"Previously on "In Treatment"..." "A U.S. Navy aircraft hit a target on the outskirts of Baghdad." "Turns out: it's a madrasah." "It's an Islamic, religious school, boys studying the Koran." "16 of them dead." "I flew that mission." ""The Madrasah Murderer."" "Shortly after you complete this mission, you work yourself up into a state of extreme exertion." "Don't you think there's a strong desire there to atone for your... actions?" "You're going back to a place where you dropped a bomb." "Your face is on the Internet, and there's a price on your head." "Surprised?" "I didn't think, uh..." "I didn't think you'd come back again." "I'm back." "Good." "Come on in." "Would you, uh... would you like some coffee?" "I've just made a pot." "Yeah, coffee's good." "How do you like it?" "I got, um... skim, whole milk..." " Got some soy here..." " Black." "I like to taste the beans." "I bet you need a lot of coffee to listen to the fuck-ups in here." "I don't drink coffee." "Just, uh, tea..." "I keep it..." "I keep it for my patients." "Blood pressure?" "Irregular heartbeat?" "No, I've just, uh..." "I've just never really liked the taste." "Aah, a subconscious irregular heartbeat." "What, do you get?" "checkups?" "EKG?" "Yep!" "Every year." "And?" "How's your heart?" "It's perfect." "Um, look, Alex, I'm..." "I'm really glad that you came back." "To tell you the truth, I was, um..." "I was a little worried after you left last week." " 'Cause I wanted to go back to Baghdad?" " Yes." "Well, I went." "Man, Paul!" "Sorry, but -- the one thing I don't compromise on is coffee." "S01E07:" "Alex, Week Two" "Is that your reaction whenever the coffee isn't... perfect?" ""Isn't perfect"?" "Paul, this is like attempted murder, your coffee." "But let me hear your interpretation." "It's obvious, you have one." "Not really, I, I..." "I remember I used to have this patient, once, and, um... he would come here and before each session he would say, "Stop!"" "And then he would -- pop a pill." "And -- it was just..." " a ritual " " What are you trying to say?" "Well, I think in his particular case, what he wanted to show me was his distress and his... his pain." "I, I, I don't know, maybe with the coffee, it's, uh... maybe you're just telling me that, uh, you're only gonna come to the therapy under... your conditions, and anything that you don't like, you're gonna... spit out right away." "Don't you think you're being just a little dramatic?" " Come on, Paul." " Maybe." "So..." "Alex..." "Why did you come back?" "I want your advice on another little matter." "Besides... you deserve to know how my trip went." "Being that you helped me decide to go - for all the wrong reasons, by the way, because my visit didn't do what it was supposed to." "And what was it supposed to do?" "Let's just cut to the chase, okay?" "Saturday morning, I'm standing in the street near the bomb strike, just like London after the Blitz, just rubble, you know?" "This area had been hit, again and again, by us, by them, by suicide bombers." "We hooked up with a Red Cross unit, and they take us to this makeshift hospital, its triage unit." "There weren't enough doctors to treat everybody." "It was chaos." "So, what did you do?" "I, I was just watching." "You gotta understand, doc, in my line of work, I'm 10 - 15,000 feet up in the air." "The missile locks in on a target, by radar, on a screen." "I don't see people." "I just press a button." "And boom..." "Just it was kind of crazy to be down there all of a sudden." "How did that make you feel?" "Coming face to face with the victims?" "How would it make you feel?" "Scared." "Um..." " Guilty." " See?" "That would be the normal reaction." "I knew, this should have been the drama of my life, but I felt..." "Nothing!" "And then I realized... the system did a great job on me." "What do you mean, "the... system"?" "Listen, there's people down there... arms and legs missing, faces blown off, it's carnage, and the... parents are walking around, they're waiting to see if their children are gonna live or die, all because of what I did." "But what can I tell you?" "To me, they look like... 200 people standing in line at the pharmacy." "Did you feel... any connection with them?" "Did you feel in any way... responsible for what they'd suffered?" "No, no, no." "In that moment, all I cared about was whether they cheated me or not." "I mean, the system..." "The people in the madrasah..." "It wasn't any difference than seeing it on TV." "The only thing in my mind in that moment was whether the system knew that the buildings near the target's bunker, the one that was supposed to get my one-ton bomb, if they knew these buildings were full of children... or not, as they claim." " Nothing else mattered." " So it was really important for you to know that... you had done the right thing." "Like you said last week, if you hit the target, you sleep well." "And all those people whose... suffering you were responsible for..." "Could you not... see them?" "No, I saw them." "I felt nothing for them." "And, and then I realized