The Short Story and Psychotherapy: A Compatible Duo
I have always been attracted to the short story, the novel’s strange little sibling. I find stories gripping, transcendent, and revealing in a way that often strikes me by surprise. Stories are like unexpected moments when you catch something fleeting that pierces your heart.
As short story writer Lorrie Moore once said, “A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.” Yes, unexpected, brief, and in that sliver of time illuminating about the human experience, not unlike, I can honestly say, a moment in a therapy session.
In addition to writing short stories, I’ve been a practicing psychotherapist for fifteen years. In my practice, I have met and worked with a variety of people from all walks of life. I can listen to my clients endlessly, remember countless details without notes, and wait for the patterns and unrecognized truths that lie like beautiful nuggets at the bottom of a riverbed. When reflecting upon it now, I see similarities between the two – short stories and psychotherapy – that I hadn’t realized before. I used to view the two professions as completely separate and different. Now I see they are tied together by one fundamental thing, love of human narrative.
Sitting and deeply listening to people isn’t for everyone. When someone discovers I’m a psychotherapist, I’m often asked how I can stand to listen to people’s troubles all day long. “I could never do that,” they tell me. “It would be so stressful and tiring.” And yet, aren’t we all surrounded by the stories of others? Do all the people we know have blissful lives, free of sadness, tragedy, and difficult periods? We take in the stories of others on a continuous basis, whether from friends, co-workers, family, or even the news. Is it stressful at times? Sure. Boring and dull? Never.
I find the human story completely fascinating. We are all in this thing called life together with its inherent struggles, drives, losses, and redemptions. I’m the person at the museum exhibit who has to read every single piece of biography about the artist before I can look at the next painting. If I’m feeling really curious, I’ll rent the headset with the artist’s story read to me as I walk along.
This is often completely annoying to most of the people I visit museums with who just want to look at the paintings and be done with them. But knowing the artist’s story — what she was doing, what happened to him, who she was with, what was happening in the world when he painted this – enhances my experience of each and every painting so that by the end of it, I feel exhausted and exalted like I’ve just had a really deep conversation with a person.
The human story is the common thread here, and I’ve begun to recognize that a short story can resemble a therapy session to me, the time-limited, 50-minute appointment that reveals something important. In my practice, if things go well, my office becomes a safe place for my clients to come in, sit down, look at me from across the room and tell me, often, things they may not have told anyone else in their entire lives. That someone would entrust me with this task seems to me a great honor.
Sometimes they know what’s bothering them; sometimes not all. So, we sit and talk. But it is often the small gestures — the canceled appointment, the crack of tears, the restricted body language – that reveal how their experiences are affecting them in the here and now.
A good short story feels just as revelatory to me. When done well, it leaves me with the feeling of having witnessed something vulnerable and immediate. It is a window into a moment in time for the character that reveals something larger. The short story comes in sideways, through that little crack in the window, and shows us just enough to be important.
There are moments in short stories that take one’s breath away. Who can forget the moment in Ernest Hemingway’s “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” when the old waiter says, “I am one of those who like to stay late at the café” in response to the young waiter’s dismissal of the old deaf man lingering over another brandy? Or that moment in Alice Munro’s “Meneseteung” when Alameda sticks the note on her door reading, “I am not well, and wish to rest today,” declaring her rejection of the life and role her little town prescribes.
The short story finds that small gesture or remark to set the world of that character on fire. It’s not unlike the feeling I have in the room with a client when an important link is finally made and suddenly what they’re feeling today makes perfect sense. Their world opens up to them in a way they hadn’t seen before, connecting them to humanity that had felt remote and distant. “You mean other people feel like this after that experience too? So, I’m not the Bride of Frankenstein?”
As George Saunders said, “When you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you.” The power of the short story is this gift. It finds that brief, telling moment that connects us with others. And it doesn’t need to say much if someone is carefully listening.