“It was for a car,” she said, then added dryly, “I can’t remember which car, so clearly the commercial wasn’t very effective.”
The ad, she said, is set at night, and there’s a dog at the wheel. We see the dog driving through a suburban neighborhood, and then the camera pans to the interior, in the back, where there’s a puppy in a car seat, barking away. Mommy Dog keeps driving, glancing in the rearview mirror, until the smooth ride lulls the puppy to sleep. Mommy Dog finally pulls into her driveway, lovingly gazing at her sleeping pup, but the second she kills the motor, the puppy wakes up and once again starts barking away. With a resigned look on her face, Mommy Dog turns the car back on and starts driving again. We get the sense she’ll be driving around the neighborhood for quite a while.
By the time Charlotte got to the end of this story, she was sobbing, which was unusual for her. Charlotte generally betrays little, if any, real emotion—her face is a mask, her words, diversions. It’s not that she’s hiding her feelings; it’s that she can’t access them. There’s a word for this kind of emotional blindness: alexithymia. She doesn’t know what she’s feeling or doesn’t have the words to express it. Praise from her boss will be reported in a monotone, and I have to probe . . . and probe . . . and probe, until I finally get to a hint of pride. 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.
Sometimes people can’t identify their feelings because they were talked out of them as children. The child says, “I’m angry,” and the parent says, “Really? Over such a tiny thing? You’re so sensitive!” Or the kid says, “I’m sad,” and the parent says, “Don’t be sad. Hey, look, a balloon!” Or the child says, “I’m scared,” and the parent says, “There’s nothing to be worried about. Don’t be such a baby.” But nobody can keep profound feelings sealed up forever. Inevitably, when we least expect it—seeing a commercial, for instance—they escape.
“I don’t know why this makes me so sad,” Charlotte said about the car commercial.
Watching her cry, I understood not just her pain but the reason she constantly pushed for me to make her decisions. For Charlotte, there had been no Mommy Dog in the driver’s seat. With Mom immersed in her depression, taking to her bed between bouts of inebriated late-night partying; with Dad frequently out of town for “business”; with two chaotic parents who argued with abandon and liberal strings of expletives, sometimes so loudly that the neighbors complained—Charlotte had been forced to act as a grownup prematurely, like an underage driver navigating her life without a license. She rarely got to see her parents acting like adults, like her friends’ parents.
I imagined her as a child—What time should I leave for school? How do I deal with a friend who said something mean today? What should I do when I find drugs in my dad’s desk drawer? What does it mean when it’s midnight and my mom isn’t home? How do I apply to college? She’d had to parent herself, and her younger brother too.
Children, however, don’t like having to be hyper-competent. So it’s not surprising that Charlotte wants me to be the mother for her now. I can be the “normal” parent who safely and lovingly drives the car, and she can have the experience of being taken care of in a way she never has before. But in order to cast me in the competent role, Charlotte believes she has to cast herself as the helpless one, letting me see only her problems—or, as Wendell once put it in relation to what I do with him: “seduce me with her misery.” Patients often do this as a way to ensure that the therapist won’t forget about their pain if they mention something positive. Good things happen in Charlotte’s life too, but I rarely hear about them; if I do, it’s either in passing or months after they occurred.
I think of this misery-seduction dynamic between Charlotte and me, and between a younger Charlotte and her parents. No matter what Charlotte did—getting drunk, staying out late, being promiscuous—it didn’t have the desired effect. This went wrong. That went wrong. Pay attention to me. Can you even hear me?
Now, after the questions about the laptop and the spilled coffee, Charlotte is asking what she should do with the Dude from the waiting room. She hadn’t seen him for a few weeks, then he came with the girlfriend, and today he came alone again. A few minutes ago, in the waiting room, he asked her on a date. Or at least she thinks it’s a date. He asked her to “hang out” tonight. She said yes.
I look at Charlotte. Why on earth would you think that’s a good idea?
Okay, I don’t say this out loud. But sometimes, and not just with Charlotte, I’ll hear something a patient is saying—some self-destructive course of action she’s taken or is about to take (for instance, telling her employer how she really feels in the service of “being authentic”)—and I’ll have to suppress the urge to blurt out, No! Don’t do it!
But I can’t just bear witness to a train wreck either.
Charlotte and I have talked about anticipating the outcome of her decisions, but I know this is more than an intellectual process. Repetition compulsion is a formidable beast. For Charlotte, stability and its attendant joy isn’t to be trusted; it makes her feel queasy, anxious. 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. Every single time. Better to expect nothing too stable. Better to “hang out” with the guy in the waiting room who either still has a girlfriend or no longer does but flirted with you when he did.
“I don’t know what his deal with the girlfriend is,” Charlotte continues. “You think this is a bad idea?”
“How do you feel about it?”
“I don’t know.” Charlotte shrugs. “Excited? Scared?”
“Scared of what?”
“I don’t know. That he won’t like me outside of the waiting room or that I’m his rebound after his girlfriend. Or that he’s fucked up because he was having problems with his girlfriend in the first place. I mean, why else would they be coming to therapy?”
