Notes On… If America Was My Client

If America was my client, she would arrive draped in stars and stripes, humming with restless energy, her smile bright and rehearsed. She would sit across from me with impeccable posture, knees bouncing slightly, as if her body could not contain the force of her own momentum.

“Tell me why you’re here,” I’d ask.

“I wanted to celebrate my freedom,” she’d say, her grin widening. “I wanted someone to see it.”

She would tell me about her birth with explosive pride: the revolt, the Declaration, the muskets firing into dawn. She would speak of how she dared to imagine a nation ruled not by monarchy but by consent. She would tell me about her ideals, rattling off life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness.

I would hear her hope. I would hear her fierce commitment to possibility. Because that is one of her strengths: her unrelenting belief in what could be. Her refusal to be confined by what is. Her ability to gather the weary, the exiled, the dreamers, and say, “Try again here.”

But in between her sentences, I would hear something… else. A tremor beneath her triumph. Because independence, in psychodynamic truth, is never clean. It is riddled with grief, guilt, longing, and relief.

“Tell me about your family,” I’d say.

She would stiffen. “They oppressed me,” she’d answer sharply. But grief lay beneath her words, unacknowledged. Because rebellion is never born without attachment. You cannot declare independence without first belonging.

As we explored her relational patterns, her defenses spiked. She fears vulnerability, seeing it as weakness. She denies dependency needs, outsourcing them to others – to immigrants, to enslaved peoples, to the marginalized. Her liberty was built upon bondage. Her freedom carved from the bodies she deemed property.

“Tell me about them,” I’d ask gently.

She broke her gaze. “That was a long time ago,” she’d say. But her eyes would fill with oceans. Because part of her knows that while she proclaimed “all men are created equal,” she was calculating precisely whose humanity could be denied to build her dreams.

And yet, alongside her shadows, there is her light. Her ingenuity, her creativity, her relentless reinvention. She built libraries and universities, invented jazz and Broadway, sent astronauts to the moon, sequenced genomes, and wrote constitutions that became models for emerging democracies. Her soil is stained, but it is also rich with seeds of brilliance.

Trauma unspoken is trauma relived. So her dreams remain haunted like strange fruit hanging from poplar trees. Her nightmares are crowded with unpaid debts and unrepaired harms.

“Tell me about interdependence,” I’d ask.

She laughed. “I’m not codependent,” she’d insist. Yet her streets pulse with loneliness, her politics reek of betrayal, and invisible chains still scaffold her economy.

And still, she loves possibility. That is her brilliance and her burden. She believes in the future more than she believes in her past.

Sometimes this helps her innovate.

Sometimes it helps her avoid accountability.

Sometimes it allows her to transform.

Sometimes it allows her to forget.

If America was my client, I would sit with her as she wept for what she has done and what she has become. I would remind her that true independence is not simply freedom from oppression, but freedom from her own tyranny.

At the end of session, she would rise to leave, adjusting her flag like a ceremonial robe, ready to return to her parades and fireworks. But before stepping out the door, she would pause, turn, her eyes softening.

“Do you think I’m a good country?” she would ask.

And I would say:

“I think you are a country of extraordinary possibility.

I think you are still becoming.

And I think you could be good, but only if you have the courage to hold your light and your shadow in the same hand.”

Because in therapy, and in nations, independence is never the end of the story. It is only the beginning.