how..." "ingenious that my body has a built-in separation mechanism." " What does that mean, "separation"?" " Compartmentalization." "I'm standing there, and all I cared about was whether I made a precise hit." "The enemy is a formula:" "Size of building, amount of people, multiplied by the amount of explosive, divided by 100 equals a number of estimated casualties." "You understand?" "I'm standing there - I don't feel anything!" "I had this friend who died." "Four months ago." "Um..." "Anyway, I, I, um..." "I went to the funeral, and, uh... all throughout the service I kept saying to myself, "Why don't I feel... sad?"" "I though to myself, "Maybe I didn't love him, maybe I didn't care."" "I tormented myself for about a week." "Anyway, finally..." "I realized that actually I felt -- a great deal." "Even the fact that I was so busy with my guilty feelings..." "Even that attests to how much..." "I felt about him." "Yeah, but what are you saying?" "That I was feeling..." " but I didn't feel what I was felling?" " I think... that you have very, very... deep feeling about these people." "But something strong inside you prevents you from acknowledging those feelings." "Not just to me or to anybody else..." "but to yourself." "You know what?" "I don't understand what you're saying." "I don't get what you're telling me." "Feelings are not a philosophy." "You either feel or you don't." "You can't bullshit about it." " You think I'm bullshitting?" " Listen, I'm paying you 150 bucks for less than an hour, and I don't see you making an effort." "You're supposed to be smarter than me, and I'm definitely not feeling that." "Aah, so, we're... competing... to see who's is the, uh... who's the smartest... yeah?" "You know, Alex..." "I think that... here like everywhere else, like with the coffee, for instance, you're concerned with "what's the best"." "It must be..." "It must be difficult." "Come on, give me a break." "It must be kind of frightening for you to feel... empathy with these people." "So you create this kind of ultimate reality for yourself, for those people were," ""Oh no, they were just waiting in line at the pharmacy." "I'm just the accidental tourist." "Not the pilot who bombed them, who killed their family."" "I wish you were right." "But it's much more fundamental." "Look -- if you hold on to this, this... organ... called guilt feelings... and I believe that's what it is, it's, it's an organ... like the spleen or liver..." "The system will cut it out of you completely." "Understand?" "I have no way of feeling guilt anymore." "I don't have the organ." "So you really believe, it's possible to... amputate such a -- a... such an organ?" "You went back to Iraq." "Why was it so important for you to go back?" "To risk your life just to... just to be there?" "I told you, I wanted to check if anything was left." "And..." "And I wanted to see what happens when I come down from that top view." "But... nothing happened?" "That's right, nothing." "Can we..." "Can we go back for a moment to the, uh... to the site of the bombing?" "Can you describe one moment when you said to yourself," ""I should be feeling something now, right now... and I don't"?" "Um..." "Yeah, there was a moment." "I, I don't know if that's what you're looking for." "But there was a moment when this old man came over to me..." "He had been burned." "His arm was bandaged." "He kept looking at me with a strange little smile." "[Iraqi] Which means "I know you."" ""I know you."" "I ignored him at first, but a couple of minutes later he was back." ""I know you, I know you," he kept saying." "For a second I thought he did recognize me, but I didn't really believe that." "I doubt he'd ever seen the Internet but... in some deep intuitive way... he knew." "He knew I was the man who dropped the bomb that destroyed the whole street we were standing on." "You could be..." "You could be describing a mystical experience, like a, like a dream." "Yeah, it was like a dream, like a, a totally bizarre dream." "He started looking like some old warlock out of a... a fairy tale or something." "And he wouldn't leave me alone." "He kept pointing at me." "[Iraqi] "I know you."" "And I looked in his eyes." "And, he... was sort of amused, kind of friendly... like my father looks at me when he thinks I've done something wrong, like he knows my secrets." "Like, no matter what I do, I can't hide from it." "And I " " I was frozen there." "And by that time people had gathered and they were watching us." "Finally someone from the church group came and pulled me away, but -- that old man, he never took his eyes off me." "You still think it's too early to talk about your father?" "Why, because he popped into my head for a second?" "You people." "What is it with you people?" "I give you a little crumb and you lunge at it." "I'm just asking myself, Alex..." "what was it about that old man that..." " that makes you think about your father?" " Let me tell you something:" "If there's someone who does not know the meaning of guilt, it's my father." "You