Couch is a series about psychotherapy.
The books I have written have each been dedicated to the same two people: my wife and my psychotherapist. My psychotherapist preceded my wife. He also preceded my writing.
I found him one summer afternoon by a stroke of luck, when, 27 years old and in the midst of a crisis, I called my health insurance company asking for a referral. My only criterion was proximity, which in retrospect seems impossibly naïve. I picked at random from half a dozen names, and a few days later I walked into a strange man’s 11th-floor office, where I sat down in front of a window that had a view of the New York skyline. I remember that it was evening, and that the therapist, who was in his early 30s and wearing a tie, seemed nice enough. But after we said hello and settled in, he said nothing at all, just nodded as if to indicate that I should begin — but begin where? It wasn’t cold in his office but I was shaking.
My first experience with therapy — or more precisely, with the idea of therapy — had come a decade earlier, in my senior year of high school, when my mother, overwrought by the news that her therapist was ending her practice and moving away for good, attempted to kill herself by overdosing on antidepressants.
My mother, plagued by an occasionally crippling, always present depression throughout most of her life (and all of my childhood), had a few years earlier summoned the wherewithal to seek professional help. And while I was not privy to the specific diagnosis of clinical depression, I was privy to her rage, her paranoia, her fatigue and her sorrow, all of which she experienced in the extreme, and all of which I thought, of course, were entirely normal — in the same way that I thought it was normal to come from a broken family and to reside in a cramped and cluttered one-bedroom apartment where the rule of thumb was pessimism and the smallest tasks were regarded as monumentally burdensome. Making dinner was exhausting and often sad, and so was doing the laundry, and so was — as my mother pointed out to me one afternoon on the way home from nursery school — the blade of grass struggling out of a crack in the sidewalk. While I had some vague awareness in my teenage years that my mother was seeing “someone” about “something,” beyond that I had no real understanding, and no real interest.
All of that changed one October morning. As I left for school, I noticed that my mother was lying face down on her bed in the living room. She had been in the same position the night before when I’d gotten home from my job bagging groceries at the supermarket, and I’d assumed that she had simply gone to bed early, just as I assumed now that she was not feeling well and was taking the day off. But an hour or so later, at school, I was ushered out of the classroom by a principal’s aide and into an empty office where a phone call from my mother’s work informed me that she had not called in sick that day or the day before. I left for home immediately, overwhelmed and petrified, walking through the city streets with the understanding that I was about to discover that my mother, unbeknown to me, had died two days ago in our apartment.
And sure enough, when I opened the front door, there she was in the same position, face down in bed. It took me great effort to rouse her lifeless, unyielding body, and when she finally woke up she was groggy, incoherent and irritated. I pleaded with her to tell me what was wrong, but her reply was merely, “You wouldn’t understand.” I suppose there was some truth to that.
What I wasn’t able to understand, at the age of 16, was that the relationship she had developed with her therapist had become the most emotionally intimate of her life. And subsequently, the news of this woman’s impending departure had devastated my mother to the point where she no longer wanted to go on living. This was all perplexing to me, but mostly it was shameful. I ended up taking my mother to the hospital by cab, and she reiterated to the doctors her desire to die, but somehow promised that she wouldn’t. How they believed her, I don’t know.
Later that evening, I did what most people do after a distressing event, which is to try to regain some sense of normalcy, and so I showed up on time for my shift at the supermarket. A friend, no doubt noticing that my eyes were red from crying, asked me what was wrong, but I refused to say. In return, he offered the platitude, “Life isn’t a bowl of cherries,” and for some reason this provided a sense of comfort. But ultimately I felt as if I was doomed to keep secret what had transpired. And true to form, my mother and I never really addressed the events of that day. The remaining few years we lived together were spent the way all the other years had been spent between us, not talking about the essential things in our home.
SO a decade later, at the age of 27, when for reasons that now seem remarkably obvious, I began to notice that I was having difficulty maintaining meaningful relationships with women, I sought out a therapist. I had just broken up with one girlfriend, whom in the beginning I loved madly, and in the end disdained, only to replace her with another girlfriend I also started off loving madly. I had an inkling that these relationships were following a pattern, and that if I ever hoped to have something lasting — like a marriage — I needed to make some significant changes.
It was the first girlfriend who suggested I seek professional help, a suggestion that did not go over well, considering that my experience of professional help had been negligible improvement, utter dependency and wholesale despair. This was the unfortunate legacy of my mother’s experience: The antidote turns toxic.
The argument that I honed and offered freely was that therapy was the domain of those too weak to understand their own brains: i.e., the mentally unstable or feebleminded or upper middle class. None of which I wanted to be associated with. But when my second girlfriend affirmed my first girlfriend’s appraisal, I knew that there was something deeper at work inside of me, something that I couldn’t solve on my own, and that it would be a fatal mistake to continue laying the blame for every breakup on the fact that the woman was no longer pretty enough or smart enough or talented enough.
THE first thing I said to my therapist in that initial visit was that I was there because I was having trouble staying in a relationship. I offered up a compendium of traumatic events from my childhood that I thought might have some bearing on the matter, of which my mother’s suicide attempt was only one. I don’t recall exactly what we talked about in the beginning, but I came away with a sense that the therapist was a sympathetic and understanding man, and also quite funny. He had a shrewd ability to break tension by offering a well-placed joke. For instance, when I recounted the confusing night, when I was 4 or 5, that my mother brought a strange man into our apartment, my therapist offered, “Perhaps he came over for tea and a scone.”
But mostly there was heaviness in those early months of therapy. My appointment happened to follow that of a blind woman, who would come out tapping her cane, an intense metaphor, which like all metaphors in my life I could not process. And when I would leave his office, 45 minutes later, it would be dark out, and I would have a crushing feeling of hopelessness, which I knew could be remedied by only one thing: seeing my therapist again. The first time he went on vacation, he asked me how I felt about being left by him, but I could not draw any sort of parallel between the past and the present, and I told him I had no opinion whatsoever.
“What are we going to do with all this?” I asked him one evening, just as our session was ending. By which I meant, how will it ever be possible to alleviate these unhappy memories that can never be undone? “Keep coming and talking about it with me,” my therapist said. And that’s exactly what I did.
Saïd Sayrafiezadeh is the author of the short-story collection “Brief Encounters With the Enemy” and the memoir “When Skateboards Will Be Free.”