I have never had a therapist with a good sense of humor. Not for long, anyway.
I imagine there are mirthful counselors out there and that they work for someone. I wholeheartedly believe that humor heals, but I don’t go to therapy for healing. I go to for the arduous psyche slogging, a job so murky even Mike Rowe said “Pass.” So I don’t need a coach or a Cheshire cat guide grinning with suggested directions.
I need a foreman who will watch while requiring me to tear down the shoddy masonry work. And I need one who won’t let me sidestep the work while falling my for jokes, either. Warm and nurturing doesn’t work for me. Crystal vision centered doesn’t work for me. My apparatus needs Swiss train conductor.
I need a therapist who won’t play well with others:
Therapist:Hmm, so that’s an interesting pattern. Tell me more about what you did when that happened.
Me: Ha, ha [witty joke] {funny story} we’re laughing at this, right?!
Therapist: I notice you are laughing. Why do you think you are laughing?
Me:I, hmm, well…wacka, wacka! Wacka? Bah-dum…. Hmm. Wa-wuh.
Therapist: [crickets]
If I can make a therapist laugh, it’s fucked. To get the insights I need, I have to have inescapable plagues of crickets, dispassionate stares, and so much quiet that you can hear her pen dragging on her notes. (Holy hell, the notes. What do those notes say? I wonder if my therapist is like me in a meeting, with three layers of paper. The top layer=notes. Just below that=shopping list and great URLs to buy. Just below that=rants and inappropriate doodles.)
I’ve wondered if the ideal therapist might be a blow-up doll. But it turns out they are relatively easy to make giggle, so that’s a no-go. (I’m sure there is a specific transference sub-type for Patient-Doctor Distruption Due to Sex Toy Ideation, so I haven’t mentioned this theory to my current therapist. Yet. I might, though–it’s crazy what you’ll say to make the silence stop. MAKE IT STOP!)
I’ve been in therapy on and off for more than 20 years. Mostly off, but on at critically important times. Like most of the 90s. Odd years, especially ‘05. Also–most Thursdays. Extra in winter. And October. And December.
My current therapist accepts AmEx so I get frequent flier miles for my sessions, which is awesome. It’s like she’s the security scan and the chick driving the tram I need to get from Terminal B to Terminal T for the connecting flight out of the echoing hangar of my unconscious. She’s a very expensive turkey wrap and a roll of Mentos when I’m not sure what time zone my id is in. She’s the perpetual longing for the grace of an occasional first class upgrade to simple neurosis or at least the human dignity of the whole can.
Dear God I Might Not Need As Much Therapy if the World Were Set Up Properly So Can We Start By Having Flight Attendants Just Give Us the Whole Can As An Experiment?
So on and off. And definitely therapy thing is ON now. Break ups are a cash cow for counselors. First they are on speed dial, and then they are on as a worthwhile investment as your dating wingmen. Because:
1.) What the hell happened, it was all going so swimmingly there for a few years. On and off. So to speak. Please let’s get to the bottom of this 55 minutes at a time.
2.) Okay, THAT again? Crap, I though I was SO over that pattern. That’s work on that 55 minutes at a time.
3.) So now that we’re starting over with New Cute People (who are so Cute just sitting there in the hotel bar that you both manage to forget you are at a hotel because you are traveling until its well past checkout time, and you are like, hey, let’s share a cab to the airport and get on a massive shiny gravity-conquering machine together hell yes meet you in the lobby–and then there she is, eleventy mismatched luggage cases in a pile emitting murky funk and your own baggage sadly with a frozen wheel so you have to scrape it over curbs it kerplumpt let’s go hey wait I might have lost my passport!) So, yeah, let’s nip those repeating mommy/daddy/dysfunction junction what’s your function issues IN THE BUD this time. In the everloving bud. 55 minutes at a time.
So by design, my therapist isn’t much for jokes, and lord knows I’ve tried. I even impulsively did my very excellent Scarface “say hello to my little friend” imitation for her and she seemed taken aback and then I tried to overcompensate because I was worried she thought it was aggressive-agressive or a Freudian slip or that I actually have a personality who is a Cuban druglord and that can get you Involuntaried but then I was like, oh, never mind, I can’t explain the cultural relevance of Scarface to you.
But what she lacks in humor she makes up for in her love of patterns. She’s the Rainman of Patterns. Her world is swirling with plaid and checkerboards and she scans the frontier looking for horse + rider, horse + rider–oh, there is a horse without a rider, let’s follow it. Her eyes look like Othello pieces, clicking over black-white-black-white as she makes dotted lines on my Genogram. She loves patterns and I love that about her. (There’s probably a diagnosis for that, too. Harlequin Transference.)