What Makes a Kid Want to Kill Somebody?

A scene from Sunday night's Desperate Housewives. A do-gooder neighbor reminds an alcoholic single mom that kids need their mommies home, not out looking for men in bars.

Yeah, there are spoilers.

I suppose it's the stuff of forensics and other fields, and even though I rarely have a murderer telling me his problems, I do hear a kid say, on occasion, "I want to kill someone."

Or it can get specific. "I want to kill so and so."

This is never a good moment, hearing this, because you have to decide who to call, and among the calls is the one that warns the potential victim. That's the law. There are very few situations in which a mental health professional has to break confidentiality, but this is one of them.

So last night, about 8:00 pm, we're eating dinner. I watch as FD reads the paper, fork to mouth, and in another country, the other eater, a biological offspring, is staring at a computer screen, searching for error in his code, reading and rereading hundreds and hundreds of lines of code. He's feeling a little homicidal himself.

I don't feel much like sitting, and as luck would have it, Desperate Housewives is about to begin. I like the show, mainly because I like some of the actors, and I like that the women, the wives, are forced to make quick decisions that will affect just about everything important in family life. And I like that when the story ends, somebody's trying to do something nice for somebody else.

There's always at least one really creepy, dangerous person on the show, which helps me raise my anxiety threshold. I'm reading a slasher novel, too, just to do that.

Anyway, the cringe, the tension in Desperate Housewives is generally well-done, not gratuitous, and the plot keeps my interest, even if I hate some of the story lines. But there are some that I hate to hate. Like last week a teen is working a counter (we like him), pouring a latte. The customer is old enough to be his father. Actually, the guy really is his father, but the son doesn't know this. Mother has made sure to hide this information, ran away with him as an infant, assumed a new identity. She knows bio-dad is a dangerous man.

Bio-dad is befriending his bio-son in the coffee shop, confides the story line of his novel in progress. Now he asks the b0y, "So what should I have him (the spurned father in the novel) do for revenge, now that he's caught up with them? Now that he's found the woman who stole his child, what should he do?"

The kid thinks. It's a long pause.

"To get to the mother," he suggests, "I'd have him get to the kid. Get to her through the son."

"That's what I'm thinking," his father replies.

Cringe stuff. Anyway, this week we get a new plot, a completely new set of characters, one that is going to tie up many of the unsolved, ongoing mysteries on the show. "Epiphany" takes us through the life of a little boy, Eddie, whose father has left him at the age of four. His mother is a verbally abusive woman, addicted to alcohol.

No matter what Eddie does, no matter what he thinks or says, she's contemptuous and ridiculing. Having Eddie has ruined her life. She laughs at him, smirks at him, belittles him. It's so well-done, so real, what we see. And even if it is television, we know it's a fine enactment of exactly what does happen in emotionally, verbally abusive homes. We don't call these homes toxic for nothing.

Eddie searches for nurturing people, and on Wisteria Lane there's no shortage of these. But he makes the mistake of taking the relationships too seriously, thinking older women might really like him, or might like him for their daughters.

And when he risks intimacy, when he tells a female, any female, about his feelings for her, she inevitably laughs, too. Like his mom. Nobody takes him seriously. He just needs someone to love him. You think this is trite? I wish it were.

And wouldn't you know? He's had some very serious anger problems for a long, long, time. He's a good kid, just can't manage his anger very well. And yeah, he's the killer in the neighborhood. One of them.

All I can say is, I liked it, and if I were on the jury, I'd go with the insanity defense. For some reason, my guess is, they'll never pick me for one of these.

therapydoc

Here's the summary from the ABC website, but if you have time, watch the whole show:

We meet Eddie's mom Barbara, a mean, slovenly drunk. She raids his room, looking for a bottle of Scotch, but instead finds his scrapbook with the clippings about the Fairview murders.

We flashback to when Eddie was just four, and his father left his mother -- after loudly proclaiming that he'd never wanted any of this, including Eddie. Mary Alice tries to befriend her, but Barbara isn't interested. Mary Alice stops by one day to give Eddie a teddy bear and finds him home alone while his mom is out drinking. She lectures Barbara about not putting her needs ahead of her son, but the lesson clearly doesn't take.

