On Teenage Therapy
♠
As a teenager I was forced into therapy by my parents. Their mandate ostensibly stemmed from a single poor decision on my part: I came home far too drunk, and embarrassed the hell out of them in front of people they were trying to become friends with. In truth, this incident probably didn’t terrify or anger them so severely; rather, they coldly calculated that my present loss of moral standing could be leveraged to redress other concerns they had about my behavior. I wasn’t a kid prone to psychotic rage or deeply depressed mopes, and I didn’t have the dreaded ADHD. I was, however, accruing a set of traits and habits that they were growing wary of, such as: showerlessness, “gateway” substance abuse, lack of girlfriend, and surliness. So when I “fucked up” (my father’s words) so badly as to give every indication that I was headed for the turn-off towards the entrance to the wrong track, they decided to straighten me out…by sending me to the same shrink my father was seeing. Not one he had seen before, or one he had a few sessions with, but his regular guy of many months. If you are asking yourself whether it occurred to them that this might cause some thorny conflicts of interest, or that it might tempt the shrink to violate certain rules of conduct, rest assured that these issues were addressed. I raised them myself, along with a litany of other objections, all of which were summarily lumped into one binding dismissal, succinctly expressed by my mother, who brought out her miniature, invisible violin for the occasion, and played a particularly mournful tune.
When I arrived for my first session with Alan, as he preferred to be called, I chose the couch at the opposite end of the office from his desk as opposed to the easy chair nearby. The space was decently but eclectically furbished, and the walls bore both his diplomas and those of another man. He asked me how I was, to which I replied that I was fine, and how was he doing? He just blinked at that, a phenomenon that would recur in subsequent sessions to my growing amusement. From there we moved to the odious subject of why I thought I was meeting with him. I didn’t try to play Will Hunting on him or sit stubbornly with my arms folded across my chest. Instead, I answered his questions in a curt but polite manner and bore it out. Within ten minutes I felt ludicrous sitting across the room and I moved, thus relinquishing whatever intentions I had for symbolic rebellion. After that we mostly just chit-chatted, and by the end I was pretty convinced that I could weather future sessions with ease, assuring him of my mental wherewithal and emotional stability without delving into anything too heavy. He struck me as a personable man, and his appearance was not what I expected of a psychologist: he was tall, and wore a polo shirt with the top buttons open, exposing a flare of chest hair and a gold cross. He wore glasses that made his eyes appear ludicrously oversized—hence the amusing blinking—yet in tandem with the rest of his appearance this created an effect of geniality rather than aloofness. All in all I expected the process to be a pretty painless one.
Which in fact, it was. I ended up seeing Alan for over a year, but within a month our basic habits were established. There would be no probing investigations from him into my fragile inner workings; rather, there would be repeated and measured exhortations to quit the pot, get a girlfriend, etc. I would have to respond that I could hear him, that I was working on it, with varying degrees of sincerity depending on the subject. Small talk was actively encouraged, and I absorbed as much about his daughter’s Avril Lavigne concerts and his beach house as he did about my car troubles and the travails of acting in the local all-girls school’s plays. Halfway through most sessions we’d take a cigarette break and stroll around the parking lot. Blowing sharp plumes out of his nose, he’d point at cars he’d like to get for his wife, or he’d pull out his clubs from his car and practice a few swings. Watch my shoulders, he’d say, see how they never rise? Now take a look at this club. The weight distribution is perfect. $300 for this club alone. But it’s worth it. Here, hold it. Feel that? I smoked too, which was the one vice I got a free pass on. When I didn’t have a cigarette he’d bum me one and talk about how my parents were going to kill him for it. Sometimes during a session we didn’t really talk much at all, and if I had driven myself there, I’d leave early. This sort of thing seemed okay since he would often talk to other, needier patients on the phone for ten minutes at a time while I flipped through a magazine.
Lest he appear flippant, I should also mention that he took a genuine and endearing interest in my life, as exemplified by the fact that he placed my junior prom picture on his desk, or at least would set it out before I came by. In fact, he was enamored of my date, who was quite pretty, and he clung to this scant evidence as proof that I didn’t have to be a total loser. But when it came to discussions of a young man who displayed a disturbing degree of emotional attachment to me, he would laughingly say “the guy’s gay, bud.” This, how shall we say, prevented certain avenues of discussion from opening up, though I’m not sure I would have known how to talk about them anyway. When I got arrested for being a “white boy in Cracktown” (the cop’s words), he was visibly upset and redoubled his efforts to curb my pot habits, noticeably by changing “hello” and “goodbye” to “have you smoked pot?” and “don't smoke pot.” He was both the buddy who hated those unnecessarily nasty cops, and the true friend who suggested that, hey, this might be a wake-up call. Distinguishing between genuine sentiment and shrewd psychological calculation with him seemed so easy that over time it became irrelevant.
