Interim report: Seventy come Tuesday*

In sixteen months I’ll be seventy years old. My wife and I don’t have a retirement cache and I’ll still be working through that birthday, and on. The number – seventy – feels prohibitive to me, but momentum will happen and necessity will rule. Wouldn’t I need to be a superlative gem of a therapist, to be helping people in my decline?

One of my aggravating flaws as a therapist has been to offer this completely unneces­sary disclaimer at the beginning of some Intake sessions: “I believe I’m the oldest therapist here: I’m 68. However, I haven’t been in the field as long as one might expect consider­ing my age. I’ve been seeing individuals and couples for around twenty-one years, and doing crisis intervention for some years before that, in clinics, hospitals, homes, jails. However, it’s been very intensive work, often six days a week, with an awful lot of thinking and writing about psychology.” I’m not sure why I feel an urge to bare my chest like this. It sounds like insecurity, but I don’t feel insecure. I do know it’s complicated, just like my clients.

In other respects, everything is simpler. The diagnostic names? Who cares? Everybody has depression and anxiety. Love and marriage, horse and carriage.** I see people as earnest false lives which are their escapes from early loss and pain. Almost every word I hear from clients is ignorance: They think they know themselves but don’t, or they know things but not the root and reason of the things. Therapy is a compromise because we can’t cleanse out all pain and go back to the unformed or incompletely formed atavistic identity we ran away from. We have to remain somewhat defended, false.

I continue to have the narcissistic feeling that almost everybody is helped in my office, even most of those who quit fairly early. They learn that they are not symptoms but history; they are not defective but were injured; and they have the opportunity to bond with someone who casts eyes on and touches their three-dimensionality: psyche, body and time. Even if they run away from this scandalous information, this offering, it’s too late: They know, and they have felt some stirrings. They are now heavier, better grounded.

There’s a part of me that wonders, quixotically, if there is another breakthrough to be had, some new way to conceptualize clients to themselves, some different tone or gravity. But I know this is a childish projection of my own desire for transformation, or to be, frankly, not-me. On Thursdays, I jones for Saturday. On Sunday, I smile upon Monday.

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* “Wok fol air didle i-do” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlF7t_WcXnY. 

** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRDBvKGc1fE.