TRANSCRIPT OF AUDIO FILE:
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT:
CLIENT: I was all on track and out the door on time this morning; and then I sat down and opened my laptop and it was all over. I even managed to drag myself out of bed and get in the car. I would have had plenty of time had there been no traffic. (both laugh)
THERAPIST: [...] (inaudible at 00:00:39)
CLIENT: Especially not a [...] in the morning on a weekday.
THERAPIST: Just like there are parking spaces.
CLIENT: There were a thousand and a half empty spaces in the little public garage across the street.
THERAPIST: Oh, good. [00:00:59]
CLIENT: Parking in there doesn't tend to fill up until about nine-ish. I was having a chat with my mentor at work yesterday. Yesterday? No, it was Tuesday. He had been part of the team interviewing the candidate for a job opening in our group. We were talking and he was like, "Yeah, I don't really know what to write about her. It's so hard when candidates are kind of on the borderline if they're not clearly rock star, not clearly terrible." And then he went on to say, "Like you. Your interview with me was terrible." He counted all the ways I'd screwed up my interview with him back in April of last year. (sighs) [00:02:13] Yeah. So I knew that my interview with him had not gone well, so it's not like it surprised me that he thought it also didn't go well but... (sighs)
THERAPIST: Not such great fun to hear.
CLIENT: Yeah. And also because he then didn't specify whether he thought hiring me had turned out to be a good decision or a bad decision, so I kind of interpreted it as, "You suck and now we're stuck with you and I don't want to end up with another you." (sighs) (pause) [00:03:11]
THERAPIST: It would be either incredibly insensitive or cruel if you brought all that stuff up with that kind of implication. I've never met him; I wasn't there; I don't know. It would have to be monumentally one or the other of those things, but that's [...]. (inaudible at 00:03:37) He has not, from what you've said so far, sounded like monumentally either one of those things.
CLIENT: Yeah, that's true.
THERAPIST: Whereas I don't know if I'd use the word "monumental", but I certainly have seen you sort of take things like "work pretty hard" to make things sound like that, that were not meant that way.
CLIENT: Yeah.
THERAPIST: [...] (inaudible at 00:04:29) In any case, it sucked.
CLIENT: Yeah. (pause) (sigh) [00:05:20]
THERAPIST: I guess you really often have so little protection from this sort of thinking or feeling about yourself, do you know what I mean?
CLIENT: Yeah. (long pause) [00:07:24]
THERAPIST: What else is coming to mind?
CLIENT: (pause) I feel like I still don't understand the tools we're using at work. I even mentioned to my mentor in our one-on-one session this week that I feel like I've learned nothing in the eight months I've been on the job. He just kind of peered over the top of his glasses at me and said, "I don't believe that." He said that he was having a hard time with this new project, that it's a completely different paradigm from the project we had been working on, and everyone is struggling. Given that I learned one set of tools and we completely threw that set of tools out the window for this project and started with a new set, that it's okay if I feel like I'm still learning. I don't know. (pause) [00:08:36] He says he doesn't understand it either and he's still hacking away at the schematic and making changes and making publishes. A lot of it is make-work, but at least it's work; whereas I've just been kind of reading and not comprehending and not doing anything visible. Of course, the ongoing issue of every time I get frustrated I open the Internet, is not helping because if someone just walks by my cube, they see me on Twitter two out of the three times they walk past me and it looks like I'm just sitting there fucking around all day. (pause) [00:10:53]
THERAPIST: I'm just not yet sure what to say. (long pause) [00:14:21] I imagine that at other places, too, but at work especially, you just get hit so hard and so often with these sort of feelings in general about yourself and being dumb or useless, I think, that it can be very painful and difficult to work. (pause) My hunch is that you pretty drastically underestimate what you've learned and what you've done because that's part of being very depressed and very self-critical, but I have no doubt that the tag also genuinely got in the way. Three hours on the Internet and it's difficult and complicated or whatever. Clearly those also genuinely make it hard to be productive and get in the way. You're also really smart and also overly motivated and those things matter, too. (pause) Are you feeling shut down here?
CLIENT: Right now? Yeah.
THERAPIST: How so. What's it like?
CLIENT: (pause) I can't think of any words to say other than why am I so stupid and how do I cope with being stupid? It seems awfully fatuous.
THERAPIST: What does fatuous mean? I knew at one time but...
CLIENT: (chuckles) Dumb, but in a disingenuous or dishonest kind of way. (pause) [00:18:50]
THERAPIST: Like as though you were slightly playing dumb.
CLIENT: Yep.
THERAPIST: It's a really interesting word to choose for dumb. You know what I mean?
