Fieldstone

In season two of Ted Lasso, Sarah Niles plays Dr. Sharon Fieldstone, a psychologist who specializes in counseling athletes.  

A good writer doesn't just pick names for a character.  Names mean something.  Although Sharon is of African descent, she has a very English name.  A fieldstone is a very specific thing.  In England, you have a lot of glacial deposits, which include igneous rocks that have had two sides worn flat by erosion and left in the soil where they're a nuisance to farmers.   After removing the stones from the field, the farmer can then plow and plant the land and make it fruitful.  The stones they remove from the field are then collected in a pile where somewhere in Britain's distant past, someone discovered that these stones with two flat sides could then be used to build the famous British walls or cobble-stone roads.  What once was a nuisance and an obstacle becomes something useful and beneficial.  In the show, that's a pretty good description of the relationship between Ted and Sharon.

Because of my Stuttering, Dyslexia, and ADHD as a child, I was given to many behavioralists for evaluation and training.  My father was a bit embarrassed by the whole process and felt like all I really needed was sports, even though he didn't have the time to participate in coaching or teaching me anything.  My mother read every possible book on child rearing and believed completely in these professionals.   To me, it felt like I was being passed from one stranger to another in uncomfortable settings, made even more uncomfortable because this combination of conditions made me really unnaturally shy and uncomfortable around people.  I'm sure the people my mother sent me to were generous and kind and wonderful, but to me, they were alien and intimidating and very interested in doing things to me that I didn't understand.  

As I entered adolescence, my oldest brother, who had been my idol, began to have pretty serious addiction issues.  When I got to the point where I had to shave every day, his condition advanced considerably, and he began to have pretty regular auditory hallucinations.  He had what you would call voices in his head.  

Immediately after that, the entire family was sent for psychological evaluation.  In Jackson in the seventies, there were really very few people doing this, and everyone suggested we use Clinical Associates at Highland Village.  Initially, I had four or five sessions with Jim Baugh, but since his son was in my class, they transferred me to Doug Draper.  Doug also had a child my age, but she went to a different school.  

I saw Doug off and on for something like forty years.  Initially, he treated me for issues of anxiety and feelings of abandonment, which expanded to panic and pretty serious depression.  Doug reported to my parents that we communicated well.  That was absolutely the truth.  Over the forty years, I spoke to him at least monthly; I always found we could and did talk about anything.  

Sometimes we would talk about me.  It was important to my parents that I develop a useful relationship with a counselor because between my father's career and my mother's career and the crisis in one brother's life and the more normal transmission of my other siblings' lives, whether they had an interest or not, nobody really had time for me.  I was the child that required the least attention, and that's what I got, which was fine by me because the only person in the family who understood the things that were important to me was either stoned out of his mind all the time or having conversations with imaginary people, so being left alone was about the best outcome I could hope for.

I grew to care a great deal about Doug Draper.  I still do.  Whatever he was like as a psychologist, he was a great intellectual mentor, and I found that valuable.  In time, I would find other people to fill that role, Catherine Fries certainly, Lance Goss, Suzanne Marrs, and probably the most important was Brent Lefavor, who taught me to use a hammer and use my mind as an artist.  

I can't say how much Doug helped me as a patient.  I can't say because I can't compare what I would have been like without him, but I can say he never cured me--if cured is even a word one should use with regard to psychology.

After my brother died and my mother died, and my wife left, I began having sessions with Doug over the phone because I refused to leave the house.  During those sessions, I covered my shoulders with a green blanket.  It's in my lap now.  The edges are frayed, and it has maybe ten cigarette holes in it.  Eventually, I quit making appointments.   Doug's secretary would call a couple times a week to see if I wanted to set up an appointment.  One day, Doug called himself.  I sank down into my chair and covered my head and face with my green blanket.  "Don't give up."  He said.  "I won't," I said, "I just want to navigate this by myself for a while."  and that was the last time I spoke with Doug Draper.

A few years before, I had an experience that made me really question the value of psychology.  

My wife and I were having trouble.  She wanted us to see a man she knew for couples counseling.  She had known him for years and been his patient for years and said she trusted him absolutely.  Her father, who I still consider something of a saint, said it couldn't hurt.  I found it much easier to talk about our problems with her father than I could with her, which is probably an indication of how poorly I was handling the situation.  So, I signed up to speak with this psychologist friend of hers.  

We had sessions together, and we had sessions individually.  During these individual sessions, I made a very sincere effort to discuss with him the things happening in the relationship that I felt were creating problems for me, things that I feared were damaging me.  It's hard to tell if a psychologist understands you because all they ever do is try to get you to talk more, which I did.

Going into the next couple's session, I felt energized and hopeful because, as much trouble as I had communicating my troubles to my wife, I had utterly unburdened myself with this counselor and believed he would facilitate her understanding of what I was going through and how this relationship was hurting me.

As the session wore on, he focused entirely on her problems with me, even putting me on the spot about what I was going to do to change.  I even said, "What about the things we talked about?" and his response was that I was going to have to work those things out on my own because what was happening to me wasn't what was important.

On the way out, I told my wife I hoped she brought her credit card because I wasn't giving that fucker another goddamn dime, that it wasn't worth a hundred and fifty bucks for my wife and her old friend to set me up like that.  Later that night, her father called me to say he was sorry, that he understood what I was going through, and it wasn't my fault.  We talked for an hour.   I could never tell if that psychologist heard any of the things I was trying to say, but I know my father-in-law did.  After the divorce, he would call every so often to check on me.  Eventually, he began to forget why he called, and then eventually, he began to forget that we weren't related anymore.  I never corrected him.  I was just glad to hear his voice.

They want me to get a new psychologist now.  There's a lot in my head to unpack, they say.  I suppose there is.  I wish I could say I had more confidence in psychology.  When someone's in a real crisis, I still find myself recommending they find someone to talk to.  In my experience, there comes a point of diminishing returns.  Somewhere along the way, I reached that.  I'm probably not being fair in my evaluation of the couples counselor I saw.  I probably would have been more upset with him if he hadn't completely taken my wife's side, so I might have put him into a no-win situation.

If the point of psychology is to lay out very honestly and completely the things that happened to you and how you feel about them and then try to make some sort of evaluation of what it all means and how to handle it better, I already do that with my scribbling.  If I'm honest, that's probably why I write.  There are things in my head that will kill me if I don't get them out somehow, and writing a few thousand words every day is the best way I know to get them out.  

I miss talking to Doug very much.  I miss talking to my father-in-law very much more.  Both were doctors.  Both tried to heal me.  I can't really say that either was able to do it, probably because I'm a fantastically bad patient.  Maybe that's not the point.  Maybe the point is not the healing but the trying, and trying gets me to hold on long enough for my body's natural systems to heal itself.  

The stones we take out of our fields become the stones we use to build walls and bridges and roads and houses in our lives.  God sends us people along the way to teach us how to do that.  Maybe that's what psychology is all about.