During the first screening interview to get into the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy research study most of the yes/no questions seemed designed to rule out people with serious psychological handicaps.  These people had larger problems than waking up exhausted every day and would be no more useful to the study than the study would be to them.  Changing how they think about their life would not likely help them very much, if at all.  Trying to reason their way to more productive pursuits would probably only take them so far.

“Do you sometimes hear celebrities on TV talking directly to you, acknowledging your secret connection?”  

“Do you feel that, as soon as you leave a room, everyone heaves a sigh of relief and begins unloading about what a complete jerk you are?”  

“Do the commands you get when wearing your tin foil hat seem more reasonable to you than the ones you get from the neighbor’s dog?”

“Do you believe that Dick Cheney would kill thousands of people to get what he wants?”  (a few were trick questions, I noticed)

This interview was at times a little tedious, but there was nothing unpleasant or challenging about it.  After the session I spent about 20 minutes filling out a written questionnaire with many of the same questions, or questions of their ilk.  

“Do you believe a health insurance industry insider and lobbyist was deliberately placed in charge of drafting the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to ensure that no violence would be done to the fabulous profitability of that industry by those with ‘noble’ ideals about human dignity?”  

I was also given a longer form to take home and fill out with questions about people who had influenced me, family dynamics growing up, the death of loved ones, traumas I may have experienced, my happiest moments, most significant events at various times of my life, what my main goals in seeking treatment are.  

The second interview was free-ranging and surprisingly enjoyable.  It was like an interview on a talk show conducted by an open-minded host who was intent on showcasing what I could do.  There were a few laughs along the way and the time felt very much like the time I spend writing here– following my thoughts where they go, retracing my steps to make a connection, clarifying something, adding an aside, noting that the aside was not strictly relevant perhaps, a laugh line, pause for ironic irony, back to a serious point, etc.

At the end of that interview I was asked to tell ten stories, five minutes or less each, about ten specific incidents in my life.  In the end, probably because I had told so many little stories in the course of the previous hour, the interviewer was satisfied with five or so stories.  Since all of these sessions are videotaped, I called afterwards to find out if I could have a copy of the interconnected stories.  They seemed to put my life and moral progress in a certain nutshell.

The stories are being kindly transcribed for me now by an assistant who works at the research study.  I was told by Conan they’d make the narrative skeleton of a novella with excellent bone structure.   He told me so the other night, transmitting the thought directly to me from my neighbor’s TV.  

I emerged from that second interview feeling like a wholly integrated person whose life made a certain organic sense.  Having the good fortune to be able to dedicate myself to a worthwhile but unlikely plan that could potentially shine a little light into a dark and angry world, having designed it based on insights gained from the often painful events of my life, seemed like a great blessing, in spite of the difficulty of struggling alone to do the impossible.  I’d work on reframing my daily struggles, get some help moving forward and, y’allah.

I had a call to say I was good to go for the therapy, they’d be charging me the low end of the sliding scale ($20 less than my co-pay for limited treatment under Obamacare, plus no $1,750 out-of-pocket), that the therapist would contact me (she did) and that the third interview would take place at such and such a time (yesterday at 3).  This was all good news, since I’d been pursuing a study like this since early December and yesterday was March 4th.

Then, yesterday, the third interview.  “How are you?” the young graduate student asked with a smile.  I nodded and said “OK” with only the faintest note of cautiousness in my voice.  I noticed, even then, that I didn’t do the polite thing and ask the same of her.  What harm could the meaningless pleasantry have done?   Asking how she was would have been a decent bit of human reciprocity  requiring perhaps two seconds to do.  I thought about that afterward, not sure if there was deeper meaning to assign to my failure to do the social thing.  I decided it wasn’t worth thinking about too much, that I hadn’t been there for polite chat, after all.

Her pleasant greeting soon took on a different cast as she began to probe with the final set of questions.  “You’re going to feel a little stick,” she might have said as she paused with the oversized needle only partially hidden.  The questions seemed innocent enough, but they were boring down into the answers, each ten words or so filled in on small blanks (do not use extra paper), that I’d provided on the questionnaire I’d done at home after the first session.   She was working from what looked like a typed and annotated transcript of my answers.

