A Therapist On Vacation

Finally, I am on vacation. The last 10 days have been exhausting and busy, with new clients beginning therapy in my practice and the external stressors of pieces of my own life. I’m tired and ready for a break. I haven’t had the time or energy to write my blog for a while, and am looking forward to writing a great deal while on vacation.

The last time I had a real vacation was September 11, 2004 when my new spouse and I took a one week Honeymoon to Martha’s Vineyard, with my beloved mother in tow. She came over for the wedding and stayed for the honeymoon. It was definitely not a romantic, or even restful, trip, despite the beauty of Aquinnah (formerly known as Gay Head). My mother dislikes “moving air” and is therefore miserable in the convertible that is so perfect for touring around the island roadways. She, like many other Brits, considers a long car ride to be anything more than an hour. Remember. Britain is a country that isn’t much more than 850 miles from one end to the other so a Brit’s idea of a day trip is a one hour drive each way tops. Anything more than that is considered re-locating.

But this time I am spouse-less and driving towards Western Mass, where I will be spending ten days with my best friend, Kathy, at the foothills of the Berkshires, and on top of a mountain. I drove here on Friday morning, with a stop off to do a therapy home-visit with a couple who used to see me for therapy before they moved out to Western Massachusetts, and who wanted a therapeutic check-in on the state of their marriage. While discussing my vacation plans with Kathy (also a sex therapist) I told her of my planned visit and that I was very much looking forward to seeing the couple again, in part because they are so fun and spunky and work so hard at being good people. She said, “Tell them that. It’s an important part of therapy that a couple knows that they’re approved of, that they’re great together.” I hope that I adequately communicated my affection for them while I was there. Home visits are a wonderful way to get a bird’s eye view of a couple’s life together, and this was no exception. If getting to do couples therapy in my office is an honor, doing the same thing in a couple’s home is a supreme privilege. I think we did some good work together. I also think Kathy is right. We humans like somebody from the outside to say that we’re doing a great job. Being half of a couple can seem really hard and it occasionally feels like an impossible feat to do it well. Being told that you’re doing a good job from somebody whose opinion you respect goes a long way towards smoothing a small part of a bumpy ride. Self-validation is an important skill to develop, but occasionally a simple, “Way to go! You’re doing great!” is just what the doctor ordered.

Most of my day to day life consists of driving less than a mile between my home and my office. So this vacation is an opportunity to drive my red convertible fast on the highway with the rag top down. I have come to consider a convertible de rigueur on vacation. On this occasion, I’m accompanied by my 6 month old puppy, Ziggy. He is new to the delights of convertible driving and spends most of the trip sitting on his haunches, looking backwards over my shoulder as we zoom down the highway, his little 9lbs of doggy fluff leaning companionably against my right arm as his white fur is whipped around like so much frenzied candy floss. There is what I imagine to be a look of sheer joy on his doggy face as we zoom past fields of manure, the canine equivalent of antipasto, the smell of which must send his olfactory receptors a-dancin’ and a-twirlin’. His round black eyes, fringed with impossibly long black eyelashes, squint and tear up from the force of the air rushing past us. His smooth pink tongue peeks out from between his small, sharp puppy teeth. He is salivating, and makes frequent little lapping movements. All of a sudden, I realize. He is tasting the air.

Before you dismiss these descriptions as those of a dog-crazed fool, let me explain. I am not an animal person. I have always been people, people, people all the way. But I love my new puppy with a passion that has surprised me, and I feel that in the very short time we’ve had together, I’ve re-learned some of the things I had forgotten were important in the world. Like how wonderful it is to be greeted like you’re a long lost love each and every time you leave the house and come back through the front door. Everybody should have that experience at least once a day. Like remembering that stretching and yawning luxuriously and taking your sweet time about it is a sensual delight, and if you can be scratched under the armpit at the same time, then all the better! That running as fast as you can through long grass is nothing short of heaven, and that doing it with a pal is even better. Sniffing, licking and lapping are crucial to any dining experience and the louder you can do them the better you enjoy your food (and a post-culinary nap is a must!) Impromptu enthusiastic wrestling with people you love is a bonding experience and sleeping curled up with your head in somebody’s lap feels like the safest thing in the world, especially if they softly stroke your hair and murmur loving sentiments. That bad things happen from time to time, but you can get over them and move on with gusto, because you’re loved and accepted by the people you live with, who will reassure you of that whenever it’s needed.

When my clients talk about their desires and wants and how impossibly out of reach they feel, I sometimes tell them that if I had a magic wand I would wave it and grant them their wishes. These doggy learning lessons are things I would want each and every one of my clients to experience daily. I would happily relinquish my therapy practice if I could make this happen for them.

In addition to my dog, I am accompanied on my trip by a pile of books, but not as many as I usually bring because Kathy and her husband, Daniel, have more books than the local library and I can browse at leisure. I have brought Nancy Slonim Aronie’s book, “Writing From The Heart,” with me and my plan is to read each chapter and complete the writing exercises at the end of each. I’m now on chapter 4. Kathy, who also loves writing, is doing some of the exercises with me. One of the chapters is about seeing an old place through new eyes. Yesterday, we sat at her kitchen table with our laptops hooked up to her wireless server, and both wrote our pieces about aspects of Kathy’s home and when we had finished, we read our stories to each other and cried as we read our own, and cried as we listened to each other’s. Being with Kathy IS therapy for me: it’s the lived experience of being required to think differently about who you are in the world and how you can be more fully yourself, despite what people say, think or feel around you. Most of the days I spend with her, continuing to get to know her deeper and deeper, is a learning curve on the friendship road of life (how’s about that for a contrived cliché?) For reasons we don’t fully understand, we are not affronted by each other, we are not threatened by each other, we don’t judge or feel judged by each other and we are endlessly curious about each other. I laugh when she criticizes me. She is now able to cry in front of me and risks feeling the deep humiliation at her own tears. We encourage each other to be as big a human being as we possibly can. A visit with Kathy changes me profoundly on some small deep level, and it’s effortless, fun, hilarious and engrossing while it’s happening. It's one of the relationships I have in which I am as close to canine as I can get. If only all therapy could be like that.