Alan’s method then was one of a light touch regarding the past and a guiding hand regarding the future. This may seem like he was only doing half of his job, but to me it seems superior to those psychologists who treat each teenager as if their problems are entirely unique. I know someone whose therapist in high school diagnosed her with “HSP”—that's highly sensitive person for you layfolk. Alan could have also diagnosed me with HSP, but he would probably have meant hardly serious procrastinator, or ham-handed, scrawny pothead . There’s probably a therapist somewhere who manages to eschew psychobabble without dispensing with conventional psychology altogether, but I haven’t met him. And for every rule Alan flouted he gained a certain nebulous unpredictability that allowed him to defy being pigeonholed. It’s for this reason that when my brother contends that he had Alan in his pocket during the time he was seeing him, I’m more than a little skeptical. My brother was certain that Alan was incapable of getting the dark truth out of him, but Alan does get phone calls from him years later, so you be the judge. As my mother sagely put it once, “Alan’s about getting you to do what you need to do. Your life story may be tragic or messed up or what have you, but that’s besides the point. It’s about figuring out how to get back on the horse.” She knows because she also saw him for a while. That’s right, we all saw him. It doesn’t not make sense, does it?
* * *
When I was living with my parents again right after college, I resumed a friendship with a guy I hadn’t been close to since middle school. We got along fine and had some good times, but admittedly we hung out because we were among the stuck, still putting the finishing touches on those implausible international trips we were planning. Okay, actually that was only me—he was there intentionally, saving money and other such responsible stuff. While he was an extremely funny guy when he wanted to be, his real sense of humor was a little nastier than what he knew could please company. Perhaps it was the self-imposed restraint on his inner clown that was making him very depressed—in any event, something was. He would describe it sometimes as an inability to find things exciting, at other times it was the girls, and then there was always the possibility of a chemical imbalance. But the signature element of the depression was his obsession with solving the meaning of life—almost always a bad sign. He did this through a certain brand of looking inward. Roughly, the idea was that in a state of repose one should determine the precise nature of the problems besetting one, and by this realization somehow overcome them. Taking action was viewed as a crass remedy befitting simpletons, it was for poor saps who lacked the higher brain function to psychically dispel their misery. At one point he took up reading Jung, and over a drink he’d clue me in that dreams are the door to the primeval cosmic night.
After a few months of disappointing results from this method, he told me he was shopping around for a psychologist. I listened quietly to the reports of his first couple escapades, in which he dealt with people wearing crystals or trying to prescribe him horse tranquilizers. At some point I finally decided to refer him to the Big A. After all, if I didn’t respect my friend’s problems entirely, then I thought the least I could do was recommend him a shrink who would respect them even less. From what I heard, their historic meeting went pretty much as expected, with my friend trying to paint a dark and compelling portrait of himself, and with Alan saying things like “I get it, you’re the kinda guy who…” Exasperated, my friend would cut him off to say that he wasn’t any “kind of guy,” to which Alan would respond that it fit perfectly with the kinda guy he was, that he couldn’t handle being seen as a type, even if for practical purposes. My friend found the experience amusing at best, but certainly unfulfilling in his ultimate quest for deep self-knowledge. Apparently after a couple of sessions he asked for drugs, which Alan provided. So much for adult therapy.
I believe wholeheartedly in knowing oneself. It wasn’t my friend’s desire to explore his problems that bothered me. Rather, I felt that his purposes in exploring his problems were almost fetishistic, and geared towards validating them, dramatizing them, ennobling them—anything besides moving past them. I healthily disdain this attitude, and for that I wonder if I owe Alan a tip of the hat. Maybe he was just a decent shrink for me, and my family, and a couple of my friends…and some family friends. Did I mention he has a beach house? In any event, he certainly didn’t do me any harm, which is an accusation that people level at their high school shrinks all the time. And check it out: I shower every day now. Just don’t ask about the rest.
—JSL