To my surprise, what had sounded like a totally perplexing conversation in person started to make more sense on the page. During the session, each time Dr. Ham had butted in and asked me to explain why I’d just said something, his interjections had felt random and senseless. But now, reading through our conversation, I noticed that he’d butted in every time I’d said something disparaging about myself, any time I’d changed the subject abruptly on him, and a couple of times when I’d gone on rambling, off-topic asides. As I read through, a comment popped up on the screen. Dr. Ham was adding notes to the transcript! “This was a wonderful summary,” he commented where I had expressed my desires in the beginning. He highlighted a sentence I had said later on and noted: “This was the first time you jumped in pre-emptively.” At two moments of self-doubt, he commented, “This is fear BS!”
I emailed him. “Can I add comments, too?” He responded in less than a minute. “Of course!”
Together we filled in a better picture of what had just happened. He explained, in the margins, his reasoning for a bunch of the interjections and comments he’d made. I pointed out moments I’d been irritated at him, and he acknowledged them with a laughing generosity. He apologized for moments where he’d been too pushy. And I pointed out moments I recognized that something deeper might have been going on with me. I noticed that I often derailed the conversation and changed the subject when I didn’t understand something he was saying. And often when I was confused, I didn’t ask for clarification. Instead, I reflexively assumed that he was criticizing me. I’d jump in and interrupt him, apologizing for my bad behavior. I said a lot of unkind things about myself. At multiple points, I rambled incoherently. I noticed one occasion where I was blabbering on about Joey’s job of all things. I made a comment: “What the fuck am I talking about. Where am I?” Dr. Ham responded, “YES! This is the aftermath of dissociation.”
Huh. Interesting. Why had I been dissociated? I scrolled up.
Immediately before my nonsensical rambling, I’d been talking about being physically abused, giving my quick and bubbly description of having knives held to my throat. Ooh. I’d turned off my awareness to talk about my trauma. And then I turned a corner and got lost, hardly aware of the words coming out of my mouth. How fascinating!
I loved this form of therapy. If Dr. Ham had called me out for that in the moment, I would’ve gotten defensive or confused. But something about editing this on a Google Doc gave it a pleasant distance. It gave our interaction objectivity—laid out the truth for everyone to see so there was no “he said, she said.” And it turned my therapy into an interesting project to investigate rather than a depressing way to obsess over my flaws. I had not often taken it personally when good editors and I had sat down in front of Google Docs just like this one to make little notes and edits on my drafts. We were collaborating to make my work better. This felt the same—we were editing my trauma out of the conversation. It thrilled my journalistic sensibilities.
I didn’t even mind Dr. Ham’s tendency to latch ferociously on to tiny things, like the tone of my voice or a simple change in subject. Three out of four times there really was something interesting to notice there. He did swing and miss often—like once when he yelped in a session, “You’re tearing up! Why are you crying!” And I said, “Dude…I just yawned.” But I came to see that occasional overanalysis was the inevitable consequence of doing a close reading.
I got As on almost all of my college papers—the ones that were thematic comparisons or cultural analyses of the books I’d read. But every time I had to do a close reading of a poem or a one-paragraph passage in a larger work—whenever I had to interpret an author’s intentions with regard to the choice of a single word or syntactical pattern—I always got a disappointing grade. I wanted to analyze what Joseph Heller was saying in Catch-22 about the absurdities of bureaucracy or the anguish of war. Individual words had no inherent meaning; they were just vehicles to get to a greater, universal idea. But my instructors never saw it that way. You were supposed to write about this one paragraph, not the whole book, they wrote, and I’d approach them afterward to argue that you could not divorce a single paragraph from the context of an entire book; it lost its significance that way. Unmoved, they would not change my grade.
But Dr. Ham was like a literature obsessive on steroids: He was a close reader on life. When I told him this, he got all hyper again. “It’s like when I’m reading one of E. E. Cummings’s poems and he starts a poem with a closed bracket [a ‘)’ ]. WHAT DOES THAT DO TO MY BRAIN! It makes me be like, okay, whatever you were thinking about and living before, it’s done. Closed bracket. Now you’re going to be in this world of the poem!”
I laughed at him. “Right. And reading that poem…I would not get that.”
But it turns out there’s a lot of shit you miss when you refuse the close reading. I’d spent so much time pathologizing my flaws, seeing them in grand, thematically untackleable ways—I am a bad listener—that I’d sit in terror, unable to see how I was failing at listening from moment to moment in a conversation. Now, having this conversation laid out, I could truly witness it. On page 12, I interrupted Dr. Ham by jumping to a negative conclusion instead of asking for clarification. On page 4, my word choice could have been more open, less defensive. On page 25, the tone of my voice shut a conversation down. And something about the Google Doc format made these mistakes easier to bear.
Exploring my trauma in the comments gave me the direction I’d craved from my last therapist. The direction I needed. The direction Dr. Ham said it was okay to need. And the collaborative spirit of it gave me a sense of control.
So often, past therapists I’d encountered had presented themselves as a kind of all-knowing, all-seeing Wizard of Oz. “Why do you think you feel that way?” they asked. But whenever I wanted to peek behind their curtain and examine their process, they demurred. In contrast, Dr. Ham was only too happy to give me a tour of the engine room.
“I was tracking your facial expressions here and realized I was floundering,” he commented at one point. At another point, where he had told me a small personal story, he noted: “I gave a self-disclosure to empathize with you on the pain of growing.”
Dr. Ham was acknowledging his own vulnerability within the session. But his vulnerability didn’t make him seem less competent or trustworthy. It did the opposite. I trusted him more. I felt comfortable letting him correct my behavior, but I also felt okay pushing back on him and telling him when he was being too much.
* * *
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At my second session, I brought up the fact that he was entirely different from the therapists I’d seen before.