Tumblweed

Posted on June 12, 2012 by JJ Roitman

Margie sits in her living room. She faces a brick wall that she gets curious about. We have encouraged her to move her chair to the other side of the living room where she could have a nice view of a Cottonwood, but she refuses. She likes the corner she’s in, and says it gives her access to the front door if she needs to escape from “…this goddamn place.”

She never moves from her big leather chair that has molded to the hunch of her back perfectly over the years. When she points to the wall she has to use her left hand to lift her right arm. It makes the gesture slow-moving but she still follows through with full force. Shaking the pointer finger just slightly as if she were hoping a laser beam might jut out through her finger nail. “Why are these walls red? Why do I have the view that I have? Why do people keep coming in and out of that building over there?”

“Well that building is where you live. You all live here. There are many of you here.” I am referring to the nursing home of course that she has been in for over a year now. It’s a top-notch place, one of the fanciest in the nation. But she doesn’t really know that because she never leaves her chair and stays facing the brick wall most of the day and far into the night. For all she knows this wall could belong to some prison.

“And whose house are we in?”

“We’re in your … place. There are lots of people who live in this building like you do.”

“Oh okay.” She shrugs and starts a conversation with herself in a whisper; turning her head to the right where possibly a possible panel of invisible informants is located.

I think she suspects that I expect her to understand, so temporarily she gives up asking questions. Questions with answers that clunk around in her head and bang against the side of her skull. Questions that have practical answers for the normal mind, but for Margie’s there is no normal anymore. And there is no chance answering her questions before they slip away into the land of not knowing.

I’m in graduate school studying to be a Psychotherapist. I have taken a side job as a caregiver for an agency that provides companionship for elders. In graduate school I spend all day studying the vast nuances of the mind. The personalities we have categorized, the diagnoses we have put into books. I study the approaches of the famed folk that have dared to put their theories into written word—Freud, Jung, Bowlby, Pearls, Rogers, Satir—so that budding therapists get the impression of tangibility and predictability. I’ve got big text books the size of tomb stones that I carry around in a pack, sometimes feeling as sense of pride that I’m holding the weight of such knowledge, the landscape of the mind, and the patterns of thought we have mapped out and named.

One of my teachers recommended this as a good job to have if you want to be a therapist. She said this with a corky smile “It will be challenging.” And as I sit with Margie I get my first taste of how far beyond our grasp the psyche can wander. Dementia turns a person’s mind into tumbleweed that passes from one reality to another. I can’t really catch it without stumbling over the thin lines of existence in myself, which would not be of any help to Margie.

Mostly I just sit at a distance from her, and then move closer to her when she asks a question, then move away again. I’m a rubber band that bounces around her confusion. And of course I am confused too. But what I get confused about is normal stuff, the things I think I know that don’t end up being what I know. But at least I still get to play on the same playground as everyone else.

Every five minutes Margie will ask the day and the date, and I will answer with enthusiasm because it’s contact we both need.

“What’s the date today?”

“Today is Novemeber 15^th.”

“Thank you.” She will say as if that is all that’s needed from me, she is perfectly fine now that she knows the date. Then I will feel satisfied too because I am able to give her some temporary conclusion like the explanation of her illness, and why she exists.

Then she will ask again and I will tell her again, because it’s a question I can answer with a lot of authority. “Today’s date is…” I can feel pretty darn useful answering that question.

Sometimes Margie will glare at me from across the room. She has forgotten who I am and why I am sitting with her. Her eyes are black and twittering in frustration. I try to sit up straighter or look a certain way, but that doesn’t help because there is no way “to be” anything that is recognizable to her, there is no way to be anything that makes sense to her.

“What are you doing here? Why don’t you get the hell away from me?” These questions I can’t answer as easily.

“Well I’m here to help…”

“I don’t need any god damn help. What you think I’m going to do something naughty?”

Usually I just give her some space and sit further away from her. At a distance her eyes are like an animal’s peeking out from behind a bush waiting to attack. I pretend that I don’t notice. I try to blend in with the environment, become one of the pink flowers stitched into her couch. One time I could not take the glaring eyes any longer, they were biting at me, taking little bits off my face.

“You’re glaring at me Margie.” I say talking to her through one of the house plants sitting between us on the nightstand.

“I’m snaring at you.”

“No you’re glaring at me.”

“Well why don’t you get the hell out of here!?” She lifts herself slightly forward and for a split second is hovering above her seat with the strength of her skinny little arms pushing down on the arms rests. We both forget just briefly that she is old and frail. I imagine that she in fact could come after me with fists, but instead she sputters out and plops back down on the seat.

I want to tell her she is losing her mind. She doesn’t know it yet but she could get up from that chair and try to turn on a light, but forget what she’s about to do, then decide since she’s up she may as well head outside to get the mail, but once she goes outside she will see that she has forgotten where the mailbox is, which will make her angry because how could she forget where the mailbox is when she has lived in this house for twenty years, at which point she will look around and realize that this isn’t her house at all and other old people are slowly making their way down these big white hallways decorated with fake flowers that she’d never have in her home, then panic and anger will set in simultaneously, she will try to get back inside the place that she just came from but forget if the door right behind her is hers, and she will start wandering the hallways looking for someone to help at which point she will realize that she’s just trying to get the mail what’s the big deal, and see a tree outside that she recognizes as one from her childhood. The tree her mother used to sit under and she and her sister would run around in circles chasing each other, and she will walk out to that tree, and look for her sister but realize that she’s all alone, and that she doesn’t recognize anything and then somehow find herself in the middle of the street looking for her first or maybe second husband’s car, and then….So that’s why I’m here Margie. To protect you from your own mind.

Instead I give her platitudes. “I like to be with you Margie. And I make sure that you get what you need like food and Kleenex and stuff. I’m here just in case anything happens like a fall.”

She rolls her eyes and looks as if she has more questions, but then gives up and reaches for a Kleenex, blows her nose and throws her wad at me. Of course it is not a satisfying answer, not like the day’s date. Of course I can’t blend into the couch either, I’m a misplaced object in a stream of scrambled memories. I’m going to stand out in some way. I can see her trying to recall something, perhaps if she has fallen recently, or why she is even sitting there in the first place.

The following week Margie is restless and wants to make herself useful. She empties one bin of trash that’s sitting next to her chair into another bin of trash by her desk. A few minutes later she empties the trash by her desk into the trash by her chair. Then she grabs some water and walks over to some dreary looking white flowers that just don’t seem to have the right color. “These need some water.”

“They sure do.” I say as I watch her pour water on four off white fake roses.

