On Being Watched Rather Than Touched

He comes to me with a list. It is usually quite specific and quite physical, and he has clearly spent some time on it. Then we spend an hour in which none of it happens, and he leaves in a state he cannot account for.

What he had not planned for is being looked at. Properly looked at, for longer than is comfortable, by someone who is not going to fill the silence for him. He arrived thinking attention was the corridor and the list was the room. It is the other way round, and it takes most men one session to find that out.

Why the waiting is not the boring part

He describes the pause as waiting because he has no other word for a stretch of time in which nothing is done to him. But nothing being done is not nothing happening. He is holding still because I have asked him to, and the holding is entirely his work. Every second of it is a decision he keeps making.

That is why he remembers it afterwards in more detail than the parts he could have described in advance. The parts on the list happen to him. The waiting is something he did.

The tell

You can see it in what he does with his hands. A man who thinks attention is a preliminary keeps checking whether the real thing has started yet. A man who has understood goes very still, because he has worked out that he is already in it.

What I am actually assessing

Whether he can be uncomfortable without needing it explained. Not endurance, which is a physical parlour trick, but the willingness to sit inside something unresolved and let it stay unresolved because I have not chosen to resolve it. That tells me more about him than anything on the list.

He asks how long it will be

I never answer. Not to be cruel, but because the answer would end the only part of the evening that is doing any work. A man who knows there are eleven minutes left is counting. A man who does not know is present, and present is the entire point.