In Treatment: perfect therapy for discomfiting times

For parts of 2020, I lived vicariously through a friend’s therapy sessions. Every 10 days or so we would catch up on the phone, and she’d at some point share a few insights that she had with her therapist. I listened as a good friend but I confess, during the intensifying months of the pandemic and lockdown, I was hungry for any crumbs that could help me parse the way I was feeling.

I’ve always believed in the benefits of getting therapy, and I’ve used it at different points in my life, whether to process grief over something or to work through seemingly new issues unearthed from an unforeseen experience. For me, therapy is neither the endlessly embarrassing, self-exposing nightmare depicted in popular culture, nor a magic wand cure-all for our distress. Emotional and mental suffering is part of the human experience that visits all of us. And yet I think many of us still struggle to even entertain the thought that therapy might be something we’d like to explore.

For me, therapy is neither the endlessly embarrassing, self-exposing nightmare depicted in popular culture, nor a magic wand cure-all for our distress

So when I saw the strangely soothing trailer for the new series of In Treatment — the award-winning Nigerian-American actress Uzo Aduba sitting in a brown leather chair staring into the camera, like a waiting therapist — I was duly intrigued. The HBO drama series, recently revived for a fourth series after a 10-year hiatus, is about a psychotherapist who sees her own patients three days a week, then on the fourth day becomes the patient and sees her sponsor, the therapist figure in her life. It is a timely return for the show, given that the world is still reeling from the effects of the pandemic, with people trying to figure out how to make sense of the emotional and mental fallout. There’s hardly a sense of “normal” to which to return. A December 2020 US Census Bureau survey revealed an 11 per cent year-on-year increase of people showing symptoms of anxiety or depression.

As I was unfamiliar with the original series, I went back to the first episodes starring Gabriel Byrne as Baltimore-based psychotherapist Dr Paul Weston. I was hooked within two episodes, and after watching the whole of season one, I skipped ahead to the new series, which picks up in present-day Los Angeles, during the pandemic. The patients here are — among other problems — trying to adjust to an opening world. Alongside the show, there’s a complementary podcast, featuring an actual therapist, but which begins with a necessary disclaimer that the podcast “is not a substitute for therapy”.

That’s clearly true, but I found that the value of the show, including the earlier series, remains. The stories follow the lives of a cast of characters diverse in age, gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality and socio-economic standing. They each present with their unique backgrounds and set of issues, and seem to offer a wide enough range for many viewers to likely catch threads that look similar to their own lives.

There’s a married couple questioning one another’s love and support and dealing with differing views on finances and whether or not to have another child. There’s the single professional woman who struggles to commit to a healthy relationship. Or the high-achieving man who’s never acknowledged the pain of an emotionally absent but demanding father, or how his parents’ marriage may have led to his own unhealthy professional and personal relationships.

Regardless of the patient or the problem, what seems to slip through the screen are recognisable aspects of our common human dilemmas. Characters in one way or another reveal resistance to and fear of vulnerability. Their situations offer a reminder that many of us inherit family narratives, beliefs and traumas, and that there are often things we lack the courage to face in ourselves, barriers we put up to discourage intimacy, and lies we tell ourselves to remain in our comfort zones. And in the characters’ impatience towards the therapist, we see reflected our tendency to want quick-fix answers to our singular concerns. We can’t easily face the reality that healing often involves more pain, discomfort, inconvenience and courage than we bargained for. At one point early in the first season, in trying to help a frustrated patient understand the nature of the process, Byrne’s character says, “All I can do is get you to confront your feelings . . . that’s it”.

Watching the series, I was reminded of how easy it seems for us all to become adept at layering our discomfort with all sorts of metaphorical coverings. It’s as if we learn to live with our wounds until they become part of the identity that we are most secure in, and the thought of changing them bears the harder work and perhaps the seemingly greater pain.

I found myself nodding and “ah-ha”-ing as I watched, because the writing is clever enough to show how people can experience deep pain and yet carry their unhealed wounds without fully recognising the source or the impact. One thing In Treatment does is remind viewers how often it’s in the slips of our conversations or the sharing of our stories that our complex selves are revealed. Perhaps one aspect of a helpful therapist is their ability to catch these slips, enabling us to see and understand the very things we need to find the courage to confront.

Enuma Okoro writes weekly for Life & Arts

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