“There” she said. “That ought to help.”

And it did. Because it’s all we had to offer something that isn’t real.

The Dangling Mutt

Posted on April 26, 2012 by JJ Roitman

My first pet as a young adult was named ‘Appropos’. I bought her off the street from a smart-looking homeless woman who had a litter of white kittens screaming in a card board box. My kitten was fifty dollars. She lasted six weeks.

I was in my early twenties. I partied quite a bit in those days and slept well. Now almost twenty years later I wake up to parts of my life that I wasn’t there for. As if three in the morning were some special time traveling hour—go back and feel this.

Apropos had a really bad case of ring worm. The vet said there was nothing I could do for her because she was too young to handle the medicine. So what I did for her was take off for the weekend and attend a music festival. When I returned she was barely alive, curled up next to a black teddy bear. I brought her to the vet and put her to sleep, and then returned home to my roommate who took a picture of me standing in the doorway empty-handed. I was looking down with a slight smile on my face. I am not sure what I was feeling in that moment, but I do know that I smoked many bowls that day.

Leslie was what we in society like to call a functioning alcoholic. She was a successful business woman, worked hard during the week, drank a few when she got home, and then went to town on the booze during the weekend.

Our appointment happened to land on a Monday, which meant that she usually arrived from a weekend of swimming in her drink, wine, sometimes vodka, when she could get away with hiding it from her husband and kids.

She actually appreciated when I told her I could tell she was hung-over “Yeah. What do I look like? How can you tell?”

“Well I can see it in your eyes mostly. They are bloodshot, tired, and they seem sad.” When I said this she became present in the room as if my reflections were missing from her perception until I handed them to her.

I had seen Leslie for almost a year. During one of our sessions she told me that her dog died two months ago.

“You didn’t tell me your dog died.”

“No.” She looked at me confused. “It just didn’t seem that important with all the other shit that was going on in my life. I mean, we loved our guy. But, you know, pets die.”

“Yeah. They do.” I said.

And they come back. Recently I woke at that special hour, three in the morning, jolted by a beating heart that felt as though the stationary bed I slept in went slamming into the wall. My husband gently kicked me out because I was vibrating. I went and sat on the couch and tried to ignore the ache in my chest as I read out of my novel. Then I watched a TV show. The distractions just slightly dulled my ache, until I stopped, then my pulse came on louder, thumping like a restless bull digging his hooves in the dirt.

So I sat with the ache in my chest and my beating heart. Almost twenty years later out of the blue, I saw Apropos’s face, tiny with pink spots all over her body. The minute I brought her home she looked at me with death in her eyes. She never played, all she wanted was to sleep and snuggle. Whenever I looked at her I felt guilty. I didn’t understand what she was pointing to. As a twenty year old, you tend to look away from sickness and death. Perhaps it’s developmental; there just isn’t enough space yet in our psyche’s to know how to let it in. So I didn’t let it in, not without the foggy net that marijuana provided.

Now I couldn’t look away. This was my second chance to grieve. So I cried on the couch until the sharp image of Apropos faded gently back into the folds of the past.

“I wonder where he went.” I asked Leslie.

“What do you mean?” Her shoulders slumped as she folded her fingers and bounced them on her lap impatiently.

“I mean where did he go?” I could tell that Leslie did not want to talk about her dog, but I did. Sometimes the difficult subjects that clients avoid talking about can become beacons of light, gesturing louder than what’s offered. In this case it’s as if Leslie’s mutt was sitting right next to her on the couch licking her hand.

“I don’t know. Doggy heaven.” She laughed, but not really. It was more like a signal for me to leave it be.

“Can we just try one thing?”

After working with each other for so long Leslie was used to my little requests, and for the most part she trusted them. So she made herself comfortable on the couch and said “Okay. What do you want me to do?”

“Okay. Just close your eyes. And bring up the image of … what’s his name?”

“Doogey.” Her eyes were closed now and there was a smile on her face. “We named him Doogey because that’s how my daughter pronounced Doggy at the time.”

She took long breaths, her inhalations going deep into her lower belly. She wiped her eyes and said “I see him. He’s standing next to my daughter when she was three years old. Shit.” And then she was sobbing. She folded over her knees and put her head in her hands.

“It was a vodka weekend when Doogey died. He went off to die alone in our backyard. It took a whole day to notice he was gone. Everyone in the family was so wrapped up in their own lives. I took care of his body.” She took a deep breath in than said “You asked me where he went. I think he’s been waiting for me to sober up enough to notice that he’s gone.”

“And what do you notice?”

“Well…I miss him. I wasn’t really there when he died. And when I found his body I just stared at it as if …it’s hard to explain, as if I wasn’t really seeing him. Like he was a black hard thing I was floating over, not Doogey. I remember feeling somewhat burdened. I wanted to get back to my Vodka.”

She continued to cry. I just watched, honored to witness her and Doogey’s goodbye. He was no longer the dangling thing outside her begging to be let in. He was now rightfully gone, part of Leslie’s deep inhalations, filling her up.

People always describe their rock bottoms as big events that crash into you and change your life for the worse. If I had to stand in front of a group of addicts and describe my rock bottom it would be the story of Apropos. It would be the ghostly sense of leaving moments hollow and unlived.

The Death Rattle

Posted on February 28, 2012 by JJ Roitman

Rosa had an incontinence problem. The staff at the nursing home talked to her in sweet but tough tones “You can’t play with your poop Rosa,” they would say. But Rosa never understood their logic because she could no longer understand logic. It’s actually a kind of brilliant translation that having Alzheimer’s might offer a person. It’s possible that what she really heard was their disgust. Maybe the meaning behind the words came before the words themselves. It was as if she stopped hearing with her ears and instead listened through her pores.

I worked with Rosa for four months, and liked that I couldn’t really understand what she was trying to say, but often understood what she felt. With my more youthful clients, I can sometimes hear what they are trying to say, but the words just get in the way, and I wish they wore their mess on their sleeves as embarrassingly as Rosa did.

Rosa was in a lockdown unit so that she couldn’t wander off. This seemed necessary since every time the front door opened she tried her best to make it through before it closed and locked again.

Sometimes when my husband and I talk about what we want to happen when we get old he says to me “Just let me wander out into the woods and die.” I always picture myself sneaking behind him with binoculars at a distance to make sure he’s okay. Even then I wouldn’t be able to leave him alone, which seems to be the role of family members when a loved one dies. We try to follow, but we can’t.

