations of mine Becca had rebuffed. I don’t want to do that with Wendell. If I
