A small comfort: I wasn’t alone in Googling my therapist.
Julie once said something to me about a scientist at her university that I’d written about, as if we’d previously mentioned that we both knew him (we hadn’t). Rita once alluded to the fact that she and I had both grown up in Los Angeles, though I’d never told her where I’d grown up. John finished one of his “idiot” rants about a just-out-of-college hire who’d graduated from Stanford with “The Harvard of the West, my ass.” Then, looking sheepishly at me, he added, “I mean, no offense.” He must have known I’d gone to Stanford. I also know that John Googled Wendell to check out his wife’s therapist, because once he complained that Wendell had no website or photo, which immediately made John suspicious. “What’s the idiot trying to hide?” he’d said. “Oh, right—his incompetence.”
So patients do Google their therapists, but that wasn’t my excuse. In fact, it had never occurred to me to Google Wendell until he suggested that by Google-stalking Boyfriend I was holding on to a future that had been canceled. I was watching Boyfriend’s future unfold while I stayed locked in the past. I’d need to accept that his future and mine, his present and mine, were now separate and that all we had left in common was our history.
Sitting at my laptop, I remembered the way Wendell had made this all so clear. Then I thought about how I knew nearly nothing about Wendell other than the fact that he’d trained with Caroline, the colleague who gave me his name. I didn’t know where he’d gotten his degree or what he specialized in or any of the basic information people tend to gather online before seeing a therapist. I’d been so eager for help that I took Caroline’s referral for my “friend” sight unseen.
If something isn’t working, do something different, therapists are taught in training when they’re hitting a wall with a patient, and we also suggest it to our patients: Why continue doing the same unhelpful thing over and over? If following Boyfriend online was keeping me stuck, Wendell implied, I should do something different. But what? I tried closing my eyes and taking some breaths, an intervention that can disrupt a compulsive urge. And it worked—sort of. When I opened my eyes, I didn’t type Boyfriend’s name into Google.
I typed in Wendell’s.
John had been right; Wendell was virtually invisible. No website. No LinkedIn. No Psychology Today listing or public Facebook or Twitter. Just a single link with his office address and phone number. For a practitioner of my generation, Wendell was unusually old-school.
I scanned the search results again. There were several Wendell Bronsons, but none was my therapist. I kept looking, and two pages in, I noticed a Yelp listing for Wendell. It had one review. I clicked.
The reviewer, who went by the name Angela L., had been named an “elite” reviewer for five years in a row, and no wonder. She had posted about restaurants, dry cleaners, mattress warehouses, dog parks, dentists (a revolving door of them), gynecologists, manicurists, roofers, florists, clothing stores, hotels, pest-control companies, movers, pharmacies, car dealers, tattoo parlors, a personal injury lawyer, and even a criminal defense attorney (something about being “falsely accused” of a parking violation, which had somehow become a criminal offense).
But most striking about Angela L. wasn’t the sheer number of reviews; it was how aggressively negative nearly all of them were.
FAIL! she’d write. Or DUMBASSES! Angela L. seemed to be horribly disappointed with everything. The way her cuticles were cut. The way a receptionist spoke to her. Even when she was on vacation, nothing escaped her scrutiny. She’d post reviews while at the rental-car booth, at the hotel check-in, upon arrival in her room, in seemingly every place she ate and drank during her trip, and even out at the beach (where she’d once stepped on a rock in what was supposed to be silky white sand and claimed that it had injured her foot). Invariably, everyone she encountered was lazy or incompetent or stupid.
She reminded me of John. And then it occurred to me that maybe Angela L. was Margo! Because the one person in the world that Angela L. didn’t feel pissed off at or treated unfairly by was Wendell.
He got Angela L.’s very first five-star review.
I’ve been to many therapists—no surprise there—but this time I feel like I’m making real strides, she wrote. She went on to gush about Wendell’s compassion and wisdom, adding that he was helping her to see how her behaviors were contributing to her marital difficulties. Because of Wendell, she added, she had been able to reconcile with her husband after they’d separated. (So not Margo.)
The review had been posted a year ago. Scanning her subsequent entries, I noticed a trend. Gradually, her string of one- and two-star pans became three- and then four-star praise. Angela L. was becoming less angry at the world, less prone to blaming others for her unhappiness (what we call externalizing). There was less raging at customer-service reps, fewer perceived slights (personalization), more self-awareness (acknowledging, in one review, that she could be difficult to please). The quantity of posts had dropped off too, making the endeavor seem less obsessive. She was approaching “emotional sobriety”—the ability to regulate one’s feelings without self-medicating, whether that medication comes in the form of substances, defenses, affairs, or the internet.
Kudos to Wendell, I thought. I could see Angela L.’s emotional evolution through the progression of her Yelp reviews.
But just as I was admiring Wendell’s skill, I came across another irate one-star review from Angela L. It was for a shuttle service, a downgrade from an earlier four-star review she’d given the company. Angela L. seemed livid that the bus played loud Muzak and the driver couldn’t turn it off. How could they “attack” riders like this? Three paragraphs later, punctuated by multiple ALL CAPS and exclamation marks, Angela L. ended the review with I’ve used this company for months, but no more. Our relationship is over!!!