Charlotte starts fidgeting, playing with her sunglasses on the arm of the chair.
“Or,” she goes on, “what if he’s still with his girlfriend and this isn’t a date but just a friend thing, and I didn’t realize that, and then I have to see him again in the waiting room each week?”
I tell Charlotte that the way she speaks about the Dude reminds me of how she’s described her state of mind before interactions with her parents, not just as a child, but now, as an adult. Will it go well? Will they behave themselves? Will we get into an argument? Will my dad show up or cancel at the last minute? Will my mom act inappropriately in public? Will we have fun? Will I be humiliated?
“Yeah,” Charlotte says. “I won’t go.” But I know she will.
When our time is up, Charlotte goes through her ritual (expressing disbelief that the hour is over, slowly packing up her belongings, stretching languidly). She ambles toward the door but stops at the threshold, as she often does to ask me a question or say something she should have said during the session. Like John, she’s prone to what we call “doorknob disclosures.”
“By the way,” she begins casually, although I have a feeling that whatever comes next will be anything but an offhand aside. It’s not uncommon for patients to go through an entire session talking about this or that, only to spill something important in the last ten seconds (“I think I’m bisexual,” “My biological mother found me on Facebook”). People do this for a variety of reasons—they’re embarrassed, they don’t want you to have a chance to comment, they want to leave you feeling as unsettled as they do. (Special delivery! Here’s all my turmoil; sit in
it all week, will you?) Or it’s a wish: Keep me in mind.
This time, though, nothing comes out. Charlotte just stands there. I wonder if she’s thinking about something particularly hard for her to address—her drinking, or her hope that her father will pick up the phone when she calls on his birthday next week. Instead she blurts out: “Where did you get that top?”
It seems like such a simple question. I’ve had an Uber driver, a barista at Starbucks, and a stranger on the street all ask me the same question about this new top—one of my favorites—and each time, I answered without a hint of hesitation. “Anthropologie, on sale!” I’d reply, proud of my good taste and good fortune. But with Charlotte, something stops me. It’s not that I’m worried she’ll start to dress exactly like me (as one of my patients did). It’s that my gut tells me why she’s asking; she wants to get it and wear it on her date with the Dude—the date that she’s supposedly not going on.
“Anthropologie,” I say anyway.
“It’s cute,” she says, smiling. “See you next week.”
And off she goes, but not before I meet her eyes for a split second and she looks away.
We both know what’s about to happen.
34
Just Be
About halfway through my traineeship, I got into a conversation with my hairstylist about therapy.
“Why would you want to be a therapist?” Cory asked, scrunching up his nose. He said that often he felt like a therapist, listening to people’s problems all day. “It’s TMI,” he continued. “I’m cutting their hair. Why do they tell me these things?”
“Do they really get that personal?”
“Oh yeah, some do. I don’t know how you do it. It’s so—” He held up the scissors, searching for the right word. “Draining.”
He went back to cutting. I watched him snip my front layers.
“What do you say to them?” I asked. It occurred to me that when people shared their secrets with him, they were probably looking in the mirror, the way we were having our conversation right now—with each other’s reflections. Maybe that made it easier, I thought.
“What do I say when I hear all their problems?” he asked.
“Right. Do you try to give them advice, add your two cents?”
“None of that,” he said.
“Then what?”
“‘Just be,’” he said.
“What?”
“I tell them, ‘Just be.’”
“That’s what you say?” I started laughing. I imagined saying that in my office. You’ve got problems? Just be.
“You should try it with your patients,” he said, smiling back. “It might help them.”
“Does it help your clients?” I asked.
Cory nodded. “It’s like this. I’ll give them a haircut, and they’ll come back the next time and say they want something different. ‘Why?’ I’ll ask. ‘Was something wrong with the last one?’ No, they say. The last one was fabulous! They just want something different. So I give them the exact same haircut but they think it’s different. And they love it.”
I waited for him to say more, but he seemed to be focusing on my split ends. I watched my hair fall to the floor.
“Okay,” I said. “But what does this have to do with their problems?”
Cory stopped cutting and looked at me in the mirror.
“Maybe everything they complain about isn’t actually a problem! Maybe it’s fine the way it is. Maybe it’s even great, like their haircut. Maybe they’d be happier if they didn’t try to change things. Just be.”
I considered this. There was certainly some truth here. Sometimes people needed to accept themselves and others the way they were. But sometimes in order to feel better, you need a mirror held up to you, and not the mirror that makes you look pretty, like the one I was looking in now.
“Have you ever been to therapy?” I asked Cory.
“Hell no.” He shook his head vigorously. “Not for me.”
Despite Cory’s objections to TMI, in the years he’d been cutting my hair, he’d told me quite a bit about himself—how burned he’d been by love, how his family had trouble accepting him when he told them he was gay, how his father had been secretly gay his whole life, having affairs with men, but still hadn’t come out. I knew, too, that Cory had had multiple cosmetic surgeries and still wasn’t satisfied with his looks, that he was preparing to go under the knife yet again. Even as we spoke, he was checking himself out in the mirror and finding himself wanting.