know why?" "Because if he could feel, he wouldn't have survived." "You know, my father killed his father, with his bare hands." "Yeah." "And that's a fact." "Man, I'd love to see him on this couch." "Man, doc, you'd have a field day with him." "You want to talk about it?" "Oh, now I got your attention." "I don't think I can tell it as well as he does, but " " I'll try." "Mid-Fifties, right?" "Jim Crow Oklahoma." "My old man had pissed off the local good ol' boys by trying to organize... some, uh, black labor at this factory." "They tried to threaten him but my dad didn't back down." "He's a tough son of a bitch, I'll give him that." "Anyway, the whole thing, it just, it escalated." "And, uh... this mob with hoods attacked his house." "My uncle Ronnie was on the front porch with a rifle." "They shot him down." "Shot my aunt Jeannie, too." "And then they came inside." "So my father takes the rest of the family, they run downstairs to the... to the boiler room, to the basement." "Right near the boiler, they all crammed into this area, this hidden room." "My grandfather, his father, was very sick... dying of lung cancer, and he had this, uh... apparently he had this... this wheezing and this hacking cough." "So, my father puts his hand over his father's mouth and nose, and he kept it there while they searched the basement, kept it clamped tight." "Then when they finally cleared out, my grandfather was dead." "He'd suffocated." "There it is." "That's, uh... that's a horrific story." "Well, he tells it every year on my grandfather's birthday." "It's a tradition." "And you really believe, he doesn't feel guilty about it?" "I'm telling you, he always used to say, "Leave the guilt for the white man." "We can't afford it."" "Well, hmm -- it's possible that he's saying that... it's dangerous to feel guilty, that it's a kind of weakness." "Maybe that's a message that... you've grown up with." "Well, what can I say?" "That's just my father's way." " But is it your way?" " I don't know." "Hey, hey, it works for him." "Doesn't necessarily make him an asshole." "People love my father." "My wife is crazy about him." "You should see him at... at family dinners." "He's got her off in a corner and, uh... telling jokes and..." "I don't know." "She appreciates him." "Maybe that's why we lasted as long as we did." "You say "lasted" as if it was past tense." "Yeah." "Yeah, actually, that's why I came to see you today." "There's this issue with my wife." "What happened was, when I came home... from my trip, it was late... and the kids were already asleep." "And I saw my wife." " What do you mean, you saw your wife?" " I looked at her." "I really..." "looked at her." "She was sleeping in front of the television." "For an hour, an hour and a half nonstop," "I sat there without taking my eyes off her." "When was the last time you watched your wife sleep, for an hour straight?" "Well, I usually fall asleep before she does." "Try it once, you'll be surprised." "What'll surprise me?" "What you'll discover... about her... about yourself." "I was looking at her... looking at every inch of her body." "And I said to myself..." ""Who the hell is this woman, sleeping on the sofa in front of the TV?" "What the hell does she know about me?" "What does she think she knows about me?" "And what the hell am I doing, living with her, in the same living room, in the same house, with the same kids for the past 15 years?"" "Understand?" "And I'm sitting there opposite her, right?" "She doesn't imagine what's going through my head." "And you know what happened?" "She starts grinding her teeth." "Now it's the first time I ever saw her grind her teeth in her sleep, and I'm talking something sick... frightening." "The sound that came out of her mouth, it... how do you..." "You could cut diamonds between her teeth, okay?" "It really fucked me up." " Sounds pretty upsetting." " Shocking!" "I tell you." "And suddenly I understood." "For the past 15 years this woman's been so busy pretending that everything's okay... flowing." "She's a model mother, a model wife, an outstanding lecturer at a communications college, what can I tell you?" "Very impressive in front of my fellow pilots." "And it turns out:" "she takes it all out... on her teeth at night." "You know, that's... pretty common, actually." "They don't think it has anything to do with... with stress, it's... has to do with, uh... flaws in the structure of the jaw." "You really believe that?" "No -- it's connected to her stress." "In what way?" "In what..." "Okay." "She is a totally repressed person." "And all her repressions come out at night, in her sleep." "So she grinds her teeth." "You think, Michaela may have trouble with her feelings, too?" "You think I don't feel?" "Wait till you meet her." "Everything is just like clockwork." "Clockwork, that's what, it's clockwork." "The kids have been going to bed at the same hour since they were two days old." "They got sick on a fixed date." "We'd -- we'd have sex on a fixed date in a fixed position." "And Michaela even farts... once