As if her underwear were an extension of herself, Rosa would take off her white briefs and throw them over the wall into the neighbor’s backyard. “Rosa you have to leave your underwear on. We all wear underwear around here”, the staff would say. To which Rosa would respond by rolling her eyes, flapping her hand at them, and saying “Oh shoo off!”

When I arrived to be with Rosa I often walked in on a fashion show she put on for the other residents. She’d wear three different scarves, a couple of dresses, one over the other, and keep going back to her closet for another purse to carry. She had a huge variety to pick from, and walked out into the dining area like a model on a runway. Even though this model had a limp, and a large bulky body she had to drag around with her, taking a pause to lean on the piano for support, the other female residents always understood her beauty. They would smile and nod, and say “Oh yes.”

When Rosa and I sat together we would tan our legs in front of a big window. I listened to her word salad phrases and nodded. Sometimes we looked at pictures of her family members and she would point at each head and go into stories that had no beginning or end, or any identifiable plot that I could grab onto. “Yes. Boat, into that we…yes, and then, when we Christmas, I loved, we had it, and we…” I waved to her family members in their pretty little frames that seemed to live in a different realm on the other side of the wall where Rosa’s underwear escaped to. Greetings from Sun Rising Alzheimer’s home. Doing well here watching all identifiable objects lose their reality. Your mom has wandered away. But we’re keeping her safe.

At one point, while sitting next to each other and looking at a fountain that had gigantic icicles dangling down like large fingers, Rosa knocked her purse off the chair. I said “Oh let me get that for you”, and dived down to her ankle area, grabbed her purse and gave a quick sniff as I rose. Something we were told to do if Rosa had an accident that needed attention.

When I met her gaze she smiled and focused intently on my face, as if she just briefly became lucid to tell me something. She put her hand on my cheek and tapped gently “You are…you are just so…it’s wonderful…you are just so…and I can tell that you, that you are…I can tell.” So far it’s been the best feedback I have ever received from anyone. I can tell that you are. See this is the thing about elders. They stop becoming, they simply can’t anymore. They just are. There is not a dishonest word spoken at a nursing home, it’s all right on the surface, all the pain, the confusion, the heart, the poop, and the dying. Most of all they can’t hide the dying.

A few months later Rosa’s eyelids are crusted shut by a deep sleep that she didn’t come back from, and the skin on her face is drawn in. Soon her family will show up and I will meet them for the first time. I stood and watched how the hospice nurses gently rolled her back and forth to clean her body. A sponge on a stick was soaked with water and brought to her lips, which she clamped down on and chewed until the nurses had to negotiate with her to let go, “Rosa you can let go now sweetheart.” And somehow from wherever she was she heard their request and unlocked her jaw.

Her body was crinkled up in a soft way. Soft wrinkled skin, thin, without purpose, ready to disintegrate, worn by life’s wash cycle over and over again. There were no machines making beeping sounds. She had the death rattle going on as loud as a construction worker pounding outside your window at the crack of dawn. The silence of death is like early morning, and the death rattle spikes your ear drums, slips down your spine, and unravels your sense of balance on this Earth. There was a big sunflower by the side of the bed that slightly shivered every time Rosa exhaled, empathizing and absorbing each grasp for air that sounded violent for the onlooker, but perhaps for Rosa it’s what it took to straddle both worlds. The hospice workers offered morphine drops to help ease…whatever Rosa seemed to battle with, physical pain or anxiety. Sometimes she pulled at her clothes as if they were in the way of…getting there, where ever she was going.

I don’t know why I was surprised how quickly death came for Rosa. It’s expected at nursing homes, the last stop. It’s the obvious secret you catch onto when you notice all the books on the shelves never move, and the names on the doors written on fancy sticky notes. Watching Rosa I felt insignificant all of a sudden. In the many years that she lived, 88, my measly four months with her equaled a half a step. The palm of my left hand started to tingle, as if from behind her closed eyes she thought to comfort me with one last memory.

We were sitting in the dining area, all the residents, Rosa and me. It was cocktail hour. They were waiting for dinner to be served and held non-alcoholic glasses of wine in their hands. One of the other residents had a big yellow lab that was as old and sleeping on the floor next to her. Rosa got the woman’s attention, pointed at her dog and said “That’s a wonderful fur coat you have.” The woman gave a big smile and proudly thanked her for the compliment. Then Rosa and I held hands. She squeezed a little possibly to make sure I understood. And I thought I did—that it all happened beneath the surface, the pounding of life, the pushing and squirming and reaching out for one another. And that the energy that dashes among us has no concern for getting it right.

I never saw Rosa take her last breath. I sat with her among other family members, but I didn’t belong in that final scene with them. Her son sat by his mother and I kneeled down on the floor next to her. At one point I placed my hand on Rosa’s arm and then felt him gently brush it off and place his hand there instead. So I left, and said goodbye to Rosa in the parking lot.

It started to snow and the heater was blowing full blast. Although it was cold and I shivered I didn’t feel cold. Something in me had no temperature and remained still, comforting me, reminding me what is special about death. Mainly that there is nothing special about death. We will all leave this world grasping for air. Everyone will look the same on their death-bed. We will all lose our individuality. I listened to the snowflakes’ small tapping sounds on the roof of my car. I closed my eyes and heard it again, this time from a much stranger place “…you are just so…I can tell that you are…” And in that quiet parking lot memorial service I dissolved with each snowflake’s surrender to something bigger.

The Possibility Game

Posted on February 26, 2012 by JJ Roitman

My husband and I are considering having a baby. We have been considering for over four years. So now, for the past year, we have begun to play a game every month, a game birthed out of our own floundering—we pretend like I might be pregnant. This is not a purposeful game, and it’s not particularly fun, but somehow every month it happens. We give birth to the possibility of having a child.

About eight days into my cycle, just barely after menstruation and a few days before ovulation, we might risk not using birth control. This means that there is about a 1.7% chance that one very determined sperm might convince one very sleepy egg to wake up early. My husband and I take this small percentage and go running with it for the rest of the month until I find myself studying my nipples in front of the mirror, looking for a change of color.

This also means that for a whole month I can blame all my behavior on my hormones. I can lash out at my husband, or cry because I just love my cat so much, and secretly smile to myself that it might be because I am changing. I once had a fun month where I allowed myself all the carbs I wanted, and sat up eating saltines with a pregnancy test waiting by my side.

Some couples just know when its time to start their family. They are clear-minded about it and they go for it readily. A friend who has four children once said to me, “It’s never been a question for us. We had our first child in high school, and every kid after that has been well…why the hell not?”

