Week 34-2: "Yo dawg, I herd you like therapy..."
Being more miserable than I've ever been in my adult life, I've wanted to get back into therapy for a long time. I think about whether I should try and do it again on a routine basis.
The problem is that over the years, I've done loads of therapy, and paid loads for therapy, and it's obvious that I really have nothing to show for it.
Therapy, as I've known it, is at least a little bit useful for someone like me who can't get their brain to shut up and just needs to talk every last boring detail of those thoughts out in a safe space. It's a space where the typical real-world fear of being judged for saying this or that is avoided, through the knowledge that you have paid good money for the privilege of saying whatever you damn well please to someone who won't go telling your other friends or loved ones the insane shit that you just said.
That's pretty much the only thing I ever got out of it-- once a week, something of a pressure-relief valve for my head, and all the dumb thoughts that stay bottled up tightly inside it during the average day, for fear of alienating / boring the shit out of others or-- worse-- Looking Unprofessional.
But it was barely effective even then, for several reasons. One, it's never enough. 45, 50 minutes on the clock... there's so much I repress in daily life that I can talk through most of it easily, and left unchecked I'd probably sit there literally talking nonstop through all of it.
And after that, I'd still be left with hours and hours of Important Things To Say connected to the things I'd already said, which of course have to be "left" for the next session, by which time I would have forgotten all of the Important Things To Say from the previous session and wouldn't be reminded by the therapist in any way of what we were talking about last week / said we would continue talking about this week.
I'd instead be left to start the conversation anew, all by myself, on the couch... which in turn would kick off a 45-50 minute monologue about something entirely different, only to be cut off and leave yet another Proustian-scale batch of unsaid Important Things To Say extending into the next session, the majority of which never get said, since the next session would begin yet again with no connection to the prior session.
The other primary reason for the lack of therapeutic effectiveness is the maddeningly recursive / circular method that most modern therapists seem to use.
I do not know much about the pedagogy of modern-day therapy, what they as a field see as their primary objectives. I've had maybe seven or eight different therapists, though, and it seems that they are primarily trained not to really help people deal with or fix their problems, but to run them in endless circles with empty, one-size-fits-all response-"questions" to absolutely everything said in the midst of a session.
My therapists all have had different approaches to running a client in circles without ever helping to actually fix anything, but their personal methods of doing so haven't differed all that much.
My longest-running therapist, who I saw weekly for maybe two years, just loved to ask the "question:" "I wonder how you process that." I reckon she used this response about 75-80% of the time whenever there was a brief lull in my bottomless monologue.
This always seemed an odd question to me, even as a guy who inherently adores process of all kinds. Best of all: many times, this question would be issued immediately after I'd just told her exactly how I "processed" some event.
If she was trying to guide me to some kind of down-in-the-dirt breakthrough by endlessly asking me to process my process, then the process of my process of my process, only to end up with more Important Things To Say that led us both nowhere in the end... well, you'd think she would at least realize this method wasn't working with the clueless, horse-to-water likes of me and would try some alternative method of getting me where she thought we ought to go a little faster now and again. Or maybe she'd, y'know, offer some actual personal perspective on the conversational returns from time to time. Not so.
I'm a big, big fan of comedians Tim and Eric. One of my favorite T&E sketches from their Awesome Show Great Job! involves an alternative product to the Internet called the Innernette, which could have come straight out of 1997. The Innernette is a ridiculous, clunky, 100% offline emulation of online functionality, "all on just a single CD-ROM," Microsoft-Encarta-style. It misses the entire point of the Internet, which of course means that dumb people still would have bought it in droves if it had been a real product.
Demonstrating the online-chat-equivalent feature of the Innernette, Tim pulls up a chat window with a computer-driven chat avatar named The Professor. The Professor automatically responds to any and all user chat input with the one-word response "Fine".
