The hard reset

Tonight I’m gonna get birth naked

And bury my old soul

And dance on his grave

And dance on his grave

- Bruce Springsteen

TW: There is some discussion of suicide and suicidal ideation herein.

I vividly remember meeting the single most depressed person I have ever worked with. Our initial session took place almost a decade ago. At the time, my office was half a block from the train station in our little suburban town. Ben, not his real name, initially read as a calm, good-looking, put-together 17-year-old guy. He opened with an unforgettable line:

“Well, my parents told me I had to come up here. It was either come in here and give this a chance for an hour, or step in front of the train. So, I guess we have an hour.”

There was a calm resolve in his eyes. I believed him.

If this had been my Year One in practice, I think I may have panicked in that moment. But a little experience in therapy can come in very handy. For one, I could find my own sense of calm and reason. After all, he did choose to come into the room. He’s here. We have an opportunity.

Ben wants that opportunity, a reason to press on.

After some discussion, it struck me how serious his depression was. His grades were suddenly awful, and this was well outside the norm for him. His girlfriend had recently broken up with him. He had been training for a marathon and gotten into really great shape. And he decided to stop all of it. He had also recently stopped eating for most of the day.

And the week before our meeting, he received the thin envelope from his dream college – application denied. Ben felt hopeless.

Hopelessness. That’s the bottom of depression.

Keep it interesting

Ben warned me that he had seen a number of therapists over the course of the past several weeks. Each had been pitching him on pressing forward, drawing breath until the next session. Hospitalization felt like a persistent threat to him. In fact, he had been so close to forced hospitalization that he intuited the script he needed to recite to stay out of the psych ward. No tricks were going to work on Ben. He had the routine down. He wanted suicide as an open option.

So in that first hour, despite the fact that we were theoretically on the clock, we got into a discussion about the meaning of life. Ben said he was unhappy, all the time. He couldn’t quite pinpoint when that started, but it had clearly been a while. We both agreed that happiness unto itself, though a desirable state a lot of the time, is not the sole meaning of life.

“What about helping people?”

“Yeah, but if you’re never happy, what’s the point?”

What if you intend that good things happen for you in the future?”

We got stuck here. Ben finally replied:

“Can you guarantee good things will happen in the future for me?”

Guarantee? No, I don’t think I can honestly do that, Ben. If I did, you’d call me out on it in a heartbeat. Then Ben:

“Okay, so what can be guaranteed?”

He was working with me, seeking reasons to stay above ground, and I appreciated it. He also showed his hand. Ben wanted to live. He just needed a compelling reason to get through this depressive bout.

What can we guarantee?

I found myself saying: “Well, you can guarantee it will be interesting.”

“Yeah, well, what if interesting means worse?”

Hey, it might. I certainly can’t promise Ben it won’t get worse. He knows better than to believe that.

“But if tomorrow were worse, wouldn’t it be interesting to see how you would handle that, just like you’re doing today? Can’t we be curious about what would happen, how you’d react?”

For some reason, Ben was able to grab onto this thought. He thought he could look at his life like watching a movie, one in which he’s the main character, and has no idea how things are going to go.

That would be interesting.

Due to the depth of his depression, we tightened up the intervals between sessions. And we fell into a rather, dare I say, fun little cadence at the start of Ben’s meetings:

“So, how have the past couple of days been, Ben?”

“Interesting.”

Ten years on, Ben’s in law school and engaged to be married next year. Says he’s happier than he ever thought he could be.

Interesting.

This is how

The best self-help book I’ve ever read came from a highly unlikely source.

I love a good memoir, and if you do as well, you’re not going to find a memoirist more jarring and traumatic and funny than Augusten Burroughs. “Running with Scissors” is a masterpiece of a bizarre memoir, many details leaving me wondering to what degree it all could have actually been true. Could memory have twisted some of his early reality?

In the midst of his fame, Burroughs wrote a little self-help book entitled “This is How: Surviving what You Think You Can’t”. It was not one of his biggest sellers, but fell right into my wheelhouse, a self-help memoir. Perfect for me, but I was not particularly enthused by the mixed reviews it had been receiving.

In “This is How”, Burroughs tells his story of hopelessness as a depressed, disenfranchised, post-traumatic, hopeless, gay young man. You also learn, for the first time, that his given name is not Augusten Burroughs. His story is brutal, ands culminates in a random train ride into New York City. If my own memory serves me correctly, he saw another passenger reading a book by William S. Burroughs.

Burroughs.

He liked that name, and thought that, were he to have a future, that would be a good, solid last name for him. Across the aisle, another passenger was reading “Confessions” by Saint Augustine. Feeling like he had plenty of guilt and shame to confess in his own life, he locked into the name Augustine. And put his own twist on it. On that ride, Augusten Burroughs was re-born.

And he went on to suggest that, if he could change his identity in an instant, he could be whomever he wanted to be, regardless of anything that might have taken place earlier in his life, traumatic and awful as so much of it had been. Maybe he could be a writer. Perhaps he could come out openly and without shame. Maybe he could be a New York guy, despite having spent his entire life to date in Massachusetts.

Maybe he could write his own story, his own way. And so he did.

That’s what “This is How” is all about. And it is low key the best, most helpful, and most important self-help book I have ever read. It changed the way I think, write, work and practice. The way I live. Burroughs was effectively telling his reader that despite the past there’s always hope. If you don’t like who you’ve been or what you’ve been through, you have the agency to decide to be someone different and do things differently, quite literally.

There is never need for hopelessness. You always have agency over your story from this moment on. By showing up in therapy, Ben realized this for himself and wrote a better life.

The hard reset

Now, all that said, most of us have not experienced so traumatic a past that we need to switch out our identities altogether. I often talk instead about the hard reset. By my definition, the hard reset is a radical and immediate shift in thinking about yourself, the world, or the future. The past may inform it all, and in fact may have driven some resolve for you going forward, might help propel you into your reset. But the fundamental idea is that you carry the capacity to reset, to change your mind, quite literally.

Now, I’m well aware that this concept is not revolutionary. Quite the contrary, it’s the basis for most therapy being done today, basic cognitive-behavioral principles. But the idea that this can be accomplished in an instant, with a decision, is pretty groundbreaking, and I can tell you from experience that it works, even in the most dire of circumstances and mindsets.

I want you to keep this idea in mind in your own life, and to remind the young people in your life of this notion: nothing will occur that will be so awful that we cannot reset. Nothing. It’s a critical concept. It can be life-saving.

A new dawn breaks every morning. A new opportunity to reset. An interesting new reason for hope.