One day I’m in my office doing my thing waiting for a patient to call or come in. After about ten minutes I checked in. Are we on for today? Text comes back, “Oh sorry I got caught up, will call at 1:15.” Ok, I write back. Nothing. I send a question mark only. Nothing. That was it. There was also earlier in the day someone just didn’t show or call. Now, I’m not saying this happens a lot, it doesn’t, but right away I start thinking. Did I say something, what was the last session like? I can’t really think of anything. No bad words, no disclaimers, bad looks, comments, nothing that I can remember. What is this? I liked these people. We seemed to have a good working relationship. What is going on? Of course, and this is the bad part, I can only guess. Maybe they have financial problems, maybe they just don’t want to tell me that it’s not working for them, maybe they just don’t want to see me anymore. Could be a million things. Inevitably I come to a place where I see they don’t want to face something or me. They avoided conversation, and therefore something within them didn’t want to feel or look at what it was. I certainly didn’t see it coming or I would have said something. It feels unfinished, like a pause but it’s not. Like an empty space. When it comes to leaving therapy, I really enjoy ending on a great note. Talking about what we have accomplished, what they can be thinking about going forward and waving goodbye at the door with smiles and sometimes a hug. Good feeling all around and the door is always open to come back if they feel the need. After all I know them, and their history and it makes it convenient to just start up from where we left off. I have had experiences with people who are unhappy and come in to tell me that. 99 % of the time I can make it work. It’s called problem solving. Ghosting is the opposite of empathy; they can’t think about what this may mean to me or how I might feel when we’ve had what appeared to be a warm and productive experience together. They have broken ties and will never come back. It seals their emotional fate. A kind of cowardice in the face of a difficult emotional truth. They reflexively recoil from their own internal struggle and therefore from me. Even more sinister would be they enjoy it. A kind of turning the tables from their own struggles with powerlessness. Of course, none of this feels good but I am left with working this out on my own, never knowing what the actual truth may be. I wonder what they must feel or don’t want to feel and how people hide from themselves and even feel entitled to ghost someone. “He was a jerk anyway.” Even if I was a jerk, I would love to know that was how they felt. Then I might be able to work on my essential jerkiness if that were the case. Now I’m simply left to wonder and feel like a psychological Uber driver. They just got out of the car. This seems to be an eerie trend in our modern culture. Ghosting in some form has always been around, it’s just so much easier now. Back in the day when telephones did not have answering machines, it was harder to hide. Someone had to pick up the phone or just let it ring. Now we can simply ignore a text or a call because we can see it on our screen. It’s become very popular on dating sites. I frequently hear about someone liking and having a brief conversation and then crickets. Inevitably I’ve concluded that it’s for the best because if that’s how someone chooses to live their lives then even if they came back, they would for sure, do it again. The shame of it is that they lost an opportunity to know something important about themselves and how they function in the world. It leaves a wake of broken connections in a world that sorely needs them. If this is how we decide to live then what hope do we have of becoming one family, one nation and one world. What comes to mind is the song Imagine by John Lennon and Yoko Ono. “You may say I’m a dreamer But I’m not the only one I hope someday you’ll join us And the world will live as one." Inevitably, we owe one another the truth, no matter how hard it is to hear, we need it. Whenever we will not be truthful, or we lie or we shut ourselves off from one another we lose something special and valuable about being human. What truth and confrontation offers us is the opportunity to learn something about ourselves but also to connect. Being connected makes us a community, a nation and a world. In the final analysis it is the avoidance of some uncomfortableness or pain that causes people to simply withdraw. Can we blame them, not really, but we can encourage people to go through the difficult feelings to get to the other side where they can feel good about the outcome. Whenever we do confront our truth and express it to another person who cares about us we inevitably learn something and the real plus is we get to feel good about who we are.
