A show only a therapist [i.e., your mother] could love

"In Treatment" began airing on HBO last week, and will run for 9 straight weeks, 5 days a week. And what you get is two or three people talking for a half hour each day, mostly in the therapist's office, or in his supervisor's office. That's it. But man, it's like therapist porn! I'm not sure how anyone who's not a therapist--not just in the mental health or healing trades, but a working shrink--could possible love such a show.

But I find it riveting. The acting is mostly solid and the stories are real enough (though they've definitely selected the more extreme cases), and the therapizing is pretty accurate. Paul Weston, the psychiatrist/analyst played by Gabriel Byrne, is a competent, caring clinician who is falling apart in about the way most therapists I know are. His marriage is imploding, his relationships with his children are thin, and he hates the supervisor who he keeps returning to for support and to punish. In fact, Friday with the supervisor is some of the juiciest interactions in the show, because you have two veterens of the game playing doing very high level sparing with rather low-level emotions. Watching Paul lie to her without even realizing it is thrilling!

The verisimilitude is a bit strained, but that's ok, since it's being adapted for dramatic television. For instance, 30 minutes is pretended to be a 50 minute session, which is a little mind bending as it happens (because you see the total session), but you can handle it. And as I said, the intensity level is higher than in most therapies.

But what you get is an intense presentation of one man and his many relationships, in which little nuances carry great meaning. He says in one of the first episodes, to the cocky fighter pilot, "In our profession we have a saying: 'The customer is always wrong,'" which he later explains as that a chunk of his work is to expose how his patients are lying to themselves and to him. Watching this unfolding and unpacking happen is riviting, and really funny at times, though the show is in no way a comedy. What's funny, to me, is seeing these common human train wrecks happening, and watch the games and machinations of the human psyche laid out so clearly. It's not a phony or supercilious clarity, though, because there are times when people are so clear and obvious.

It would be a much paler show if you didn't get to see Paul interacting with his wife and with his estranged supervisor, which then changes the way you see him interacting with his clients, even though his demeanor is consistently professional and competent. Like the one scene where he's spent most of the episode fighting with his wife after she exposes her having an affair, and then after she is dismissed from the room, he straightens his jacket, wets his hair, and opens the door to greet his next client, who launches into his own self-centered stuff. It's funny because it's so accurate, and is a juxtaposition of tones which is part and parcel of the therapists life. There are unresolved contradictions which are simply held, which is also so much of a therapist's work.

Seeing a portrait of a mature psychotherapist is a treat for such as me, relatively green in the field. Because it's a complex portrait of a complex man, who is both very skilled and personally very flawed. And it gets the therapy situation right--they must have good consultants. It's like seeing a show shot in your home town. You get to point and jump up and down: "Ooh, I've been there!" Good stuff.

An update

I'm here at work, with the morning's rain blown off, and thick, gray and pink clouds pushed across the sky by a high wind. The day's paperwork is finished, and a Fresh Air interview with a Russian double agent is playing in the background. A client is out cooking fish and fries, which I helped him with though I had to look up the cook time in the Joy of Cooking. The others are watching the Superbowl, which I hear is going to fall to the Patriots, which would have done my maternal grandmother proud, her being a big fan of the Patriots.

These Sundays have gotten harder and harder to manage emotionally, as I haven't had a co-worker for quite some time. With the severity of clients we've had, you're always vigilant, while at the same time there's no other staff to help carry the responsibilities, and the level of depression has increased. It feels at time like I'm at the end of the earth, and my own depression buttons have been getting pushed. Someone will be coming in soon, which will help.

There are these moments, though, like when I went out to check my clothes (I do wash every Sunday) and no one was out on the patio. I stood there and watched the bamboo wave in the neighbor's yard, and the tone was so still and placid, hard to relate to the crowd inside. But when I can coordinate the two experiences, I'm at peace here.

