A casual post

I have the ugliest office at the counseling center where I work as independent contractor. This is by design (lack of design). There’s the big hideous brown couch that’s perfect for lying on but not sitting, as the seat cushions are longitudinal. They make adults feel like children, as they have to slouch forward to let their knees bend in the right place.

Good. Feel like children.

All the other offices – accoutered by their respective clinicians – are beauteous. I no longer feel good about myself for postures like that – owing to my burnt yet placid mental age of 67.

Right now, I’m being a bit silly. I have two framed pictures leaning up against the wall – a Maxfield Parrish (Ecstasy) and some Hungarian gloomy thing my wife bought at an arts festival. Happy and depressed. I joke to the kids that since leaning against the wall is closely related to hanging on the wall, I’m within adequate parameters. But they’ve been like that for too long now, so I recently switched them: Maxfield leans where the Hungarian did, and vice versa.

This is the first time I’ve worked at a spiffy place where the other counselors (and interns) don’t have the air of your typical homeless shelter street smart drug-tough-love social worker type. They are bourgeois, dress better than I, seem smooth, white collar and on top of things. Owing to this environment, I’ve begun to cultivate an even more insular and serene outlook. That is, I blind and numb myself to everything but my clients.

I’m new at this place. There are two clients one day, nine the next. Two out of two Intakes (first-timers) cancel; a third-visit client “late cancels” as her “car broke down.” This is not Las Vegas, but its adjacent rich sister, Henderson. I’m not sure I believe her. Take an Uber, Doll. In five years, I’ll be carefree enough to text-message: “Oh really?”

An hour ago I read a semi-popular blog that, like my surrounding offices, looks beautiful, and which stated that Narcissism is not a mental illness. One of the causes of my forced equanimity is to realize how pitifully ignorant people are, and then they blog about it.

This was a nice evening, though. I received an email from a teen I saw for two months at my previous center. It was titled “Important,” and read: “This is J-----. How are you? I miss our therapy sessions.” That was the whole letter. I know that I had facilitated a transfer to another therapist there. I invited her to email, to text-message, and if possible to get driven the rather long distance to my new office. That’s not “stealing a client”: She reached out.

In this profession, we risk clients quitting early if we challenge them. I may be about to prove that, again. A fifty-five-year-old woman came in with suicidal character yet a decision to live, breezy manner, hated life, wished she wouldn’t wake up in the morning. Her childhood was “wonderful.” Her parents were “wonderful.” She must have drugged out, in her early teens, and cut on herself “for attention.” I said basically – With all due respect, it all can’t be true. It couldn’t have been that rosy. She looked alarmed.

Should I have taken breezy ol’ time and ridden along with her, listened to this supreme ignorance week after week? I don’t think so. We’re both too old.