Gaby first meets Eddie when she moves to Wisteria Lane and finds a lonely Eddie inside her empty house -- he'd been sneaking in to play there since the previous owners moved out. He ends up coming over every day because Barbara has a new boyfriend. When he surprises Carlos and Gaby in the tub, Carlos orders Gaby to "cut him loose" and start making friends with other women, not nine-year-old boys. Gaby wants to go talk to Barbara, but Carlos advises her, "We don't want to be known as the nosy neighbors." After Gaby tells him they can't be friends anymore, Eddie grabs a BB gun and shoots a bird.

Season Closers: Friendship

Warning: May contain spoilers.

Like many of you, I've been watching way too much TV this week. It's the end of a very short season.

So to make up for it, I thought a little extracurricular cleaning might help. Having emptied the refrigerator this morning, I yanked the blue plastic trash basket from under the sink. You have to toss the science experiments. Underneath the pipes I saw a little rust and definitely, crud.

The kitchen was already in disarray. It couldn't hurt to attack the cabinet, too.

It's not rocket science, understand, so your mind drifts off. Mine drifted to the two shows I watch religiously, Desperate Housewives and Boston Legal.

Last week's cringe on Desperate upset me so much that I almost swore off the show forever. A little girl emotionally blackmails step-mom Lynette Scavo (Felicity Huffman). Lynette, always the sympathetic character, will go to jail for child abuse in the closer because of this manipulative, unlikeable kid (Rachel G. Fox is perfect) .

She really creeped me out, even though her character and the story line didn't ring true. So I didn't want more, but I said to myself, You're tougher than this. Watch the finale.

The truth is that television is kind of new to me. I watched it as a young person, as a little kid, then checked out. We had shows like Leave It to Beaver, Andy Griffith, Lassie, Mr. Ed, and Father Knows Best, shows that reflected the hopeful mores of the time. Plots didn't vary much. A kid gets into trouble, the parents (or animals) help resolve it, and everyone whistles at the end.

When I checked in again, television was mostly people taking off their clothes or shooting at one another, and nobody rode a horse or loved a dog. So what was the point?

A couple of years ago a patient, an adolescent, talked about Gilmore Girls. She really wanted her mom to watch it so her mom could become more like Lorelai. Empath Daught also liked Gilmore so I checked it out and found the relationship between mother and daughter interesting. Rory could see right through Lorelai's issues, and there were many.

So if I watched the show I could say to the kid (or to my daughter), "Did you see last night's Gilmore?" and we could talk about it.

And I loved the stuff with Rory's grandparents. Lorelai had cut them off because they didn't accept her as different, or so she always thought. Lorelai stayed angry at Richard and Emily, so that conflict kept my attention; that and counting everyone's drinks. (Edward Herrmann and Kelly Bishop are totally watchable and wonderful actors, which certainly helped).

So yeah, I got hooked. It was the entry drug.

And sure, I broke down and watched the two-hour season finale of Desperate on Sunday night. I set the VCR so that if I couldn't stand the cringe I could tape the show and watch it another time, fast forward through the stuff that upset my equilibrium. But the show was pretty good, the ending a real winner.

The enactment of spousal abuse, the whole Katherine sequence (Dana Delaney, so good) is amazing. You can watch this at ABC.com whenever you want.

And last night, well, my mother reminded me that Boston Legal would be on, so hey, who am I to lose the recreational intimacy of discussing that with Mom?

So there I am, cleaning under the sink, and I realize that both shows ended (stop right here if you don't want to read the spoilers) with messages about friendship.

Look here! the networks are telling us. You people are getting better. You want friendship in your lives. Sex and violence? Sure, we can provide that, too. But what you really want is friendship and we know it. So we'll give it to you. You get it here. We'll give you friends. Live vicariously.

What we want are friends.

Listen to this amazing dialog on last night's Boston. Background, first.

Alan Shore (James Spader) is in a huge disagreement with his best friend, Denny Crane (William Shatner) and they're about to go head to head in the courtroom on opposite sides of a case. Alan, in the hallway, overhears their mutual partner, Shirley Schmidt (Candice Bergen, my hero) tell Denny that Alan is very competitive. He's so competitive when it comes to his work, and this case is work, make no mistake about it, that he will take no prisoners. He will crush even his best friend to win.

After the commercials Jerry Espensen (Christian Clemenson, brilliant as the lawyer with Asperger's) argues with Alan about something immaterial. Alan has always been Jerry's arch support. But lately, they've drifted apart.