Crying Wolf

I met with a friend yesterday for coffee. We had a good chat over tea and a bagel, catching each other up on our respective lives, then meandering around therapy subjects. She's been doing EMDR for a long time, so, as a newbie, I picked her brain on general and technical questions.

Two hours later, we gave parting hugs, and she said she intended to attend our potluck next month. I wave goodbye and walk around the corner to get on the scooter, and where I parked it in the little space in front of the beige and purple houses was...spacious.

Now, it's an odd feeling to find something you know you place somewhere, not there. I went and looked at the space, then up and down the street trying to remember if I'd parked it elsewhere. I scanned my memory, and recalled pulling up and seeing my friend on the corner, waiting for me, and me walking only a few dozen feet to greet her. So it wasn't around the block or across the street. Hmm, apparently it was stolen.

Next part of my strategy was to wander back and forth between the Empty Spot and the cafe. And yet that didn't make the bike appear. Then I called 911 and asked how to report a stolen vehicle, and they gave me the non-emergency number. I walked up the block, somehow thinking the bike may have wandered off and was grazing in another parking spot, but no luck. So I resigned myself to dealing with a stolen scooter, and started walking home.

I called the police when I got back, and they directed me to the impound. Not there, so I called back and they told me they'd send a cop out to take the report. I only had some of the information on the bike, but Heather was in her class orientation, so I could only leave her the dismal news on her voice mail. Then I was going to do some work, but couldn't concentrate, instead playing the video game my brother sent. Well, shooting up banditos wasn't soothing, so I finally decided (it's funny how long it takes for us to do the appropriate thing) to meditate. And a minute into it, vroom, it hit me where the bike was.

See, although we met at the Royal Grounds, she had originally wanted to meet at Peet's, up the street, because their coffee was better. The memory I had of her on the corner was true, but I layered it over the wrong real-time corner. Smacking my forehead, I left a message with Heather, a "This is your stupid husband calling..." type of thing, and then headed off, walking to get the scooter. Heather actually pulled up just then and gave me a ride, and I did some more mea culpas for being a twit and scaring her.

An odd event. I think, with my brain running with "stolen bike" narrative, that I was in a bit of shock and couldn't piece together the data to figure out what had happened. When meditating, apparently the dust cleared and there it was, but in the heat of the moment(s), the memories wouldn't jell.

The positive thing is that we confirmed that the bike is covered for theft (though with a depreciation for age). That's comforting, I suppose.

Just a day...

Let's see, not too much coherence here at the end of the day, not a particularly difficult day at work, but I'm pretty fagged out. Still, it felt like a pretty good day, mostly because I felt that I handled my moods well. I woke up with a dose of nebulous anxiety, but worked with it, particularly with the resource tapping. Early in the day, I did the safety resourcing--summoning a picture that conveys a felt sense of safety, and then tapping my knees to get my brain to remember...believe it or not--and then one with an inner counsel figure--who turns out to be someone named Xavier, go figure, and he sits on top a slab of beginner rock up at Donner Pass. There wasn't an overwhelming change in mood in the moment, though there was a little relief. But what I noticed through the afternoon was a greater sense of ease, and especially a great if gentle sense of diminishment in what feels sometimes like I'm living a the end of the earth. There's a loneliness to being here on Sunday that sometimes triggers a bleakness that's hard to kick. But today, there was a sense of having sympathetic and supportive company. Weird but true.

What this resource tapping is teaching me is how much one can intentionally manipulate one's psyche in the same way that you can manipulate your body when you are uncomfortable. If you're sitting in a certain posture and get crooked, you just shift into another comfortable position. No magic, no struggle. The same can be true of the mind. You notice discomfort, you call forth an image of a pleasant feeling, and the psyche shifts or calms down. Voila!

I guess in the past, this felt like cheating, or somehow wrong. But here, with the resource work, it's simply you changing you. There's no one to pass your decision by, and no one outside of you presenting the resource. Just what's in the brain already, and you're simply choosing to connect up the parts.

