Now I use the word "former" because I don't see her any more. It's not that she was a bad therapist, it's just that I see psychotherapy as something akin to welfare. It should be a safety net, not something that becomes a dependence, or entitlement.

Today as I left the grocery store with my son I looked at the building and wondered how SHE was doing, for no other reason than I had spent two months pouring my heart out to this woman, and while I knew nothing about her, she knew everything about me -- at least as much as anyone else does. And there I sat waiting for the traffic light to turn green while my youngest sat in the middle row of seats in our quasi-SUV (it's somewhere between the size of a Yukon and a Subaru), and I started thinking about happiness.

The concept of happiness came up a lot right before I entered therapy, and for the time that I was in it. I asked my wife about it. I asked my friends about it. I asked my parents, and my therapist about it, for during that time I had gotten caught in the trap that keeps therapists very well employed. The trap is the media trap refleceted in everything from images of a Dickensian Christmas to Cialis advertisements.

We're supposed to be happy, damn it. Right? Not that I'm not happy, but as one of my wife's classmates said to her in the past year, "what IS happiness?" We're healthy. We do well financially. We don't want for food or shelter. My wife and children unconditionally love me as I unconditionally love them. What else is there? And why should we become concerned when bumps in the road occur that create discomfort and unhappiness?

And then I thought of how the therapy ended.

Therapist: How was your week?

Me: Great.

Therapist: Really?

Me: Yeah. I had a great conversation with my mom. I've been able to control my behavior around the kids...figured about a number of ways to proverbially count to ten that work for me...yeah, everything's great.

Pause.

A long pause. I just sat looking at her. As far as I was concerned I was as happy as anyone needed to be. Sure there were aspects of my life that still needed work, but those were up to me to figure out with my loved ones and the other aspects of my life. That was LIFE!

Therapist: So what about your relationship with your dad?

Oh God. She was reaching. I suddenly got VERY cyncical remembering how she had told me four weeks prior that my insurance had approved twelve weeks of sessions. Even with that approval I was still shelling out $60 a session.

Me: I'm OK with my relationship with my dad. Sure there are things that he and I need to talk about still, but we've never had a problem doing that.

Needless to say I didn't go back the next week, but how easy it would be to become dependent on seeing this person to work out the most trivial conflicts in my life. But as Joseph Campbell said, "the human condition is shared misery." In other words, the journey, and the beauty in the journey, is about how we make it over the bumps.

No, life is not a dress rehearsal, and not all performances go well. Even when they do go well, there is often a lot of heartache behind the scenes to make it go off as smoothly as it seems.

So why do we choose to avoid living?!?!

It's defeatest to then react to this and ask "so is that all there is?" On one hand, yes, this is all there is, but on the other hand, thank God this is what we have!

Enjoy the moment, even if it sucks!