The conversation happened about a decade ago. I’ll change names and details for the sake of privacy.
Rosalyn was 19. She was pretty, privileged, and a student at a premier liberal arts university. She was also rigid, perfectionistic, anxiety-ridden, status-seeking, and miserable, which was why she was my client.
After going home for winter break, she’d just returned to college. We discussed how the Christmas holidays had gone in our first therapy appointment after her return.
”I hate my stepmother,” Rosalyn said. This was a chronic theme and an important one. “She gets me the lamest Christmas gifts — she actually got me stupid cheap clothes from Old Navy.”
I inhaled and smiled and exhaled slowly. I willed my face to hold the neutral pose.
I spend a lot of time taking deep breaths and moderating my reactions during my workday, keeping that pleasant, blank look on my face as I invite a client to tell me more as I work to find the best intervention to move toward a goal. In this case, I was keenly aware that I was at that very moment wearing my favorite pair of Old Navy jeans, and I was not going to show Rosalyn my emotional reaction to her critique of a brand rather dear to my chintzy heart.
I set my focus: This is not about me. It’s about Rosalyn’s poor relationship with her stepmother.
Though my mental focus shifted back to the anger and hurt within Rosalyn’s family system, my mind went back to Old Navy and my reflexive counter-transference reaction when the visit was over.
It’s all about social class. Some consider Old Navy to be a budget store with inferior clothing. It’s cheap. Upper-class people say low-class people shop there. I know this, yet I love a good pair of $15 jeans and an $8 t-shirt. I know where this puts me on the social status hierarchy.
I made an okay therapist for Rosalyn, but she might not want to hang out with me in public if she really knew me. Her offhand comment had really hit me in a vulnerable place.
My awareness of social class is always present when I sit with people and their problems. It’s incredibly relevant because our social class has everything to do with available options, and therapy is about exploring our options and making changes for growth.
Earlier the same day, I’d met with an overwhelmed and exhausted young mother just a few years older than Rosalyn, who didn’t have the ten dollars she needed to pay for her toddler’s antibiotic ear infection medicine. The child had been crying and red with fever at our visit. Stepping in wasn’t part of my role as a therapist, but I knew there were no immediate resources for her. It was an emergency, she didn’t have the money, and it seemed that the only human thing to do was to give her the ten bucks to pay the pharmacy and pick up the medicine. Sometimes, making a difference in a poor person’s life can feel easier because the need is immediate and concrete.
I see people from a vast social class spectrum daily in my work. One hour I may speak with a destitute person living in a shelter. The following hour, I meet with a person who spends more on private school tuition for a single child than I will ever earn in a year. It’s surreal that they may cross paths in my waiting room.
Social class is complicated. There are many ways to hierarchically rank ourselves, encompassing various educational, professional, artistic, and ethnic subcultures. Financial resources are part of it, but not all.
The financial piece determines whether we can afford the basics, like reliable transportation or if we’ll be dependent on public transit. It determines whether we can live in a safe area or a neighborhood exposed to chronic violence. It determines if we can offer our children reliable, safe childcare, dental treatment, and medical care and whether or not we can hire a tutor if needed. Social class is relevant to everything.
One of the many weird things about being a psychotherapist is that I often find myself helping people in a much higher social class than my own learn how to feel less miserable and desperate than they do. I must ponder these things a lot to stay clear on how I’m responding to people emotionally.
The people with money have housecleaners, gardeners, and vacation homes, and they assume I have these things too. I don’t. I like cleaning my own house and doing my own gardening, but I do confess envy about the vacation home.
Rosalyn had no idea where I bought my clothes. She knew next to nothing about my personal life or shopping habits. She wore designer labels and dwelled within a superficially elegant fishbowl with no awareness of worlds other people inhabited, even when those people were in close proximity, even when that person was her therapist. Roslyn’s family had a professional house cleaner and a gardener. She was raised with the clear expectation that she would attend a college chosen by her parents and do well there. Rosalyn’s family took European vacations every summer. Despite all this, it was clear they were not happy or well-adjusted people.
Social science researchers are attempting to study how much money people need to be happy. The results aren’t clear yet, but it makes sense that people should be more content when they aren’t struggling with being able to access basics like housing and healthcare.
Money can’t buy happiness, but it provides far more options in life and having options can open up all sorts of avenues to health and wellness. It’s not an answer, but it allows access to resources.
While people with wealth seem to have easier lives, I can’t say that from my vantage point they seem overall to be happier. They are just miserable about different things, like whether or not their kid got into the college they had their heart set on. Suffering about very small things can still be intense.
I came from a solid working-class background of truck drivers, steel mills, and teen mothers. It was stated explicitly, “college is for rich people, people unlike us.” I had to work long and hard with a therapist in my 20s to find ways outside the bubble of the class I was born in.
I’ve been fortunate to find ways to do work that carries great personal meaning for me and that I find deeply fulfilling. For the bulk of my 30-year career, I’ve been able to be entirely self-employed, but this also has meant I’ve made relatively little money compared to many peers. But I count myself lucky, just incredibly lucky.
My only honest regret is that I couldn’t do more for my kids when they were college-age. Two of the three got degrees, but it was entirely self-funded. I admire them so much.
Many people don’t think twice about spending a hundred bucks on jeans. I have never been one of those people — especially when you can get a perfectly fine pair on sale at Old Navy for $15.
It's all about perspective, right? For my family, we shopped at Old Navy only when we really needed something new instead of thrifted. It was generally out of our price range. Rock those fancy Old Navy jeans. :)
Human relationships have so much beyond materialism going on. This is a marvelously succinct and pithy little piece of writing. It's almost like a piece of sociological pornography dealing with economic class, personal memoir, and understanding you bring to your practice. Very well done. Of jeans and domestics, social caste and colleges, and vacation homes, I sing! I'm coming off a marathon binge of Jane Austen movies. Vacation homes are overrated. Just another obligation. Five star hotels, that's the way to go!