The one who did not come back

A new referral came through this morning with a presentation close enough to one from 2017 that I had the whole thing back before I had finished the intake form. Second year out. A woman in her fifties, four sessions, and in the fourth I said something clever. Not wrong — clever. An interpretation about her mother that was almost certainly accurate and was about nine months early, and I made it because the session was flat and I wanted to be useful and I could feel her deciding whether this was worth her Tuesday evenings. She thanked me, said it was helpful, and cancelled the fifth. And the sixth. And then stopped replying. I have thought about her, without exaggeration, several times a year for nine years. What I learned from it is real and I use it constantly — it is the whole origin of the not-flinching thing, of being boring on purpose for four months, of waiting until somebody arrives at the sentence themselves. Every good hour I have had since is partly built on that Tuesday. And underneath that, which I do not say when I tell the story as a training anecdote: I think about whether she found somebody else. I have no way of knowing and will never have one, and at this point she is in her sixties. Nine years is a long time to carry a cancelled appointment.

That I was performing. That the clever interpretation was not for her, it was so that she would think the four sessions had been worth it and come back. Which means the thing I did to stop her leaving is the thing that made her leave, and I have never said that part out loud to anybody.