Her dramatic breakup with the shuttle service after all those more balanced reviews might have been expected. Like many people, she’d probably backslid, regretted it, realized she’d hit bottom, and decided that moderation wasn’t enough; she had to quit Yelp entirely. And so far she had—that had been Angela L.’s final review, posted six months ago.
But I wasn’t ready to quit my Google-stalking. Half an hour later, my cursor hovered over the interview with Wendell’s mother. The therapist I knew seemed both grounded and unconventional, tough and gentle, confident and awkward. Who had raised him? I felt like I’d found the mother lode—so to speak.
Of course, I clicked.
The Q&A, which turned out to be a ten-page family history, appeared on the blog of a local organization that was documenting the lives of notable families who had lived in that Midwestern town for half a century.
Both of Wendell’s parents, I learned, had grown up poor. His maternal grandmother died in childbirth, so his mom went to live with her father’s sister in a small apartment, and their family became hers. Wendell’s father, meanwhile, had become a self-made man, the first in his family to go to college. It was at this large state university that he met Wendell’s mother, the first woman in her family to get a college degree. After they married, he started a business, she gave birth to a brood of five, and by the time Wendell was a teenager, the family had become spectacularly wealthy—one of the reasons for the interview I was reading. Apparently, Wendell’s parents gave away much of their wealth to charitable causes.
By the time I got to the names of Wendell’s siblings and their spouses and children, I had become as unhinged as Angela L. I researched Wendell’s entire family—what they did for a living, what cities they were in, how old their kids were, who was divorced. None of this was easy to find; my mission involved extensive cross-referencing and hours of time.
Admittedly, I knew a few things about Wendell from comments he’d strategically dropped into our sessions. Once, after I said, “But it’s not fair!” about the Boyfriend situation, Wendell looked at me and replied, kindly, “You sound like my ten-year-old. What makes you think life is s
upposed to be fair?”
I took in his point, but I also thought, Oh, he has a kid around my son’s age. When he tossed me these morsels, they felt like unexpected gifts.
But that night on the internet, there was always another lead, another link. He’d met his wife through a mutual friend; his family lived in a Spanish-style house that, according to Zillow, had doubled in value since they’d bought it; recently, when he’d needed to reschedule our appointment, it was because he was presenting at a conference.
By the time I finally shut down my laptop, the night was over and I felt guilty, empty, and exhausted.
The internet can be both a salve and an addiction, a way to block out pain (the salve) while simultaneously creating it (the addiction). When the cyber-drug wears off, you feel worse, not better. Patients think they want to know about their therapists, but often, once they find out, they wish they hadn’t, because this knowledge has the potential to contaminate the relationship, leaving patients to edit, consciously or not, what they say in their sessions.
I knew that what I’d done had been destructive. And I also knew that I wouldn’t tell Wendell about it. I understood why, when a patient inadvertently reveals knowing more about me than I’ve shared and I ask about it, there’s a slight hesitation while the person decides whether to be honest or lie. It’s hard to confess to stalking your therapist. I was ashamed—of invading Wendell’s privacy, of wasting away the evening—and I vowed (perhaps like Angela L.) never to do it again.
Still, the damage had been done. When I went back to Wendell the following Wednesday, I felt weighed down by my newfound knowledge. I couldn’t help thinking that it was only a matter of time before I’d slip up—just like my own patients did.
28
Addicted
Chart note, Charlotte:
Patient, age twenty-five, reports feeling “anxious” for the past few months, though nothing of note has recently occurred. States that she is “bored” at her job. Describes difficulty with parents and a busy social life but no history of significant romantic relationships. Reports that to relax, she drinks “a couple glasses of wine” nightly.
“You’re going to kill me,” Charlotte says as she saunters in and slowly settles herself into the oversize chair diagonally to my right, arranges a pillow on her lap, then tosses the throw blanket over it. She has never sat on the couch, not even at the first session, instead making the chair her throne. As usual, she takes her belongings out of her bag, one by one, unpacking for her fifty-minute stay. On the left arm of the chair, she places her phone and pedometer; on the right, her water bottle and sunglasses.
Today she’s wearing blush and lipstick, and I know what that means: she’s been flirting again with the guy in the waiting room.
Our suite has a large reception area where patients wait to be seen. Leaving their appointments is more private—there’s an exit through an interior corridor that leads to the building’s hallway. Patients generally keep to themselves in the waiting room—but Charlotte has something going on.
The Dude, as Charlotte calls the object of her flirtation (neither of us knows his name), is my colleague Mike’s patient, and he and Charlotte have their sessions at the same time. According to Charlotte, the first time the Dude showed up, they noticed each other immediately, stealing glances over their respective phones. This went on for weeks, and after their sessions, which also ended at the same time, they’d exit through the interior door only to steal more glances at each other in the elevator before going their separate ways.
Finally, one day, Charlotte came in with news.
“The Dude just talked to me!” she whispered, as if the Dude could hear her through the walls.
“What did he say?” I asked.
