Unsure

“I feel ridiculous going into therapy because I can’t decide whether or not to get married,” Nina, a slender young woman with shiny dark hair and large brown eyes, begins. “I mean I’ve been in therapy before, lots of times. It’s been a lifesaver sometimes, but going into therapy because I can’t decide whether or not to marry Sam seems silly. Either I want to marry Sam or I don’t. I don’t know what makes it so hard to decide.”

“What does make it so hard to decide?”

“I guess because I don’t know if I love him. But is it even necessary that I love him? I’ve loved other guys and they all turned out like shit. I don’t know. I keep going round and around in my head.”

“Nina, I hear that you feel a lot of pressure to decide right now, but it would be helpful if you told me something about you, your background, why you’ve been in therapy before, maybe something about the shit guys.”

Nina sighs. “I knew I’d have to go through the whole thing again. It’s so tedious. Okay, here goes. When I was a kid, my life was pretty normal until I was six. Then my mother was hit by a car. She lived on a ventilator for a year or so until my Dad won the court battle with my Mom’s parents and had her disconnected. My Dad didn’t let me see my grandparents for quite a while, but then I got to see them and that was hard too because they talked such shit about my Dad. That’s when therapy was really helpful. Things got better after that until my Dad started dating and dating and dating. I guess he was trying to drown his sorrow in women, at least that’s what my therapist said. Fast forward, I now have my fourth step-mother except of course I don’t live at home any more so I don’t really care who he’s with. End of story.”

“That’s an overwhelming story, Nina, yet you told it like you were reading from a book, like it happened to someone else.”

“I just can’t feel about it anymore. I don’t want to feel about it anymore. I want it over.”

“But maybe it isn’t over.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, that’s a tremendous amount of loss and trauma for anyone to go through, let alone a young child. You lost your Mom, your grandparents and your Dad.”

“My Dad’s not dead.”

“No, but it sounds as though once he started dating you felt as though you’d lost him.”

“Yep! But that was just me being jealous. That was another therapist’s opinion.”

“And what’s your opinion?”

“I don’t know. It felt too soon. It felt like he forgot about my Mom. It made me wonder if my grandparents weren’t right about him. It made me sad. I missed him. I missed them all,” Nina says, her voice breaking a bit.

“I’m sorry Nina.”

Her eyes fill with tears which she blinks back. “But what does this have to do with my not being able to decide whether or not to marry Sam?”

“First tell me whether the previous guys you loved were unfaithful to you or otherwise unavailable.”

She snorts. “You mean like married? Yeah, I had my share of those. And my share of womanizers too. So you think I have an Oedipal thing, right? You think I want my father just for me.”

“Is that what you think?”

“Maybe. I just don’t know any more.” Pause. “For sure Sam isn’t anything like my father. He’s kind and generous and faithful. I know he loves me. I just don’t know if I love him.” Pause. “So you’d say I have to give up on my Dad in order to allow a different kind of man into my life.”

I smile. “You’re certainly no stranger to therapy.”

She nods. “Too true.”

“But I wonder if, as you said, it’s only an ‘Oedipal thing.’ You’ve had so many early losses, Nina, losses that had to have a huge affect on your life. I wonder if you’ve walled yourself off from ever allowing yourself to be really close to anyone for fear that the pain of losing them would be too much. If you choose unavailable guys, they maintain the distance. If you choose a guy who is available, maybe that’s just too scary. What if you come to rely on him like you did your Mom or your Dad? What if he leaves or is in an accident? What if he dies? Maybe your six year old self doesn’t feel like she could cope with that.”

“But I’m not six.”

“The unconscious is timeless, Nina. We’re all whatever age we are today as well as six and ten and fifteen. That’s how we’re made.”

“But what do I do?”

“I’d say we have to go back so that you can feel the tremendous pain and loss and fear you felt as a child and help that child mourn and grow so that you can allow yourself to love and to know that however painful it might be you could again survive loss.”

“Sounds charming.” Pause. “When do we start?”

The Reluctant Patient, The Reluctant Therapist

Mr. Marty Stein sits across from me. With his slight, stooped frame, bald head, and sad, drooping eyes he looks all of his 89 years.  Shifting in the chair and sighing audibly he begins.

“Rose said I had to come. She said she can’t stand it anymore that I don’t talk. I’m happy with her. I don’t know what more she wants. We’ve been going out for over five years. I’m too old for this. Who ever heard of an 89 year old man seeing a … you’re a psychologist, right?”

“No one is too old for therapy,” I say nodding, “But it doesn’t sound as though you want to be here.”

“Right,” he says. “I’m not going to change now. I was married for over fifty years and my wife complained of the same thing. I didn’t change then and I’m not going to change now.”

“You sound almost proud of your reluctance to change,” I offer tentatively.

“No, just resigned. What’s the expression, ‘You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.’ But I told Rose I’d come, so here I am.”

“Can you tell me about yourself, about your background, your childhood?”

Another sigh. “My mother died when I was three. My father couldn’t take care of me – or didn’t want to – so I spent my childhood in an orphanage, two orphanages actually. The first one was in Brooklyn. It was boys and girls. Then when I was 10 they sent me to upstate New York, Syracuse, where it was just boys. It was run by rabbis, very strict. But it was okay. We got fed. And then when I got to be 18 I had to leave, so I joined the army. That was OK too. It was good actually. I grew up and learned to be responsible and even got to see some of the world. And they taught me to be a mechanic so I got to make a decent living when I got out. All in all it was a pretty good life. I have no complaints. The bad parts, I just put them away. No point in dwelling on the negative.”

As Mr. Stein relates his story, deadpan with no affect, I feel an increasing heaviness in my body and an enveloping cloud of sadness overtaking me. “You certainly had a very sad, deprived childhood,” I say gingerly.

“It wasn’t so bad. As I said, they fed me, they didn’t abuse me and in Syracuse we had lots of empty space to run around. Besides, I did all right. Took care of my wife and three kids. No complaints. I just put the bad stuff away.”

“Did you see your father over the years?” I ask, aware that I am reluctant to probe too deeply into this man’s psyche.  Over his long life, he’s built up a stalwart defense that has worked for him, protecting himself from the pain of his early life.

“He’d come and visit sometimes. But he could never be counted on. He wasn’t reliable. I don’t even know how many wives he had. And he stole money from me. While I was in the army I sent him money to hold for me and he gambled it away.”

“That must have made you very angry.”

“I guess. At the time. But I just started working again and built up my little nest egg. As I said, no point dwelling on the negative.”

“And your mother? Do you remember her?”

“Nah. I was only two or three when she died. I didn’t know anything more than the orphanage. When that’s all you know, it’s okay. As I said, my life turned out pretty good.”

What next, I ask myself. If this man was 30 or even 20 years younger, I’d be far more eager to explore his defenses, to try and get to the pain that must reside underneath. Is my reluctance to attempt to plumb his depths ageism? Perhaps. But he has the same reluctance. Except he’s here.

“Mr. Stein, you say that Rose insisted that you come. What would happen if you didn’t? Why did you agree? Is there anything you’d like to get out of coming here?”

“She’s a good person. I don’t think she’d stop seeing me, but maybe she would. I don’t think so, though. But I’d like to make her happy. Maybe you could help me work on things to talk to her about.”

“How about what you were telling me about today? Your background. Your experiences.”

“You think she’d be interested in that old stuff?”

“Yes, I suspect she would. So maybe that’s one thing we could do. You could tell me things about yourself, as kind of practice for telling Rose.”

“I guess.”

We are both still reluctant participants, perhaps fearful of exposing too much pain on the one hand, or dealing with the deadness of meaningless conversation on the other.