I start to speak, but somebody yells John’s name, startling him. The phone slips out of his hand and careens toward the floor, but just as I feel like my face might hit the ground, John catches it, bringing himself back into view. “Crap—gotta go!” he says. Then, under his breath: “Fucking morons.” And the screen goes blank.
Apparently, our session is over.
With time to spare before my next session, I head into the kitchen for a snack. Two of my colleagues are there. Hillary is making tea. Mike’s eating a sandwich.
“Hypothetically,” I say, “what would you do if your patient’s wife was seeing your therapist, and your patient thought your therapist was an idiot?”
They look up at me, eyebrows raised. Hypotheticals in this kitchen are never hypothetical.
“I’d switch therapists,” Hillary says.
“I’d keep my therapist and switch patients,” Mike says.
They both laugh.
“No, really,” I say. “What would you do? It gets worse: He wants me to talk to my therapist about his wife. His wife doesn’t know he’s in therapy yet, so it’s a non-issue now, but what if at some point he tells her and then wants me to consult with my therapist about his wife, and his wife consents? Do I have to disclose that he’s my therapist?”
“Absolutely,” Hillary says.
“Not necessarily,” Mike says at the same time.
“Exactly,” I say. “It’s not clear. And you know why it’s not clear? Because this kind of thing NEVER HAPPENS! When has something like this ever happened?”
Hillary pours me some tea.
“I once had two people come to me individually for therapy right after they’d separated,” Mike says. “They had different last names and listed different addresses because of the separation, so I didn’t know they were married until the second session with each of them, when I realized I was hearing the same stories from different sides. Their mutual friend, who was a former patient, gave both of them my name. I had to refer them out.”
“Yeah,” I say, “but this isn’t two patients with a conflict of interest. My therapist is mixed up in this. What are the odds of that?”
I notice Hillary looking away. “What?” I say.
“Nothing.”
Mike looks at her. She blushes. “Spill it,” he says.
Hillary sighs. “Okay. About twenty years ago, when I was first starting out, I was seeing a young guy for depression. I felt like we were making progress, but then the therapy seemed to stall. I thought he wasn’t ready to move forward, but really I just didn’t have enough experience and was too green to know the difference. Anyway, he left, and about a year later, I ran into him at my therapist’s.”
Mike grins. “Your patient left you for your own therapist?”
Hillary nods. “The funny thing is, in therapy, I talked about how stuck I was with this patient and how helpless I felt when he left. I’m sure the patient later told my therapist about his inept former therapist and used my name at some point. My therapist had to have put two and two together.”
I think about this in relation to the Wendell situation. “But your therapist never said anything?”
“Never,” Hillary says. “So one day I brought it up. But of course she can’t say that she sees this guy, so we kept the conversation focused on how I deal with the insecurities of being a new therapist. Pfft. My feelings? Whatever. I was just dying to know how their therapy was going and what she did differently with him that worked better.”
“You’ll never know,” I say.
Hillary shakes her head. “I’ll never know.”
“We’re like vaults,” Mike says. “You can’t break us.”
Hillary turns to me. “So, are you going to tell your therapist?”
“Should I?”
They both shrug. Mike glances at the clock, tosses his trash into the can. Hillary and I take our last sips of tea. It’s time for our next sessions. One by one, the green lights on the kitchen’s master panel go on, and we file out to retrieve our patients from the waiting room.
22
Jail
“Hmm,” Wendell says after I make my book confession well into our session. It’s taken me a while to get up the courage to tell him.
For two weeks I’ve moved over to position B planning to confess all, but once we’re face-to-face, catty-corner on the couches, I stall. I talk about my son’s teacher (pregnant), my dad’s health (poor), a dream (freaky), chocolate (a tangent, I’ll admit), my emerging forehead wrinkles (not a tangent, surprisingly), and the meaning of life (mine). Wendell tries to focus me, but I’m skating so quickly from one thing to the next that I outmaneuver him. Or so I think.