Alan, always the mentch, has already tried to make peace with Denny and failed. Now he wants to make peace with Jerry. He alludes to the fact that they have drifted apart over the past year. They're not as close. He misses him.

Jerry makes light of it. You can tell he's very nervous but he tries to play it cool and says, "Work! It's work! I have so much work, and you have so much work. We're both busy working and that's just the way it is. Back to work."

Alan doesn't move. He thinks awhile, then says, "I never thought of myself as a person who put work before friendship. But it seems I do."

Jerry looks up. He gently replies, "Friendships are like little gardens. We plan to tend to them but always seem to put them off until next week."

Pretty good writing for television, no?

Alan and Denny make up, too, at the end of the show, and leave their scotch on the balcony to go fishing, perhaps camping, who knows? They can do what they want. They can work on their friendship if they want. It is their choice. The two of them walk arm in arm in the streets of Boston in the middle of the night in their Coast Guard jackets and those silly plastic or rubber pants you wear when you're about to walk into a river to fish.

It is a great scene. The type of scene that makes us wistful for that sort of freedom.

That, only days following the Desperate closer. The Desperate epilogue takes place five years later, following the drama, and the wives are seen playing cards, Gabby (Eva Longoria, such a star) has gained a lot of weight and has two little plump daughters, maybe two and five. Susan (Teri Hatcher) is married to a hunk we've never seen before (I haven't). Lynette's children are older, more difficult. Bree is back with Orson. And Katherine is among them. She's one of them now.

We know that the writers will start next season with these themes, children who are out of control, sex, family tension and desperation. We also know, that they know, that we're glad these housewives have each other.

So there I am, under the sink, going over this stuff. I finish up the scrubbing and get to cleaning up the mess I've made emptying the fridge. I toss an almost empty Dannon yogurt (vanilla, if you must know) into the trash then fish it out. I've used the yogurt as a starter and made my own, surely more fattening and worse for you, but better.

Rather than throw out the container, I'm thinking that I should wash it out and use it for my yogurt. Then, when I see it in the fridge, I'll know it's yogurt, not mystery food.

Somehow (so me), while washing it out, that foil at the top slices my left index finger.

No panic, no pain, I move to the bathroom. The blood drips into the sink (you're reading popular media so you don't mind a little blood, right?) and with my good hand I get out the BandAids. It's getting a little difficult. The paper on the first BandAid sticks to the adhesive and the second BandAid gets wet. Things aren't going so well.

In my head I'm wondering, sheez, do I need a stitch? I begin to really regret this stupid idea, using a Dannon yogurt container when I have a houseful, no joke, a house full of Tupperware.

Then somehow, I remember Lillian.

It's her fault I made yogurt.

When I was in college as an undergrad, Lillian taught me two things. She taught me to make bread, and she taught me how to make yogurt. These are invaluable skills and may have exceeded in utility far beyond whatever I learned in the classroom.

We lived in a university student co-op (all women) and I was the R.A. She was one of the only really mature kid in the house, although I loved them all the same. Lillian, from a tiny farm town in Illinois taught me how to make bread the old fashioned way, no dough hook. I use one now and bet she does, too.

So here I am, thinking about Lillian probably for the first time in many, many years, wondering where she is, what she's up to, wondering if she's married, has children, maybe grandchildren. For all I know, she's no longer alive.

I let her go. I just let the friendship go after school let out. No idea where she is now. I think I remember her last name, but there must be a thousand women with that name (last name starts with an L, maybe you know her).

So I ask myself, and you probably do, too, How do we let this happen? Don't we know as much as the television producers when it comes to the importance of people?

You have to wonder.

therapydoc

Spirituality, Mental Health and Desperate Housewives?

I didn't see it coming, honest. All set to write about spirituality and mental health, my show comes back on the air. And it's about spirituality, and maybe mental health.

We really took a hit with that writer's strike. Three months of no Desperate. No Boston Legal. Let's not let this happen again. Please.

Warning: Although I only reveal one subplot, the following post might be a spoiler if you haven't seen the April 13, 2008 episode of Desperate Housewives.

As soon as I saw the listing in TV guide this morning I emailed all my kids between patients to tell them Desperate would be on tonight. I inserted this announcement in a thread FD started about all the topics we can't talk about at the Passover seder. Only Empath Daught cared in the least bit about my show.

"We'll talk tomorrow!" she said.