It’s a strange place to be, in this limbo land with my husband. He likes to say things to me like “There are babies hanging all around you today.” And I smile and giggle, and feel shy all of a sudden that I might have company. I start to look for signs, like other babies and toddlers noticing me from afar and giving little knowing winks, or a mystical hand print on my belly.

I once had a dream where I was leaning against a counter standing next to an older woman. She turned to me and said “Don’t lean too hard.” And I realized that I was pregnant. Suddenly I could feel it inside me, pushing against the cold metal.

I had another dream that I was a bad mom. I was hanging out at the bar drinking with friends when suddenly I remembered that I had left my baby home alone. I started to panic and found myself in a blizzard, running up a hill towards my house. But I couldn’t make it up the hill, and my house kept getting farther away while my malnourished child wailed inside.

I once saw a woman who had three kids, and was shopping around for therapists. It was our first meeting when she looked at me with distrust and asked “Are you a mother?” I knew my answer would mean that I was either in her club, or I was only an observer and might not be of any use to her at all.

“Should I be?” I asked.

She paused and thought about this then broke out laughing. “No. Don’t do it!” And then she turned to the side as if she was already leaving, “But seriously, do you have any children?”

In my favorite dream I am hugging a girl. She’s about five years old. It’s nighttime and there is a street lamp warming our spot. She has long brown hair. I am on my knees. She has her light arms wrapped around my neck. Our cheeks are pressed against each other and I can smell her. I love her so much that I feel a peace that is untouchable, and I have a smile on my face that says everything. I can smell her to this day, as if she has managed to reach into my waking life as a real reference for me. I can go back to the feel of her whenever I want to. In my dream she is my little girl.

This might be the most common question a woman who is not single gets asked. But I don’t have children right now, and I find myself wishing that I could refer to my dream life as some kind of truth.

Most of my clients have had children—adopted children, toddlers, teenagers. Adult children who have come back to haunt their lives and camp out in their living rooms, or have made it a point to find all the faults of their now older parents and reverse the role.

A couple of the clients who are still young mothers watch as the person they thought they were dissolved, along with all the accomplishments they meant to complete. They complain that no one talks about this part of having a baby, how it completely takes away any sense of being their own person. They feel like their life has been taken over and talk about their breasts as if they are tools of the trade that need constant maintenance.

One young mother kept wincing in pain because of an infection she had on her nipple from breast feeding. I was surprised by the jealousy I felt while she talked. Later in the car I looked down at my still independent breasts, and felt my unshaken life still intact.

It’s hard not to get superstitious when it comes to these types of big life decisions. It seems only natural that we look for signs, something beyond our own limited minds to provide some sort of direction.

I know a couple that has been trying to get pregnant for about a year now. They measure and record every step of the process. They use thermometers and record her temperature around ovulation. They have tried acupuncture, and have seen professionals who offer blessings and spells. They are in the same club that my husband and I are in, The Possibility Club. Every month they too look for signs, and then, sitting on the couch we bleed and call each other, feeling silly for crying over something that was seemingly just in our heads.

They were the ones who told me about an author named Walter Makichen, a clairvoyant who communicates with spirit babies. He claims that some babies know who their parents will be and are waiting for their parents to conceive. He also says that some babies do not know who their parents are and are lost and searching. In one chapter of his book Spirit Babies he describes how one of those babies floated above him and asked if he was her father.

When I was a teenager I was pregnant. I remember my breasts becoming something, something beyond my maturity level. Now I look back and appreciate the miracle in the way they swelled, and mourn the missed opportunity.

My older clients who are parents have a seasoned look about them, as though they have survived the strange tunnel that all parents go through, a sort of mystical urn that burns them alive, changes their inherent make up and spits them out on the other end. Not as individuals, but as parents.

In therapy, most of the clients who talk about their children speak only of the difficulties. If they were at a party or a soccer game they might express things differently. But even so, I can always see it there, like a fierce torch—how much they love these beings that popped out of them. So much so that sometimes it gets confused and becomes anger, fear, or exhaustion. I have seen tears of tenderness fall easily out of fathers and mothers while they talked about being parents. The love that they feel for their kids is so gigantic it hurts.

There was one client, who like me, had an abortion when she was a teenager. She kept bringing “her child” up as if it was still a possibility. Saying things like, “If I had him my life would be very complicated”, or “I wonder what my life would be like. He would be in his twenties now.” She always looked down and to the left, as if it were there, sleeping on the floor.

Makichen says that some babies that have been aborted stay hanging around for when the same woman tries again. Others move on to different parents.

I want very badly to believe in Mr. Makichen’s theories.

It’s the Possibility Game my husband and I play. We fret over money when we play the game. We feel closer when we play the game. We talk in higher pitch cutesy tones to each other and our cat. We make jokes about The Possibility, all the while knowing that we haven’t really tried. We haven’t made a direct invitation yet. We are still playing with The Possibility while keeping it on the outskirts of manifestation. It’s deliberate yet unconscious. We both want a baby and yet we are scared. The Possibility is so much easier to take care of.

Still the longing is born, and the love is already so huge it hurts.

The Same Boat

Posted on January 29, 2012 by JJ Roitman

I sat over my husband’s naked body in the middle of the night. He was snoring, too deep in sleep to notice the cold air, or the cold heart that hovered over him. I wanted to dig my nails into his little butt cheeks.

A couple of minutes before I was also in a deep sleep until a sound from the great beyond came up and crawled into my quiet place. Like a sudden intruder barging into my personal night, my husband made a crashing grumble that resembled the choke of a car engine and a dying a person. I hated his snoring. And no, hate is not too harsh a word for the middle of the night, when the sweet call of sleep beckons alongside a jack hammer.

My poor husband lied naked with goose bumps because he had no covers over him while his loving wife sat with clenched fists. I threw the covers on him and said in a nasty terrifying tone, “Aren’t you cold?” as I flopped down next to him and got a speck of relief as my elbow pressed hard into his back. And then he woke up. For some reason I thought I could get away with poking him. Just like a child accidently punching her sibling in the face to see how far her torment can go without realizing the consequences.

And then I saw it, as if I suddenly regained consciousness from being possessed by an evil demon. I hurt him. I saw in his face, bewilderment, fear, and disgust. I pulled the covers over my head, putting myself in jail and peering out of the holes of the blanket with guilt.

We spent the rest of the night trying to work ourselves out of the knot I had caused. I woke the next morning after about twenty minutes of sleep gazing at our royal purple sheets. When we fight I don’t understand why we chose such an eager color.

