Two Hours in the Life of a Psychologist – A Chinese lady… a lovely, thin gentle Chinese woman gave me a gift today. It was carefully wrapped in a Saks Fifth Avenue box with a grosgrain ribbon. “I hope you will enjoy these,” she said.
May I open it? I asked.
“Of course.”
Inside were 12 or so thin cookies wrapped in what looked like waxed paper with Chinese writing.
“They are very good and will not make you fat,” she said, apparently sensitive to my own continuous pursuit of physical perfection or whatever that means in this woman-of-a-certain-age body.
I believe her. She says she eats these things and she looks perfect to me. The cookies, she tells me, come from Hong Kong, where she was born and raised. Now that she lives in the United States, she says she tries to hold on to little cultural symbols and tastes, which help define who she really is. That’s healthy, I think.
I couldn’t wait to taste the cookies. They looked like oblong flat, thin slices of date-nut bread. I waited until the lady left, offered one to my next client, and joined him with a cup of tea. He accepted and tore through the wax paper covering, not even paying any obvious attention to how decorative and artistic the wrapping looked. Let alone how smooth and even sensuous the wax paper felt.
I’ve been aware for a long time now, that everyone meets and greets the world through different senses. This man was just not visual, at least when it came to cookie wrappers. He was a new client but I had already learned that he was professionally successful and that his personal life was in shambles.
Perhaps you think it’s a stretch, but his cookie-behavior made me wonder about the more intimate parts of his life.
Psychologists are funny about things like this. We’re trained to think about all kinds of clues. I file this information.
Now what else about this man? He’s fifty or so. Has been sort of “married” to “wife” number two. His first marriage at twenty-three, was a ”mistake,” he says, Boom, boom and three kids later, his wife left him for the clergyman of the church they both attended. The man had been “outraged.” The minister’s wife was not too happy either, at least at first.
After wife #1 realized her “terrible mistake”, she tried to reclaim her husband. But he already had his eyes, and a few other things, on a woman with long blond hair and an ample chest.
He had met her on-line but it never had occurred to him to “google” and check out her past.
She agreed to become his second wife. On a romantic whim, they went off to a Las Vegas’ Elvis Chapel and got “married.”
Lucky for this man, that the lady was already married to another, who happened to be in jail at the time.
He tells me now how he’s “learned” his lesson. He’s proud that he waited two weeks before even beginning his search on one of his internet sites.
What’s going to happen to Mr. Z.? The good news is that he has come asking for “help.” He says that he’s proud that his own children are raised and fine. He’s also proud, that in spite of all his turmoil, his latest project at work is a huge success.
I want to to know more about these successful relationships. I also want to know about his professional successes. Surely, there are some useful and transferable skills we can tap into.
What about the Chinese lady? She’s on her own self-enrichment journey, explaining that one does not have to be sick to get better.
I know I’ve said that a lot too,
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