Indeed.

Did I tell you that I shlepped the exercycle up from the basement so that I could watch cable and fake a little cardiovascular at the same time? It's a compact little thing that my significant other lifted from someone's basement for fifty dollars, but it weighs a ton. He couldn't believe I got it upstairs myself, having sworn off furniture years ago.

This is what happens when that ant gets going at the rubber tree plant.

Anyway, a few years ago I had a patient who experienced an Aha spirituality moment. Spirituality is a big thing in mental health. I think I wrote in a previous post that the HMO's ask therapists to check off ten or so "specialties" for referrals and that spirituality is on a list of about thirty "areas of interest."

At the time I saw way too many patients for my own health and didn't turn down many HMO panels. This is probably the default reason therapists get cranky, too many patients, too much stress. And to merit too many patients and too much stress, one fills out managed care applications and checks off specialties like, spirituality.

Being kind of religious person, I thought maybe I should check that, since I felt that I could empathize with anyone who used the Higher Power coping strategy thing.

Except on occasion I'd get a call like this:

You're a Christian therapist, right?

Uh, no.

Never mind.

Click.

This made me feel bad, especially since I really like people no matter their race, color, creed, etc., assuming they're not into terrorism or any kind of violent belief system, and yes, I have reservations about taking patients who believe in incest, statutory rape, bigamy, polygamy, and the like.

What's good about being religious, however, is that when a patient wants to talk about spirituality, or his or her concept of the Old Mighty, I'm not afraid of the discussion. In fact I'm totally open to all of it: atheism, agnosticism, as well as a belief in something out there. I'll even tip my hat to aliens, and have.

How DID we ever get on this subject, anyway?

Oh yes. What I wanted to put out here is an Aha moment, a patient's Aha moment. (all identifying details are changed, of course, as always)

Our unidentified patient obsessed about relationships, not unlike many of us. She obsessed about her boyfriends, she obsessed about her mother. She obsessed about her children and her neighbors, the clerks at Nordstrom, even the people she typed for at the office.

Then one day, in the throes of depression, she sat in a chair totally wrecked with despair. She talked out loud to what she thought of as the Old Mighty (what my grandfather, not terribly familiar with English, called Him or Her). She talked to her Higher Power and she cried. She prayed and talked, discussed and argued with her Maker. Would it be so terrible, she asked, if.. . Would it spoil, some vast eternal plan?

Sure, she was Jewish. We do this, argue, try to reason on occasion.

When all of a sudden she had that Aha moment. As she tells it, "All my life I've been wasting my time obsessing about people, thinking what I want to tell them, worrying about what they'll think of me! I should really be talking to Him! I get nowhere with people, and when I talk to Him, not only do I feel He's listening, but it's possible, certainly, that He'll answer. And no one else does, honestly. There's nothing to lose. It's a win-win!"

Do I plug assertiveness training or social skills at this point? What would you do?

It is a tough call. But of course not. What she's talking about is a major coping strategy, one that millions of people use every day. They are believers. They have, at least in their minds, a relationship with their Big Guy/Gal.

So of course, all I do is raise an eyebrow and smile. Whereas, it could be a You go girl moment for another therapydoc. But I'd never say that. These are moments in therapy where the support is all in the look, the understanding, the empathy, it's all in the eye contact. Words pale.

Oh, you want to know what happened on Desperate Housewives. Well, Lynette has an Aha moment in tonight's show. It's Sunday morning and she's watching as her neighbors pile their families into their automobiles, all dressed up, going to church. She's the staunch non-believer in the community, has never had any formal religious education.

And she's married to a Catholic and has a bunch of children, so she's thinking maybe they should go to church. She watches her friends going off to pray and she makes a decision.

"We're going to church," she tells her husband. He fights it but she wins in the end when her son says, "Sure I know who Jesus is. He helps Santa Claus."

But which church? She relies upon Bree's church initially since Bree is the most religious of her friends. It's obvious that Bree has made it through some serious problems and she credits that resilience to her faith.

At the Presbyterian church, Lynette, unfamiliar with the formal culture, raises her hand and asks a question, something you just don't do in a Presbyterian house of worship, apparently. The minister is truly surprised, but patiently answers Lynette's questions. Bree is mortified. "You don't do that here," she whispers to her friend, desperately trying to get her to stop interrupting the service and asking the minister questions. Everyone just wants to get out of there, apparently.

