Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,101

continuums, every decision they make is based on two things: fear and love. Therapy strives to teach you how to tell the two apart.

Charlotte once told me about a commercial she saw on television that made her cry.

“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