Thank you, Dr. Truth

HanukkahLand III, Night 5: The yelling therapist

Dear Dr. Truth,

Thank you for helping me to appreciate myself this year. It took a long time to make it through, but I think I’m really starting to understand the basic concepts that come to others so easily, such as motivation, purpose, and self respect.

Your methods are interesting to say the least. You call yourself a Freudian, but I wonder if Freud yelled this much as his patients. I’ve never been yelled at by a mental health professional before. Or maybe you aren’t yelling at so much as yelling with? Hard to say. With you, italics matter.

The things you yell are always encouraging. It’s like you’re angry at the same things I’m angry at, but I’m too afraid to yell. We usually carry out our Zoom sessions in a small focus booth at work, and I’m always afraid they’ll hear me through the plaster.

I remember our intake appointment. The first thing you said to me was, “Here’s what we’re going to do. We are going to heal ourselves from our past trauma. And there are two ways we’re going to accomplish this. The first way is: right now, we are going to breathe. Breathing is essential, you can’t think if you’re not breathing. The second way is: right now, we are going to begin affirmations. When you do something big or you do something small, I don’t give a shit if you’re taking out the trash or winning a Nobel Peace Prize, you’re going to stop and say thank you to yourself. We do this for two reasons: because it’s polite and because it helps us build a foundation upon which to find healing.”

And you held on the word “heal-ing” like it was a cousin of yours.

Once you yelled at me for being mean to myself. “Would you just quit it?” you said. You might be one of those people who talks too loudly on Zoom because you think it’s a ham radio. I don’t care. I will never forget that moment, nor will I forget the moment you actually told me to quit writing.

This summer, I was facing a bout of writer’s block. I brought this to you. In our session, I said I was writing a lot, but I was hating everything I was writing. You said: “Then why don’t you just quit?” I was shocked. No one had ever told me to quit before. Friends usually say things like, “Oh, you’ll get your muse back” or “Go for walk, that always works for me.”

But you were not my friend, and somehow speaking to deeper part of me that I have never met. “Put the pen down, turn off the computer, stop writing completely. Don’t do something that makes you unhappy. Don’t do anything you don’t want. Give it up.”

I tried to interject with some kind of allowance, like, “Well, this happens to all writers from time to time,” but you broke my sentence up before I could think.

“I bet you won’t last a week,” you said. “I know because you are an artist. You must create your art.”

And you were right. After about three days of not writing, I sat down at a coffee shop and wrote a poem. Later that week, I wrote two essays.

I am hooked on what you say. Some other things you’ve said to me with emphasis:

• “Any bad feeling you have about yourself is false.”

• “If your problem is you don’t know what you want, you will terrorize yourself with that forever.”

• “We are supposed to die trying.”

• “Society sucks, so we are obliged to believe in ourselves.”

• “There’s no situation in life so bad we can’t make it worse.”

• “Happiness is more than relief from pain. It’s fun.”

• “Give yourself credit where credit is due.”

• “You’re running out of excuses to make yourself a hopeless shlepp.”

These quotes have run around in my head like all that Shakespeare I had to memorize in high school. You are like Shakespeare. A 70-year-old, African American Shakespeare.

Happy Hanukkah, Dr. Truth.

Professional regards,

Sam Z
CULTURE BOY