a year on a fixed date." "Once a year, on the night after Easter Sunday, she farts." "She lets herself fart once, maybe twice, a little one, not that much." "Then it's over." "No farting for the rest of the year." "She's... man, she's a programmed person." "Every emotion is under control." "Sounds like you're, uh..." "you're a little angry with her." " No." "What..." "Why..." " Just the way you talk about her." "No." "Takes a lot more than Michaela's schedule to make me angry." "I got the impression before when you were speaking that " "Maybe you're a little angry with yourself, Alex." "I mean, you went all the way to Iraq and..." "you couldn't feel anything." "I don't know..." "Maybe." "Have you spoken to Michaela about it?" "Of course." "Over our morning coffee." "She says, "Yes, honey." "I, I grind my teeth." "And you only noticed it now?" "You are such a sweetheart." "That's what I'd call love."" "Then she said, "Baby, please, cut down on your coffee." "Remember what the doctor said?"" "Since my heart attack she lets me have one cup of coffee a day." "And, and that battery acid you gave me, that's not coffee," " that doesn't count." " Okay, okay." "So -- so you don't like Michaela..." "worrying about you, treating you like you're sick?" "It's just -- it's like she's on a mission." "To get me back up in the air ASAP." "She says I'm fit as a fiddle and I need to be knocking on the Navy's door to get back." "How long has it been since you've flown?" " Two months since my heart attack." " It must be hard... to be away from that world, not to be part of what used to be the... the center of... of your life." "First of all, I'm still one of them, okay?" "So, you can relax on that." "But meanwhile sitting at home, thinking about the possibility that you..." " that you might never fly again." " Of course I'll fly again." "People with worse injuries have bounced back." "Do you want to go back, Alex?" "When the time is right." "But Michaela's dying for me to go back." "And at night she grinds her teeth like some kind of..." "Alex, it's not like she..." "she changed overnight." "What are you saying?" "I think there are things about Michaela that really bother you, because they reflect something... inside you that you can't live with." "Like what?" "Like her passion for you to fly again." "I'm not 100% convinced that you actually want to go back." "Maybe because... you're having trouble... forgiving yourself." "Okay, all of this, this reinforces my decision to leave home." "What?" "Why?" "Yeah, I don't think..." "It's pointless to drag this out for years." "When a person decides he's not in love with his spouse, he shouldn't have to put off leaving home." "Isn't that so?" "It's over." "It's dead." "I've had friends who've reached this conclusion." "They go to three years of couples therapy, and they still end up separating." "So, what's the use?" "I say, cut that shit." "Don't you think, that's a little extreme?" "I mean, it is possible to overcome a crisis here, you know." "Do you know what I realized?" "That I was never in love with her." "With Michaela." "Do you know what that means?" "Do you know what a terrible realization that is?" "What do you expect me to do?" "Find a lover, like my dad?" "Start coming home late at night?" "I don't even have a good excuse anymore." "I won't do anything but sit on my ass and watch TV." "So what?" "You look upset." "No, I'm just, uh..." " I'm just a little concerned, that's all." " Well, don't be, it's..." " I feel a great relief." " No, I'm sure." "There must be tremendous relief in just... pfff, walking away." " I'm not convinced it's the solution." " Why not?" "I suppose because I ask myself, who you're really leaving." "Maybe you're leaving her because she's such a frightening reflection of you." "Maybe you're leaving yourself... not your wife." "It's irrelevant." "I have no reason to go back." "We're finished, we're done, we're finished." "Have you said anything to, uh... her about it?" "Not yet." "I thought I'd consult with you first." "Is this really a consultation?" "Because, you know, something, I, I, I..." "Again, I feel like I'm a rubber stamp, for a decision that you've already made." "No, no." "On the contrary, this meeting clinched the matter, not before." "You can take credit for it." "Why are you always giving me credit?" "You know... it's not that you give me credit." "What you're really doing is, you're asking me to accept responsibility for your big decisions." "And you know what?" "It's not me making these decisions, it's you." "You knew before you walked through that door that you were gonna go back to Iraq." "You knew before you ever brought up the subject of Michaela's... teeth grinding that your marriage was deeply in trouble." "These aren't conclusions that you've come to here on this couch, in the last week with my permission." "Aren't these things that have been... boiling over inside you for a very, very long time, Alex?" "I " " I got to go." "Like you say, my time is up." "Hey, don't worry." "I'll keep you posted."