I am Addicted to the Possibility of Repair

On the show Couples Therapy, Trying to Be in a Throuple, and Is My IBS Healing?

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In another life I become a psychoanalyst because it involves the revealing of the impossible truths and then the repair of those truths.

So much of being a writing professor is therapy adjacent, and then of course it isn’t, can’t be, shouldn’t be, and yet.

What’s lurking underneath what you’ve written about here? “What’s almost said or implied?” (stolen long ago by hundreds of thousands of writing faculty from Peter Elbow and Pat Belanoff from New Ways of Responding, 1985, I’ll send you a PDF if you want it).

You’re telling me this text is about how many sacrifices your parents made for you, but your whole essay is also about how sad you feel because you’ve never had time with your father.

You write that it was good for you to get sent away to a boarding school on a remote island, but these are stories about profound loneliness and disconnect.

I want to know more about what the stained glass windows meant to you?

What about this image here of you and your brother making mud pies? Can you say more about that time?

Let’s do some research on your home town so we can find out it’s history, who lived there, who got pushed out, what it used to be like?

Do you want to write about that apartment where everything went wrong? Let’s do some research on what it might have been like for your mother, single and alone, to raise you? Let’s find some other writers to help you think about this.

All things I’ve said to students, teachers, and writing clients. Variations on the same theme.

For the last three days, while my daughter is away at sleepaway camp and it’s the only two week period of the year she can’t contact me, I’ve been binging Couples Therapy. I never feel so free as when she is at sleepaway camp.

My friend Megan Milks has been telling me for years to watch this slow, but I finally got around to it, and it feels like a narrative addiction. If you don’t know, Couples Therapy is a reality TV show about a pyschoanalyst, Dr. Orna Guralnik, and her work with couples in crisis. There are three to four couples every season, who volunteer (audition too I think?) to be in treatment with her. The setting is her office and they do real therapy. The edits and camera work are on Orna, the individuals in the couple, and the couple itself. Orna has a cute dog who we also see greeting patients and sleeping during sessions, who looks like this, but the tiny version:

Photo by Kieran White on Unsplash

When not in session, the show runner, Josh Kriegman, who is the son of therapists, provides shots of the city that I usually recognize block by block and storefront by storefront. The New Yorker in me loves this. Orna also meets with her own supervisor to discuss her patients and in the last three seasons, a group of other psychoanalysts. One of those is someone I went to graduate school with, Dr. Nuar Alsadir. When we met in 1994 we were baby poets. We both went on to teach in the same program, get Ph.D.(s) and write and publish several books. Nuar’s are truly wonderful. You should read them. I love seeing Nuar on the show, hearing her voice, and her gentle probing questions for Orna and the other therapists.

I am obsessed with the show. If I were in a couple and we were having problems (I’ve never been in a couple that wasn’t having problems ha) I would want to be on the show. I want to work with Orna. I have transference with Orna. I love how direct she often is with patients. With one obstinate man who refuses to reflect on his own behavior, she says she’s not sure she can continue to work with them.

If couples are fighting and being very mean to one another, she will turn to the mean one and say “I understand how angry you are and that you are longing for change, but do you want to yell at him/her or do therapy?” Another Ornaism, “Look at me, let me help you with this.” She’s also incredibly kind and validating, especially when she asks patients to talk about their childhoods which are often full of violence and sexual abuse.

I love her because she is so different from the couples therapist my ex-husband and I worked with briefly before we decided to separate. She was very young, and she tried her best with us, but we hated her and made fun of her outside of session. We were a difficult case, total friends and complete enemies at the time. We were so mad at each other then.

We needed someone tough and direct. We needed Orna maybe, though I don’t think our marriage could have been saved at the time. We didn’t want it enough. Or one of us did and the other didn’t. Or I don’t remember. The pain was too much for two abused children with very few coping skills. I loved conflict and he hated it. I was very mean and he was hiding from me. He was very mean and I was hiding from him.

I wanted to come out and have queer relationships. I needed to learn how to be an adult on my own and take care of myself. I needed to learn that I could do that.

I won’t speak for him anymore because that’s not fair. He would likely have different things to say and they would also be true.

I called him yesterday before continuing season three of the show. I revisited an old narrative we had at the end of our marriage. I said I wanted to changed it and we talked about how we might. It was a good conversation. The things he and I have learned how to do as co-parents and friends that we couldn’t in a romantic relationships!

In a weird way I’m trying to do couples therapy along with the show. I’m trying to be part of a disastrous throuple right now. The new season has what looks to be (I’m only three seasons in) a disastrous throuple in it. I am trying to stay present in my messy throuple because I like the man quite a lot, but he also scares me in the usual ways—drinks too much like my brother, needs mothering, blah blah blah.

I can answer most of the questions many therapists might ask me. Why are you drawn to these messy relationships? Because I spent my childhood in the epicenter of my parents horrible marriage. Because I love a messy triangle. Because I am lonely and I haven’t found a good partner for myself. Because I don’t want a good partner. Because I am not a good partner. Because something messy is easy to leave. Because I have massive trust issues. Because I like to get what I want (sex, fun, laughs, chill hangs) and then step away. Because I really love my independence and freedom and a secure relationship (in my mind) would compromise that. Because I am the disaster that happened to the throuple.