Lynette continues peppering the minister in front of the congregation and Bree is dying of embarrassment. Later Bree tells Lynette, "We just don't do that in our church, ask questions of the minister."

"Huh?" Lynette asks. "I thought religion was for answering questions."

"Well, yes, but we wait for the minister to answer them in his sermons. We don't ask him anything. We hope that he'll get to answering everything eventually." Then Bree does the unthinkable, she intimates somehow that Lynette embarrassed her. Lynette gets upset and decides her family will go to the Catholic church down the street.

The next week the Presbyterian minister asks Bree, Where is your nice new friend? He's so happy she came to their church. He thanks Bree for introducing the Scavos to him, for bringing them to church.

"But she asked questions!" Bree objects, seeing the error of her ways, regretting sending Lynette away. "I thought the church is about answers, not questions!"

He corrects her, "Of course it's about questions. It's more about the questions than answers. First the questions."

You'd think he's a Jew.

Bree hurries over to the Catholic church. "You must come back, Lynette! I miss you! Please. Please leave this place and come with me to my church." Lynette doesn't fall for it.

Bree persists, "Please, let's talk outside."

They go outside to talk and Lynette tearfully confides to Bree, "I've been through cancer and a tornado and I've survived both of them. I need to know why!"

Bree gets it. Lynette isn't going to church because she feels she has to go, like everyone else. She's going because she wants to go. She's looking for answers. "Why didn't you talk to me? I had no idea. Of course you're right. Faith shouldn't be blind. We should question things. I want you to have faith, and I want you to have faith in our friendship, too."

So they make up, and I'm happy, because I hate to see friends fighting. And Lynette, bottom line, does trust her friend and they talk about the ideas of faith as the camera fades to the next scene about Susan catching her cousin in bed with. . .

Those Aha moments are really fantastic, you know. I'm pretty sure they're all about slowing it down, stepping outside of our lives and reexamining what we're doing, how we're doing it, and thinking, I should change. And the funny thing is, that although those moments surely happen in therapy, and we do speed them along, we really do, there's no reason they can't happen at home.


copyright 2008, therapydoc

The Perfect Friend

There are so many deep things we can talk about on this blog.

So did anyone see Desperate Housewives Sunday night?

As far as I know, only Empath Daught and I own up to watching Desperate religiously. We hadn't discussed it at all this season, but a couple of weeks ago, right after the tornado episode (great television) I called Daught traumatized and pleaded with her.

"I know, I know you're busy with the job and the kids, I know. But by any chance, have you watched Desperate lately?"

"OMG yes!" she cried. "Did you believe that tornado?! Isn't the show amazing this season?"

Yes, in a word. But Sunday's show, the one following the storm, had only a few good moments, only a few scenes that really got to me emotionally.

They're usually the ones with Felicity Hoffman. I'll watch the whole show, alternating between treadmill and exercycle, knowing that some of it will surely be boring and annoying. But oh, those moments! When it's good, it's splendid.

Anyway, I'm going to tell over one of the scenes right now to make a couple of points, one about friendship, the other about the need to be perfect. How I'll relate the two is anyone's guess.

So as you may know, one of the housewives, Bree Hodge (Bree Van de Camp before she married Orson Hodge) is a perfectionist. She casts a spell over everything she cooks, everything she bakes. Her house is immaculate. She irons her sheets. She has a spice garden. She's gorgeous, always dressed. Her make-up's perfect. Heck, she's Marcia Cross.

Her house is wrecked from the tornado and her friend Susan (Teri Hatcher), always the people pleaser, offers up her home as Bree's temporary residence. Susan's daughter Julie (Andrea Bowen) is really upset about it and correctly predicts that Bree and Orson (also a perfectionist, played by Kyle MacLachlan, I love him) will be moving furniture within the hour.

But Susan can't say no to Bree. Make yourself at home, that's what friends are for, she says. We help one another. The show thrives on hyperbole, which is why it's cute, of course.

By evening the next day Susan returns from work (I guess she works). The ambiance in the house is sensuous, the room lit by candle light, the table set. Classical music filters through the the house and remarkable smells waft from the kitchen. Julie sweeps down the stairs to greet her mother:

"Welcome to Heaven," she says, obviously thrilled.

And it is heaven. They realize they can get very used to Bree, very used to ironed pillow cases and the smell of lilac.