But I think that

Speed the Plow: A review of a play more interesting in the disection than the viewing

Saturday rained like a million Clydesdales pissing, and I, seemingly in some egotistical notion that by virtue of not being prepared for inclement weather, the weather would bend to my will. Instead, in the attempt to find the A.C.T. theater on Ellis, after my consultation group, I couldn't drive my scooter fast enough to get between the rain drops. Drenched from top to bottom, in a punishment of my hubris.

And then I get to the theater, looking for my wife to be standing there, awaiting me with pitying eyes, I see no one familiar. She hasn't left yet, telling me to come home and get dry, and we'll set out again. I'm irked by her absence, but at the thought of sitting through lunch and a two hour play wet, it seems a pretty good idea.

So, to the play. "Speed the Plow," by David Mamet, is a piece of theater that talks a lot, has people move around in small spaces, and says very little. Not that the characters say little; they actually are saying a lot, even when they're saying nothing. It's the work itself that has people expressing meaning in empty patter, and yet, in its gestalt, says nothing particularly revealing about its subject. I found more in it on the walk back to the car with Heather than actually sitting in the theater.

So. "Speed the Plow" is about two old Hollywood survivors who have risen together through the studio ranks, one in the lead and the other ("The Parasite," my term) on his coattails, struggling through a 24 hour period, blown around by the introduction of Kathy the temporary secretary ("The Idealist"). The Mogul and Parasite are set to make an empty but profitable blockbuster with someone I kept hearing as Tom Cruise, a prison buddy movie blah blah. They're going to make a lot of money: the Mogul will continue to rise, and the Parasite will finally get some juice around town, and long coveted wealth, and longer coveted ability to get some payback for having to eat shit the last 20 years.

Enter the foil, a young woman working as a temp, filling in for the Mogul's sick secretary. She acts as the voice of idealism, who, in a bid to get her in bed, the Mogul invites to read a book on the transformative value of radiation in human history and soul. She comes to his house and pitches the book to him, which he buys because she taps into his long dormant need for basic human sustenance: purpose and emotional meaning.

But he's a duck out of water in those realms, and stumbles into the office the next day, the day of the big meeting with the head of the studio, and tells his old partner that he'd doing the book, not the blockbuster. The Parasite struggles through the next 20 minutes, from cajoling to physical attack, and finally does a brilliant maneuver on the Idealist, a beautiful judo move that throws her to the mat and out of the ring. The partners go off to serve their appropriate function.

Now, I have never like Mamet. I find his people odd cyphers, not devoid of real life, just so filtered as to be relatively useless. His men are a particular narrow, and at the end of the day, particularly uninteresting and unrepresentative variety of humanness. They're like testosterone that has been thinned with water. They have the carapace of power, they move like power, but they're wispy inside.

As a send up of the Hollywood system, it was a bit of a yawner, and besides, what's easier to skewer? But it's not really a satire, because the most likable person, the most honest and worthy of empathy is actually the Parasite. He isn't confused about who he is or what he wants. The Mogul wants redemption, in the same way a dim ember wants to burst into flame, but finds itself on a dark night, totally without wind. The Idealist closets her yearning for power in ideas and phony emotions, in intellectualized pathos for the world, in her desire to reshape the world in her own image, the right image.

The Parasite calls it right and honestly when he says to the Mogul, "You're a whore and I'm a whore." That is true. And there is integrity in the admission and embrace of that. The Idealist is the ugliest character on stage because she doesn't really know herself, is lying to herself throughout the play, learning nothing at the end, baffled by her own failure because she cannot recognize her own machinations. The Mogul's redemption is actually his return to lucidity about his own identity: he is no longer lying to himself.