That day the client I was seeing sat opposite her husband. She was puffy and had a fierce jack lantern face. She pointed her finger at him, her breath short and sporadic as she yelled at him. “I can’t handle it anymore. I can’t keep taking care of you like this. You wake up and you do nothing! If I didn’t cook for you I seriously wonder if you would die of starvation! If I didn’t clean up our house would be a pig sty. I can’t keep doing this!”

She went on and on and on. He slumped, and listened, and made puppy-like noises that were apologetic and devotional like it was his place to cower and take the blows.

“I take care of everyone.” She whined.

When I noticed the tears in her husband’s eyes I thought for sure this would soften her heart, but it made her angrier. “Oh don’t do that.” She said to him slowing her speech down so that each word was pronounced with a hiss. “Don’t sit there and whimper like you’re the victim here.” Then she started whimpering herself, “I just want someone to take care of me for once. Is that too much to ask?” She looked at me for some confirmation which I have no idea if I was able provide. My face was frozen, my lips slightly parted like I was trapped in a block of ice.

Wife. What a word. The big white gowns hide so much, package so much expectation and unrelenting ideas of perfection. I remember the partner I thought I would be—even tempered, never threatened by another woman. I had my perfection all lined up when I was single. But when I began my relationship, the real me started to surface. All those little bugs that lay dormant and asleep woke up, and I became …imperfect. Little did I know I wasn’t just marrying the soothing salve of commitment that takes the edge off the loneliness. I was marrying something far more threatening—my dark side.

I asked her to pause so that we could hear what her husband was feeling. We both looked at him and waited. His face seemed to be melting, his mouth drooping down into a frown. At that moment I sensed a familiar revulsion I’ve felt towards my husband when he’s vulnerable. He wiped his nose with the sleeve of his shirt even though he was clutching a tissue. My husband does that.

It took me three years to get to the place where I could actually take full breaths when my husband was upset. The only thing that would stop me from leaping out of my body when he was hurt, scared or angry, was realizing that I would not be able to fix him. My trying to fix him came from a panic that he would not survive the pain, as well as feeling responsible for his happiness. We all know that this isn’t true, but like many psychotherapists’ the mistaken belief that I could solve the riddle of human suffering was deeply ingrained in my being, not something easily unraveled.

I was the one with the cape in my family. I remember being seven years old and driving in the passenger seat with my father. He was terrified that we would not make it out of the underground parking lot alive. He banged his fists on the steering wheel and squealed. I sat up straight and gently guided him to the exit signs. I believed I was his savoir. It’s hard to let that identity go.

When my client’s husband looked at her it was clear that he felt differently about his wife then I did. I felt she was being too hard on him, and her anger was making it difficult for him to express himself. I judged her for being so out of control, irrational, and unkind. I also detected a twisted ball of astonishment in my solar plexus having to do with the unfortunate kinship I had with this woman.

When he looked at her I saw that he was practiced at witnessing her suffering, he was patient, and understood her more than I did. After thirty years of marriage it looked as though he saw the whole story. “I know I haven’t been doing my part. I’m just not good at that kind of stuff.”

“That’s bullshit!” she yelled and was about to continue when I interrupted her.

“Please. Let’s just see what else he has to say.” But he didn’t. He just held his face in his hands, and in that moment of silence I sensed the undertow of fear in the room. We were literally wading in it. These two people were immensely afraid of each other. Neither of them knew how to relate to each other’s dark sides. I was afraid too. Afraid that there was nothing else there but this anger, this insecurity, this deep fear that we are all ugly, ugly, humans.

I wanted to say, screw it. Why do this? Just free yourselves from this. But just as I knew I wasn’t going to leave my marriage, I could tell that divorce was not an option for them.

When you come to the realization that you will never jump ship even if you want to, then when there’s a fight you don’t get to leave, you get the couch. An invisible boundary grows around your relationship like a fence. Your spouse will always be there, close in proximity, yet out of your control. Then it is only a matter of learning how to tolerate the powerlessness of watching someone you love squirm in pain with your hands tied behind your back.

I wish I could say that I helped this couple. That I somehow offered a great tool or advice that completely turned their relationship around for the better. Out of desperation I asked them to say what they appreciated about each other.

The husband sat up and took the cue, like he had done this many times before, thrown in the towel and lavished her with appreciation. “What I love about Suzanne is her strength. Her ability to put up with all of us…” To this she huffed, and he raised his shoulders to his ears and looked down at the floor. “I love the way she takes care of our dogs. She has so much love to give.” The three of us clung onto those half-attempted words as a shimmer of light at the surface of a deep well.

She squinted at him from across the room, her arms crossed over her chest. I thought she wasn’t going to give anything but to my surprise there was some tenderness in her voice. “I love him. I do. We’ve been through a lot together. He’s seen me go through some horrible shit and he hasn’t left my side.” They looked at each other. There was a glimmer of something old and well kept, possibly familiarity, possibly all the scenes passing before their eyes, the way they have held on.

Our time was up. I handed them their words of appreciation like a doctor would hand a lollipop to a child. I hoped they would suck on those words at least a couple of hours after the session. I peeked out the window and watched them walk to their car. To my amazement I saw an embrace before he opened the door for her.

Shaken up and feeling pretty useless I had to wonder if they just needed someone to witness their fight. It gets lonely sharing a boat with just one person.

Later that night I apologized to my husband for losing my shit on him before we even got out of bed. When we have our ‘check-ins’ we share the same pillow while looking at each other. “I really wonder who I am with you sometimes.” I said.

“Yeah. Me too.” My husband said, looking at me like he saw the whole story.

It is possible that there is only one sin a therapist can make—believing that we are not like the clients we see. Without this irony we lose perspective and forget how to forgive ourselves. We forget that every client that comes into see us has claim to the same struggles we have. This might be hard to admit, that all of our education didn’t give us a free ride—hovering above the most mundane suffering.

In actuality it was their gift to me. I didn’t feel so alone on my boat.

This article was originally published in Elephantjournal.com March 2012

The Great Pause

Posted on January 15, 2012 by JJ Roitman

Daryl had long black hair that he wore in a ponytail. He sat with his hands in his pockets wadded up in tight fists. His feet tapped out the Morse code on the ground as he poked his head out of his jacket. You would think that being in a room with me was torture for him. In fact it was, but he kept coming to see me. Knowing that he smoked and I just quit six months ago, I wished we could both light up together like they did in the fifties.

“I wonder if I’m sitting too close?” It had been two minutes of silence. Too much to bear I think, so I asked a question. Maybe this was how the first pebble got thrown into a pond to create ripples. Some child somewhere couldn’t bear the stillness.

“I don’t know. I guess.” He said turning away from me like I was a shining light glaring in his face.

