Matthew PerryHis portfolio is on sale next month. Yours for $1,650. His AAA card, his SAG trophy and a host of personal items will hit the auction block in an estate sale that already looks like grief has been turned into a commodity.
But the item that stopped me cold wasn’t the wallet or the cup.
It is a painfully moving message from Jennifer Aniston.
The Internet wants you to look at this auction the way it looks at everything. Clickable. Sortable. Celebrity lives are divided into lots and bidding begins. I want you to look at it the way I look at it after twenty years of sitting with couples in San Francisco.
Because that message is not a collection. It’s proof of how human love actually works when someone you adore drowns.
The body keeps receipts that you cannot auction off
This is the part I can’t stop thinking about as a therapist.
In my view, we are interconnected beings. We are born needing a primary attachment figure, from cradle to grave. When someone feels unbearable pain, their nervous system does not politely wait for the right coping strategy. Reach for anything that calms down faster.
In my practice, I call this competing attachment. Anything we turn to for comfort instead of our partner or people. Sometimes it’s work. Sometimes porn. Sometimes material. Drug use sends two tragic messages to people who love the user: You are not my priority, and you are not acceptable for who you are.
Matthew’s lifelong struggle was not a moral failure. He was a being who turned elsewhere because the pain of not feeling enough was too heavy to bear alone.
Now look at the message.
The human body is the original distributed ledger. It records every important interaction, every moment of safety, every moment of abandonment. You cannot delete those blocks. The wallet kept his money. The trophy proved his talent. But that letter is the physical notebook of his attachment system. It’s undeniable proof of a secure base you’re trying to reach.
When someone you love is drowning, writing letters, pleading, and trying to connect them to Earth is a biological protest against the agony of separation. This is what you look at when you see the lot description. Not souvenirs. protest.
The penthouse, the basement, and why “Codependent” is a rubbish word
I see ghosts of this dynamic every Tuesday. Founders, executives and creatives have their own versions of the SAG Awards on the shelf. Winning from the outside and fear from the inside.
I use a metaphor with these couples. Shed and basement.
The partner who communicates, writes letters, organizes interventions, this is the uncompromising lover. They live in a penthouse, high expectations and great pain. The person hiding inside addiction or avoidance is the reluctant lover, curled up in the basement for safety. Relentless up. The hesitant retreats. They both feel essentially invisible.
The sober partner usually arrives at my office as the world-renowned expert on his or her partner’s problems. Tell them, if you hold a conference next week about what’s wrong with your partner, you’ll be the keynote speaker. They want me to fix the addict.
But as Dr. Gabor Maté says, attachment-related suffering lies at the heart of addiction. When I look at the partner downstairs, I don’t see a villain. I see a person with a place inside who believes there is a void that will never be filled. Someone is terrified that if he really shows up fully, his inadequacy will finally be exposed.
If any of this comes close, figure out your relationship style before going back to swiping.
And here I feel fierce. Culture wants to label friends who look like Aniston as “codependent.” I throw this word in the garbage. I will never hear my clients call themselves codependent. Being consumed by the well-being of someone you love is one flavor of how a person learns how to survive without being loved the way they need to be loved. If you’re in a primary relationship and they’re not okay, you’re not okay. That’s how important they are to you.
Jennifer writing a desperate letter to a struggling friend is not an illness. It is love to do what love does.
Two facts, one episode, no villains
Two online game rules books will be running in this auction.
Playbook One: The addict was selfish. Playbook Two: Friends Were Enablers. Both playbooks are what I call the story of the other. The world will always provide facts to support your hurt. It’s tempting to make someone out to be the bad guy. The story of the other never leads to growth, never to healing, and never to mastery. It is the path that the laboratory mouse discovers over and over again, where he eventually has no food.
We have to find a place for the poor bastard who relapsed, lied, and hid. Because someone at this level of addiction is living in agony. Trapped in what seems like a bad land forever. Terrified that they will never be forgiven, never accepted.
We have to find a place for our friend in the shed, write letter after letter, and watch the person he loves disappear in real time. This is not a disease. This is the beautiful and tragic biology of the attachment bond. Two truths in every struggle. Panic makes sense. The closure makes sense. No bad guys.
If a couple in this exact dynamic were sitting on my couch, the first thing I would do is stop the fixation. I use a metaphor I call hospice versus painkillers. We sit with people who are experiencing their pain instead of rushing to remove it. I would look at them and say, I’m not here to help you feel better. I’m here to help you feel your feelings better. Then we love each other there.
This is part of the science behind trauma interconnectedness, and part of the reason I build the science behind the work of an AI relationship coach into my clinical practice. The goal is to move two people from separate suffering bubbles into one shared suffering bubble.
What a wallet can’t tell you
Someone will pay $1,650 for the wallet. Someone else will pay more for the cup. The message will be used no matter how much it costs a piece of love in a room full of strangers.
None of these numbers say anything true about Matthew.
What is true is that the man fought his whole life for the sake of connection, and the people who loved him kept praying. Receipts for this access are now in the catalog. Read it like a ledger, not a tabloid. Then go and call the person you are afraid to lose in your life.
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Figs O’Sullivan and his wife, Till, are San Francisco couples therapists, relationship experts at Stars and Silicon Valley, and founders of Empathi, who built Figlet, an AI-powered relationship coach trained in their clinical work.
