You Don’t Have to Do This Alone.

CBT and Psychoanalysis: What’s The Difference?

A woman with short grey hair sat flipping through a copy of HELLO! and a student in a hoodie sat picking at the skin around his fingernails. Penny felt as if everyone was looking at her, assessing what her secret might be, but she was doing exactly the same in return. She wondered if the woman was weathering a divorce after years of putting up with a husband who never appreciated her. Maybe the student had questions about his sexuality. What would they say if they knew what Penny’s problem was? Oh, boo-hoo, you had three men fighting over you? How awful.

‘Penny?’ a woman said, appearing in the doorway. Penny stood and followed her into a stark room painted cream, with a cream sofa and a cream chair Penny recognized immediately as IKEA. There was a small table beside the sofa with a box of tissues on it. She couldn’t see a clock.

‘Can I get you a cup of tea, or some water?’ said the woman, who wore a name badge that read ‘Christina.’

‘No, no, I’m fine,’ said Penny, sitting on the sofa. ‘Thank you.’

Christina nodded. ‘And what brings you here today? This is our first time together, so I’ll be making notes as we talk. Is that okay?’

Penny nodded.

‘Thank you,’ Christina smiled. ‘So. What’s on your mind?’

Penny thought about how to begin. With Uncle David? Francesco?

‘Everything just feels a bit of a mess,’ she settled on, which was as good a summary as any. ‘And I’m having a hard time untangling myself from it, I think.’

‘Okay,’ said Christina, her voice slow, her tone neutral. ‘In what way does it all feel a bit of a mess?’

Penny shrugged. ‘I just don’t feel very happy, I suppose,’ she said, and saying that out loud to a stranger made her voice crack, like it had done when she’d talked to Clementine and Rima and Charlie. ‘And I don’t know what to do about it.’

Christina nodded. Her eyes were sympathetic but her face didn’t give away any kind of feeling about what Penny was saying.

‘That sounds like it would be a very heavy thing to carry around with you,’ she said.

‘It is,’ Penny said.

Christina let that hang in the air. She wasn’t desperate, it seemed to Penny, to drive the conversation forward at all or fill in the gaps after Penny had spoken. It made Penny nervous. Was she supposed to keep talking? Or was Christina just thinking about what to say next? When Penny had been to counselling throughout the cancer it was a bit more talkative than this, a bit more informal. Christina didn’t seem to want to go in for the role of a Chatty Cathy.