New Strings

He mentioned it on the way to something else. He was telling me about a Sunday spent mostly on the couch, which by then was an ordinary Sunday for him. And in the middle of the account, he said he’d also gone to the music store for new strings for his old guitar, because the old ones were dead. Then he moved on.

He was in his early thirties, married, with three young children and a job he did well. He came to me because for about two years nothing had felt like much. He wasn’t in despair, and he could tell you plainly that his life was good. He got up, davened, worked, came home, helped with baths and went to sleep, and none of it reached him. When I asked what he enjoyed, he answered the way people fill out a form: his kids, Shabbos, time with his wife. But he qualified his answer: “I appreciate all of those.” Then he shrugged and added, “But ‘enjoy’?That’s not something I feel much these days.”

The clinical term for this is anhedonia, the loss of the capacity for pleasure. It’s one of the less discussed parts of depression, partly because from the outside it barely shows. A man like him keeps every commitment. The people around him might notice he’s quieter or more tired than he used to be, and assume he’s busy. For a long time, he assumed the same thing.

The guitar had been in a closet since his sheva berachos. He played in high school, badly by his own account, and loved it. When I asked about the strings, he shrugged and said it was a shame to let a decent instrument rot, and maybe he’d play songs with the kids before Shabbos. I noticed that he needed a reason, and that he’d brought two.

My first instinct was to make a big deal of it. Clinicians are trained to notice change and reinforce it, and I could hear myself about to say how good it was that he was getting back to things. I held back, because I could see how fast that could turn a small private want into one more thing he was supposed to do, and soon the guitar would have joined everything else that didn’t reach him.

So, I asked what it sounded like with new strings. He said it was out of tune and his fingers hurt, and he looked like he was almost smiling when he said it.

Over the next few months, the guitar came up four or five times, never as the subject. He’d mention he played for a few minutes after the kids were asleep, or that he’d looked up a song he used to know. Then, near the end of a session, he asked me sheepishly whether I knew anyone who gave lessons to adults.

He wasn’t yet feeling anything he’d have called happiness. And he hadn’t made any major changes. What came back first was the wanting: for something with no use, which he couldn’t justify and had to keep trying for. The happiness he’d been waiting for did arrive, later and with less fanfare than he expected. Most days it looked more like being interested in things and being able to actually enjoy the things he already had in his life.

The large study this column has been working through over the past months, on what clients themselves say they gained from therapy, found this across many lives. Researchers analyzed 177 studies of clients’ own descriptions of what changed for them. In 109 of those studies, clients described something the researchers grouped as general wellbeing: feeling happier, calmer, more grateful, with a greater sense of vitality. One client’s words could have been his: “my pleasure in music has returned and my desire to develop, to practice things, to become better and learn new things has quite simply been awakened again.”

That client describes more than pleasure. The pleasure came back together with an appetite for effort, a desire to practice and improve. Most of us picture recovery as relief, a weight lifted and finally some rest. A good deal of what returns looks more like hunger.

This matters for the people around someone going through a hard stretch, because the first signs are small and easy to step on. A husband starts tinkering with something in the garage, or a daughter asks a question about something that has nothing to do with school. The temptation is to seize on it: Are you feeling better? That’s wonderful, you should do more of that. It’s said out of love, and it often lands as pressure, or as proof that someone has been watching him for progress. A want that has just come back is fragile. It does better when nobody asks it to carry anything.

It matters even more for the person himself, who may not count it. To him it can feel like wasting time, and in a community that values time well spent, a man may be the last to let himself want something that serves no purpose. Sometimes he needs someone to tell him it counts.

Toward the end of our work, I asked how the lessons were going. He said he was the worst student his teacher had, and that he practiced most nights after the kids went to bed. Then he spent a good part of the session explaining a chord change he couldn’t get right in a kumzitz song, and I didn’t steer him back.