Pandemic journal entry #1

I don’t think I’ll go to work tomorrow. I’ll stay home and talk with a few people about their problems, try to help them ‘get better then feel better’ (to manipulate Ralph Klein’s apothegm that Borderlines come to therapy to feel better, not get better). I suspect that Albert Einstein must have felt good in this mellow kind of way: He was a scientist in his identity, was a scientist in most settings: at the patent office, at Princeton, talking a walk, not while playing the violin, scribbling arcane brilliance on an envelope. I feel like a therapist almost everywhere.

Decades ago I realized that I am thrilled by pandemonium: some crisis involving many people, a big storm or fire, a cluster-fuck of question marks slamming everybody’s head, giving a violin-piano recital (Allegheny College, 1973) with a sudden gust of wind blowing the sheet music about. This coronavirus pandemic gives me a related sensation. We are all now in a formidable theme, at least for the moment, all eyes looking in the same direction. Each individual is now important for him- and herself and for other people. And in this world theme and this double importance, being a therapist feels warmly grand.

Now, the question is: Will people want to work with me as a face and voice on a computer screen? I’ve now had thirteen such clients, first time each. How will they grade me, and will they come back? It feels different, less profound if you will, and I am ambivalent about its goodness.

Addendum

I wonder if my wife feels something similar, about the earth tilting unexpectedly, but I won’t discuss this with her. When I’m busy and relatively happy and income is in slight excess, she becomes very quiet, seemingly grim, stares at her iMac most of the time, over-spends. But when income is modest or scary and troubles encroach (taxes, job stress), she gets galvanized in constructive ways: will look brighter, will talk more, will clean, beautify the apartment, manage like a captain as if everything were fine or better this way, budget and juggle expansively, make lists that get done, light incense.

Have problems on the home front, heal problems on the home front.

I've lost my tele-cherry

Dear client –

XX Counseling – and I – have moved to “teletherapy,” more accurately called video therapy. This is an updated message, in case I’ve already given you the scoop on the Azalea teletherapy program, which I’m now considering the lesser of two alternatives. Presently, I’m using Doxy.me, a HIPAA-secure program. It will (reportedly) work not only on computers and laptops, but on mobile devices including smartphones. (That is fabulous, but slightly weird: Picture doing therapy with phone in hand while waiting in line at Trader Joe’s. Don’t wait in the virus line!) And, unlike Azalea, there are no “access codes” or other bothers. When it is time for your appointment, you’d just click on the following link:

https://doxy.me/f👻$🍗!⏰+🌜

(Save this email! Save that link!) That’s it. There will, of course, be differences between this method and at-office sessions. (Some of these differences, I’m sure I haven’t anticipated yet.) For one, you’d need to sign in pretty much right on time: If your session is at 10 a.m., you should click in within two or three minutes of that time (before or after). I will no longer get away with being my traditional four minutes late for everybody! If you are later than that, I will busy myself watching Yuja Wang, pianist extraordinaire, on YouTube. For two, you’ll be looking at my shiny reflective glasses, owing to screen brightness. I promise – I won’t use hypnosis!

There will be other advantages besides the obvious convenience of staying at home. I will be open for more flexible scheduling. There might be late evening hours or something on Sunday. We’ll see how it goes. Here, I’ll state my guarantee of confidentiality at my end: I will be alone in my home office, with doors closed. You may hear a toilet flushing on the distant horizon.

There’s every reason to be confident that this process will be as substantial as face-to-face therapy, though that may take a short growth period: I’ve been warned that it’s too easy to get “chatty” with online contact. Note to all of us: This isn’t FaceTime, it’s therapy. I will continue to bring my best to it.

Please feel invited to contact me with any questions or concerns at this email, or text message. If you call, I’m afraid I’ll think you’re the Student Loan people, and will probably toss my phone aside and hide under the bed.

Later! And thanks for continuing to work with me.

-- TPS

😷         😷         😷

Comment

I’ve seen only four teletherapy clients so far. I’ve found it a bit of a strain, and there’s been a slight unreal sensation. As a depth therapist – as opposed to a cognitive therapist – I am generally trying to be in tune with the client’s feeling and her historical self, the “inner child.” That is very hard to do without the personal face-to-face vibe and the “room of truth” ambience. A consequence is that one therapy hour has felt like two. The formula would appear to be: Heavy engagement makes time go by faster. Screen contact, with its sense of distance, threatens to bleach out conversation, make it more superficial, and time drags. However, I’m hopeful: For a few seconds, I watched my client’s face and actually felt I was in the room with him. I will try to cultivate that hallucination for future sessions.

Your final diagnostic evaluation

In your last days before you turn to the grave, will your spirit have love and good memories or will it be bitter and crash-and-burn? I’m conceiving this as the final and maybe truest diagnostic assessment of the psyche, which formed in the primary crucible of birth, infancy and early childhood. All later development will be adaptation and not our true self. So many layers of experience, like the earth’s layers. But in the end, at our death, it’s the core that will either be white hot and ruinous or it will be the hearth that fades to cold.

I suspect that I may be the bitter ending, notwithstanding the good things in my life. I think the best I’ll be able to hope for is ambivalence: warm, cold, pastels, dark, post-regret. It won’t make a difference if I predecease my wife or not. The core is the core.

I see clients who you’d think had a basic benignity but who repeatedly sabotage themselves. Others, such as a fifteen-year-old very depressed boy, talked and felt away much of his thick dark layer to reveal a bright sun. There is every reason to believe that it’s the core that determines long-term success or failure in therapy. It’s the core underlying all our feelings and beliefs about ourselves that determines our final phase, that death bed.

Can therapy change it, our primal identity? Maybe the best it can do is sink a few pastels into the breach. Therapy can’t give you the good birth, the good mother, the parents who loved each other. But it can visit that core. And if it goes there, it should add warm light.