Doing the same thing but harder

When I was training to be a couple and family therapist, a beloved teacher of mine, the late Darrel Johnson, said that young therapists often go into a first session with the idea that you need to be super deft and subtle because a family or a couple is such a complicated and delicate system. “But after fifteen minutes, you realize that you could set off an atomic bomb and they would still be having the same arguments they have always had.”

It is funny how much doing therapy during the apocalypse is like doing therapy the rest of the time. The people who were ambivalent about their relationships before are still ambivalent. The people who were stuck or angry because of childhood trauma or neglect are still stuck or angry. Workaholics work too much , they just do it from home. People who nagged, nag. People who shut down, are shutting down. I reflect on this to clients sometimes; “Wow. So much has changed in the world around us, with all of us having to face how contingent our lives are, how little control we have over so many things, and you are still FILL IN THE BLANK. What can you tell me about that?” Which of course, is me doing my therapist things, but harder; “How did you feel when Karl said that he is the one who always has to fight the zombies?”

Two examples from the larger context:

In the midst of a pandemic that has hit the Montreal health care system particularly hard, in the CIUSSS where I work, we got a new form to fill out. I was amazed. In the midst of an all-hands-on-deck sirens-blaring DEFCON 5 emergency, someone said, “What we need is a different form for telehealth interventions.” And someone else made it. And somebody checked the translations. And a committee had an agenda item during a zoom meeting and approved it. This when they cannot get enough people to go and work in old-age homes.

The second example; a week after protests erupted all over the United States because a policeman killed a black man by kneeling on his neck during an arrest, another cop was filmed kneeling on the neck of someone he was arresting in Seattle. People in the crowd shout at him to stop. They shout over and over again, enraged at what the cop is doing but also amazed at the obliviousness, the determination to do the same thing that got us all here. He cannot or will not change. A whole country is on fire because of this and not only does it not prompt him to change, chances are, it probably deepens his commitment to his stereotyped response.

Probably there are people who gained a whole new perspective on their problems because of COVID out trying to live their lives differently and not coming to therapy. One client told me as much. “My stuff with my partner seems like pretty small potatoes now.”

But so much of what I see both in my clients, in myself and in the world is a dogged determination to do the same thing but harder.