Why my therapist isn’t getting through to me

My therapist says she is not getting through to me. This is not because she lacks skill or competence. On the contrary, she is intelligent, patient, observant and possesses of the sort of calm that would make an air traffic controller seem mildly excitable.

The problem is that every time she attempts to speak to the hurt, the hurt sends the rage to attend the meeting. Rage, unlike hurt, arrives prepared. Rage has talking points. Rage has supporting documentation. Rage has screenshots. Rage has a 47-slide presentation entitled Why Everything Is Terrible and Why I Am Right About It.

My therapist, meanwhile, has me lie down on a couch facing away from her. Apparently this is a very old idea. Freud preferred that patients not look directly at the analyst. The theory, as I understand it, was that people speak more freely when they are not busy managing another person’s reactions. No encouraging nods or sympathetic smiles; no visible judgement – just you and your thoughts. I am beginning to suspect the arrangement was invented specifically for people like me.

I stare at the ceiling and talk about Google. Somewhere behind me sits a woman patiently waiting for me to notice that Google is not the problem. She asks about disappointment. I explain the decline of journalism. She asks about uncertainty. I discuss artificial intelligence. She asks about fear. I deliver a lecture on search algorithms, institutional decay, media economics and the modern tendency for every second person on LinkedIn to describe himself as the founder of something that currently consists of a logo, a deck and a dream. By the end of the session, I have successfully diagnosed civilisation while talking absolutely nothing about myself. It is, I must admit, an impressive performance.

The difficulty with anger is that it is an exceptionally cooperative emotion. Unlike sadness, which arrives uninvited and refuses to explain itself, anger is eager to provide evidence. It has exhibits, charts and a witness list. It has spent years preparing its case.

For a long time I assumed this meant I was angry about obvious things. The internet becoming a shopping mall. Professions becoming content categories. Institutions becoming brands. Experience becoming optional. The gradual replacement of expertise with enthusiasm. These seemed perfectly respectable reasons for outrage. Indeed, if required, I could produce a bibliography. My therapist, naturally, is not particularly interested. This is irritating because I have excellent material.

She is similarly uninterested in artificial intelligence, media economics, LinkedIn title inflation, the decline of institutions and several other topics on which I possess what I consider valuable insights. Instead, she keeps returning to a much more uncomfortable question.
“What are you actually angry about? Or Let’s stay with that feeling?” An unfair question because the older I get, the less certain I am on what exactly bothers me.

I do know this much. I am not angry because the world changed. The world has always changed. I built an entire career adapting to change. New technologies arrived, workflows evolved and whole business models collapsed as audiences migrated. One learned new skills, abandoned old assumptions and carried on. That was never the problem. The real problem is that the changes have finally begun touching things I assumed were permanent. Not newspapers or Google or careers. Time.

At twenty-five, every disappointment feels temporary because time appears infinite. There is always another opportunity, another reinvention, another decade waiting patiently around the corner. At forty-six, time begins sending invoices.

The bill arrives in small amounts. A friend announces retirement and you find yourself doing arithmetic rather than offering congratulations. A parent acquires a new medication. A technology you once dismissed as a fad becomes mandatory. Young people stop asking for advice and begin dispensing it with alarming confidence. Even one’s knees, after years of loyal service, join the opposition benches.Nothing dramatic occurs. There are no violins. No epiphanies. Yet one morning you realise that the future has quietly stopped expanding and started narrowing. Possibilities remain plentiful, but they are no longer infinite, and the distinction is larger than it first appears.

A younger version of me imagined that experience was a destination. You accumulated knowledge, survived enough crises, acquired a few scars and eventually graduated into a state of reassuring competence.Instead, middle age has turned out to be a peculiar arrangement in which one possesses more knowledge than ever before and less certainty about what any of it is worth. Perhaps that explains why so many reasonably successful people appear permanently exhausted. We have spent decades adapting to a world that keeps reinventing itself and then acts surprised when adaptation leaves us tired. The exhaustion is rarely discussed because exhaustion lacks glamour.

Ambition photographs beautifully. Burnout looks terrible on LinkedIn. Yet I increasingly suspect that much of what passes for cynicism among middle-aged professionals is simply fatigue in formal attire. A great many people who appear angry at the world are merely tired of renegotiating their relationship with it.

Beneath the anger sits disappointment. Beneath the disappointment sits grief. And beneath the grief sits something even more embarrassing. A sense of betrayal. Not by any person. By a set of assumptions. The assumption that competence would always matter. The assumption that effort and reward maintained a stable relationship. The assumption that experience would eventually produce certainty. The assumption that adulthood was a destination rather than a subscription service. Nobody explicitly promised these things, of course. Reality is far too well lawyered for that. The terms and conditions were always vague. We simply inferred guarantees where none existed.

The older I get, the more I realise that anger and grief have very different objectives. Grief says something valuable has been lost.
Anger insists something valuable has been stolen. The first invites acceptance. The second demands a culprit. One is painful. The other is energising. Which perhaps explains why I keep choosing the latter.

A culprit is always easier to find than acceptance. Google can be blamed. Artificial intelligence can be blamed. Media companies can be blamed. Politicians can be blamed. Consultants can be blamed. Twenty-seven-year-old founders with podcast microphones can certainly be blamed. The list is endless. The alternative is considerably less enjoyable. The alternative is admitting that some of what I am experiencing is not injustice but passage.

That, I suspect, is where my therapist is trying to take me.Not towards happiness. Therapists are far too realistic for that. Not towards forgiveness. Merely towards the uncomfortable possibility that beneath all the commentary about technology, careers, institutions, modernity and decline lies a much simpler truth.

I am mourning contracts that reality never actually signed. The promise that expertise would always matter. The promise that effort would reliably compound. The promise that experience would eventually produce certainty. The promise that the world would eventually make sense. Reality, meanwhile, has adopted the customer service strategy of a low-cost airline. It regrets the inconvenience, accepts no responsibility and would like me to direct further complaints to an unattended mailbox.

Which leaves me where I began. Lying on a couch. Staring at the ceiling. Explaining Google to a therapist who has no interest in Google.
And slowly beginning to suspect that she has spent months trying to convince me that my anger is not a weapon.It is a security blanket.
An unusually articulate security blanket, admittedly.But a security blanket nevertheless.

Postscript

Since writing this piece, I have begun to wonder whether my therapist keeps overlooking an important variable. My in-laws.

For most of my marriage they lived 600 kilometres away. Today they live two floors below me. On paper, this should explain at least some portion of my anger.

The surprising thing is that twenty years into marriage, one discovers that liking one’s in-laws is no longer optional. They become family through a process so gradual that resistance appears both futile and impolite.

This is deeply inconvenient because a man should be able to blame something. Google was promising. Artificial intelligence remains under investigation. But my in-laws now have an airtight alibi. This dramatically reduces the list of suspects.

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