Out of the blue, Wendell yawns. It’s a fake yawn, a strategic one, a big, dramatic, gaping yawn. It’s a yawn that says, Until you tell me what’s really on your mind, you’ll stay stuck exactly where you are. Then he sits back and studies me.
“I have something to tell you,” I say.
He looks at me like No shit.
And out comes the entire story in one fell swoop.
“Hmm,” he says again. “So you don’t want to write this book.”
I nod.
“And if you don’t turn in the book, there will be serious financial and professional repercussions?”
“Right.” I shrug as if to say, See how screwed I am? “If I’d just done the parenting book,” I say, “I wouldn’t be in this situation.” It’s the refrain I’ve been repeating to myself daily—sometimes hourly—for the past few years.
Wendell does his shrug-smile-wait routine.
“I know.” I sigh. “I made a colossal, irrevocable mistake.” I feel the panic well up again.
“That’s not what I’m thinking,” he says.
“Then, what?”
He starts singing. “‘Half my life is over, oh yeah. Half my life has passed me by.’”
I roll my eyes, but he keeps going. It’s a bluesy tune and I’m trying to place it. Etta James? B. B. King?
“‘I wish I could go back, change the past. Have more years, to get it right . . .’”
And then I realize it’s not a famous song. It’s Wendell Bronson, impromptu lyricist. His lyrics are awful, but he surprises me with his strong, resonant voice.
The song goes on, and he’s getting really into it. Tapping his feet. Snapping his fingers. If we were out in the world, I’d think he was a nerdy guy in a cardigan, but in here, it’s his confidence and spontaneity that strike me, his willingness to be fully himself, entirely unconcerned that he’ll come across as foolish or unprofessional. I can’t imagine doing this in front of my patients.
“‘’Cause half my life is o-o-o-o-over.’” He arrives at the finale, complete with jazz hands.
Wendell stops singing and looks at me seriously. I want to tell him that he’s being annoying, that he’s trivializing what is realistically and practically an anxiety-provoking problem. But before I can say that, I feel a heavy sadness descend, seemingly out of nowhere. His tune is going through my head.
“It’s like that Mary Oliver poem,” I say to Wendell. “‘What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?’ I thought I knew what I planned to do, but now everything has changed. I was going to be with Boyfriend. I was going to write what mattered to me. I never expected—”
“—to be in this situation.” Wendell gives me a look. Here we go again. We’re like an old married couple by now, finishing each other’s sentences.
But then Wendell is silent, and it doesn’t seem like the intentional kind of silence I’m used to. It occurs to me that maybe Wendell is stumped, the way I sometimes get stumped in sessions when my patients are stuck and I get stuck too. He’s tried yawning and singing and redirecting me and asking important questions. But still, I’m back to where I usually go—the saga of my losses.
“I was just thinking about what you want in here,” he says. “How do you think I can help you?”
I’m thrown by his q
uestion. I don’t know if he’s enlisting my help as a fellow therapist or asking me as his patient. Either way, I’m not sure; what do I want from therapy?
“I don’t know,” I say, but as soon as I say it, I’m scared. Maybe Wendell can’t help me. Maybe nothing can. Maybe I just have to learn to live with my choices.
“I think I can help,” he says, “but maybe not in the way you imagine. I can’t bring your boyfriend back, and I can’t give you a redo. And now you’re in this book situation and you want me to save you from that too. And I can’t do that either.”
I let out a snort at how preposterous this is. “I don’t want you to save me,” I say. “I’m a head of household, not a damsel in distress.”
He locks his eyes on mine. I look away.
“Nobody is going to save you,” he says quietly.
“But I don’t want to be saved!” I insist, though this time part of me wonders, Wait, do I? On some level, don’t we all? I think about how people come to therapy expecting to feel better, but what does better really mean?
