Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,100

toe. The bruise had gotten worse, and she was still in pain. “Do you think I should get it x-rayed?” she asked.

Before that, her favorite college professor had died in a camping accident (“Do you think I should fly to the funeral, even though my boss will be mad?”), and before that, her wallet had been stolen and she’d spent days combating identity theft (“Should I keep my driver’s license locked in the glove compartment of the car from now on?”).

Charlotte believes she’s been hit with a wave of “bad karma.” It seems as if, every other week, there’s another crisis—a traffic violation, an incident with her sublet—and while at first I felt bad for her and tried to help her cope, gradually I noticed that we’d stopped doing any therapy at all. And how could we? By focusing on one external calamity after another, Charlotte has been distracting herself from the real crises in her life—the internal ones. Sometimes “drama,” no matter how unpleasant, can be a form of self-medication, a way to calm ourselves down by avoiding the crises brewing inside.

She’s waiting for me to advise her on what to do about her presentation, but she knows by now that I don’t tend to give prescriptive advice. One of the things that surprised me as a therapist was how often people wanted to be told what to do, as if I had the right answer or as if right and wrong answers existed for the bulk of choices people make in their daily lives. Taped up next to my files is the word ultracrepidarianism, which means “the habit of giving opinions and advice on matters outside of one’s knowledge or competence.” It’s a reminder to myself that as a therapist, I can come to understand people and help them sort out what they want to do, but I can’t make their life choices for them.

When I first started out, though, occasionally I’d feel pressure to give advice of the benign (or so I believed) sort. But then I realized that people resent being told what to do. Yes, they may have asked to be told—repeatedly, relentlessly—but after you comply, their initial relief is replaced by resentment. This happens even if things go swimmingly, because ultimately humans want to have agency over their lives, which is why children spend their childhoods begging to make their own decisions. (Then they grow up and plead with me to take that freedom away.)

Sometimes patients assume that therapists have the answers and we simply aren’t telling them—that we’re being withholding. But we aren’t out to torture people. We hesitate to give answers not only because patients don’t really want to hear them, but also because they often misconstrue what they hear (leaving us thinking, for instance, I never suggested you say that to your mother! ). Most important, we want to support their independence.

But when I’m in Wendell’s office, I forget all this, along with everything else I’ve learned about advice-giving over the years: that the information the patient presents to you is distorted through a particular lens; that the presentation of the information will change over time as it becomes less distorted; that the dilemma may even be about something entirely different that has yet to be uncovered; that the patient is sometimes gunning for you to support a particular choice and this will become more clear as your relationship develops; and that the patient wants others to make decisions so that she doesn’t have to take responsibility if things don’t work out.

Here are some questions I’ve asked Wendell: “Is it normal for a fridge to break after ten years? Should I keep this one longer or pay to repair it?” (Wendell: “Are you really here to ask me something you can ask Siri?”) “Should I choose this school for my son, or the other one?” (Wendell: “I think you’ll benefit more from understanding why this decision is so hard for you.”) Once he said, “I only know what I would do. I don’t know what you should do,” and instead of absorbing his meaning, I replied, “Okay, then, just tell me—what would you do?”

Behind my questions lies the assumption that Wendell is a more competent human being than I am. Sometimes I wonder, Who am I to make the important decisions in my own life? Am I really qualified for this?

Everyone wages this internal battle to some degree: Child or adult? Safety or freedom? But no matter where people fall on those