“He said, ‘So, what’s your issue?’”
Great line, I thought, impressed despite its cheesiness.
“So here’s the part where you’re going to kill me,” she said that day. She took a big breath, but I’d heard this refrain before. If Charlotte drank too much the previous week, she’d open the session with “You’re going to kill me.” If she’d hooked up with a guy and regretted it (as happened often), she’d open with “You’re going to kill me.” I was even going to kill her when she put off researching graduate-school options and missed the application deadlines. We’d talked before about how underneath the projection was a deep sense of shame.
“Okay, you don’t want to kill me,” she conceded. “But, ugh. I didn’t know what to say, so I froze. I completely ignored him and pretended to text. God, I hate myself.”
I imagined the Dude at that very moment sitting in my colleague’s therapy room just a few doors away and recounting the same incident: I finally spoke to that girl in the waiting room, and she completely rejected me. Ugh! I sounded like an idiot. God, I hate myself.
Still, the next week, the flirtation continued. When the Dude walked into the waiting room, Charlotte told me, she opened with a line she’d been rehearsing all week.
“You want to know what my issue is?” Charlotte asked him. “I freeze when strangers in waiting rooms ask me questions.” That made the Dude laugh, and they were both laughing when I opened the door to greet Charlotte.
Upon seeing me, the Dude blushed. Guilty? I wondered.
As we walked toward my office, Charlotte and I passed Mike, who was approaching to collect the Dude. Mike and I met each other’s eyes then immediately looked away. Yup, I thought. The Dude has told him about Charlotte too.
By the following week, the waiting-room banter was in full swing. Charlotte told me that she asked the Dude his name, and he replied, “I can’t tell you.”
“Why not?” she asked.
“Everything in here is confidential,” he said.
“Okay, Confidential,” she shot back. “My name’s Charlotte. I’m going to go talk about you with my therapist now.”
“Hope you get your money’s worth,” he said with a sexy grin.
I’d seen the Dude a few times, and Charlotte was right, he had a killer smile. And while I didn’t know the first thing about him, something in me sensed danger for Charlotte. Given her history with men, I had a feeling the whole thing would end badly—and two weeks later, Charlotte walked in with an update. The Dude had come to his session with a woman.
Of course, I thought. Unavailable. Just Charlotte’s type. Charlotte, in fact, had used that same expression every time she mentioned the Dude. He’s so my type.
What most people mean by type is a sense of attraction—a type of physical appearance or a type of personality turns them on. But what underlies a person’s type, in fact, is a sense of familiarity. It’s no coincidence that people who had angry parents often end up choosing angry partners, that those with alcoholic parents are frequently drawn to partners who drink quite a bit, or that those who had withdrawn or critical parents find themselves married to spouses who are withdrawn or critical.
Why would people do this to themselves? Because the pull toward that feeling of “home” makes what they want as adults hard to disentangle from what they experienced as children. They have an uncanny attraction to people who share the characteristics of a parent who in some way hurt them. In the beginning of a relationship, these characteristics will be barely perceptible, but the unconscious has a finely tuned radar system inaccessible to the conscious mind. It’s not that people want to get hurt again. It’s that they want to master a situation in which they felt helpless as children. Freud called this “repetition compulsion.” Maybe this time, the unconscious imagines, I can go back and heal that wound from long ago by engaging with somebody familiar—but new. The only problem is, by choosing familiar partners, people guarantee the opposite result: they reopen the wounds and feel even more inadequate and unlovable.
This happens completely outside of awareness. Charlotte, for instance, said that she wanted a reliable boyfriend capable of intimacy, but every time she met somebody who was her type, chaos and frustration ensued. Conversely, afte
r a recent date with a guy who seemed to possess many of the qualities she said she wanted in a partner, she came to therapy and reported: “It’s too bad, but there just wasn’t any chemistry.” To her unconscious, his emotional stability felt too foreign.
The therapist Terry Real described our well-worn behaviors as “our internalized family of origin. It’s our repertoire of relational themes.” People don’t have to tell you their stories with words because they always act them out for you. Often they project negative expectations onto the therapist, but if the therapist doesn’t meet those negative expectations, this “corrective emotional experience” with a reliable and benevolent person changes the patients; the world, they learn, turns out not to be their family of origin. If Charlotte works through her complicated feelings toward her parents with me, she’ll find herself increasingly attracted to a different type, one that might give her the unfamiliar experience she’s seeking with a compassionate, reliable, and mature partner. Until then, every time she meets an available guy who might love her back, her unconscious rejects his stability as “not interesting.” She still equates feeling loved not with peace or joy but with anxiety.
And so it goes. Same guy, different name, same outcome.
“Did you see her?” Charlotte asked, referring to the woman who came to therapy with the Dude. “She must be his girlfriend.” In the quick peek I’d gotten of the two of them, they were sitting in adjoining chairs but not interacting in any way. Like the Dude, the young woman was tall with thick dark hair. She could be his sister, I thought, coming with him for family therapy. But Charlotte was probably right; more likely she was the girlfriend.
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone_A Therapist, HER Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed Page 20