“What if I move my chair back a little?” I scoot back a couple of inches. “Does that help?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know.”

“How about a little further?” Again, I move a little further back, feeling how this is relieving some tension. Maybe instead of a light of interrogation bellowing over him, I am becoming a soft energy-efficient light bulb. “How’s that?”

“Yeah. Okay. That’s better.” He laughed apologetically.

“Okay. I’ll stay right here.” I would need to wear my glasses to see him. But this is where I belonged. He seemed to breathe a tad easier this way.

Daryl didn’t want to be tracked. He did not want my little mental therapist’s fingers attempting to figure out his terrain. In order to make this work best for him he would respond to every question with “I don’t know.” And even when there was no question to answer he would fill the silences with “I don’t know.” And even when he was talking he would use “I don’t know” as punctuation, mostly commas not periods because it was rare that he committed to finishing a sentence.

I left every session with him, saying to myself, Did that help? Was that useful for him? Only to be able to respond to myself I don’t know. Then I would ask, What does he want from me? Why does he keep coming back to therapy? And the same answer would wash over me like a nervous little giggle.

At one point, and I thought this was pretty clever, I asked him if every time he said “I don’t know” it really meant he didn’t want to know. I stole this from one of my teachers in grad school, who stole it from his supervisor, who stole it from his therapist who studied with someone who studied with Jung.

So there you go. There’s a lineage of folks out there who have wondered about the use of “I don’t know” in their sessions, and thanks to Darryl, I was now a proud part of that family. I once heard a famous opera singer interviewed on the radio. He said that opera singers partly learn by imitating other famous opera singers that have come before. Why should therapists be any different?

Darryl paused when I asked him this. He paused for a long time. It was one of those pauses that are like crack to therapists. What would commonly be known as a pregnant pause.

It felt like both Daryl and I were quivering in this pause, our wings spread out, dangling over a cliff. It was the point where the opera singer might have hit a note that goes on forever and everyone is riding it, unsure of how it will end. Daryl had gone into his own abyss, his own mystery, and soon he would pull something out, a great jewel perhaps.

After a few luscious moments, his eyes squinting at me from across the room, he straightened up and I saw his neck for the first time. He coughed into his fist then quickly put it back into his pocket and said, “I don’t know. That’s a good question.”

Daryl and I saw each other for almost a year. What did we talk about? Well it circled around and around, sometimes girls, sometimes work, the usual things you might discuss with a grocery clerk you have gotten used to over the years. I wasn’t going to get to know.

Yet there was one session that came close.

“You say I don’t know a lot.”

He smiled. “Yeah. It’s only with you. I don’t think I do this with other people as much.” His shoulders went up and down as he talked while his hands stayed tucked away in his jacket.

“Well I might try to go there.”

His feet started tapping again. “What do you mean?”

“I might ask you about things that you don’t want to talk about.” There was a silence again. Daryl moved his head back and turned it to the side a little like he was trying to avoid a smell that suddenly transpired in the room. “What would be the worst thing we could talk about?”

“My family.” He said this so quickly. I imagined he’d been holding those words down for months. “I don’t want to talk about my family.”

“Oh. Okay.” His chest was rising and falling almost as fast as a person running from a tiger. He was twitching and holding his hands in fists. Pain was scratching at the surface of his face that he was trying hard not to show. I didn’t have to ask anymore.

“I don’t see the use in going there”, he said.

There was silence again, like everything in my office was holding him with a sincere presence—the books on my shelf, the sound of the clock ticking, all of us wanted to know.

He brought a finger to his eye. I was too far away to know if he was clearing a tear. “Yeah. Last time I went there I lost it you know.” He looked at me without blinking. “I won’t go there again. It’s just not…I don’t know. I’m just not going there.”

It was the strongest, clearest statement he had ever made in our sessions. “So you do know.” I said.

“Yes. I know that.”

I accepted this, although it challenged everything I thought therapy was supposed to be. I thought you were supposed to get to the story, I thought you were supposed to feel like a therapist which meant…well I didn’t know what it meant with Daryl.

I appreciated my time with him because I got used to the ups and downs that battled in me after every session. I saw that it was pointless to blame myself for anything, either the positive “Oh you are so helpful”, or the negative “That was a waste of time” outcomes.

I quickly learned with Daryl that I simply was not that important in his process. I wasn’t going to be the one who knows, or gets to find out what hurt him so that I could somehow make it all better. I was simply the one who scooted her chair back and respected the distance between us.

Although, our last session together I did sit an inch closer to him. “Is this okay? I don’t have my glasses today.” I really didn’t know where they were. But this was all part of therapy, the unseen world helping out.

He smiled at me while tucking his head into his jacket. He was moving to Arizona where he got a better job offer. I asked him one last question, “What has therapy been like for you Daryl?” I looked away as I asked this just to give him space.

“Well…no one really knows me. I can’t really talk to anyone. It’s not their fault. It’s actually extremely difficult for me to truly say how I feel and know how I feel. So I come to therapy to give myself that chance…to at least point at what I am truly feeling, for myself at least. I may not express it to anyone else, but for myself. At least I can give myself some time to look. Otherwise life just speeds up and piles over. So…yeah. That’s it… I don’t know. Yeah.”

I realized then that he was just now coming out of the great pause. I nodded to him and smiled. Without words I thanked him for his response. He smiled back and tapped anxiously with his feet, looked away, then looked back at me, then looked away again. We both giggled nervously.

“Okay well…” He replaced the goodbye with a half of a laugh and a final shrug.

There were wild-fires burning out of control the day that Daryl was supposed to move to Arizona. I pictured him driving along those long orange flames consuming years and years of growth. I saw him like a wild-fire, a strange self-existing question that glowed.

Apocalyptic Day Dreams

Posted on January 5, 2012 by JJ Roitman

As I walk to the edge of the Earth, thinking that I will eventually fall off, I discover, like many before that there is always another step.

My apocalyptic day dreams have nothing to do with fighting for my life. There is no action packed adventure. I am not running from falling buildings or other crazy human beings gone rogue. I am usually alone, walking, with a backpack on, the real intrigue coming from seeing my world, and the small stream of my life running through it as if for the first time.

I am holding an orange saying to myself, how could I have ever overlooked these little bumps? Why do we call this orange? I dig my nails into the skin and wonder if there is a fountain that squirts up and out of me like there is in this orange.

