I, Couples Therapist (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Just Pop a Pill When I Bomb)

There are times in life when I think it's appropriate to make a suicide pact. Or at least to draw that line in the sand where, once crossed, you start considering whether you'd qualify for assisted suicide under Oregon's Death With Dignity law. Typically, this is reserved for terminal illnesses or the problem of excruciating and unrelievable pain.

Working as a counselor is not a terminal illness -- at least, not as I've yet been made aware of -- but the quandary of excruciating and unrelievable pain may be the little caveat by which my work today as a would-be couples therapist qualifies me for a really large bottle of morphine and a fifth of gin.

I'm just saying.

But perhaps it wasn't *that* bad.

You'd have to ask S2 and Buddha Boy how it went from their perspective, as they are role-playing my couple and were consequently subjected to my therapeutic "attempts." (In light of my previous blog entry, I'm considering the possibility that one ought not be a couples therapist if one has not survived an experience with couples therapy.)

In any case, a little about my couple:

S2 is "Shannon," and Buddha Boy is "Eric." They are having a rather significant dispute over the prospect of having children. Eric wants them; Shannon is "ambivalent," and raises the following concerns:

-- She is very successful in her career and is the primary breadwinner, bringing in at least 75 percent of the income. She is essentially supporting their family of two while Eric tries to get his consulting business onto good financial footing.

-- She doesn't like her job and would consider having kids for the trade-off of not working. But she doesn't see how that's possible given the financial situation.

-- If she has to continue working, even part-time, she doesn't trust that Eric will kick in his fair share of the parenting, so she has significant resistance on that matter.

-- And then there's the part where maybe she doesn't really like the idea of having kids. Maybe she'd just prefer to be a good auntie to someone else's children, so she can go off and get into a line of work that she would actually enjoy.

Eric, for his part, is confused why Shannon has all these feelings. He says he's "changed" from the past, back when they used to "communicate basically by saying, 'What the fuck?!' to each other all the time."

This is the wilely twosome I have for my couple. To make matters worse, they are my own private Frankenstein. I created them. S2 and Buddha Boy are simply playing the roles I gave them.

No sooner had we opened the "session" with a "What brings you in today?" than the teacher walked in and started quietly observing us. I hadn't even started to find my groove (and truthfully, I never did), so that may have thrown me off a bit.

But it was really Shannon and Eric and their stunted communication, their desire to keep the session at a surface level by talking about their financial issues, and their dug-in positions that presented the challenge.

At one point, I said something like, I can understand why the finances are a concern, but I am not your financial counselor. I'd rather we focus on what's going on between the two of you. Something nice and inelegant like that. Something designed to build a calm and trusted therapeutic alliance.

At another point, early on, I had covered my face momentarily, tried to pretend these people weren't in role and said, Oh my god, I have *no clue* what I'm doing! To which S2 had replied, "Press on! Just keep going!"

And so I did. But my god.

It is one thing to work with an individual, particularly in role-play where you've got a very limited time to attempt making a connection with the client and start getting a sense of what's going on with them. But TWO people? Who are a tad hostile toward one another or who may be frightened of revealing their truest sense of "the problem" in front of their partner? And who can fall into fits of talking to and about each other, slipping from third to second person and back again in a single sentence because *you* -- the therapist -- are suddenly struggling against triangulation and trying to build an alliance with both of them?

That, my friends, is some seriously squirrely stuff.

It reminded me of trying to pull a watermelon covered in Crisco out of a swimming pool.

Fortunately, I realized at some point that *of course* it was going to be hard, that it was completely novel and that I was just going to fuck it up until the cows came home. But maybe someday way out in the future, faced with some real couples and armed with more training and experience, my work might not end in catastrophe.

In fact, it did not have catastrophic consequences today. It was just ... banal. Maybe it started going somewhere. But it was HARD getting there, I can assure you.

The upside to the experience is that, unlike with the last role-playing in Couples Therapy, I found it quite easy to let the couple have their problem and keep it when the session was over. As I said last time, I was having a hard time playing the role of your basic traditional Indian male head-of-household (in "asshole" fashion, as S2 observed), and I felt bad about fighting with my "wife" (S2), who'd started taking birth control without telling me.

But tonight, I guess, I was not having very much empathy with this couple I was trying to counsel. Even though I created this couple, I couldn't quite figure out what they wanted from each other. I have *no idea* how I will be able to help them bridge their emotional distance and have an "honest" conversation about what the "kid issue" means to each of them.

The upside is that I officially have a whole new level of awe and respect for couples therapists who actually do good work.

I'll be taking a pill now and going to bed. It may not be the whole bottle of morphine washed down with gin, but it's the least I can do.