Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

by Lori Gottlieb

I thought it would feel good to be touched by a man again, but I think I’ll just stick with my pedicures.”

“Every day,” she continues, “the mother unlocks the front door, opens it up, and calls out, ‘Hello, family!’ That’s how she greets them: ‘Hello, family!’” Her voice falters and she takes a minute to compose herself. The children, Rita explains, come running, squealing with joy, and her husband gives her a big, excited kiss. Rita tells me that she watches all this through the peephole that she secretly had enlarged for spying purposes. (“Don’t judge,” she says.) “And do you know what I do?” she asks. “I know it’s horribly ungenerous, but I seethe with anger.” She’s sobbing now. “There’s never been a ‘Hello, family!’ for me.”

rapprochement

I open the door and yell, “Hello, family!” Zach shouts from his room, “Hey, Mom!” Cesar takes off an earbud and calls out from the kitchen, where he’s preparing dinner, “Hey!”

Nobody runs up excitedly to greet me, nobody squeals with delight, but I don’t feel deprived the way Rita does—just the opposite. I go to my bedroom to change into sweatpants, and when I come back out, we all start talking at once, sharing our days, teasing one another, vying for airtime, putting plates on the table and pouring the drinks.

I got chills. People often use that expression loosely, but I actually did get chills, goose bumps and all. It was shocking how right this felt, as if my life’s plan had finally been revealed. In journalism, I thought, I could tell people’s stories, but I wasn’t changing their stories. As a therapist, I could help people change their stories. And with this dual career, I could have the perfect combination.

“Being a therapist is going to require a blend of the cognitive and the creative,” the dean continued. “There’s an artistry in combining the two. What could be a better mix of your abilities and interests?”

Boyfriend seemed to be putting it all together. “So that’s how you know her.” He joked that dating a therapist was like dating a CIA agent.

He flashed his gleaming smile at the guy, and that’s when John noticed me looking at him. He froze, stunned to see his mistress-hooker-therapist standing there, the one whom he didn’t want his wife or, probably, his friend or daughter to know about.

inscrutable

Talking can keep people in their heads and safely away from their emotions. Being silent is like emptying the trash. When you stop tossing junk into the void—words, words, and more words—something important rises to the surface.

And when the silence is a shared experience, it can be a gold mine for thoughts and feelings that the patient didn’t even know existed.

Angela L. was becoming less angry at the world, less prone to blaming others for her unhappiness (what we call externalizing).

brood

Charlotte came to me three years after she had graduated from college, and while everything looked good on the outside—she had friends and a respectable job; she paid her own bills—she was also unsure of her career direction, conflicted about her parents, and generally lost.

Granted, I didn’t drink too much or sleep with random people, but I’d moved through that decade just as blindly.

At twenty-five, though, Charlotte has pain but not significant regret. Unlike me, she hasn’t had a midlife reckoning. Unlike Rita, she hasn’t damaged her children or married someone abusive. She has the gift of time, if she uses it wisely.

Charlotte didn’t think she had an addiction when she first entered treatment for depression and anxiety. She drank, she insisted, only “a couple of glasses” of wine each night “to relax.” (I immediately applied the standard therapeutic calculation used when somebody seems defensive about drug or alcohol use: whatever the total reported, double it.)

“I was thinking,” John began, “about the word therapist.” He took a bite of his salad. “You know, if you break it in two . . .” I knew where this was going. Therapist is spelled the same way as the rapist. It’s a common joke in the therapy world. I smiled. “I wonder if you’re trying to tell me that sometimes it’s hard to be here.” I’ve certainly felt that with Wendell, especially when his eyes seem to bore into me and there’s no place to hide. By day, therapists hear people’s secrets and fantasies, their shame and their failures, invading the spaces they normally keep private. Then—boom—the hour’s over. Just like that. Are we emotional rapists?

“So you think I’m a pain in the ass?” It took some effort not to emphasize the I, as in “So you think I’m a pain in the ass?”

Just as often, there are people who have extremely problematic relationships and fantastic sex, and there are people who are deeply in love but who don’t click with the same intensity in the bedroom.

“It feels like picking a scab instead of letting it be.”

People communicate through their attendance—whether they’re prompt or late, cancel an hour beforehand, or don’t show up at all.

In his own way, John seemed to be forming an attachment to me. Or maybe it’s that I’ve been forming an attachment to him. I’ve come to feel real affection for John, to see flashes of humanity behind his obnoxious façade.

Medical school was also a trial by fire; in medicine, students learned procedures by the “see one, do one, teach one” method. In other words, you watched a physician, say, palpate an abdomen, you palpated the next abdomen yourself, and then you taught another student how to palpate an abdomen. Presto! You’re deemed competent to palpate abdomens.