Because I am addicted to the possibility of repair.

The woman lives in another country and I’m not sure we’ll ever meet, though we have spoken on the phone. I like her, but I don’t trust her. I don’t trust either of them, but they are funny, smart, sexy, and interesting people. They don’t trust me either.

They are also doing mean things to each other and maybe it’s easy for me to watch, maybe it’s familiar to me because most of what I watched my parents do to each other was mean and vindictive. Maybe I love being the better, bigger person, the healed one, the one who has had quite a lot of therapy. Maybe I am trying to save us all. Maybe I am a stupid white woman. Maybe I’m a narcissist with a savoir complex. I’m definitely a slut for them. I can definitely be mean to romantic partners.

They are both Black, though not Black Americans. Race is a factor, fantasy, and/or play space in our relationship. How could it not be? I would have to think for a very long time about how to write about this part of it, in any bigger way. Often if I bring up issues around race, they both say I’m a silly American white woman. I don’t mind this or think it’s entirely wrong. They might also just be messing with me because it’s fun. I’m fun to mess with, and/or I like it in some ways.

Is it possible to be too reflective? Or to have become so reflective that you can imagine anything horrible about yourself to be true. Why must I talk and write about every last little thing?

I have learned to say to partners. I can see that. I might be doing that. I’m probably wrong about this, but…and…I see that, do you think that, what about this, and this? I am the untrained analyst of most of my relationships.

I love to fix things. I have also learned it’s impossible to fix anyone but me. I am also unfixable. Perfect as am I and always in progress. Another favorite Ornaism, “Well, we are all broken.”

The mantra, I am that, I am that, I am that, when I think I’m better than someone.

I am amazed by the work I’ve done in therapy. I have healed so much, am less prone to anger, and less reactive. I have boundaries. I can say no. I can ask for what I want. I am far less co-dependent.

I’m a still a bit sad about a dear friendship that we tried to turn into a romantic relationship. It didn’t work and it left me feeling rejected.

Photo by Matthew Henry on Unsplash

I am also really sick of being in therapy. I ended rather disastrously with my last therapist. I still owe her $225 which I never seem to have, but should have. I will pay her. I won’t pay her. I’m mad at her for what felt like abandonment. I’m mad at her for her boundaries about money. She also helped me get through the pandemic. At one point, in deep lock down, she began meeting me in the park, so that I wouldn’t feel so alone. Some part of me believes I wore her down. I believe I wear a lot of people down. It’s still hard for me to be kind to myself about myself. My family’s strong and very articulate dislike for me still, adds to this sometimes.

I began with a new therapist this summer. I really like her, but I can’t pay her, so I’m taking a break. She’s not a psychoanalyst thought she’s very good in many ways. I think I want a psychoanalyst. Maybe I just want Orna or Nuar. I know I could never afford them.

As I write I remember my therapist who I owe money to did recommend a psychoanalytic institute with a sliding scale. I should call them. Maybe I will after I write this. Why is it so hard to spell psychoanalysis?

I am addicted to the possibilty of repair because my bio family is fractured and broken. We are so beyong repair, I believe it’s unreachable. If anyone in my family were to even consent to therapy, Orna would likely have to tell them she can’t work with them because they will not reflect on their behavior. My mother won’t speak of the past. My father mostly disappears into angry email tirades if we communicate at all. Last time I was told anything about my brother it’s that he might get a new liver. Orna would not tolerate my family’s denial. She does not entertain bullshit.

But when I watch the gay couple in season two, Matt and Gianni, I weep. Matt almost died from his drinking, became sober, and repaired so much. They did it together as a couple, with Orna. It’s so beautiful. It’s so necessary to heal ourselves and to heal the world.

I believe in reparations. Apologies. All secrets coming out into the open. I hate lies.

Land back, though if I lose my apartment I will honestly be so sad. But that would be fair wouldn’t it. Why should I have this land that isn’t mine?

But there’s a world in which we could all be fed, clothed, and housed. Someone I follow on Instagram, poet and librarian, Michael Nicoloff, wrote this and posts every now and again as a reminder of what we could have. Here it is:

“enough space, healthy food, freedom from physical and emotional violence, perpetual access to emotional and physical healthcare, clean air and water, adequate shelter with climate controls, reasonable obligations to work for others, the guarantee of moving in public and private space without fear, leisure time and quiet, social time with friends and strangers, opportunities to get enough sleep, clean/easy/free transportation, free access to information and education, some permanent possessions, ability to borrow items as needed”

Yes this. Wow, we are far from this. But I need to believe in it. I might add, “repair from trauma and reparations from colonialism….”

What would you add?

One other cool but perplexing thing. My IBS is mostly gone this summer. It started in Shanghai where I ate all the gluten all week, and since then I have been eating gluten and my stomach is mostly good. No pain, shit is a bit weird but happening.

Two nights ago I ate a pita sandwich. Today I want to go and eat a piece of pie. Next up pizza.

I am not writing a book or teaching. Is this my cure to IBS? Rut roh.

Enjoy the typos,

xoxo

Carley