Boredom

I look at the clock. Camilla is now 15 minutes late for her session. I’m not surprised. She’s been consistently late for every session since we started working together several weeks ago. She always apologizes, always has some reason – the car wouldn’t start, she got a last minute phone call, the traffic was bad. 

Finally I see the red light that signals a patient is in my waiting room. 

“I’m sorry,” she says, breathless. “I told myself I’d be on time today. But my Mom called and was telling me I needed to call my Grandmother. I know I should. I love my Grandmother, but I don’t like talking to her on the phone. It’s boring. She asks the same questions – how’s my job, have I met any nice boys, am I going out with my friends. Boring!”

“What makes it boring?” I ask and then immediately regret my question. I want to talk to her about her lateness. Or at least ask her what she means by boring. 

“I told you,” she replies, crossing and uncrossing her legs, combing her fingers through her long brown hair. “She always asks the same questions. My job is fine, I haven’t met anyone and, yes, I go out with my friends.”

We sit in silence for a few seconds until she says, “What? You think I should call my Grandmother?”

I shrug my shoulder. “I think that’s up to you.”

She sighs. “I wish my mother felt like that.”

Silence.

“What?” she asks again. “Aren’t you going to ask me anything?”

“What do you feel in the silence?” I ask.

“What?”

“What do you feel in the silence?”

“Like we’re wasting time, not getting anywhere.”

“That’s what you’re thinking, what are you feeling?”

“I don’t know.” Pause. “Bored I guess.”

“Sounds like it’s easy for you to feel bored.”

“Yeah, I guess,” she says fidgeting in the chair. “I don’t like sitting still. I don’t like quiet. I need to have stuff going on. That’s why I like my job at Saks, even though my parents say they didn’t pay for me to go to college for me to work at Saks. But there are people around and all those great clothes. Even if we have no customers I can walk around picking out clothes, holding them against me, deciding if I see something I really, really want. Although that’s frustrating because I can’t afford most of that stuff anyway, even with the employee discount. Not until my parents give me an allowance again. They say they’re paying for my apartment and until I get a real job that’s all I get.” Pause. “But I’ve told you all this already. What else should we talk about?” she asks, glancing at the clock.

“Do you have any thoughts about why you looked at the clock just then?”

“I don’t know. I guess because I’m bored and because time is just crawling by.”

Ah ha, I think. “Camilla, do you think it’s possible that you’re consistently late here because 45 minutes feels like a long time to sit and talk to me?”

She looks startled. Then smiles. “Yeah! 45 minutes is a long time! I never sit for 45 minutes. It’s why I always nix going to the movies. Who can sit for two hours watching a dumb movie?”

“So you come late so you don’t have to sit so long?”

“Yeah. But it’s not like I decide to come late. It just happens.”

“I understand. But it may ‘just happen’ because you unconsciously don’t want be here for the full session.”

“I suppose.”

“Is there any other reason you might want not to come here?”

“I don’t know. What are you getting at?”

“Well, I was wondering if coming here is kind of like calling your Grandmother. You feel you should do it. You know your parents want you to do it. But maybe it’s not really something you want to do.”

“Maybe,” she says shrugging.

“You’re 25 years old, Camilla. You don’t have to be here if you don’t want to.”

“I know,” she says looking down. “But I have to do some of the things my parents ask.”

“I think it would be important for you and for us to know what it is that you want to do.”  

“I don’t know what I want to do! That’s why I’m here.”

“Does that mean you’re not only being an obedient child by coming here, but that you do want help figuring yourself out?”

“I guess.”

“That doesn’t sound too certain.”

“Can we make the sessions 30 minutes?”

“No. My schedule is based on 45 minute sessions. And, besides, if you decide you want to come, I think it would be good for us to work on what makes it so difficult for you to be still, on what you feel underneath what you call boredom. And perhaps we could look at your lateness – or being on time – as a message about how you’re feeling about me and the therapy. That’s if you decide to continue. And that’s something you will have to decide.”

Lost and Perhaps Found

I’ve been working with Marvin, a 72 year old depressed widower for nine months. His sessions – like his life - are boring and repetitive. He refuses to discuss the past – says he’s too old for that – and complains bitterly about the emptiness in his life. “Nothing’s better,” he says today. “I still sit alone in my apartment staring at the beautiful weather and wondering why I can’t get myself out there, even to take a walk. There’s no place to go. I’m just lost. When Esther was around, even if we did fight all the time, at least there was someone there. Now there’s nothing.”

I ask myself, not for the first time, why I don’t feel more empathy for this man. After all, I too am a widow. I know the pain of loss, the feeling of aloneness. It’s his passivity that I find difficult. I want to shake him, tell him to find some hobby, some activity, a friend, a girl-friend. But I do none of that, knowing full well that he would find reason to rebuff any suggestion I might make. Today, I take a different track.

“How do you feel about coming here?” I ask.

“I come,” he says, averting his eyes.

Although his answer is the typical passive, uninvolved response, I sense a certain discomfort and wonder if more is going on than he’s saying.

“But how do you feel about coming?” I ask again, more persistently.

“What do you mean?” he says, even more flustered.

“How does it feel for you to come here?” I repeat. “To see me?”

“I…I don’t know,” he says, squirming in the chair.

I remain silent.

“Maybe I shouldn’t come. Is that what you’re telling me?” he says petulantly.

“I didn’t hear myself say that.” 

He sighs. “Everyone gets tired of me. Even my children tell me if I don’t stop complaining they won’t call any more. Not that they call that much.” He pauses. “You think I complain too much, don’t you?” 

