throwing his mind at complicated problems and reasoning them out on his own.
Sitting down in front of a stranger struck him as uncomfortable, if not a tad
dramatic. Couldn’t he just run over to Borders and buy some relationship books?
Weren’t there discussions we could have on our own? But I wanted to really talk,
and to really listen, and not to do it late at night or during hours we could be
together with the girls. The few people I knew who’d tried couples counseling
and were open enough to talk about it said that it had done them some good.
And so I booked us an appointment with a downtown psychologist who came
recommended by a friend, and Barack and I went to see him a handful of times.
Our counselor—Dr. Woodchurch, let’s call him—was a soft-spoken white
man who’d gone to good universities and always wore khakis. My assumption
was that he would hear what Barack and I had to say and then instantly validate
all my grievances. Because every last one of those grievances was, as I saw it,
absolutely valid. I’m going to guess that Barack might have felt the same way
about his own grievances.
This turned out to be the big revelation for me about counseling: No
validating went on. No sides were taken. When it came to our disagreements,
Dr. Woodchurch would never be the deciding vote. Instead, he was an empathic
and patient listener, coaxing each of us through the maze of our feelings,
separating out our weapons from our wounds. He cautioned us when we got too
lawyerly and posited careful questions intended to get us to think hard about why
we felt the way we felt. Slowly, over hours of talking, the knot began to loosen.
Each time Barack and I left his office, we felt a bit more connected.
I began to see that there were ways I could be happier and that they didn’t
necessarily need to come from Barack’s quitting politics in order to take some
nine-to-six foundation job. (If anything, our counseling sessions had shown me
that this was an unrealistic expectation.) I began to see how I’d been stoking the
most negative parts of myself, caught up in the notion that everything was unfair
and then assiduously, like a Harvard-trained lawyer, collecting evidence to feed
that hypothesis. I now tried out a new hypothesis: It was possible that I was more
in charge of my happiness than I was allowing myself to be. I was too busy
resenting Barack for managing to fit workouts into his schedule, for example, to
even begin figuring out how to exercise regularly myself. I spent so much energy
stewing over whether or not he’d make it home for dinner that dinners, with or
without him, were no longer fun.
This was my pivot point, my moment of self-arrest. Like a climber about to