The next day he called St. Luke’s elementary and asked for Mrs. Corcoran. She wasn’t in, and the receptionist asked if he wanted to leave a message. He did indeed, but what to say? Therapist first, therapist first, he reminded himself, and he told the receptionist he wanted to speak to her about a new student of hers who mentioned that the two of them were close, which was in fact the truth. Any personal desires he had were secondary to this, although even as he said this to himself he knew it was also partially a lie. He wanted to get to know her better and hoped this phone call was also a precursor to that.

So he left his message, feeling vaguely unsatisfied and disappointed that he hadn’t gotten to talk to her. In between sessions that day, he kept thinking about the movie the Wizard of Oz. His whole life he had gotten repetitive messages that popped into his head for weeks and even years at a time, and he was very curious as to why this movie would present itself to him right now.

He spent most of the afternoon thinking about the movie. It was actually one of his favorite metaphors to use in therapy, as it said so much about people’s interpersonal journeys. Often we have the answers to our problems, that was the easy part. The tough part was getting to the point where we took action in pursuit of these answers. Like Dorothy in the movie, we often have to stumble and stagger and fall down before we understand that there really is no magical destination, but rather a place inside ourselves of acceptance and understanding.

He thought even more about the characters in the story and what they were missing. More importantly he thought about what he was missing. He thought about what usually made him the most defensive, and realized this usually occurred when people pestered him about why he wasn’t married. Just the fact that the word “pestered” occurred to him in this capacity was revealing, and he was once again mindful of his own conflictual feelings about commitment.

Was he missing a heart? In some sense the tin man was the character that rang the truest for him. He gave every ounce of himself as a therapist, but somehow had an undeveloped sense of his own ability to give and receive love when the therapeutic day came to an end. Why was this? It was a question he had explored endlessly, and he knew the basic answers about being a child of divorce, attachment issues, etc.

Later that day another phrase came into his head, an old Buddhist proverb; ‘When the student is ready the teacher appears.” He thought about it all the time with regard to his relationship with Dr. Paul, who was an astute enough therapist to know that giving people answers was essentially a useless exercise. John himself felt the same way about therapy, but had a much more supportive and encouraging style, which he knew was at least in part because of his fear of confrontation. He always rationalized that this was just what he was comfortable with, but lately something had been nagging at him. What if being confrontational was in fact the empathic thing to do?

It wasn’t a new question in the field of psychology. In a ranking of the most influential therapist of the twentieth century, two names that were at the very top of the list were Albert Ellis and Carl Rogers, who had drastically different approaches to human change. John had gravitated towards Rogers, whose emphasis on empathy, active listening, encouragement, and the relationship between the client and the therapist influenced thousands of future therapists, and set the gold standard for how a therapist should conduct himself in a session.

Ellis’s style on the other hand was in your face, attacking people’s self-sabotaging ways of thinking and not allowing people for a second to make a victim of themselves. He was highly effective with this approach, and also influenced thousands of therapists and was in a large part responsible for giving birth to the cognitive-behavioral paradigm that was currently the most popular approach to therapy all around the United States.

John had used Roger’s approach to therapy for his entire career, and had established himself as a very successful therapist who had an excellent rate of client retention. This was a bit of a paradox however, as the goal of therapy was essentially to make it so your clients no longer need to come to therapy, although there was considerable debate as to the amount of time that such a process should take.

What John was actually debating however, was confrontation as it related to the scrutiny of his own behavior. He thought back to one of his favorite books on human behavior, M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled. In it the author makes the point that discipline in personal behavior, although exceedingly difficult, was at the core of a happy human experience. The entire book was full of amazing insights into human behavior, and john had read the book several times. The rub of the story was that the author turned out to be a hard-drinking womanizer who betrayed his wife who he had written such glowing things about. Many people felt these actions nullified the points he made in his book, as he couldn’t live up to the standard he outlined for others in his widely influential book. John disagreed.

It was the end of a long week and John found himself very tired of thinking about all of these issues in his own life.  It all seemed rather self-absorbed, and he needed a little break from his own thoughts for a while. Way against his better judgment, he headed across the street to the dingy bar and ordered a drink. It was going to be a long night.

Over the years he had learned a lot about his own drinking. One of the great lessons he had learned from talking to a lot of people that drank heavily, was that getting drunk was often an antidote to anxiety, which at its core was a future-oriented fear. That was the tack that he took with people who came to him with a drinking problem. What was the fear? What were they avoiding? At this moment John was wondering what he was avoiding, as he scanned his own body looking for signs of anxiety. His heart was beating way too fast. He was fidgeting around in his chair, and clearly knew that something in his system was on high alert. The proper thing to do would be to try and figure this out.

But that’s not what John did.