Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,1
know people deeply and not come to like them. We should take the world’s enemies, get them in a room to share their histories and formative experiences, their fears and their struggles, and global adversaries would suddenly get along. I’ve found something likable in literally everyone I’ve seen as a therapist, including the guy who attempted murder. (Beneath his rage, he turned out to be a real sweetheart.)
I didn’t even mind the week before, at our first session, when John explained that he’d come to me because I was a “nobody” here in Los Angeles, which meant that he wouldn’t run into any of his television-industry colleagues when coming for treatment. (His colleagues, he suspected, went to “well-known, experienced therapists.”) I simply tagged that for future use, when he’d be more open to engaging with me. Nor did I flinch at the end of that session when he handed me a wad of cash and explained that he preferred to pay this way because he didn’t want his wife to know he was seeing a therapist.
“You’ll be like my mistress,” he’d suggested. “Or, actually, more like my hooker. No offense, but you’re not the kind of woman I’d choose as a mistress . . . if you know what I mean.”
I didn’t know what he meant (someone blonder? Younger? With whiter, more sparkly teeth?), but I figured that this comment was just one of John’s defenses against getting close to anybody or acknowledging his need for another human being.
“Ha-ha, my hooker!” he said, pausing at the door. “I’ll just come here each week, release all my pent-up frustration, and nobody has to know! Isn’t that funny?”
Oh, yeah, I wanted to say, super-funny.
Still, as I heard him laugh his way down the hall, I felt confident that I could grow to like John. Underneath his off-putting presentation, something likable—even beautiful—was sure to emerge.
But that was last week.
Today he just seems like an asshole. An asshole with spectacular teeth.
Have compassion, have compassion, have compassion. I repeat my silent mantra then refocus on John. He’s talking about a mistake made by one of the crew members on his show (a man whose name, in John’s telling, is simply The Idiot) and just then, something occurs to me: John’s rant sounds eerily familiar. Not the situations he’s describing, but the feelings they evoke in him—and in me. I know how affirming it feels to blame the outside world for my frustrations, to deny ownership of whatever role I might have in the existential play called My Incredibly Important Life. I know what it’s like to bathe in self-righteous outrage, in the certainty that I’m completely right and have been terribly wronged, because that’s exactly how I’ve felt all day.
What John doesn’t know is that I’m reeling from last night, when the man I thought I was going to marry unexpectedly called it quits. Today I’m trying to focus on my patients (allowing myself to cry only in the ten-minute breaks between sessions, carefully wiping away my running mascara before the next person arrives). In other words, I’m dealing with my pain the way I suspect John has been dealing with his: by covering it up.
As a therapist, I know a lot about pain, about the ways in which pain is tied to loss. But I also know something less commonly understood: that change and loss travel together. We can’t have change without loss, which is why so often people say they want change but nonetheless stay exactly the same. To help John, I’m going to have to figure out what his loss would be, but first, I’m going to have to understand mine. Because right now, all I can think about is what my boyfriend did last night.
The idiot!
I look back at John and think: I hear you, brother.
Wait a minute, you might be thinking. Why are you telling me all this? Aren’t therapists supposed to keep their personal lives private? Aren’t they supposed to be blank slates who never reveal anything about themselves, objective observers who refrain from calling their patients names—even in their heads? Besides, aren’t therapists, of all people, supposed to have their lives together?
On the one hand, yes. What happens in the therapy room should be done on behalf of the patient, and if therapists aren’t able to separate their own struggles from those of the people who come to them, then they should, without question, choose a different line of work.
On the other hand, this—right here, right now, between