Working virtually sometimes gives us a real-time view into people’s lives that could never show up in an office.
“Sorry, Josh!” I heard Leslie say as she logged on to her computer. All I could see was her waist and a kind of movement that let me know she was looking for a place to put her laptop.
“Sadie just threw up, literally, as we were about to log on.”
“The cat?” I asked.
“Yup!” vented Leslie. “And the smell makes me want to puke, so Rob’s in the other room figuring it out. Bet you’ve never had a couples session start like this,” she said with a roll of her eyes.
After a few minutes, Rob joined, slightly out of breath and trying to shake off “go mode.”
“We’re good,” stated Rob. “We got lucky, it was actually on the throw rug, so cleaned that off and brought it outside to air out, sprayed the back room so it doesn’t smell like cat vomit, and then checked on Sadie. Closed her in the room so we don’t get interrupted and gave her some water, she seems fine.”
“Babe, what are you doing?” asked Leslie.
While Rob had filled us all in on his triaging, he had also simultaneously picked up their computer and put it down in another spot.
“We can do the session from here,” Rob said.
“I’ve explained this to you like 10 times, Rob—I don’t like sitting there when we talk to Josh! There’s too much sun coming through that window, I can’t see well, and anybody walking by can see us. I don’t want people staring at us during couple’s therapy.” Rob, with the silence of a mime, walked the computer back over to its original spot.
“I don’t underst–”
“Enough! I didn’t do anything wrong, and you don’t get to speak to me like that—we’ve also talked about that 10 times!” Silence. Rob stared off into the direction of the throw rug, and Leslie sat next to him looking the other way, her eyes wet with new tears.
“Hey, Leslie?” I said. “You were right. Never had a couples session start quite like this before.”
In the brilliant words of Anais Nin, “We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.” If there is one line that could sum up the downfall of most relationships, this is it. Whether it’s Terrence Real’s adaptive child, Jim Dethmer’s “below the line,” or Sue Johnson’s “dance that we do,” there’s a reason why so many spend so much time trying to articulate the part of us that cannot take in an experience other than our own; because our inability to do so is the source of so much relational pain.
Rob and Leslie were not bad apples. They were two kind and warm people who often saw one another through their own pain-colored glasses. Once we become emotionally invested in someone, we are vulnerable to hurt. Once we are vulnerable, we are looking for our very specific brand of hurt that we know will cause us the most pain. Anything we look for, we will eventually find. The bad news is almost all of us do this. The good news is there’s a way out.
“Josh, we can’t keep doing this,” said Leslie, allowing her tears to fall instead of wiping them away. “And you know us, we need a ‘to do,’ what’s the ‘to do’ here?!” Rob rejoined, his gaze now on Leslie.
“Here’s the ‘to do,’ guys. The only thing is someone might puke again. Compassion.”
You don’t have to look very far for compassion to be recommended within couples therapy. But offering up compassion to a couple is like recommending happiness for life advice. Sounds good, but how, exactly? The difficulty comes from the fact that compassion, like happiness, is much more the result of something than a thing to do itself. So, if Anais Nin is giving us the source of so much of our pain, reverse engineering her quote can give us a cure. Here’s our new definition of compassion: seeing things as they truly are. That’s it. If we can do that, almost every time, compassion will be a natural offshoot.
“Rob, question for you: Why did you move the computer?” Rob took a deep breath, almost looking ashamed.
“The smell.”
“I’m hooked now,” I said to Rob. “The smell?”
“Yeah, I know how sensitive Leslie is to smell. The whole time I was cleaning up I was thinking, when I get back in there, where we normally sit is too close to the puke smell, so I need to move the computer so Leslie isn’t distracted or grossed out by the smell.”
“But when he yells like that, Josh–”
“It sounds like yelling,” I said to Leslie. “But it’s actually more like loud begging.”
“Begging for what?”
“To not lose you,” I said.
Rob grew up with a verbally abusive and alcoholic mother, who had kicked out his father for much of the same reasons. Every night Rob’s mom would get drunk, and every night Rob’s mom would rage at him, blaming him for the brokenness they found themselves in. If you had only done this! If you would only stop that! She would scream. That little boy internalized perfection as the only possible solve, believing if he could get everything just right maybe the chaos would stop, Mom would stop blaming him for all that was so painful, and maybe even Mom and Dad would get back together. To that little boy, getting everything just right was how he was going to survive. Getting anything wrong meant it was all over, in the most unfair way.
Leslie takes this in, noticing the tears that seem to have transferred from her eyes to Rob’s. After a breath, she looks at me.
“It makes me so mad to think about what Rob had to deal with growing up,” she says.
“Tell me why,” I ask.
“It’s just so unfair. For a little boy to think he has to be perfect every time, and then never be able to achieve it. It makes me so sad for him.”
I touch my nose and then point at Leslie. “All you’re doing right now, Leslie, is seeing things as they truly are, that’s it. When you’re able to do it, it’s actually a gift.”
Mike Tyson (yes, that Mike Tyson) said, “You think you’re great now, wait till you learn compassion.” He’s right. Because compassion is a contact sport. It’s not pity, or soft, or weak. It’s someone strong enough to look past their own pain and into the pain of another. It’s not easy. But neither is a life where we constantly mistake someone else’s pain for our own. And seeing things as they truly are can be our way out.
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