Lorraine Kessler

I became a therapist because I was nosy. This is not the version I told the admissions committee at the University of Pennsylvania when I applied to the Master of Social Work program in 1982, but it is the true one. I grew up in Allentown, Pennsylvania, the oldest of four children in a household where my mother’s sisters came over every Sunday and talked about their marriages in the kitchen while the men watched football in the other room, and I sat on the stairs and listened. By the time I was twelve I could have told you which of my aunts was going to leave her husband first. I was right, by the way. Aunt Sheila. 1978.

I practiced as a licensed clinical social worker and family therapist for thirty years, first at a community mental health center in West Philadelphia, then in private practice in the suburbs, which is where I learned that money does not solve the problems people think money solves. I saw individuals, couples, and families. I specialized, if you can call it that, in the particular crises of midlife and beyond: the marriage that has gone quiet, the adult child who has become a stranger, the retirement that feels like exile, the parent who needs care and the siblings who cannot agree on what care means.

I sat across from approximately nine thousand people over three decades. I do not say this to impress you. I say it because nine thousand people told me their worst secrets and their hardest questions, and after a while you start to notice that there are maybe thirty problems. The details change. The geography changes. The names change. But the problems are the same thirty problems, and most of them come down to this: someone needs to say something, and they have not said it, and the not-saying has become the problem.

My husband, Frank, was a high school football coach in Doylestown for twenty-eight years. He died in 2019 of pancreatic cancer, eight weeks from diagnosis to the end. We were married thirty-four years. He was a man who believed that problems were solved by effort and that feelings were what happened after the effort was complete, and I was a woman who believed feelings were the starting point, and somehow this worked for three decades. I miss him in ways that are specific and daily and that I do not need to catalog for you because you either know what I mean or you will someday.

We have three daughters. Beth is a pediatrician in Boston. Karen is a middle school counselor in our hometown of Doylestown, which makes me prouder than I can say. Annie is thirty-four and works in nonprofit management in Philadelphia and calls me twice a week with questions that are really about her boyfriend. I answer the questions she asks. I do not answer the question she is actually asking, because she is not ready for that yet, and a good therapist knows the difference.

I started writing this column because a friend of mine forwarded me the Sunday Evening Review launch issue and said, “This is the magazine you have been complaining doesn’t exist.” She was right. I wrote to Dale Parsons and told him I wanted to write an advice column. He wrote back and asked why. I said, “Because people are still writing to Ann Landers, and Ann Landers has been dead for twenty-four years, and somebody should answer.” He said yes.

The column is called “Since You Asked.” The letters are from readers, and the problems are real, and my answers are as honest as I know how to make them. I will not tell you what you want to hear. I will tell you what I think you need to hear. Thirty years in a therapy office taught me that the difference between those two things is where all the useful work happens.