But of course there's conflict. Bree essentially pimps out her own son to a gay roofer, hoping the roofer will move along the construction. Susan squashes the plan because she doesn't want the roofer to hasten Bree's exodus from her home.

Bree sits Susan down To Talk.

Susan fesses up. She doesn't want Bree to leave so soon because having her there is keeping her sane. The only reason that Susan is functioning at all is that Bree is there, taking care of her. Without Bree, Susan can't make it right now. She has issues. She's pregnant and her husband is in drug rehab.

But basically, Susan is Teri Hatcher. She has to have issues.

It's not codependency, it's friendship. Bree softens up, bakes Susan cookies, brings her a glass of milk. That's what friends are for.

So we need to take a second look at this, my friends. Bree's natural care-taking qualities, the way she takes care of house and home. "Heaven" is holding Susan together. Susan feels nurtured. She's fed, literally.

But as much as Bree is a perfectionist at material things, and gets it that her friend needs her, as a parent she's a disaster. Pimping your son? Is the lesson here that perfection is in the eye of the beholder? Or is it that denial rules. I can make a perfect crème brulée and pimp out my son.

Pick Door Number Two.

Therapists tend to pick at perfectionists as O.C., obsessive-compulsive, but that's really not fair. There are people out there who can do it all, parent well, keep a great house, attend to their parents and spouses, call their aunts and uncles, deacon at the church. And they don't always crack under the pressure, either.

At the risk of simplifying, it depends upon the support system, among other things. Energy out versus energy in. A person needs balance and a vacation now and then to function consistently well. A rewarding job really helps, add exercize, maybe spirituality, too. And eliminate all those other variables like an onset of depression, loss. Resolution of family of origin and marital issues helps. Getting handed divorce papers, on the other hand, can blow your whole day, really put a dent in the vacuuming.

Add it all up, make your subtractions, and trying to to be perfect might just net you headaches, ulcers, sleeplessness, all kinds of stress related physiological feed back.

Sometimes it affects the kids, too, setting that bar too high, either for yourself or for them. Demanding, perfectionistic parents are a challenge. Most kids have difficulty flipping them off, as hard as they'll try to rebel. And if they don't rebel, they're the ones with the headaches. Or they become care-takers, possibly co-dependents. Surely I'm simplifying. There are other outcomes.

Like a child's self-esteem, for example, that can suffer in the process of making mental comparisons with the perfect mom, the perfect dad. To me, the perfect mom lives in the shadows. Maybe not in the shadows, but she tries to stay backstage, be there as the working memory on the family computer that never breaks down. She's not perfect. She makes mistakes and owns them.

I think the saying is To err is human, to forgive, divine. Error makes us palpable, it's what we can relate to, the fallibility in our personalities and in the personalities of others.

Bree manages to make the perfect quiche. Do we really care?

Well. . .

Listen, we LIKE a good quiche. That kind of perfectionism, making the tangible in life excellent, is only dysfunctional when it hurts, when it's achieved at the expense of self (too much energy out) and something more important, like a child or spouse's well-being, or neglecting an elderly relative.

And perfect, it's my job to tell you, is only one level of functioning. It's nice. It's a very nice level. But it all depends upon what you're measuring.

It's nice to make a great dinner and not burn anything :)

It's nice to fold the laundry well, make the beds, sort the mail and pay your taxes on time. But doing it really well when other things (like people) get less out of you might mean that although you're functioning very highly, perhaps you're not really functioning well enough.

So yeah, we therapydocs tell you to drop it. Drop your coat on the floor, leave the dishes on the table for awhile, give the brain a rest and play with your kids.

Although Bree's perfectionist home-making make Susan feel nurtured, it's questionable whether or not her perfectionism really mattered all that much to Susan. I'm guessing that the perfect crème brulée is what we call the spurious variable in therapy. It just so happened.

The variable that matters, surely, is Bree's understanding. Her empathy cements the friendship. And let's not forget. Susan confides in Bree, she trusts her. I'd say pick Doors Number Two and Three, Trust and that corallary, sensing the freedom to speak intimately. A real blessing if you have that. It's not a given in life.

Indeed, the television is probably the best friend for millions of people who live alone.

So if you've got a friend who will make you cookies when you're down, you're incredibly lucky. And if she's understanding, and on top of that, makes really good cookies? Luckier still.

therapydoc