Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,115

illness. I remember something I learned during my internship: “Avoidance is a simple way of coping by not having to cope.”

“It’s a story about avoidance, isn’t it?” I say.

“Well, in some ways, yes,” Wendell replies. “Though I was going to say uncertainty. It’s also a story about uncertainty.”

Of course, I think. Uncertainty.

I’ve always thought about uncertainty in terms of my patients. Will John and Margo stay together? Will Charlotte stop drinking? But now so much seems uncertain in my own life. Will I be healthy again? Will I find the right partner? Will my writing career go up in flames? What will the next half of my life—if I even have that long—look like? I’d once told Wendell that it was hard to walk around those prison bars when I didn’t know where I was headed. I might be free, but which way should I go?

I remember a patient who had pulled into her garage at the end of an ordinary workday and was greeted by an intruder with a gun. The intruder’s accomplice, she would soon learn, was in the house with her children and their babysitter. After a horrific ordeal, they were saved when a neighbor called the police. My patient told me that the worst thing about this incident was that it had shattered her smug sense of safety, however illusory it might have been.

And yet, whether she realized it or not, she still held on to that illusion.

“Do you worry about pulling into your new garage?” I asked when the family, too traumatized to live at the scene of the crime, had moved into a new home.

“Of course not,” she said, as if it were an absurd question. “Like this would happen twice? What are the chances of that?”

I tell Wendell this story and he nods. “How do you make sense of her response?” he asks.

Wendell and I rarely talk about my work as a therapist, and now I feel self-conscious. Sometimes I wonder how Wendell would be with my patients, what he would say to Rita or John. Therapy is a completely different experience with a different therapist; no two are exactly the same. And because Wendell has been doing this much longer than I have, I feel like the student to his teacher, Luke Skywalker to his Yoda.

“I think we want the world to be rational, and it was her way of having control over how uncertain life is,” I say. “Once you know a truth, you can’t unknow it, but at the same time, to protect herself from that knowledge, she convinces herself she could never be assaulted again.” I pause. “Did I pass the test?”

Wendell starts to open his mouth but I know what he’s about to say: This isn’t a test.

“Well,” I say, “was that what you were thinking? How would you make sense of her certainty in the face of uncertainty?”

“The way you did with her,” he says. “The same way I’d make sense of it with you.”

Wendell goes through the concerns I’ve brought to him: my breakup, my book, my health, my father’s health, my son’s rapid ascent through childhood. The seemingly offhand observations I’d pepper our conversations with, like “I heard on the radio that about half of today’s Americans weren’t alive in the 1970s!” Everything I talk about is shaded with uncertainty. How much longer will I live, and what will happen in that time before I die? How much control will I have over any of it? But, Wendell says, like my patient, I’ve come up with my own way to cope. If I screw up my life, I can engineer my own death rather than have it happen to me. It may not be what I want, but at least I’ll choose it. Like cutting off my nose to spite my face, this is a way to say, Take that, uncertainty.

I try to wrap my mind around this paradox: self-sabotage as a form of control. If I screw up my life, I can engineer my own death rather than have it happen to me. If I stay in a doomed relationship, if I mess up my career, if I hide in fear instead of facing what’s wrong with my body, I can create a living death—but one where I call the shots.

Irvin Yalom, the scholar and psychiatrist, often talked about therapy as an existential experience of self-understanding, which is why therapists tailor the treatment to the individual rather than to the problem. Two patients might