There’s a magnet that somebody stuck on the refrigerator in our office’s kitchen: PEACE. IT DOES NOT MEAN TO BE IN A PLACE WHERE THERE IS NO NOISE, TROUBLE, OR HARD WORK. IT MEANS TO BE IN THE MIDST OF THOSE THINGS AND STILL BE CALM IN YOUR HEART. We can help patients find peace, but maybe a different kind than they imagined they’d find when they started treatment. As the late psychotherapist John Weakland famously said, “Before successful therapy, it’s the same damn thing over and over. After successful therapy, it’s one damn thing after another.”
I know that therapy won’t make all my problems disappear, prevent new ones from developing, or ensure that I’ll always act from a place of enlightenment. Therapists don’t perform personality transplants; they just help to take the sharp edges off. A patient may become less reactive or critical, more open and able to let people in. In other words, therapy is about understanding the self that you are. But part of getting to know yourself is to unknow yourself—to let go of the limiting stories you’ve told yourself about who you are so that you aren’t trapped by them, so you can live your life and not the story you’ve been telling yourself about your life.
But how to help people do this is another matter.
I go through the problem again in my mind. Must write book to have roof over head. Turned down opportunity to write book that would have put roof over head for years to come. Can’t seem to write stupid book about stupid topic that’s making me miserable. Will force myself to write stupid miserable happiness book. Have tried to force myself to write stupid miserable happiness book but end up on Facebook, feeling envious of all the people who manage to have their shit together.
I remember a quote from Einstein: “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” I’ve always felt that made sense, but, like most of us, I also believe that I should be able to think my way out of my problem by going over and over how I thought myself into it.
“I just see no way out of this,” I say. “And I don’t just mean the book. I mean the whole this—everything that’s happened.”
Wendell leans back, uncrosses and recrosses his legs, then closes his eyes, something he does when he seems to be gathering his thoughts.
When he opens his eyes again, we sit there for a while, saying nothing, two therapists comfortable together in a long silence. I lean back and luxuriate in it, and I think about how I wish everyone could do this more in daily life, simply be together with no phones, laptops, TVs, or idle chitchat. Just presence. Sitting like this makes me feel relaxed and energized at the same time.
Finally, Wendell speaks up.
“I’m reminded,” he begins, “of a famous cartoon. It’s of a prisoner, shaking the bars, desperately trying to get out—but to his right and left, it’s open, no bars.”
He pauses, allowing the image to sink in.
“All the prisoner has to do is walk around. But still, he frantically shakes the bars. That’s most of us. We feel completely stuck, trapped in our emotional cells, but there’s a way out—as long as we’re willing to see it.”
He lets that last part linger between us. As long as we’re willing to see it. He gestures to an imaginary prison cell with his hand, inviting me to see it.
I look away, but I feel Wendell’s eyes on me.
I sigh. Okay.
I close my eyes and take a breath. I start by picturing the prison, a tiny cell with drab beige walls. I picture the metal bars, thick and gray and rusty. I picture myself in an orange jumpsuit, furiously shaking those bars, pleading for release. I picture my life in this tiny cell with nothing but the pungent smell of urine and the prospect of a dismal, constrained future. I imagine screaming, “Get me out of here! Save me!” I envision myself frantically looking to my right, then to my left, then doing one hell of a double take. I notice my whole body respond; I feel lighter, like a thousand-pound weight has been lifted, as the realization hits me: You are your own jailer.
I open my eyes and glance at Wendell. He raises his right eyebrow as if to say, I know—you see. I saw you see.
“Keep looking,” he whispers.
I close my eyes again. Now I’m walking around the bars and heading toward the exit, moving tentatively at first, but as I get closer to it, I start to run. Outside, I can feel my feet on the ground, the breeze on my skin, the sun’s warmth on my face. I’m free! I run as fast as I can, then after a while I slow down and check behind me. No prison guards are giving chase. It occurs to me that there were no prison guards to begin with. Of course!
