Rosie?” he says. “She’s the only one who doesn’t ask things of me. The only one who isn’t, in one way or another, disappointed with me—or at least, she wasn’t before she bit me! Who wouldn’t love that?”
He laughs loudly, like we’re at a bar and he’s just tossed out a breezy one-liner. I try to talk about the disappointment—who’s disappointed with him and why?—but he claims it was just a joke and can’t I take a joke? And though we get nowhere with this today, we both know what he told me: he has a heart under those quills, and the capacity for love.
For starters, he adores that hideous dog.
9
Snapshots of Ourselves
People who come to therapy present snapshots of themselves, and from these snapshots, a therapist has to extrapolate. Patients arrive, if not at their worst, then certainly not at their best. They might be despairing or defensive, confused or chaotic. Generally, they’re in very bad moods.
So they sit on the therapist’s couch and look up expectantly, hoping to find some understanding and, eventually (but preferably immediately), a cure. But therapists don’t have an immediate cure because these people are complete strangers to us. We need time to acquaint ourselves with their hopes and dreams, their feelings and behavior patterns, sometimes more deeply than even they have. If it takes from birth to the day they arrive in our offices to develop whatever is troubling them or if a problem has been incubating for many months, it makes sense that they might need more than a couple of fifty-minute sessions to attain the desired relief.
But when people are in extremis, they want their therapists, these professionals, to do something. Patients want our patience but may not have much patience themselves. Their demands can be overt or tacit, and—especially in the beginning—they can weigh heavily on the therapist.
Why would we choose a profession that requires us to meet unhappy, distressed, abrasive, or unaware people and sit with them, one after the other, alone in a room? The answer is this: Because therapists know that at first, each patient is simply a snapshot, a person captured in a particular moment. It’s like a photo of you taken from an unfortunate angle and with a sour expression on your face. There might also be a photo in which you’re glowing, caught opening a present or mid-laugh with a lover. Both are you in that fraction of time, and neither is you in your entirety.
So therapists listen, suggest, nudge, guide, and occasionally cajole our patients to bring other snapshots into view, to shift their experience of what’s happening inside and around them. We sort through the snapshots, and before long it becomes apparent that these seemingly discrete images all revolve around a common theme, one that might not have been in our patients’ fields of vision when they decided to come in.
Some snapshots are disturbing, and glimpsing them reminds me that we all have a dark side. Others are blurry. People don’t always remember events or conversations clearly, but they do remember with great accuracy how an experience made them feel. Therapists have to be interpreters of these blurry snapshots, aware that patients need to be fuzzy to some extent, because those first snapshots help to gloss over painful feelings that might be invading their peaceful inner territory. 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 people first come in, we’re imagining them down the line. We do this not just on that first day but in every single session, because that image allows us to hold for them the hope that they can’t yet muster themselves, and it informs how the treatment unfolds.
I once heard creativity described as being the ability to grasp the essence of one thing and the essence of some very different thing and smash them together to create some entirely new thing. That’s what therapists do too. We take the essence of the initial snapshot and the essence of an imagined snapshot and smash them together to create an entirely new one.
I have this in mind each time I meet a new patient.
I hope that Wendell does too, because in those early sessions, my snapshots are, well—not flattering.
10
The Future Is Also the Present
Today I’m early for my appointment, so I sit in Wendell’s waiting room and take a look around. Turns out his waiting room is as unusual as