Heads of the Colored People(39)
Alex scribbled again. “Had the customer done something wrong?”
“They’ve always done something wrong.” Marjorie could feel her blood pressure rising. “I don’t just get mad for no reason. This girl had come in there, and first of all, I saw her cut in line to take a pen from one of the other tellers, and then she was still filling out her slip when she walked up to my counter, and she had made a mistake on her form and tried to argue with me about it. I tried the de-escalation techniques we’re supposed to follow, but those kind of customers take a toll on your day.”
Alex nodded and wrote; she must have used some kind of shorthand. “It seems like you feel a lot of guilt about your anger. Do you think you might also feel any anger about your guilt?” Alex said, and the subtle profundity of this chiasmus annoyed Marjorie. It was precisely the kind of psychobabble she wanted to avoid and that she sometimes pointed out in Jessica, who would sigh and apologize.
“The Bible says, ‘Be angry, and do not sin,’?” Marjorie said, ready to pack her purse and go, “so if I have guilt, it’s over what I said, which was a sin, not over being angry.”
“Listen to that statement,” Alex said. “You’re allowed to be angry and still not sin. Do you give yourself a chance to feel the anger?”
“What do you mean, ‘feel the anger’? I told you I threw a tub of yogurt and whispered ‘Go to hell.’?” Marjorie was beginning to think Alex was a little slow.
“But did you try to suppress those negative feelings, or did you pause to accept that you were angry?” Alex said. Her fingers moved rapidly; there was something squirrelly about her. Marjorie made up her mind that she wasn’t coming back. But Alex stood and, after fiddling in her desk, handed Marjorie a worksheet and sat back down on the couch.
“I’d like to work with you if you want to keep coming,” she said. “Do you know what a dialectic is? That two or more things can be true at once? So you can feel how you feel—and you can observe that emotional side of your mind and really feel it—and you can still make a choice not to follow it.” She pointed to her head, fingers still moving. “We can recognize our emotions without either negating them or letting them dictate our response, as in ‘I feel like I could eat every cookie in sight, but I know I shouldn’t.’ Instead of invalidating your feelings, you would say, ‘I want to eat everything in sight, and I’m still going to have only one chocolate chip cookie and really take my time eating it.’?” Alex leaned back and stopped moving her hands at this.
“So I would say, ‘I hate my job and many of the customers who come in—even though as a Christian I’m not supposed to hate—but I’m still going to have a good attitude,’?” Marjorie said.
‘?“And,’ not ‘but’ or ‘though,’ or ‘yet,’ which are fake ‘buts,’?” Alex said. “You’d say, ‘I feel some hatred toward some of the customers at my job, and I’m a Christian, and I’m still going to have a good attitude.’?”
Marjorie didn’t see how these subtle semantic shifts would make any difference, in her behavior or her feelings. She could already picture herself becoming one of those people who always talked about what their therapists said, or at least becoming a person who made fun of what her therapist said. But—and—she committed to completing the homework assignment over the next week.
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THEY WERE TAKING forever to call her number, another reason to regret this DMV. At the one on Baseline, she bet, you could simply stand in line with your check already made out and get your license much more quickly. Here, you had to grab a number and wait. Take a letter and wait. Fill out paperwork and wait. Get fingerprinted and wait. Have your picture—which always comes out looking deranged—taken and wait for the little machine to print out a new license. The entire setup at this DMV was inefficient—even with the new technology and all the blue monitors—routing people through various lines as though they were at Disneyland, where the lines only appeared to shrink because of the ways they wrapped around the dividers. When she was thirty-three Marjorie had won a lawsuit against Disneyland. While there with her boyfriend Charles Stampton, she had slipped in a puddle near Splash Mountain and sprained her ankle. She’d won similar lawsuits from a Denny’s restaurant and a ninety-nine cent store in San Bernardino. If these businesses were more efficient, she wouldn’t have needed to sue. If Marjorie were running this DMV, there would be two sections with three lines each, one for driving tests and one for plates and registrations and renewals. One could deposit the paperwork and get fingerprinted, have one’s vision tested, and take the photograph in a single interaction with a single teller, no numbers, no letters, no sitting, queuing, sitting, lining up again, and waiting over and over.
Marjorie and Alex had discussed this very scenario earlier in the week, to prepare Marjorie to handle her stress in places where she was likely to lose—and historically had lost—her temper. These lines are long and the setup stupid, Marjorie thought, and I am still going to sit here and hold my peace. I have already been mean to a little kid, and I can’t change that.
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HER FIRST FOUR weeks of therapy were much more cut and dry than Marjorie expected. She had yet to cry or break down, and though Alex seemed relaxed, she gave Marjorie new homework to practice in between each appointment. The replacement of “but” with “and” had started to help, Marjorie could admit after the first week, as had the introduction of an acronym, WAIT, in the second.