by Nicholas Hack, Psy.D.

“Well, you’ll never guess what happened this week” my client says, though we both know what happened. It’s the same thing that happened last week, and the week before, and the month before, and the year before: misfortune, injury, pain, despair, hopelessness.

Most of our sessions start this way, with a listing of the week’s tragedies both small and large. The specifics change – being attacked by others, being attacked by the self, being attacked by fate – but one thing is constant.

She's always under attack.

The pandemic adds a new layer. While many of us describe these times as unprecedented, for her it resonates as something deeply familiar. Another disease, this one external, threatens the body – her body, the national body – and as it so often feels with her own body, the national response is maddeningly out of her control. 

Watching the news of the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and too many others, she again sees what she knows so well. She sees a country with a centuries old autoimmune disease that, in confusing itself for an enemy, relentlessly attacks that which is most vulnerable.

There’s so much pressure to make light, to minimize, but slowly therapy becomes a place where she can take a break from the need to put on a happy face. She can stop performing that everything is alright when it’s anything but. We can have moments where there’s no silver lining, no pretending. We can sit with the part of reality that has been so hard to bear. 

It often doesn’t feel like enough. I want to do more, to help her feel better in some immediate, relieving way. But instead of “helping” unhelpfully I try my best to do what has been so difficult for her and others: I try to be as fully with her as I can. No dismissiveness, no blaming, no looking away. 

And in that, we find space for something slightly different. For all that stays the same, there is something new. While she’s not always able to “go there,” when she does, she doesn’t go there alone.