The Idealist is willing to have the Mogul sacrifice his 20 year relationship with the Parasite, and all that the Parasite has yearned and worked for, without a second thought, without a trace of empathy or understanding of what she is doing. She sells the Mogul on the arrogant totalizing of the Radiation book without realizing she's selling, or that she's manipulating. When she says to the Mogul, after admitting, when pushed by the Parasite, that she wouldn't have slept with the Mogul if he hadn't agreed to making the book, "Come, we have a meeting," you see the ugliness of her unacknowledged manipulations.

When, in the program notes, the play's director, in a single paragraph in a two page article, refers to the Idealist as pure or honest, I was totally surprised. The idealist is the dishonest one, and more brutal in her way than the business men because she will sacrifice both on the altar of her own righteous ideals. The book won't make a great movie; it's horribly written, and intellectualized in its spirituality. The Mogul will be ruined and not at all redeemed, because he has found only a toxic mimic of spirituality and soul, and will realize this in the hail of scorn over the movie. The Parasite will be thrown away, made the scapegoat of venality for the other two's palsied reach for salvation.

The Parasite and the Mogul actually have a bond, a relationship, and when the Parasite says he loves the Mogul, you believe him. Thus the Idealist's encouragement for the Mogul to toss away the Parasite is not an indictment of the Mogul--he's been exposed to the pheromones of Spirit and is totally un-moored--but of the Idealist, who in the guise of caring and meaning will cut the throat of the unworthy and unconverted. She doesn't know it; it's buried a few layers down and only emerges in a couple comments, but is there in her actions. Given enough power, you could see in her why the far left and right often come out acting the same, even if one is dressed in organic cotton and the other blue blazer.

At the end of the day, it's the aware corruptions who are more sympathetic than the unaware idealism. The system is what it is; you're dealing with huge sums of money and therefore there's huge constraints and dynamics at work. That's the real world, and the Parasite, and then the Mogul, know what world they're living in. They're not exercising a subtle violence against Spirit by insisting that the real world is a corruption of something else. Plus, they have a relationship formed out of real struggle and loyalty, and against the de-centered, other-focused pull of the Idealist, that's something to be admired.

BioShock and my history of gaming

James and I, in our impromptu walk on Sunday, spent time talking about this game, which I was rhapsodizing about. And in that talk, he brought up "The Game Room," an arcade where his friend used to work at during high school. I haven't thought about it forever, and it's apparently been deceased for a long time. Which, given the current state of video games, doesn't surprise me. The quality of console (xbox 360, Playstation 3, the new Wii) and computer-based games is so good that these shops are totally antiquated. There was a place down the street that tried to do an arcade with desktops, but it failed quickly.

BioShock, a game released this year for the new Xbox 360, is probably the clearest example of why the Game Room's of the world are gone. The 360 gives performance and graphics which are just stunning, not photo-real (yet), but getting close. Which would be neither here nor there if the game was not so sophisticated--beautiful and empty is no unfamiliar phenomenon in this photoshoped and CG'ed world--basing itself on classic dystopian novels, and sending up the Libertarian philosophy of Ayn Rand and her wacky crown (a whole different post, believe me...).

The story has your character (it's in the genre of the "first person shooter," with some elements of "adventure games") in a plane crash in the middle of some icy ocean, landing right next to a dark, moonlit tower poking up from the frigid waters. That's the entry to Andrew Ryan's utopian Libertarian experiment, a world where "petty morality" can be transcended by the artists, scientists, industrialists. Of course it goes really, really wrong: the genetic modifications have turned the denizens either into corpses or zombified "splicers" (i.e., genetic splicing into the persons DNA code), who wander around attacking each other and you. (By the way, my favorite line from these splicers--as they do their murderous perambulations, they spout different comments--is "Don't you fucking judge me!") The place is leaking icy water all over the place. There's lots of decay and fires, blood everywhere, but with the artifacts of the functioning city, like the 1950's style perky advertisements and loudspeaker announcements that tell the history of the city's decline into fascism and civil war. You go through the huge city (that's the images in this post), from level to level, accomplishing various tasks towards learning the history of this sick place.

