“The hypervigilance?” I asked. “I’m sorry. I didn’t even notice it.”
“You just said sorry.” He sighed. “Oh, fuck. It’s just like what you said earlier about how your C-PTSD ruins relationships.”
“Can you see how?” I asked, hesitantly. “Am I weird?”
“That’s not how I meant it.”
“Oh. Okay. Um…I can be sensitive.”
“It’s okay. I can be a little rough.” A long pause. “How is this session going for you?”
“It’s okay. It’s pretty normal, I guess. But, well…earlier, when you said just regulating isn’t enough, I was like, what do you mean not enough? What else am I supposed to fucking do? But I was curious. I said that kind of challengingly, but I was both curious and defensive. I had both of those inclinations in my head.”
“Yeah, that makes perfect sense.” Dr. Ham paused. I sat there, confused at what exactly was happening. Eventually he said, “I wish I could communicate more effectively.”
“I mean, lots of people come to you for the way you communicate,” I said.
Suddenly, Dr. Ham jumped forward in his seat again, gleefully, his eyes enormous behind his glasses. “That was an interesting moment! Can we analyze it to death?”
I looked at him as if he’d just pulled a whopping booger out of his nose. “Um…sure?”
“You jumped ahead of me again! You just jumped in with something. Some pat reassurance, right? Why did you do that? Did you notice that? What was going on for you?”
I giggled at the absurdity of this overanalysis. “?’Cause you said you wished you could communicate better…and I don’t want you to feel bad!”
“So you started to parent me! But you said it with an energy of like, That’s tough shit, because people come here for comfort.”
“I didn’t mean it that way? Um…” I laughed more. “I do have a droll way of speaking, particularly around people I don’t know very well yet?”
“It wasn’t quite droll. It was matter-of-fact!” Dr. Ham said.
Okay, I was completely lost here. Why did it matter what tone I’d used? “So…saying things in that tone can be off-putting?”
“Oh God! No, no, no! I’m not judging it yet! That would shut down the exploration!” he exclaimed. “I’m just trying to point out things for you to wonder about. To wonder about what you’re feeling when you say things. Because I don’t think it was purely reassurance.”
What the fuck? What I was feeling? I didn’t know what the fuck I was feeling at that one little moment. He seemed bummed, so I tried to say something nice. Which was a weird thing to do in a session about my PTSD, but, whatever. I sat on it for a while. “I think I was trying to reassure you and myself at the same time because communicating well is a thing I’ve been thinking about? And then I think I said it in that tone because I was, like…tired?”
“AH! THAT’S WHAT IT IS!” Dr. Ham spluttered, almost jumping out of his seat. “You’re tired! Tired of buttressing yourself!”
“I have a lot of work to do, yeah. To try to communicate better.” Case in point.
“What did it feel like? To microanalyze that?”
“Jesus Christ. If I were to microanalyze all my shit like that…it would take me forever. But what was the purpose of that? To call me out on it?”
“NO! God, no!” Dr. Ham scrunched up his face in disgust and shook his head. “I’m flabbergasted at that! You’re perceiving me as judging you again!”
“Sorry,” my mouth said again, reflexively.
“You just jumped ahead of me again and asked, Is that a thing I’m not supposed to do?”
I shrugged. But it felt as if he was being critical. Or something? He was being weird? I didn’t know what the fuck he was doing. How was I supposed to react? I was lost, so I tried to grab a foothold. “Why did you pick that one thing where I tried to make you feel better? To microanalyze?”
“Because it was a mismatch in what we were experiencing. There was a momentary rupture in our communication. And it’s always revealing whenever there’s a rupture. So we’re going to keep practicing curiosity and exploration rather than judgment, and it’s through this process that you’ll start being nicer to yourself. Does that make sense?”
“Yeah…it makes sense,” I said. It kind of did, anyway. Not the momentary rupture part. But the last part. Being nicer to myself. “I have an immense amount of curiosity about why I do what I do. But it’s not like, Oh, that’s why I do that! It’s like, Shit. That’s why you do that, you fucking moron.”
Dr. Ham nodded at me again, his smiling eyes saying, Yes, exactly. His intense gaze bored into me again. “It’s really interesting, because most people feel more liberated and forgiven once they get a PTSD diagnosis. Because other diagnoses like bipolar and depression are pathological. And PTSD is the only one that says this isn’t your fault. It offers you an excuse. But for you…”
I shrugged. “I’m just anti-excuses, I guess.”
After a while, our conversation dwindled into a long silence. I broke it. “So, doc. What do I do now?”
“Well, what I heard is that you want unconditional love but still no bullshit. Do you want me to care enough that I push you to get better and call you on your stuff? You want me to be both tough and gentle at the same time?”
I hadn’t outright said any of that, but, yes—it was what I wanted. It sounded so impossible when he laid it out like that, though. So many contradictions, all competing for attention. I squirmed and made my body as compact as I could on his couch. “Is that too needy?” I asked in a small voice.
“No. No. It’s actually exactly what you need,” he confidently declared.
Well, that sounded good. It sounded really good. But was Dr. Ham capable of it?
CHAPTER 38
After I left his office, I had no idea what to make of the past hour and a half. But unlike other therapy sessions, I could do something about that. I immediately went to a café around the corner from Dr. Ham’s office, uploaded the audio from our session onto my computer, and put it into an automated transcription service. Within a few minutes, I had a full transcript of the session I’d just been in. I copied it into a Google Doc, shared it with Dr. Ham, and started to read through it.