Therapy, though, felt different to me. I found performing a concrete task with specific steps, like palpating an abdomen or starting an IV, less nerve-racking than figuring out how to apply the numerous abstract psychological theories I’d studied over the past several years to the hundreds of possible scenarios that any one therapy patient might present.

I’m so uncomfortable that I worry a nervous giggle might erupt.

The tsunami continues with no sign of letting up. I consider waiting it out, figuring she’ll run out of steam soon and then be ready to talk, the way my son would as a toddler after throwing a tantrum. But it just keeps going. And going. Finally I decide to say something, but as the words leave my lips, I’m convinced I’ve just uttered the dumbest thing that any therapist has ever said in the history of the field. I say, “Yeah, you seem depressed, all right.”

She cries some more, and through her tears, she says, “This is like . . . emotional yoga.”

(If you ever want proof that what people present online is a prettier version of their lives, become a therapist and Google your patients.

I learned quickly never to do this again, to always let patients be the sole narrators of their stories—pages of hits popped up. I saw images of her receiving a prestigious award, smiling at an event standing next to a handsome guy, looking cool and confident and at peace with the world in a magazine photo spread. Online, she bore no resemblance to the person who sat across from me in that room.)

Over the next few sessions, I get what I need for the clinic’s intake form, but it’s clear to me that’s all it is—a form. It takes a while to hear a person’s story and for that person to tell it, and like most stories—including mine—it bounces all over the place before you know what the plot really is.

nebulous

I’d brainstormed with her about volunteering, perhaps getting involved in the art world or at a museum, since her passions were painting and art history, but she came up with reasons to dismiss these suggestions as well.

In the following months, Myron and Rita did things together—took walks, visited museums, went to a few lectures, tried some new restaurants. But mostly, they cooked dinner and watched movies on Myron’s couch, both of them chattering throughout.

She hated the fact that she was almost seventy and still analyzing interactions with men with the same obsessiveness she had in college.

She hated feeling like a girl with a crush, foolish and helpless and confused.

Here’s what Myron realized: He missed Rita. Deeply. He wanted to tell her things—all the time, every day—the way he had wanted to tell his wife Myrna things throughout their marriage. Rita made him laugh and think, and when photos of his grandchildren popped up on his phone, he wanted to show them to Rita. He didn’t want to do any of this with Randie in the same way. He loved Rita’s sharp intellect and sharper wit, her creativity, her kindness. How she picked up his favorite cheese if she was at the grocery store. He liked Rita’s worldliness and wry observations and wise counsel whenever he asked her advice. He adored her throaty laugh and her eyes that were green in the sunlight and brown indoors and her bright red hair and her values. He loved that if they started a conversation on one topic, it would segue into two or three others before it would loop back around or that sometimes they’d get so immersed in their tangents that they’d forget what they’d been talking about in the first place. Her paintings and sculptures made his heart thrill.

Charlotte believes she’s been hit with a wave of “bad karma.” It seems as if, every other week, there’s another crisis—a traffic violation, an incident with her sublet—and while at first I felt bad for her and tried to help her cope, gradually I noticed that we’d stopped doing any therapy at all.

Sometimes “drama,” no matter how unpleasant, can be a form of self-medication, a way to calm ourselves down by avoiding the crises brewing inside.

One of the things that surprised me as a therapist was how often people wanted to be told what to do, as if I had the right answer or as if right and wrong answers existed for the bulk of choices people make in their daily lives.

ultimately humans want to have agency over their lives, which is why children spend their childhoods begging to make their own decisions. (Then they grow up and plead with me to take that freedom away.)

Here are some questions I’ve asked Wendell: “Is it normal for a fridge to break after ten years? Should I keep this one longer or pay to repair it?” (Wendell: “Are you really here to ask me something you can ask Siri?”)

Once he said, “I only know what I would do. I don’t know what you should do,” and instead of absorbing his meaning, I replied, “Okay, then, just tell me—what would you do?” Behind my questions lies the assumption that Wendell is a more competent human being than I am. Sometimes I wonder, Who am I to make the important decisions in my own life? Am I really qualified for this?

But no matter where people fall on those continuums, every decision they make is based on two things: fear and love. Therapy strives to teach you how to tell the two apart.

alexithymia.

A sexual assault in college—she was drinking, found herself at a party in a strange dorm room, naked, in a bed—will be reported in that same monotone. A retelling of a chaotic conversation with her mom will sound like she’s reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

When you’re a child and your father is loving and playful, then disappears for a while, and later comes back and acts as if nothing happened—and does this repeatedly—you learn that joy is fickle.

When your mother emerges from her depression and suddenly seems interested in your days and acts the way you see other kids’ moms acting, you don’t dare feel joy because you know from experience that it will all go away. And it does.

Like John, she’s prone to what we call “doorknob disclosures.”