Calling a therapist

People mostly call psychologists (or any shrink, for that matter) when they're in trouble. It's because they have made a mess, or because someone intimately involved in their life has made a mess. What do they think we're supposed to do?

A few months ago a new patient is overwhelmed by grief in my office because she has just found out her husband has had an affair. "Lady, I can't fix that!" I want to say, but she already knows that. She just wants someone to bear witness to her unhappiness, to have someone say to her "That's a shame. I'm sorry you're hurting." Hearing that won't fix anything, but somehow she will feel validated in her misery.

Where are the friends and family that should be standing witness to this sort of event? We've become so fragmented that we seem to have lost our natural support systems, and we're reduced to hiring a sympathetic ear to make real what has happened to us. Maybe the young people with their cell phones and instant messages have the right instinct. Maybe out of the deep human need to escape isolation they are re-creating their own tribes.

My job as a psychotherapist is to help people change. The absolute worst time to try to make a considered and thoughtful change is in the midst of a catastrophe. Granted, a catastrophe, especially one that you create yourself, establishes a dramatic context for the necessity of change, but nobody can think clearly while overwhelmed with misery, desperation or grief. To know what you want to change requires that you know who you are. You have to start from where you are, not from where you want or ought to be. That requires clear thinking, not desperate emotionality. "The court told me I have to see a psychologist" is possibly the worst possible starting point for anything useful.