The Sandbox

When a friend recently told me she was depressed again I offered some suggestions: Time to get distracted by something fun? Like a funny show or comedian on Youtube? Try to figure out how to be less self-obsessed? Then I apologized for giving advice without first asking, something she often did which I found annoying.

“I’d rather have sympathy,” she said.

I don’t like sympathy, it makes me feel uncomfortable, that I may have manipulated it. Praise and sympathy often don’t feel sincere, as if someone is just robotically saying what is expected, or maybe it’s feelings of unworthiness incubated long ago, a symptom of a dysfunctional family? It reminds me of when my therapist suggested I “go into the sand box,” which I presumed was a euphemism meaning delving very deep, and I was resistant to going so deep that I might never get back out?

Maybe I should have gone into the sandbox, maybe I should still go into the sandbox, the scary thing being she actually has a sandbox in the corner of her office, within which her presumably troubled toddler clients (or big sad confused adults?) get to play, or get therapy?

I haven’t seen Carmela in at least eight years (maybe I got tired of whining about loneliness), she’s in her seventies by now, and I recommend her to everyone. A girlfriend, to whom I referred her once, said she was kind of old-fashioned, though she does have a lot of common sense. It seemed like almost any issue, for any client, was resolved, or at least made clearer, by asking yourself one question: “Which decision should I make, what path should I take, to have the least amount of pain?”

I have learned that to handle anxiety (the word Carmela wrote on the bottom of every bill) you need to know yourself, accept yourself, and maybe even like yourself. (My emotionally disturbed friend, in her thirties, reminds me of me in my thirties: insecure, can’t handle criticism, a hopeless pothead, and often depressed.)