“Well,” I say, trying to be diplomatic, “I understand you’re feeling miserable and unhappy and wanting to talk about your feelings. But you don’t really talk about your feelings. Instead you present as a forlorn, helpless person stuck in your misery. Yes, Esther died and you’re alone and you can’t bring her back. But you can try, ever so slowly to make a life for yourself.”

“I love you,” he blurts out.

I’m stunned. And speechless. I flash on the story a well-known psychoanalyst, Dr. Glen Gabbard, told about himself when he was first starting out in the field. When a female patient told him she loved him, he responded first by saying, “No you don’t” and then by trying to convince her that what she felt was not “real” love, but transference from earlier loved figures in her life. I knew what not to do. What to do was more difficult.

“I’m flattered…” I say.

He interrupts, more animated than I’ve ever seen him. “You mean you love me too?” he asks hopefully.

Oh dear, I think. “I’m flattered that you think that much of me,” I continue. “And I’m really glad you’re able to feel so alive.”

“You don’t love me,” he says, immediately deflated.

“I care about you, but I don’t love you as you want and need to be loved.”

“Nobody ever loved me,” he says. “What a fool to think someone like you could love me.”

“I don’t think you’re a fool at all. I’m glad you’re able to engage in life sufficiently to feel love for me. Now we have to help you find someone who can love you back.”

He shakes his head. “That’s impossible. No one ever loved me, no one ever will.”

“I would really like to understand why you feel so unlovable.”

“Why don’t you love me?” he asks challengingly. 

“I’m impressed,” I say truthfully. “You can be assertive when you want to be. But by looking to me for love, which I suspect you know wouldn’t be appropriate, I’d guess that you tend to look for love from people who can’t love you back, probably like the people who couldn’t love you in the past.”

Marvin slumps further down in the chair.

“You know,” I say, “now that I know you can have that spark, I’m going to be more insistent that you engage with me in therapy. We need to talk about the past. We need to talk about how you feel right this minute. We need to reintroduce you to life or perhaps introduce you to life for the first time.”

“You think that’s possible?” he asks.

“I detected a bit a hope in that question. I say we go with that hope.”

Breaking Up

“I’ve decided I’m going to break up with Tim,” Allison announces at the beginning of her Monday session.

“Really?” I say, obviously surprised. I see Allison three days a week. On Thursday there was no intimation of her breaking off the relationship. “I thought you and Tim were doing very well.”

“Wow! I finally got to shock you,” she says laughing, passing her fingers through her curly, brown hair. “Yeah, we were. But, I don’t know, I think he’s too boring for me.”

“Too boring,” I repeat. 

Allison is a 30 year old drug rep who came into therapy because she made repeatedly poor choices in men. We came to understand that Allison chose men who were similar to her grandiose and narcissistic father, a man who was always too busy and self-involved to attend to Allison. By choosing boyfriends who were like her father, she hoped to win in the present the love she couldn’t achieve in the past. Such a strategy never of course works, since choosing a narcissistic boyfriend will lead yet again to disappointment and pain.

“Yeah. I don’t know, the relationship is just too predictable, maybe too easy.”

“Too easy,” I say.

Allison laughs. “I’ve clearly thrown you for a loop. I love it!”

“So maybe our therapy sessions were also too boring and you’ve just spiced them up.”

“I never thought of that, but maybe,” Allison replies, still gleeful.

“Okay, so here are my questions: What’s wrong with easy? What makes easy uncomfortable? And what happened in the last four days?”

“It’s just not exciting. There’s no spontaneity. He’s always there – trusty, reliable Tim.”

“And you could say the same of me.”

“Yes, that’s true, you’re trusty and reliable, but I kind of like that from you.”

“Except you liked ‘throwing me for a loop.’”

“Yes. But that was like I kind of one upped you, like you know so much and sometimes it seems you can even read my mind and here I am able to surprise you. It makes me feel like I got you!”

Thoughts race through my mind. Allison feels she has just won a competition. With her father? More likely her mother. Allison and I have spent so much time dealing with her father, that her mother is a more shadowy figure to me. Still, my sense is that she too was fairly narcissistic and definitely intent on receiving as much of her husband’s meager supplies as possible. And there’s still the question of what changed in four days. Was the weekend break difficult for her? Was I too know-it-all in our last session?

“Did you have a hard time with our weekend break, Allison?” I ask.

“This has nothing to do with you! Why do you always want to make it about you?” she says angrily.

“I guess that makes me feel like your parents.”

“Now that you mention it, yes! I think you just wanted to deflate me because I surprised you.”

I consider Allison’s accusation. “I’m not consciously aware of competing with you or wanting to deflate you, but I am aware of being disappointed in your so easily discarding Tim and what seems like such a good relationship. Perhaps it made me feel you were discarding our work together and perhaps that made me want to reassert my presence.” 

“Wow! There’s a lot of stuff in there. You certainly think a lot about why you do what you do.”

“I try to. I think it’s very important that we try to understand as much as we can about ourselves and our motivations. Doesn’t mean we always succeed. We all have an unconscious – including me – and by definition the unconscious is unconscious.”

“I guess you’re saying I should try to understand why I want to break up with Tim.”

I nod. “Yes, I guess that’s what I’m saying.”

“He’s so much not my father. I know, I know, that’s a good thing. But it doesn’t always feel like such a good thing. It feels like I’m giving up so much.”

“You are. You’re giving up hope. You’re giving up the hope of ever getting the father you needed and deserved in both the past and the present and that’s very painful.”

“But you’re saying I should do it?”

“I’m not saying you should stay with Tim, but I am saying that until you mourn the father you never had and give up chasing him in the present, you’re going to face a lot of painful breakups in your life.”