CLIENT: (laughs) Yeah. (sighs) (pause) [00:20:20] This is the thing that pretty much every IT student encounters their freshman year. You grow up being the smartest in the room, wherever it was that you grew up and how the teachers say you're the smartest kid in the class and you have so much potential. When you get up to 19 you realize that you're not the smartest kid in the room anymore. In fact, it's quite possible that every other kid in the room is smarter than you are; and it's a huge shock to the system. Most people just process this and move on with their lives, but I feel like I'm still stuck at the "I'm a horrible person because I'm not the smartest kid in the room" stage and I've never moved past that. I just wonder what's wrong with me that I can't just deal with emotions like normal people. [00:21:10]
THERAPIST: Gosh, and knowing your history I have no idea where that could possibly have come from. (chuckles) That sort of prompts me to make a joke about Harvard students. They grow up being the second smartest ones. [...]
CLIENT: (laughs) This is creepy. There's a repeating pattern of if I encounter a problem and I don't immediately know how to solve it, I just become overwhelmed with despair that I'll never be able to fix it, so I just give up. I feel like the fifth toe that most people outgrow some time in childhood. [00:22:50]
THERAPIST: One answer that seems to be right at the heart of this is you were sort of very clear [...]. (inaudible at 00:23:22) that all that really mattered about you was how smart you were and how good at all these things. And most kids, even the ones that go to places like MIT, grow up with reminders of support or encouragement that that's not all that matters about them; that they're worthwhile human beings for other reasons besides knowing the most or being able to think the fastest or figuring things out the best. [00:23:51] Sometimes those reassurances are more in place [...] (inaudible at 00:24:15), but either way it makes a huge difference when you wind up in a room with a couple hundred kids who are all [...]. (inaudible at 00:24:31) I gather, then, part of the way it must be playing out here is that you're essentially here trying to tackle a problem that you can't. It sort of puts you right in the middle of it. You can't produce an answer here that's going to solve this problem. [00:25:22]
CLIENT: Which problem? There are a bunch that are kind of tangled together.
THERAPIST: Any of them. I guess what I'm saying is that I imagine you're both struck dumb and feeling dumb because you don't know what the answer is for how to feel better at work in some way that's going to be useful how this all works, so I think you feel very competent in a way here. I guess I imagine that also means you probably have a fantasy somewhere that you're supposed to be able to understand all of this. [00:26:38]
CLIENT: And make it better.
THERAPIST: And make it better. Therapy is kind of like a problem set. I think that's probably...
CLIENT: That worked out so well, my last therapist who did treat it that way.
THERAPIST: She was like that? How so?
CLIENT: Like every week she'd ask me how my work went and, if I said I got distracted or I didn't get much done and missed a deadline, she would be very disappointed very visibly disappointed and say, "You're not hurting anyone but yourself and, if it were anyone else doing this to you, you wouldn't allow it. Also, this is hurting your advisor and you should feel solidarity with her because you're both women of color and the academy and, if you can't do it for yourself, at least do it for your advisor. There was a lot of second-wave feminist bullshit thrown in and (sighs)... yeah. You have a duty to fight imposter syndrome to prove that women have a place in engineering in the academy. It didn't work. I take your point that I still have that fantasy that therapy is a problem set and if I just figure out the right answer, everything will be better; but that didn't work. [00:28:23] (chuckles)
THERAPIST: No, no.
CLIENT: I might still cling to the fantasy and I might chafe a little at your methodology, but my more rational side recognizes that this is probably better for me even if I do get a little recalcitrant at times.
THERAPIST: Look, (pause) I suspect from what you said, she was well meant.
CLIENT: Oh, yes.
THERAPIST: Which is good, being well meant; but therapy, it turns out, is not a problem set (chuckles) and, in a way, it's never primarily about performance. Performance may be important and, clearly, in a way it's terribly important and is what we're talking about, but only because it matters to you and because that causes trouble. I think you in some ways intentionally although totally painfully, prioritize performance over yourself. I don't mean that in some mystical psychological sense, I just mean you care more about how you're doing performatively than how you're doing emotionally. [00:31:28] It does sound like the way she talked to you played into that a lot and encouraged it. I'm sorry that happened to you. I'm not, in saying that, trying to make an evaluation of the whole treatment, but just the fact that does it. (pause) [00:32:44] I don't know, maybe your recalcitrance isn't such a bad thing. Maybe it's a way of kind of standing up for yourself and saying you don't want to be a part of something that feels like it's more about your output than yourself. I'm not saying I think this is, but I'm saying I think it can feel that way. Sure. (pause) Do you have other thoughts about your recalcitrance? [00:34:35]
CLIENT: No.
THERAPIST: Is that meta-recalcitrance? [...] (inaudible at 00:34:56)
CLIENT: [...] (inaudible at 00:35:01) I don't know. I kind of feel like I'm always teetering on the brink of falling into a pit of existentialist despair.
THERAPIST: [...] (inaudible at 00:35:28)
CLIENT: I don't know. [...] (inaudible at 00:35:28) teenager. What's the point of living? Why are we here?
THERAPIST: Ordinarily I'd sort of want to hear more before saying something, but we're right at the end of the hour so I'll throw out a thought which is that I wonder whether that is the alternative to you as a performance machine well then what the hell is the point? Is that not what it's about?
CLIENT: Yes. I think that's where I was going with that thought.
THERAPIST: Okay. We'll talk more on that.
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