So, bad session. It was an after-hours appointment, so I had to ring the bell.

She was right on the other side of the door waiting for me. Unexpected. We head back to her office and she starts jabbering at me in the hall on the way there. I can’t get what she’s saying and she has to repeat herself like four times. (She was asking if I wanted a minute to gather myself.) So by the time we reach her office I’m upset, embarassed, and feeling stupid. And all I want to do is leave. I don’t usually react this way to not hearing someone. Can’t afford to.

She tries to start by talking about an incident that triggered thoughts of 2ex last week and that I wrote her a letter about. I’m still hung up on the thing in the hall and we talk about that instead. For like 25 minutes. Then we talk 2ex for maybe ten minutes, then wind up back on the thing in the hall.

I’m very quiet that first 25 minutes, staring around in a dissociated fashion and being weepy. Finally it occurs to me she’s being very quiet, too, letting me be quiet to an extent no therapist ever has.

ATAT: Why are you being so quiet?
Piaf: Well, to be honest, I don’t quite know where to go from here.
ATAT: So you’re just going to give up and sit there?

After that we both talked more, about the incident in the hall. I end up telling her the most embarassing thing that ever happened to me as a result of my hearing (it involves thinking a whole roomful of people at a talk were laughing at me as a result of something I misheard). She calls this “very sad,” despite me pointing out there was a happy ending.

Then for some reason I tell her about the film Last Year at Marienbad and a novel of Salman Rushdie’s that mentions someone watching it because they love the person who really wants to see it, which I did for 2ex. (The film is virtually incomprehensible.)

Then we get on to 2ex, during which I ask her why she’s so blunt in her criticism of him—like, personal—while other therapists have said he was abusive but don’t criticize him personally. She says she likes to call a spade a spade.

She asks if any of my other therapists suggested PTSD, and I said yes, for assault, abusive marriage, and hearing struggles. That brings us back to the incident in the hall.

Piaf: How did you feel?
ATAT: You’re going to start asking therapist-y questions?
Piaf: You don’t have to answer.

I’m more interested in why I felt whatever.

Piaf: I don’t like why.
ATAT: Why not?
Piaf: It is not specific enough. One can talk about the whys forever and get nowhere. I prefer what. It is concrete. What did you feel?

We go through that, I say confused and surprised (that she was right there on the other side of the door) and humiliated. She spends the next five minutes taking responsibility for the whole thing, saying she “pounced” on me as soon as I entered and didn’t give me time to collect myself and turned away from me when she spoke.

ATAT: I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but...
Piaf: But...?
ATAT: It isn’t your responsibility. You’re not the one who’s a freak.



At this point she tells me that from the outside it seems that my life is pretty hard, harder than most people’s. I disagree, arguing that the life of no one in white middle-class America can really be called “hard,” and my problems are definitely First World. I also point out my mother has the same hearing problem, a much more stressful job, raised kids, and had a terminally ill spouse, but coped with it all.

We go over because I’m still weepy. She says again she’s sorry for the incident in the hall, that she just wasn’t communicating well. I tell her about AY’s Chinese room/therapy theory. Piaf the Practical says, “Just open the door.” (She is obviously not a philosopher. Wonder what she would do with Schrodinger’s cat?)

And then finally I get out of there. No Piaf for three weeks, and she’ll be “completely inaccessible.” Nunnery? Biosphere II? Climbing Everest?