A Little Love Story

I'd been seeing this complex client for a couple of years probably, and had reached a point in the therapy where I was ready to conclude that he wasn't truly interested in making any meaningful or beneficial changes, but was habituated to and desirous of having an audience for his sometimes cynical soliloquies and various dramas, and so would not on his own terminate therapy. I had decided to broach the subject in our next session, and to in fact strongly recommend that we terminate, at least for the time being. Strangely, this session kept getting postponed and rescheduled due to one thing or another coming up in his calendar.

By the time we finally met again, after probably three postponements, everything had changed. My client reported that he had met someone, that they'd been talking and texting multiple times a day for, at that time, several weeks, and that he was beside himself with confusion about what was happening to him in this new relationship. He wondered if he might be in love, since he felt himself, for the first time in his middle aged life, caring about someone else's feelings at least as much as he cared about his own, and experiencing a tremendous fear of losing this person.

While this client's experience was not easy, while it was confusing and even painful and frightening at times, he was in the process, before my eyes, of being transformed by love. Nothing short, I propose, of the inner tektonic force and upheaval of falling in love could have opened this man into his next and necessary stage of healing and development. His world had indeed been turned upside down, and his psyche had been thrust into a spiritual awakening that nothing besides love seems to have ever been able to accomplish. Now, out of sheer necessity, the deeper work of therapy continues.














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