Free Lying on the Couch by Irvin D. Yalom Page A

were a few pictures of herself, her mother, and a handful of friends, including her law partners. Norma and Heather, whom she would phone in the morning for help. She stared hard at her mother's picture, desperately craving her help. But her mother was gone, fifteen years in her grave. Gone even long before that. As her breast cancer slowly invaded all the crawl spaces of her body, her mother had become frozen with terror, and for years Carol had become her mother's mother. Carol tore out the pages with the pictures she wanted, ripped apart the album, and threw it into the fire as well. A minute later she thought better of it— the white plastic album covers might give off fumes toxic to her eight-year-old twins. She snatched it out of the fire and carried it to the garage. Later, with other debris, she'd make a package of it to return to Justin.
    Next, Justin's desk. She was in luck: it was the end of the month and Justin, who worked as the CPA for his father's chain of shoe stores, had brought work home. All his paper records—ledgers and payroll receipts—fell quickly to the scissors. The important stuff, Carol knew, was locked in his laptop. Her impulse was to take a hammer to it, but she thought better of it—she could make use of a five-thousand-dollar computer. File erasure was the proper technique. She tried to get into his documents, but Justin had encrypted them. Paranoid bastard! Later she would get some help on that. Meanwhile she locked the computer into her cedar chest and made a mental note to get all the house locks changed.
    Before dawn she fell into bed after checking on her twins for the third time. Their beds were crowded with dolls and stuffed animals. Deep, peaceful breathing. Such innocent, gentle sleep. God, she

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    envied them. She slept fitfully for three hours until awakened by an aching jaw. She had ground her teeth in her sleep. Cupping her face in her hands while slowly opening and closing her jaws, she could hear the crepitations.
    She looked across to Justin's vacant side of the bed and muttered, 'You son of a bitch. You aren't worth my teeth!' Then, shivering and holding her knees, she sat up in bed and wondered where he was. The tears running down her cheeks and onto her nightgown startled her. She dabbed at the tears and stared at her glistening fingertips. Carol was a woman of extraordinary energy and quick and decisive action. She had never found relief from looking within, and considered those who did, like Justin, pusillanimous.
    But no further action was possible: she had broken all that remained of Justin, and now she felt so heavy she could barely move. But she could still breathe and, remembering some breathing exercises from yoga class, she inhaled deeply and let out half the breath slowly. Then she exhaled half the remaining breath and half of that, and half again of that. It helped. She tried another exercise that her yoga teacher had suggested. She thought of her mind as a stage and sat back in the audience, dispassionately viewing the parade of her thoughts. Nothing came—only a progression of painful and inchoate feelings. But how to differentiate and grasp them? Everything seemed matted together.
    An image wafted into her mind—the face of a man she hated, a man whose betrayal had scarred her for life: Dr. Ralph Cooke, the psychiatrist she had seen at her college mental health service. A well-scrubbed pink face, round as a moon, topped with wispy blond hair. She had gone to him in her sophomore year because of Rusty, a boy she had dated since she was fourteen. Rusty had been her first boyfriend and, for the next four years, had served her well, permitting her to skip all the awkwardness of looking for dates and prom escorts and, later, sexual partners. She followed Rusty to Brown University, enrolled in every course he took, bartered her way into a dorm room close to his. But perhaps her grip was too tight: ultimately Rusty began dating a beautiful