Nellie, a man in his fifties lost a good portion of his savings during the 2008 economic collapse. The 2008 economic collapse has an apocalyptic ring doesn’t it? I imagine a bright and shiny Coca-Cola can crushed and torn to bits. The first thing Nellie said to me was “I don’t know who I am anymore.” After the loss of income, the death of his mother, and finally the death of his dog, he lost his world as he knew it.

Nellie said he didn’t know how to get out of bed in the morning. He was considering antidepressants, and had no passion for life anymore. He kept beating himself up for the money he invested that was gobbled away by a scam. How could he not see this would happen?

Around the same time that Nellie came in to see me the big Whole Foods in our neighborhood decided to remodel. They extended the store to be one of the largest in the nation. The produce moved to the meat section, the cheese was somewhere on the other side of soups, nothing was the same anymore. Plus, because they were still renovating there were random hallways made of plastic sheets that one might get stuck in, thinking they were being led to quarantine until finally they emerge by the nuts miles away from where they began.

In her article Shock, Uncertainty, Conviction, psychologist, and professor at Naropa University, Karen Wegela, writes about our illusions of comfort, permanence, and stability. Buddhist psychology suggests that most of our suffering is caused by the belief that life should not involve suffering, should stay the same, and should always be safe. Wegela describes three responses to these false realities crashing down on us as —shock, uncertainty, and conviction.

Shock, is the sudden shattering of how we thought things were. Something has changed, something that has been seemingly the same for a long time and that we have gotten used to. This scrambles our brain and all the ways that we identify with this thing staying the same. It’s as if we have been airlifted from our usual environment and plopped down in the middle of the no-where. We don’t recognize ourselves anymore. There is no right or left, just change.

Uncertainty is the fear that results in not knowing how things work anymore which can cause an array of malfunctioning. One might lock her keys in the car upon finding out that her husband has had an affair. Or like my dear friend who had to go into surgery and called me at four in the morning from the hospital thinking that she had been kidnapped. We get confused and our bodies wander in one direction, while our heads go the other way.

And conviction is the attempt to solidify what is going into something we can understand. Anything that will provide a spec of relief from the uncertainty we feel. Unfortunately this usually involves blaming ourselves, ‘see we just aren’t good enough’. We have no control, no power over the future. Bad things happening are a reflection of our stupidity. We try to get our lives back to the way it was by retrieving the person we thought we were before the change occurred. When we can’t do this we might find something else to blame. We become fixed minded as if we want to grip reality in our fists and hold it there grinding our teeth.

Nellie said he wanted to try to figure out what went wrong. He wanted to go back over the years and find the mistakes he made that led to losing his money. He said this will prevent mistakes from happening in the future. He wanted things to go back to the way they were. I wondered if the loss of his mother and dog was falling into the same category as “mistakes made”.

“What if things will never go back to the way they were? What if it is almost a guarantee that you will make another mistake?” I asked.

He looked at me wide-eyed. The look of uncertainty, of I don’t know.

I stood in front of the meat section trying to find my vegetables. My heart was beating fast, and as I looked around, I saw that most everyone in the store had that same wide-eyed look that Nellie had. One woman was yelling at one of the workers wearing the green apron that marked him as a target. “I can’t find anything I need. This is ridiculous! I have to be somewhere in a half hour. All I need is Olive Oil!”

The worker nodded his head sympathetically then took hold of her basket as if he were taking her hand and gently lead her to the olive oil.

Wegela writes, “Moments of freshness may emerge to be recognized as such, or they may emerge to be hurriedly covered over with familiar thoughts.”

I recognize that my fantasies are more of a longing, a psychological game of Russian Roulette. I want to become new to myself again—or for the first time. I want the courage to dangle off my familiar self and see that the world is dangling too.

Am I trying to prepare myself for the end of the world? Or more likely the inevitable—someone I love dying, the possibility of a war closer to home, old age, sickness, death, or my vegetables being moved to a different section in the store.

Are our fantasies of the world coming to an end simply a wise voice inside us saying—it will and it does, over and over again?

Nellie looked different as he described to me what kind of morning he had. “I woke up and said to myself for the millionth time ‘I don’t know who I am anymore.’ I just kept repeating this over and over ‘I don’t know who I am anymore.’ Then I was screaming it. You know, I was really angry lying in bed screaming to the ceiling ‘I don’t know who I am anymore! I don’t know who I am anymore!’ And then something just broke … I started crying and I realized….” He paused and started to giggle, “I really don’t know who I am anymore.”

Then he was laughing, large ripples shaking him. And then he was crying. His own apocalypse squirting out of him like a fountain of life.

This article was originally published in Elephantjournal.com Jan. 2012

Watering

Posted on January 5, 2012 by JJ Roitman

The morning after a good cry

you notice how soft everything is in the middle

how gelled together we all are

by some ancient puddle of tears.

And in the moisture of the white midst

pulled towards the warmth of a new day

you see

how greeting your pain

quiets the Earth.

For reprint information, contact JJ Roitman

Sitting on the Bathroom Counter During the Thanksgiving Holiday

Posted on November 30, 2011 by JJ Roitman

Recently I heard another psychotherapist talk about the mistake people often make, interpreting how they feel to mean they are good or bad. She spoke of this mistake as if we have a choice. As if our emotions and physical sensations flow in a river inside us and we have the option to crawl out of the current and watch without identifying with what we experience.

Over this Thanksgiving weekend I attempted to discover the point where this occurs. How does this happen? When do I mistake my emotions to be a me? And what does it mean to uncouple my view of myself from a feeling I am having? In fact, what do I do with ‘who I am’ without having judgments to hook on to?

One of the terms for this identifying with is called ‘coupling’ in psychotherapy. (It actually has many other terms depending on the approach.)This ‘coupling’ can now be seen on EEGs as pathways created in our brain, like little armies of thoughts that keep traversing the same terrain over and over. These pathways may become strong beliefs, which over time can form the reality we live in.

This doesn’t have to be something we reject, like a bunch of ugly highways creating traffic in our mind. This might also look like an ancient deep cave where water has dripped from the same spot for hundreds of years creating long sharp glittering crystals.

It’s just that sometimes this ‘coupling’ can have a very painful effect. I once had a client who had an overbearing mother. He felt trapped in the relationship because she financed much of his living expenses. Whenever I leaned in to hear what he had to say (because he often mumbled inaudibly) he would arch back, turn his head to the left and peek at me from out of the corner of his eye. We soon found out that this turning of the head was a way to shield him from the yelling he experienced as child. My leaning in meant harm and that he was bad.

When I go to scary movies I put my hands up to my face and look out through the cracks of my fingers. I feel safe enough to watch this way. I think this gesture has happened for years and years, beginning with the infant in the back seat of the car witnessing a raging father turn towards her.

