Nothing Happened. You're Still in a Rut.

Somebody asked how you were and you said fine, because the honest answer would have required a reason and you do not have one.

Nothing happened. Nobody died. You were not fired. The relationship is adequate. By every visible measure the situation is acceptable, and you have been moving through it for months with the enthusiasm of a man walking to a bus stop.

That is the part that makes it difficult to mention. Suffering with a cause is respectable. This just sounds like ingratitude.

The absence of a reason is not evidence that there is nothing wrong

A man described himself to me as being in a seemingly endless rut that brought only despair and hopelessness. He had no catastrophe to offer. He had a rut.

I want to say something about that word, because he chose it well.

A rut is not a hole. You are not stuck at the bottom of anything. You are moving, on rails, along a groove that was worn by your own repeated passage, and the sides are just high enough that you cannot see out and just low enough that it would be embarrassing to call it a trap.

Depression without a precipitant is common, it is unremarkable to any psychiatrist, and it is frequently the more stubborn kind precisely because there is nothing to resolve. When a man is low because his father died, the work has a subject. When there is no subject, people go round for years looking for one, on the assumption that a cause must exist and that finding it is the cure.

Looking for the reason can become the rut. A year spent excavating your childhood for an explanation is a year in which nothing about your Tuesday has changed, and the search itself begins to feel like progress.

Direction is not something you locate. It is something you build.

The instinct is to work out what you want first, and then act on it once it is clear.

I have watched that sequence fail for fifty-five years. Clarity does not arrive through contemplation in a rut, because a rut is a low-information environment. There is nothing new coming in. You are consulting a mind that has been fed the same fortnight forty times and asking it for a fresh opinion.

Direction is built the other way round. You do something, and the doing produces information, and the information produces preference. You cannot know that you dislike a thing until you have been near it, and you cannot know that something lights you up until it has.

So the question I ask is what you could do this week that you have not done in six months. The answer is usually small and slightly ridiculous, and that is fine. The point is the new data.

Why I use the tennis court for this

Men in a rut respond poorly to being told about neurotransmitters and poorly to being asked how they feel about their mother. They respond quite well to a court.

Here is what I mean by it. When you are late to a ball, the mistake happened three seconds before contact, in the split step you never took. The correction is never at the point where it hurts. It is always upstream, in the preparation, in something small and mechanical that happens before the shot exists.

A rut is the same shape. The flatness at four in the afternoon is not the thing to work on. What is to be worked on is the morning, the hour you got up, whether you left the house before eleven, whether anything is in the calendar that requires you.

I do not use the court with everybody. I use it with people who already think in terms of practice and mechanics, because a metaphor only works if it is built from something the person already trusts. With somebody who has never held a racket it would be an obstacle, and I would find a different one from their own life.

The one thing I will insist on

If we work together I am going to ask you to do things, and some of them will seem beneath the size of the problem.

That is deliberate. The despair is large and shapeless and you cannot get hold of it directly. What you can get hold of is the hour you get up and whether you saw a person you like this week. Those are unglamorous, and moving them moves the large shapeless thing. Discussing it, at length, generally moves nothing at all.

What the first session looks like

I will ask you to describe a Tuesday. The actual sequence of it, hour by hour, from waking. People find this a strange request and it is the most informative twenty minutes we will spend.

I will ask what you were like at twenty-two, and what you have stopped doing that you used to do. The list is usually longer than expected and nobody has ever asked them to produce it.

An Invitation

You do not need a reason to be entitled to help. That is a rule you have imposed on yourself and it is not a rule anybody else is applying.

Come with nothing to report. That is the presentation, and it is treatable.