Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,125

down, or he’ll simply walk off the dance floor and find somebody else’s feet to stomp on.

Charlotte’s first drink after four months of sobriety happened on Father’s Day, when her dad was supposed to fly into town to be with her but canceled at the last minute. That was three months ago. She didn’t like that dance, so she changed her steps. She hasn’t had a drink since.

“I need to stop seeing the Dude,” she says now.

I smile as if to say, That sounds familiar.

“No, really—I mean it this time,” she says, but she smiles too. It’s been her mantra for months while in preparation. “Can I change the time of my appointment?” she asks. Today she’s ready for action.

“Of course,” I say, recalling that I’d suggested this before so that Charlotte wouldn’t have to sit with the Dude in the waiting room each week, but Charlotte hadn’t been ready to consider it. I offer her a different day and time and she puts the appointment into her phone.

At the end of our session, Charlotte gathers up her myriad belongings, walks to the door, and, as always, stops, stalling. “Well, see you on Monday,” she whispers, knowing we’ve pulled one over on the Dude, who will likely wonder why Charlotte’s not there at their regular Thursday time. Let him wonder, I think.

As Charlotte heads down the hallway, the Dude comes out of his session, and Mike and I nod hello, poker-faced.

Maybe the Dude told Mike about the girlfriend, and they spent the session talking about his tendency to juggle people, to mislead, to cheat. (“Oh, so that’s his issue,” Charlotte once said after he’d done this to her twice.) Or maybe the Dude didn’t mention it to Mike at all. Maybe he’s not ready to change. Or maybe he’s just not interested in changing.

When I bring this up in my consultation group the next day, Ian says simply, “Lori, three words: not your patient.”

And I realize that, like Charlotte, I need to release the Dude too.

40

Fathers

During a belated New Year’s cleaning, I come across my grad-school coursework on the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl. Scanning my notes, I begin to remember his story.

Frankl was born in 1905, and as a boy, he became intensely interested in psychology. By high school, he began an active correspondence with Freud. He went on to study medicine and lecture on the intersection of psychology and philosophy, or what he called logotherapy, from the Greek word logos, or “meaning.” Whereas Freud believed that people are driven to seek pleasure and avoid pain (his famous pleasure principle), Frankl maintained that people’s primary drive isn’t toward pleasure but toward finding meaning in their lives.

He was in his thirties when World War II broke out, putting him, a Jew, in jeopardy. Offered immigration to the United States, he turned it down so as not to abandon his parents, and a year later, the Nazis forced Frankl and his wife to have her pregnancy terminated. In a matter of months, he and other family members were deported to concentration camps, and when Frankl was finally freed, three years later, he learned that the Nazis had killed his wife, his brother, and both of his parents.

Freedom under these circumstances might have led to despair. After all, the hope of what awaited Frankl and his fellow prisoners upon their release was now gone—the people they cared about were dead, their families and friends wiped out. But Frankl wrote what became an extraordinary treatise on resilience and spiritual salvation, known in English as Man’s Search for Meaning. In it, he shares his theory of logotherapy as it relates not just to the horrors of concentration camps but also to more mundane struggles.

He wrote, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”

Indeed, Frankl remarried, had a daughter, published prolifically, and spoke around the world until his death at age ninety-two.

Rereading these notes, I thought of my conversations with Wendell. Scribbled in my grad-school spiral were the words Reacting vs. responding = reflexive vs. chosen. We can choose our response, Frankl was saying, even under the specter of death. The same was true of John’s loss of his mother and son, Julie’s illness, Rita’s regrettable past, and Charlotte’s upbringing. I couldn’t think of a single patient to whom Frankl’s ideas didn’t apply, whether it was about extreme trauma or an interaction with a difficult family member. More than