I loved that. Not “What were you saying” but “What was I saying.”
“Well—” I began, but his phone pinged, and off he went, responding to another text.
“See, this is what I mean,” he grumbled. “I can’t delegate anything if I want it done right. Just a sec.”
Judging by the pings coming in, he seemed to be having multiple conversations. I wondered if we were reenacting a scene that played out with his wife.
Margo: Pay attention to me.
John: Who, you?
It was profoundly annoying. What to do with my annoyance? I could sit and wait (and become more irritated), or I could do something else.
I stood up, walked over to my desk, searched through a file, picked up my cell phone, walked back to my chair, and started texting.
It’s me, your therapist. I’m over here.
John’s phone pinged. I watched him read my text, surprised.
“Jesus Christ! You’re texting me now?”
I smiled. “I wanted to get your attention.”
“You have my attention,” he said, but he kept on texting.
I don’t feel like I have your attention.
I feel ignored, and a bit insulted.
Ping.
John sighed dramatically, then resumed his texting.
And I don’t think I can help you unless we’re
able to give each other our full attention.
So if you’d like to try to work together, I’m going
to ask that you not use your phone in here.
Ping.
“What? ” John said, looking up at me. “You’re banning my cell phone? Like I’m on an airplane? You can’t do that. It’s my session!”
I shrugged. “I don’t want to waste your time.”
I didn’t tell John that our sessions aren’t, in fact, his alone. Every therapy session belongs to both patient and therapist, to the interaction between them. It was the psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan who, in the early twentieth century, developed a theory of psychiatry based on interpersonal relationships. Breaking away from Freud’s position that mental disorders were intrapsychic in origin (meaning “in one’s mind”), Sullivan believed that our struggles were interactional (meaning “relational”). He went so far as to say, “It’s the mark of a senior clinician that he or she is the same person in their living room that they are in their office.” We can’t teach patients to be relational if we aren’t relational with them.
John’s phone pinged again, but this time it wasn’t me. He looked between me and his phone, deliberating. As his internal battle waged, I waited it out. I was half prepared for him to get up and leave, but I also knew that if he didn’t want to be here, he wouldn’t have come. Whether he understood it or not, he was getting something out of this. I was likely the only person in his life right now who would listen to him.
“Oh, for God’s sake!” he said, tossing his cell onto the chair across the room. “Okay, I’ll put down the goddamned phone.” Then he changed the subject.
I expected his anger, but for a second it looked as if his eyes had moistened. Was that sadness? Or was that a reflection from the sun streaming in the window? I toyed with inquiring, but there was only a minute left in the session, a time usually reserved for putting people back together rather than opening them up. I decided to file it away for a more opportune moment.
Like a miner spotting a glimmer of gold, I suspected that I’d hit on something.
Today, with much restraint, John stops mid-reach, leaving his vibrating phone alone and continues his story about being officially surrounded by idiots.
“Even Rosie’s being idiotic,” he says. I’m surprised to hear him talk this way about his daughter, who’s four. “I tell her not to go near my laptop, and what does she do? She jumps on the bed, which is fine, but it’s not fine to jump on the laptop that’s on the bed. Idiot! And then as soon as I yell, ‘No! ’ she pees on the bed. Ruined the mattress. She hasn’t peed on anything since she was a baby.”
This story concerns me. There’s a myth that therapists are trained to be neutral, but how can we be? We’re humans, not robots. In fact, instead of being neutral, we therapists strive to notice our very un-neutral feelings and biases and opinions (what we call countertransference), so that we can step back and figure out what to do with them. We use, rather than suppress, our feelings to help guide the treatment. And this story about Rosie raises my hackles. Many parents have yelled at their kids in their less-than-glorious parenting moments, but I wonder about John’s relationship with his daughter. When working with couples on empathy, often I’ll say, “Before you speak, ask yourself, What is this going to feel like to the person I’m speaking to? ” I make a mental note to share this with John one day.
“That sounds frustrating,” I say. “Do you think you might have scared her? A loud voice can be frightening.”
“Nah, I yell at her all the time,” he says. “The louder the better. Only way she listens.”
“The only way?” I ask.
“Well, when she was younger I would go outside and run around with her, let her blow off some steam. Sometimes she just needed to be outside. But lately she’s been a real pain in the ass. She even tried to bite me.”
“Why?”
“She wanted to play with me, but . . . oh, you’ll love this.”
I know what’s coming.
“I was texting, so she had to wait, and she just lost her shit. Margo was out of town, so Rosie was spending her days with her Danny, and—”
“Remind me, who’s Danny?”
“Not Danny. Her danny. You know, a dog nanny?”
I stare back blankly.
“A dog sitter. A nanny for the dog. A danny.”
“Oh, so Rosie is your dog,” I say.
“Well, who the hell did you think I was talking about?”
“I thought your daughter’s name was—”
“Ruby,” he says. “The little one is Ruby. Wasn’t it obvious that I was talking about a dog here?” He sighs and shakes his head as if I’m the biggest idiot in his kingdom of idiots.
He never mentioned having a dog before. The fact that I remembered the first letter of his daughter’s name, which was referenced only in passing two sessions ago, feels like a victory to me. But more than John’s entitlement, what strikes me is this: he’s showing me a softer side I haven’t seen yet.
“You really love her,” I say.
“Of course I do. She’s my daughter.”
“No, I mean Rosie. You care about her deeply.” I’m trying to touch him in some way, to bring him closer to his emotions, which I know are there but atrophied, like a neglected muscle.
He waves me away with his hand. “She’s a dog.”
“What kind of dog is she?”
His face brightens. “A mix. She’s a rescue dog. She was a mess when we got her because of those idiots who were supposed to be taking care of her, but now she’s—I’ll show you a photo if you’ll let me use my goddamned phone.”
I nod.
As he scrolls through his pictures, he smiles to himself. “I’m looking for a good one,” he says. “So you can see how cute she really is.” With each photo, he beams a bit more, and I glimpse his perfect teeth again.