Do I Look Like I Care?

The title of today's post is a rather nasty phrase, when spoken in the sarcastic and condescending voice of a teenager.  I have several teenaged clients in my practice most of the time and I hear that phrase occasionally when the client is describing his or her response to another teen's conversation.  I understand completely that it's not a nice thing to have said to you.

I was raised to be polite so I wouldn't have dreamed of using the phrase in that tone of voice to anyone, no matter how bored I might have been or how badly I wanted to escape a conversation.  But those words popped into my mind recently after a conversation with a daughter-in-law.  I had been describing to her my first overseas flight on my own when I was 18 and flew to Germany to visit relatives after graduation.  There was a layover of several hours in Montreal and I described to my daughter-in-law that I was so nervous about missing my connection that I found the departure gate immediately and parked myself on a seat in sight of it and refused to leave it.

And that's how I wound up trapped by a lady who worked in one of the airport restaurant kitchens and had a discount on a flight to visit family overseas.  I found all this out because she began to talk and I was too polite to get up and move away or even pretend to read in hopes of discouraging her.  She told me the names of all her grandchildren, their likes and dislikes, their special talents, and showed me photos of them.  She spoke of her work and some of her coworkers.

Most of them, I learned, were good to work with and were "team players," but there was one who was impossible to work with.  This coworker insisted on rinsing lettuce for salads in warm water, not cold as the staff was instructed to do.  My new "friend" was quite upset that she sometimes was blamed for limp salads when all along she knew it was the coworker who was causing that result.  Really now, wasn't that just terribly unfair?

If the phrase, "do I look like I care?" had been in use when I was 18, I might have thought of it then.  This lady went on and on, insisting I had to see what an injustice was being done to her.  I don't recall my responses but I'm pretty sure they weren't what she wanted because she continued to tell her story over and over, getting more passionate and more adamant that I had to see it her way with each telling.  As I recall, escape didn't come until her flight was called and she had no choice but to leave.  And when she was gone I found myself thinking that she was pretty weird, to go on like that to a perfect stranger about something so trivial.

Of course now that I have trained to be a psychotherapist and have worked with clients for years, I know how to interpret such stories, understand the significance of an oft-repeated story or theme, and recognize when validation or interpretation are required.  But as a shy teenager, taught to respect her elders and too polite to end the conversation, I missed all of that.  I wasn't even planning yet to make counselling my career; I was quite certain I was going to be a high school English teacher.  In hindsight I can also see that I had none of the skills needed to manage that conversation or, better yet, to be of service to that lady.

But despite all my failings, apparently I looked like I cared.  And so many of my clients tell me now, many years later.