by Lila Zimmerman, AMFT

THE PROVIDENCE OF AUGUST 

“The only thing August is good for is nature and friendship.” (Sigmund Freud, 1894)

There is a different cadence to psychotherapy in the summer. August is slow-moving. Patients are away. The consulting room feels lonely, and the sessions disjointed. Colleagues and supervisors are gone. My own mind wanders to my life outside of work. Taking longer mornings in bed, longer walks with my dog, and indulging in binges of Love Island. I want to be poolside, napping, slowly arranging my spice rack. I am not distracted but I am not focused. I forget about sessions as soon as they end. I make plans during the open hours my patients leave vacant. I am still working but the days stack together differently.

In between sessions I:

Deleted 23 spam emails
Text my mom back from 3 days ago
Tell myself I’ll do the note later, go for a coffee instead.

We, both patients and I, seem to be taking a step out of the clinical relationship and into our personal lives, not quite on purpose but perhaps because it’s August. When we do meet it feels casual, like calling out to each other from separate pool floats, “It’s so good to see you, I can’t wait to catch up.”

I have a patient getting married, another is having a baby, and another left to travel for three months. It’s summer, people are unfurling, becoming. All the efforting slows down, the dust settles. “I haven’t been this happy in a long time,” someone tells me coming back from being away last week on a camping trip. “That’s wonderful. I’m so happy for you,” I reply. And I am. 

I have noticed there is something useful about the dog days of summer, when we are too hot, too tired, too adrift to defend ourselves so brazenly, the edges of the work seem to soften. We are able to be honest with each other. Say things more plainly. Perhaps it’s something like a surrender. August isn’t a good month for gritting our teeth. 

I work with a transwoman whose partner has become pregnant. She is worried about becoming a mother, worried what other people will say. We’ve circled around this for many months and maybe because it’s August and we are both less determined to solve a problem, I am able to say to her finally, “Yes, you will be judged. All mothers are judged, and you will have it worse because you are not the kind of mother people are used to.” She softens, “That’s right, I will.”

We sit back in silence, listening to the fan rotating between us. Listening to the matter-of-factness we have arrived at. I am reminded again and again that it is not my job to fix the world for the people I work with. It is to be with them in it, and there is something about August that seems to demand this in a way other months do not.