Most of us come to therapy feeling trapped—imprisoned by our thoughts, behaviors, marriages, jobs, fears, or past. Sometimes we imprison ourselves with a narrative of self-punishment. If we have a choice between believing one of two things, both of which we have evidence for—I’m unlovable, I’m lovable—often we choose the one that makes us feel bad. Why do we keep our radios tuned to the same static-ridden stations (the everyone’s-life-is-better-than-mine station, the I-can’t-trust-people station, the nothing-works-out-for-me station) instead of moving the dial up or down? Change the station. Walk around the bars. Who’s stopping us but ourselves?
There is a way out—as long as we’re willing to see it. A cartoon, of all things, has taught me the secret of life.
I open my eyes and smile, and Wendell smiles back. It’s a conspiratorial smile, one that says, Don’t be fooled. It may seem as though you’ve had an earth-shattering breakthrough, but this is just the beginning. I know full well what challenges lie ahead, and Wendell knows that I know, because we both know something else: freedom involves responsibility, and there’s a part of most of us that finds responsibility frightening.
Might it feel safer to stay in jail? I picture the bars and the open sides again. A part of me lobbies to stay, another to go. I choose to go. But walking around the bars in my mind is different from walking around them in real life.
“Insight is the booby prize of therapy” is my favorite maxim of the trade, meaning that you can have all the insight in the world, but if you don’t change when you’re out in the world, the insight—and the therapy—is worthless. Insight allows you to ask yourself, Is this something that’s being done to me or am I doing it to myself? The answer gives you choices, but it’s up to you to make them.
“Are you ready to start talking about the fight you’re in?” Wendell asks.
“You mean the fight with Boyfriend?” I begin. “Or with myself—”
“No, your fight with death,” Wendell says.
For a second I’m confused, but then I flash to my dream about running into Boyfriend at the mall. Him: Did you ever write your book? Me: What book? Him: The book about your death.
Oh. My. God.
Typically therapists are several steps ahead of our patients—not because we’re smarter or wiser but because we have the vantage point of being outside their lives. I’ll say to a patient who has bought the ring but can’t seem to find the right time
to propose to his girlfriend, “I don’t think you’re sure you want to marry her,” and he’ll say, “What? Of course I am! I’m doing it this weekend!” And then he goes home and doesn’t propose, because the weather was bad and he wanted to do it at the beach. We’ll have the same dialogue for weeks, until one day he’ll come back and say, “Maybe I don’t want to marry her.” Many people who say, “No, that’s not me,” find themselves a week or a month or a year later saying, “Yeah, actually, that’s me.”
I have a feeling that Wendell has been storing up this question, waiting for just the right moment to float it out there. Therapists are always weighing the balance between forming a trusting alliance and getting to the real work so the patient doesn’t have to continue suffering. From the outset, we move both slowly and quickly, slowing the content down, speeding up the relationship, planting seeds strategically along the way. As in nature, if you plant the seeds too early, they won’t sprout. If you plant too late, they might make progress, but you’ve missed the most fertile ground. If you plant at just the right time, though, they’ll soak up the nutrients and grow. Our work is an intricate dance between support and confrontation.
Wendell asks about my fight with death at exactly the right moment—but for more reasons than he could possibly know.
23
Trader Joe’s
It’s a busy Saturday morning at Trader Joe’s, and I’m scanning the lines to see which is shortest while my son darts off to look at the display of chocolate bars. Despite the chaos, the cashiers seem unfazed. A young guy whose arms are covered in tattoos rings a bell, and a bagger in leggings dances over and packs up a customer’s groceries, jiving to the canned music. In the next aisle a hipster with a Mohawk calls for a price check, and at the end of the row, a pretty blond cashier juggles some oranges to amuse a toddler having a meltdown in her stroller.
It takes me a minute before I realize that the juggling cashier is my patient Julie. I haven’t seen her new blond wig yet, though she had mentioned it in therapy.
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone_A Therapist, HER Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed Page 16
