‘Words alone are not enough,” San Diego Mayor Bob Filner said last week, apologizing for his recent conduct, including sexually harassing seven different women. His behavior ranged from patting the rear end of a political consultant to asking his communications director to work “without panties.”
Filner doesn’t plan to resign, of course. Instead, he’ll do two weeks of therapy.
Um . . . if words aren’t enough, though, what does he expect to be doing in therapy? Assuming he’s not going to get electric shocks every time he’s shown a picture of a woman’s behind, it’s hard to imagine what he’ll accomplish — except to get lectured about the inappropriateness of his behavior and explore in endless talk sessions the reasons behind his proclivities.
We know how well that worked for Anthony Weiner, who, his wife tells us, underwent “a lot of therapy.”
Weiner told The New York Times Magazine a few months ago: “Therapy wasn’t something that came naturally to me. I am this middle-class guy from Brooklyn, the men in our family don’t hug each other, we don’t talk about our feelings. It wasn’t a comfortable place to be.” But now he’s so into sharing his feelings that the Times reporter wrote that the interview felt like a therapy session.
His real problem, Weiner implies, was that he wasn’t in touch with his feelings. But all that talking didn’t seem to do much to stop his inclination to sext with strangers.
Time and again, politicians pretend that therapy has made them all better. Or it will soon.
Eliot Spitzer also went into therapy after his escapades were made public. All he needed was some marital counseling, the theory went, and he’d get over the narcissistic behavior that led him to throw away his career and his marriage.
Can you imagine those sessions? After wife Silda told him about the shame and embarrassment he’d caused her and their teen daughters, what did Eliot get to say besides “I’m sorry”? Did she have to listen to self-justifications? Did he tell the therapist that his mother didn’t love him enough, or that the men in his family don’t hug each other?
And all so he could then drag his whole family through the mud again? How exactly did therapy make him less of a selfish pig?
At least Silda has seen through the therapy ruse. It’s too bad the polls are showing the voters aren’t as smart.
Of course, these pols are all just exploiting our culture’s assumption that therapy is an instant fix; we can’t know if they really tried to reform, or just wanted the “certificate” so they could pretend.
But in fact, the whole notion that the way for men to really solve their problems is to talk it out is dubious. It can even compound the selfishness that characterizes their behavior, because it’s not always a cure-all to simply get things off your chest.
Emily Yoffe, who writes the Dear Prudence advice column on Slate, regularly gets letters from men and women who’ve cheated on their spouses. They tell her that they want to confess because their sins are eating them up inside. As she wrote recently, “The argument against [confessing a one-time affair] is that it offers relief for the guilt-ridden but just transfers the mantle of pain to the innocent partner. I believe . . . [that] part of the penance of having violated one’s marriage is living with the guilt of the violation and making sure it never happens again.”
In other words, suck it up. But our culture no longer encourages living silently with guilt.
The indiscretions of Weiner, Spitzer and Filner were no longer secrets, of course. But the lesson remains the same. Haven’t these men done enough talking? Maybe they should put a lid on it for a while and show us through their actions — such as staying out of the public eye and sparing their families this embarrassment — that they’re repenting.
Yes, a therapist sometimes really can help someone change his behavior or work out problems in a marriage. But, as these shameless men keep showing us, there are worse things than being repressed.