Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

People often mistake numbness for nothingness, but numbness isn’t the absence of feelings; it’s a response to being overwhelmed by too many feelings.

We tend to think that the future happens later, but we’re creating it in our minds every day. When the present falls apart, so does the future we had associated with it. And having the future taken away is the mother of all plot twists. But if we spend the present trying to fix the past or control the future, we remain stuck in place, in perpetual regret.

All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy.”

What kind of person gets away with simply not wanting to look?

the American Psychological Association published a paper called “Where Has All the Psychotherapy Gone?” It noted that 30 percent fewer patients received psychological interventions in 2008 than they had ten years earlier and that since the 1990s, the managed-care industry—the same system that my medical-school professors had warned us about—had been increasingly limiting visits and reimbursements for talk therapy but not for drug treatment. It went on to say that in 2005 alone, pharmaceutical companies spent $4.2 billion on direct-to-consumer advertising and $7.2 billion on promotion to physicians—nearly twice what they spent on research and development.
Of course, it’s a lot easier—and quicker—to swallow a pill than to do the heavy lifting of looking inside yourself. And I had nothing against patients using medication to feel better. Just the opposite; I was, in fact, a strong believer in the tremendous good it often did in the right situations. But did 26 percent of the general population in this country really need to be on psychiatric medications? After all, it wasn’t that psychotherapy didn’t work. It was that it didn’t work fast enough for today’s patients, who were now, tellingly, called “consumers.”
There was an unspoken irony to all of this. People wanted a speedy solution to their problems, but what if their moods had been driven down in the first place by the hurried pace of their lives? They imagined that they were rushing now in order to savor their lives later, but so often, later never came. The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm had made this point more than fifty years earlier: “Modern man thinks he loses something—time—when he does not do things quickly; yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains except kill it.”

“I’m sorry about your father,” I say. After all, the jig is up. He knows I know the whole story.

Wendell smiles. “Thank you.”

“Do you miss him?” I ask.

“Every day,” he says. “Not a day goes by that I don’t miss him.”

“Not a day will go by that I won’t miss my father either,” I say.

I feel lighter, relieved of a burden. Sharing difficult truths might come with a cost—the need to face them—but there’s also a reward: freedom. The truth releases us from shame.

I get ready for . . . I don’t know what. Something bad to happen. A tornado to enter the room and alter our connection in some intangible but irreparable way. I wait for everything to feel distant, different, changed between us. But instead, the opposite happens. It feels as though the storm came in, passed through the room, and left not ruins but a clearing in its wake.

I think about how there’s nothing in the world like laughing with my dad. I think about how knowledgeable he is on almost any topic and how fully he loves me and how kind he is—not just to me, but to everyone.

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”