1: “John was your classic self-absorbed, narcissistic jerk,” David Brooks quotes therapist Lori Gottlieb in her book Maybe You Should Talk to Someone.
“By day he worked as a writer on fabulously successful TV shows, winning Emmy after Emmy,” David writes in How to Know a Person. “But he was a monster to everyone around him, cruel, inattentive, impatient, demeaning.”
John sought out a therapist because he wasn’t sleeping well, his marriage was falling apart, and his daughters were acting out.
“At first, he treated [Lori] the way he treated everyone else, like an idiot he had to tolerate,” David writes. “He pulled out his phone during therapy sessions, and she had to text him from across the room to get his attention. He ordered lunch for himself so he could multitask while he talked to her. He called her his ‘hooker’ because he paid her for her time. John’s dominant narrative was that he was the alpha performer, the successful one, but that he was surrounded by mediocrites.”
2: Lori could have written John off as a “narcissistic personality disorder,” David writes. But she didn’t. She says, “I didn’t want to lose the person behind the diagnosis.”
As an experienced therapist, Lori knew that people like John, “who are demanding, critical, and angry, tend to be intensely lonely. She intuited that there was some internal struggle inside John, that there were feelings he was hiding from, which he had built moats and fortresses to keep away.
She told herself, “Have compassion, have compassion, have compassion.”
“Behavior is how we speak the unspeakable,” Lori says. “John couldn’t speak something unspeakable, so he did it by being rude to others and by having this sense of himself as better than everybody else.”
She approached their sessions by attempting to create a relationship with John. Her goal was for him to feel heard. She describes her approach as: “In this room, I’m going to see you, and you’ll try to hide, but I’ll still see you, and it’s going to be okay when I do.”
She didn’t get triggered when he acted like a jerk. Instead, she patiently waited for a sign of what bigger trauma he was grieving.
“Successful friendship, like successful therapy, is a balance of deference and defiance,” David notes. “It involves showing positive regard, but also calling people on their self-deceptions.”
Lori challenged John, but not aggressively. “She realized she could only prod him at the pace he was comfortable with or he would flee. She was trying to make him curious about himself with her questions. ‘Typically therapists are several steps ahead of patients,’ she writes, ‘not because we’re smarter or wiser but because we have a vantage points of being outside their lives.'”
Over time, John started to open up. “One day, he mentioned, in a matter-of-fact tone, that his mother had died when he was six,” David writes. “A teacher, she was exiting the school when she saw a student in the street in the path of a speeding car. She ran into the street, pushed the student out of the way, but was killed herself.”
Lori thought about if John had been told after his mother’s died to be strong and bury his feelings. .
“One day, John was venting about all the stresses in his life,” David notes. “He was talking about how his wife and daughters were ganging up on him, and he blurted out, “And Gabe is getting so emotional.'”
Lori had never heard him talk about Gabe. She asked: “Who is Gabe?”
John ignored the question. Lori asked again, “Who’s Gabe?”
“A wash of emotions swept across John’s face. Finally, he said, ‘Gabe is my son.’ He picked up his phone and walked out of the office.”
Several weeks passed. John finally returned to therapy and shared he had had a son, Gabe. His statement about the boy being emotional “must have hurtled out from somewhere in his unconscious,” David writes, “because Gabe was dead.
“When Gabe was six, the whole family was driving to Legoland,” he writes. “John was at the wheel when his cellphone rang. John and his wife started arguing about the way the phone intruded into their lives. Eventually John looked down to see who had called him and at that instant an SUV hit them head-on. Gabe was killed. John never knew if his act of glancing at his phone was the crucial error. If he’d been looking at the road, could he have avoided the SUV? Would it have hit him anyway?”
Sharing this experience proved to be a turning point in his life.
“John was finally learning to tell a truer story about his life,” David writes. “As this happened, he found that he was able to spend an evening with his wife and have a wonderful time. He was able to accept that sometimes he would be happy and sometimes he would be sad.
John told Lori: “I don’t want your head to get too big or anything, but I thought, you have a complete picture of my total humanity than than anyone else in my life.”
Reflecting back on the moment, Lori says, “Most people have their answers inside them, but they need a guide so they can hear themselves figure it out.”
3: David writes: “I like the Lori-and-John story because it illuminates many of the gentle skills it takes to be truly receptive—particularly, the ability to be generous about human frailty, to be patient and let others emerge at their own pace—but it also illuminates the mental toughness that is sometimes required. The wise person is there not to be walked over but to stand up for the actual truth, to call the other person out when need be, if they are hiding from some hard reality.”
“Receptivity without confrontation leads to a bland neutrality that serves nobody,” theologian Henri Nouwen writes. “Confrontation without receptivity leads to an oppressive aggression which hurts everybody.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Think of a difficult person in my life. How might their behavior be speaking something unspeakable? Could there be hidden pain or trauma behind their actions?
Action: In my next interaction with a challenging person, practice compassionate curiosity. Ask myself: “What might this person be struggling with that I can’t see?” Then, engage with them from a place of empathy rather than judgment.
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