“What do you do when you feel lonely or sad?” I asked.
“Tinder,” he said matter-of-factly.
“And hook up?”
He smiled. Of course.
“And then you don’t see these guys again?”
“Not usually.”
“And you feel better?”
“Yeah.”
“You mean, until you get lonely or sad again and go back on the app for another fix?”
“Exactly.” He exchanged his scissors for the blow dryer. “Anyway, is that any different from people who come to therapy each week for their fix?”
It was. It was different in so many ways. For one, therapists don’t provide a simple weekly fix. I once heard a journalist say that doing a proper interview was a little bit like cutting another person’s hair: it looked easy until you got the scissors in your hand. The same, I was learning, was true of therapy. But I didn’t want to proselytize. Therapy, after all, wasn’t for everyone.
“You’re right,” I said to Cory. “There are many ways to just be.”
He turned on the dryer. “You have your therapy,” he said, then he nodded toward his cell phone. “And I have mine.”
35
Would You Rather?
Julie is cataloging her body parts, deciding which ones to keep.
“Colon? Uterus?” she asks, her eyebrows raised as if telling a joke. “And you’re not going to believe this one. Vagina. So basically it comes down to, do I want to be able to shit, have babies, or fuck.”
I feel a knot form in my throat. Julie looks different from the way she had at Trader Joe’s a few months back, or even from what she’d looked like a few weeks ago, when the doctors said that in order to keep her alive, they’d need to take more of her away. She’d soldiered through the first bout of cancer and the recurrence and the death sentence that ended up with a stay of execution and the pregnancy that gave her hope. But after too many just kiddings, she’s done with the cosmic jokes, worn down by it all. Her skin looks thin and lined, her eyes bloodshot. Now sometimes we cry together, and she hugs me when she leaves.
Nobody at Trader Joe’s knows that she’s sick, and for as long as she can, she wants to keep it that way. She wants them to know her first as a person, not as a cancer patient, which sounds a lot like how we therapists think about our patients: We want to get to know them before we get to know their problems.
“It’s like those ‘would you rather’ games we played at slumber parties as kids,” she says today. “Would you rather die in an airplane crash or a fire? Would you rather be blind or deaf? Would you rather smell bad for the rest of your life or smell bad things for the rest of your life? One time when it was my turn to answer, I said, ‘Neither.’ And everyone said, ‘No, you have to choose one,’ and I said, ‘Well, I choose neither.’ And that kind of blew people’s minds, just the concept that when presented with two awful alternatives, maybe neither was an option.”
In her high-school yearbook, under her name, they’d written I choose neither.
She’d used this logic in her grown-up life too. When she’d been asked if she’d rather have a prestigious grad-school opportunity with minimal funding or a fully funded position that was far less interesting, everyone had an opinion about which one she should take. But against all advice, she chose neither. It served her well; soon after, she got an even better grad-school offer in a better location in the same city as her sister, and she’d met her husband there.
Once she got si
ck, though, neither became less of an option: Would you rather have no breasts but live or keep your breasts and die? She chose life. There were many decisions like this, where the answers were difficult yet obvious, and each time, Julie took them in stride. But now, with this particular would-you-rather, this body-part roulette, she didn’t know how to choose. She was, after all, still getting over the shock of her recent miscarriage.
Her pregnancy had lasted eight weeks, during which time her younger sister, Nikki, had become pregnant with her second child. Not wanting to announce their news until the end of their first trimesters, the sisters kept each other’s secrets, giddily marking the days on a shared online calendar that labeled their progression for twelve weeks. Julie’s hash marks were in blue because she guessed she was carrying a boy; she’d nicknamed him BB, for Beautiful Boy. Nikki’s were in yellow (nickname: Baby Y), the color she planned to paint the baby’s nursery; as with her first pregnancy, she wanted the gender to be a surprise.
At the end of Julie’s eighth week, the bleeding started. Her sister was just beginning week six. As Julie was on her way to the ER, a text popped up from Nikki. It was an ultrasound photo with the caption Hey, look, I have a heartbeat! How’s my cousin BB? XO, Baby Y.
Baby Y’s cousin wasn’t doing so well. Baby Y’s cousin was no longer viable.
But at least I don’t have cancer, Julie thought as she left the hospital she knew so well by then. This time, she’d been there for a “normal” problem for people her age. Lots of people miscarried in those early weeks, her obstetrician explained. Julie’s body had been through a lot.
“It’s just one of those things,” her doctor had said.
And for the first time in her life, Julie, who had always lived in the land of rational explanations, was content with this answer. After all, every time the doctors had a reason for something, the reason was devastating. Fate, bad luck, probability—any of those seemed like a welcome respite from a dismal diagnosis. Now when her computer crashed or a pipe burst in the kitchen, she’d say, It’s just one of those things.
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone_A Therapist, HER Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed Page 25
