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.
[For more of this story, written by Said Sayrafiezadeh, go to http://opinionator.blogs.nytim...chotherapy-and-mine/]
Comments (0)