I've often thought that the Innernette, were it real, could have a chat character named Your Therapist, in which the response to damn near everything you type would be "I wonder how you process that."
me: hello, therapist, so i am not feeling so grate
Your Therapist: I wonder how you process that.
me: well i don't know, i guess that it means that something is wrong in my life. like, bloody well everything.
Your Therapist: I wonder how you process that.
me: are we going in circles here? christ, i dont fuckn KNOW how to "process" that
Your Therapist: Very interesting. I wonder why it is that you 'dont fuckn KNOW how to "process" that' .
me: you're just copying and pasting what i just said, ffs.
Your Therapist: I wonder how you process that.
At the end of a 45-minute chat session with Your Therapist, you'd be billed $200.
The absolute worst is when therapy gets meta. This happened a lot on my last few futile attempts to re-enter therapy, because I was a lot less willing to accept endless streams of "how do you process that" sorts of things, and a lot more demanding of visible results or at least conclusions in semi-reasonable spans of time.
My last therapist was one I saw for maybe six or seven sessions. From the first session, I warned her that I had been in therapy for a long time and I was tired of the circular-"question" approach; I had dumped three therapists in the preceding four months, and I would want results for my money if I was going to stick around.
She seemed like a straight shooter for a few sessions. But it turned out she was extremely good at the same passive-involvement walking-the-client-in-circles bullshit that I had experienced with every therapist before her.
Three or four sessions in, I started warning her about these sorts of approaches as I noticed her using them more frequently.
Suddenly, we started spending time in the sessions talking about what I expected and wanted out of therapy, which is all well / good and fair. I was spending time telling her my clear expectations... and how I "processed" those expectations... and answering "questions" like "I wonder what those expectations say about you", with me paying for the privilege.
My reasonable expectations for therapeutic results could probably be summed up clearly in about five minutes before work on my problems could resume, and I was pretty sure I'd said all I needed to say. But prompts along these lines still continued.
When this line of inquiry began to extend over multiple sessions, I realized that she was just shuffling the same goddamned cards around, never making any personal statements on what she planned to do to help me achieve the desired result, thinking that she could keep me happy by letting me vent / complain endlessly about all my past therapists for a while.
On our last "session," I walked in fifteen minutes early with no intentions of actually having a session, and told her I was never going to see her again. We then had a 50-minute talk about what had gone wrong and my specific objections to the approach I'd just experienced-- now we're in meta-meta territory, great. I kept trying to end the conversation due to its pointlessness. She kept extending the conversation until, whaddaya know, "time's up," sucker.
Of course, I was asked to pay for that "session" too.
Well, at least complaining on the Internet is free, and maybe my own publicly-posted complaints re: said therapist will save some other poor sap a couple bucks.
The best time I've ever had in therapy, the most I've ever gotten out of it by far, was in group therapy. Following a visit to the university counseling center, I was put together in a room with a bunch of fellow grad students in other programs. There were a few regulars, with other folks coming and going all the time. We talked about our shit turn by turn, and it was always kind of terrifying. People talked honestly to each other about what they saw when someone else opened their mouth, with a real therapist sitting in to supervise and, thankfully, never saying very much.
I saw at least one "breakthrough" a week in that room, had a couple myself over time, and they definitely hurt so good. I saw at least two breakdowns a week in that room too. I felt like we all hated and loved each other all at the same time. It was fascinating, but who cares; the important thing is results, and I could clearly see we were all getting shit done. I felt like I got six times as much "done" in the three months I met with that group than I did in the two years with my old therapist, the Queen of Processing.
Nobody in that room-- the trained therapist aside-- ever offered a response / asked a "question" beginning with "I wonder how you...". Responses started with "what I hear," "do you see," "what I think," "don't you realize."
That is what modern therapy ought to be, in my book. And I would kill to find another group of real folks like that, another therapeutic environment where I'm not just being asked to talk in circles around myself week after week.
I have no idea how to begin finding one; all I see in the Yellow Pages are folks with degrees in passive circular "question"-asking, AA meetings, and things associated with religions I already know I don't believe in.
I wonder how I process that.