Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,144

you’re leaving therapy if you were inexplicably left in the waiting room. Has Charlotte been planning to leave, or is this an impulsive reaction to the primal fear she felt a few minutes ago? I wonder if she’s drinking again. Sometimes people drop out of therapy because it makes them feel accountable when they don’t want to be. If they’ve started drinking or cheating again—if they’ve done or failed to do something that now causes them shame—they may prefer to hide from their therapists (and themselves). What they forget is that therapy is one of the safest of all places to bring your shame. But faced with lying by omission or confronting their shame, they may duck out altogether. Which, of course, solves nothing.

“I decided before I came in today,” Charlotte says. “I feel like I’m doing well. I’m still sober, work is going fine, I’m not fighting as much with my mom, and I’m not seeing the Dude—I even blocked him on my phone.” She pauses. “Are you mad?”

Am I mad? I’m certainly surprised—I thought she’d moved past her fear of being addicted to me—and I’m frustrated, which I admit to myself is a euphemism for mad. But underneath the anger is the fact that I worry for her, perhaps more than I should. I worry that until she has had practice being in a healthy relationship, until she can find more peace with her dad than bouncing between pretending he doesn’t exist and becoming devastated when he shows up and inevitably disappears again, she’ll struggle and miss out on much of what she wants. I want her to work through this in her twenties rather than her thirties; I don’t want her to squander her time. I don’t want her to one day panic, Half my life is over. And yet I also don’t want to discourage her independence. Just as parents raise their kids to leave them one day, therapists work to lose patients, not retain them.

Still, something feels rushed about this decision and perhaps comfortably dangerous for her, like jumping out of a plane with no parachute.

People imagine they come to therapy to uncover something from the past and talk it through, but so much of what therapists do is work in the present, where we bring awareness to what’s going on in people’s heads and hearts in the day-to-day. Are they easily injured? Do they often feel blamed? Do they avoid eye contact? Do they fixate on seemingly insignificant anxieties? We take these insights and encourage patients to practice making use of them in the real world. Wendell once put it this way: “What people do in therapy is like shooting baskets against a backboard. It’s necessary. But what they need to do then is go and play in an actual game.”

The one time Charlotte got close to having a real relationship, about a year into her therapy, she abruptly stopped seeing this guy but refused to tell me why. Nor would she tell me why she didn’t want to talk about it. I was less interested in what had happened than in what made this—of all the things she’d told me about herself—the Thing That Cannot Be Discussed. I wonder, today, if she’s leaving because of that thing.

I remember how she’d wanted to hold on to this Thing—to say no to my request. “It’s hard for me to say no,” she explained, “so I’m practicing in here.” I told her that regardless of whether she talked about the breakup, I thought it was equally hard for her to say yes. The inability to say no is largely about approval-seeking—people imagine that if they say no, they won’t be loved by others. The inability to say yes, however—to intimacy, a job opportunity, an alcohol program—is more about lack of trust in oneself. Will I mess this up? Will this turn out badly? Isn’t it safer to stay where I am?

But there’s a twist. Sometimes what seems like setting a boundary—saying no—is actually a cop-out, an inverted way of avoiding saying yes. The challenge for Charlotte is to get past her fear and say yes—not just to therapy, but to herself.

I glance at the bees pressed up against the glass and think of my father again and how once, when I was complaining about the way a relative would try to make me feel guilty, my father quipped, “Just because she sends you guilt doesn’t mean you have to accept delivery.” I think about this with