This is the beginning of the hard part, I realized at some point during that hour.   These are not softball questions teed up to me while a buzzed studio audience laughs and enjoys the show.  They’d set the speed on the pitching machine to ‘high’ and these pitches were being thrown with purpose.  A few came in right under my chin.  “Provide five adjectives to describe your relationship to your mother.”  The fifth of these, I recall, was ‘complicated’.  My arms were too tired to take a better hack at that fifth one.  

Then I had to describe why I’d chosen each adjective.  Complicated, and the thing that connected all the moving parts was the pain behind each adjective.   My mother’s limitations, the sorrows she’d lived with, the humiliations she’d undergone, all overshadowing her talents, work ethic, great intelligence and sense of humor.  My childhood had been lived on a battlefield, surrounded by mine fields and beyond them barbed wire and dark, muddy trenches, and my only escape was into the world of my imagination.  That world held hope and terror in almost equal proportion.  I felt by the end of the session as though I’d made almost no progress from that imagined world of hope and nightmare that was my foundation in life.  It seemed to me I live there still, in that war zone.   The insights I’d gained?  Butterflies of the imagination losing color and substance as I tried to remember them.

We were done in exactly one hour, the shortest time the exercise could be done in.  I told the young woman that I’d take 41 more seconds to show her something, she was agreeable.  A moment before I left the room a shuddering nine year-old wondering why the world remained such an evil place I handed her the iPad and she watched this, which elicited a few chuckles from her as she watched.  She asked if I’d seen the Lego movie, I hadn’t.  I gave her a wehearyou.net Idea Book, which she accepted gracefully (she’d admired Sekhnet’s label at the end of the previous session when I’d made a note in my own worn Idea Book).  I put my coat on as I thanked her and said goodbye over my shoulder turning toward the lobby while she went into the office in the opposite direction.  I didn’t pause or turn to make final eye contact with her.  

What’s up with that running out of there like a whipped dog, I thought a moment later, feeling a bit like a whipped dog.  I continued feeling that way as I walked the streets near the original school where I’d gotten the program up and running.  I was aware of a strong desire not to run into anyone I knew from that school.  “How you doing?” they’d ask.  “Good!” I’d say, wincing out a smile and turning slightly to avoid showing the whip marks on my dog back.

The hard part is why few people succeed at doing things that are hard.   There are many things leading up to the hard part that most people can do well enough.   Then comes the hard part and, as George Dubya Bush said, with visible peevishness, about good people in his administration who had botched the rescue of poverty-stricken hurricane victims  (the wealthier ones did OK, thank God), the delivery of democracy to Iraq and anything else they touched, “it’s hard work!”  

“Which of your parents were you closer to?”  And, in spite of the complicatedness of the relationship, I had no hesitation choosing my mother.  “My father was a total asshole,” I said by way of summary, like a petulant eight year-old,  before clarifying, rephrasing, reminding us both that considering where he came from, the unimaginably painful abuse he’d suffered as a young kid, and all through his childhood, he deserved to have it clarified– yes, he was a verbally violent man, but, as I’ve described, it’s more complicated than that, and I don’t say asshole in a dismissively judgmental way.  

I thought afterwards of my friend quickly walking back his understandable frustration with the demanding mother who was driving him crazy during his annual visit to her.  He began talking about how manipulative she is, caught himself and began to talk about what a basically good person she is, how lonely she is, how much she loves him.

The hard work of that third interview left me feeling my wounds for the next couple of hours.  I realized, walking away, that there would be no more getting-to-know-you sessions in the green room, no more canned laughs.  If this therapy was going to help me move myself and this program forward, the hard work would be beginning toot sweet (comme un dit).

I thought of the Temptations, Cloud Nine – “The childhood part of my life wasn’t very pretty, I was born and raised in the slums of the city.”  My identification with those born and raised in the slums of the city is something I can’t shake.   My disconnection from those who lead comfortable lives and accept the inevitability of slums, the viciousness of the cycles of inherited poverty and inherited wealth, the routinized murder of children the New York Times refers to as “collateral damage”, the ongoing evil of wars fought only to make the rich richer, a status quo that accepts as an externality of corporate wealth that the vast majority of the world, and the earth itself, will suffer whatever is necessary to maximize profits… all these things in the category of things I cannot change and that I ask an indifferent, or wholly absent, God to grant me the serenity to know I must simply bear…  

“You’re getting yourself worked up, calm yourself.  Why do you do this to yourself?” 

Who the fuck are you?  The hard part, in a word, is anger.  We have a damned good right to it sometimes, yes.  Now what are we going to do with it?