I had a fairly eccentric graduate school teacher compare coupling with the example of dogs mating. Sometimes the male’s genitals can get stuck in the female because she has clamped down on him and cannot release. We were all pretty disgusted by this example, especially when our teacher laughed as she gave us the image of the connected dogs wandering around unable to let go. But I have to admit, this might be an appropriate metaphor to describe the process by which we attach a belief to a feeling or physical sensation to the point of a painful outcome that can hinder the way we get around in life.

In Buddhist psychology the ultimate, most painful ‘big daddy’ of overlaying a belief on our inner experience, is the conclusion that there is a self to actually judge as good or bad. According to Buddhism we have taken a conglomeration of associations or ‘couplings’ for generations upon generations and called it me.

When I was a child I used to wander into the bathroom and slowly walk to the mirror. I would put my face as close as it could get without losing focus. I would look into these eyes and try to find someone, possibly me, possibly someone else. I would smile and frown, hoping to expose her, then walk away and jump back in front of the mirror real quick attempting to capture what was inside me looking out?

“As long as there’s a self, I think eventually we discover that there will be a sense of badness.” This is what one of my supervisors once said, as if he were naming some small detail in life. And I still feel this statement pointing around in me like a probe, seeking what I haven’t discovered yet but that could possibly set me free.

Thanksgiving was a perfect time to catch this process of coupling loud and clear. There is ample opportunity to feel bad during the holidays. Usually I walk around with a sensitivity that dangles out my chest. Much like the turkeys waddle I imagine it tender and pink.

This holiday I found that I was sad. There was no logical explanation for this except that sadness for me sometimes comes with the holidays as distant background music. Not enough to distract me, but enough to pull just slightly at my ability to wholeheartedly enjoy. One of the five-year olds in the group kept disappearing under the table. Everyone assumed he was playing, but I wondered if he was just taking a break.

So there I was feeling like a bad person because I was sad on a holiday where everyone should be happy. I decided that this was it. This was the time I was going to capture the ‘coupling’ device, grab it and shake it, and tell it to find a different mate.

I left the crowd and went into the bathroom. I sat on the countertop, closed my eyes and looked for the thing that attached feeling bad for the belief that I was bad. I don’t know, I guess I was hoping I could locate the hinge and remove it. But like when I was young and looking in the mirror, I could not find what I was looking for.

What I did find was space. Space around my sadness. Space around my body. A distance between my thoughts about what I was experiencing and what I was actually experiencing. I found a swirling of identity and lack thereof. I found a figure wearing lipstick who calls herself woman with drops of salty water in the corner of her eyes. And most importantly within this ability to self-reflect I found a choice.

As I looked in the mirror I still could not identify what was looking back, longing, reaching, familiar features, a presence, but not necessarily a me I could pinpoint and call bad or good. I had a choice.

And perhaps that’s what we are trying to wake up to, not only the fact that coupling occurs, but the space that sees all the possibilities.

This article was originally published in Elephantjournal.com Dec. 2011

http://www.elephantjournal.com/2011/12/the-painful-self–jj-roitman/

The Space Between

Posted on October 15, 2011 by JJ Roitman

I have a memory of kissing my mother goodnight when I was around seven years old. When she went to pull away I wouldn’t let her go. I kept holding on, and pressed my kiss into her cheek as far as it would go, as if I were getting to something. Something I imagined was deep inside her. I loved her, and I wanted that love to find her.

Recently my mother admitted that she never got touched or held as a girl. Raised by nannies, it seemed that the children in my mother’s household were held like dirty diapers, handled only when necessary.

When I wouldn’t let go of my mother’s face she got nervous and told me to let go. To this day I’m not sure if I have.

I have a very tall friend who has decided to bend her legs just slightly when we hug, this serves two purposes, she doesn’t have to bend over, and it also makes for a full-bodied hug, every inch of her touching you.

I have another friend who hugs like she’s leaning her elbows on a table. She only really lets the tip of her chest touch yours, very aware that her breasts stay anonymous.

When I hug my husband I fall into him completely, I could stay in that embrace for as long as a year. My head gets all fuzzy and I feel like a slow warm breeze peacefully swaying in a vast quiet field. I am on this Earth, and safe.

There’s this thing that happens at the end of a therapy session. The client stands up, I stand up and the energy between us vibrates like a stretched out hula-hoop. Most men don’t even consider hugging me, but for some women to not hug would feel rude. Either way, whether there is a hug or not, the question lives in that distance between us. How to let go, separate, end this moment and walk onto the street.

As a beginner therapist I often mock the older more experienced therapists that I admire. I listen very carefully to how they handle things, to their rules, to their styles, and I try them out for myself. I once heard a famous opera singer interviewed on the radio. He said that opera singers partly learn by imitating other famous opera singers that have come before.

I have modeled myself off of a woman practitioner who hugs almost every client when she greets them and when she’s leaving them. She has no awkwardness around this. She just throws her arms out and looks at you with her soft warm eyes delicately framed by crow’s feet and lets you dive in if you want.

I have also tried a different approach I learned from one of my male supervisors, which is to ask my clients who tend to hug to put words to what the hug means instead of actually doing it. What is the hug expressing?

One client said “Its gratitude. It’s saying to you that I trust you.”

Another said it was a way to show me that she felt connected.

Another client felt very offended that I even asked, thought I was rejecting her, and cried. It took us two sessions to work through the riff—did she hurt me when we hugged? Was she bad for being touchy-feely?

Some therapists believe that touching the client crosses boundaries. Others believe that holding their clients in an embrace at the right moment can be very healing.

I had another session with a woman in her fifties who was describing how difficult her life was. While she talked I kept having this strong desire to hug her. I simply said “I keep getting this impulse to hug you.” There was a long silence between us as she looked at me. I could tell that in that moment she was experiencing a hug, who was giving it or where it was coming from was a mystery, but she took deep breaths and let herself be held.

I wonder about this space between us. What it wants? To be filled? To become? To remember? Maybe it’s just possibility.

Driving down a winding side road at dusk I pulled over to watch two horses rub their long noses against each other. They extended the touch to reach their necks and swish their tails. Then they just stood by each other and closed their eyes. I wondered if they reached that place I was trying to get to when I wouldn’t let my mother go.

There are times when I don’t know what to say in therapy, and instead some sort of longing slips out of me and attempts to communicate, invisible, reaching.

Sometimes a hug is disappointing and leaves us dangling outside of ourselves. Sometimes I have to remember to invite that longing back home.

For reprint information, contact JJ Roitman