Now, NOTHING like this existed even 10 years ago, in terms of the technical and storytelling sophistication. But in terms of brain modification, it's pretty much the same experience after a point as playing Pacman back at the Game Room.

As fun as these games can be, and as clever and immersive as they are, much of their appeal is that they are diversions, and that they induct the brain into a fugue state. These are not, usually, the choice of the integrationist. And they are usually built to encourage a forward-leaning progress of half-satisfactions, leading onward to the longed-for finale, an addictive process of pulling you out of the present, as you lean into the future, anticipating the Big One.

That's the way they've always been, if they fit into the rubric of "video game." Back to pong, through the arcade games to the early text-based adventure games, then into these modern technical masterpieces (like BioShock).

Which is not to slam them, really. I like my coffee, and try to limit it to one cup in the morning, knowing that if there are more, I'll be an anxious mess the rest of the day. Same with games, you have to know how to use them in moderation, and not do them to excess or for the wrong reasons. Which are all easy to do--as I said, they're built for addiction.

That said, BioShock really is a masterpiece of the genre. And it points up the amazing cultural phenomenon of these games, the intense use of resources (apparently, even before marketing, the modern console games cost $15 million to make, and BioShock I'll bet too more than that), and the incredible profits (2K, which produced BioShock, will net about $1.4 billion next year with the release of the new Grand Theft Auto IV). I've seen a few film sets and it's always awesome and appalling how much it takes to produce even the worst movie.

BioShock's most amazing aspect is its set design, the exquisite art deco environments and flourishes (my favorite is the redwood trees individually encased in glass at the bottom of the sea), and it must have taken a butt-load of money to stable a group of artists that talented. This is the sort of place you can just wander around gape-jawed, regardless of the story or combat.

So, my history with these games continues, more complex and sophisticated than when I was ten and whacking a white dot back and forth on a TV screen, but with the same ambivalence and awe, joyfulness and dread.

The Month of Integratification-ified

OK, so it's the New Year, 2008...Wow! I can remember fairly distinctly talking with my brother in our teens, comparing what ages we'd be in the year 2000 (thirty-two for me). Now I'm nearing 40, James already is 40 and with wife-n-kid, I'm married and a professional, with birds, and the worlds chugging along to heaven and hell and McDonalds. It all helps you realize it's really nothing personal...

Heather and my New Year consisted of playing video games (that BioShock is amazing and addictive), having hot cocoa and marshmallow, and then having a fight over the same crap that we usually fight about. But it's OK, the cocoa was good and the fight's already washed through me.

So last month was the Adult Month, and out of that experiment, I am going to make January the Integration Month, because in asking myself all December what the most "adult" decision would be at different times, it came clearer that what I was actually asking was, "What is the most integrative choice in this situation."

In other words, when I felt most adult was when I felt most integrated. Another way of saying it is that not allowing myself to fragment, and choosing actions which promoted engagement rather than dis-association, those were the decisions that organically felt "Adult." When I would indulge in anxiety, or would play the video game too long, or would fight with Heather, or would hunker down at work, or play footsie with despairing thoughts about my practice--those were the adolescent (at best) choices.

But when I would respond to anxiety with pulling it in close as a felt experience, not blaming the world for it, and examining it up close, that would feel adult and integrating. Or when I would choose to go for a run, or to the gym, despite the part of me wanting to close down and crawl under the couch--that would lead to an experience of myself as connected and energized.

Why? The way I understand it is that we are integrated by nature; all the parts are ours, and when we forget or ignore that, we suffer because it's as if we're moving against the thorns. We can do that, but the natural (and not at all punitive--no one is punishing us with suffering!) consequence is pain. We can choose to move with the thorns of life by moving with integration (and here, too, no one is rewarding us for "good deeds"!), and then the natural consequence is peace and connectedness.

So, January 2008 for Marty is the month in which the orienting question in the ongoing life experiment is, "Which decision leads towards and experience of being integrated, with myself and the world?" I'll let you know how it goes.