Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,134

last week.”

He’s silent, but his magnet eyes are on me. I start telling him how Caroline felt about her patient and how sometimes I feel that way about patients, how every therapist does, but still, I say, it bothers me. Are we judging people too harshly? Do we not have enough empathy?

“I can’t pinpoint why,” I continue, “but I’ve felt strange about that conversation all week. It makes me uncomfortable in a way it hadn’t at lunch, and—”

Wendell’s brow is furrowed, as though he’s trying to follow my train of thought.

“I think as a profession,” I say, attempting to clarify, “we can’t keep it all inside, but at the same time—”

“Do you have a question for me?” Wendell asks, interrupting.

I realize I do. I have many: Does Wendell talk about me with his colleagues at lunch? Do I still feel to him like my patient Becca felt to me before I stopped seeing her?

Wendell had used the singular, though—not “Do you have questions for me?” but “Do you have a question for me?” He did that, I recognize, because all of my questions boil down to an essential one, a question so loaded that I don’t know how to say it aloud. Is there anything that makes us feel more vulnerable than asking someone, Do you like me?

It seems that being a therapist hasn’t made me immune to responding to Wendell in the ways that patients respond to me. I get frustrated with him. I resent being charged for a cancellation when I’m sick (even though I have the same cancellation policy). I don’t always tell him everything I should, and I unwittingly (or wittingly) distort what he says. I’ve always assumed that when Wendell closed his eyes in our sessions, it was to give him space to think something through. But now I wonder if it’s more of a reset button. Perhaps he’s saying to himself, Have compassion, have compassion, have compassion, the way I used to do with John.

Like most patients, I want my therapist to enjoy my company and have respect for me, but, ultimately, I want to matter to him. Feeling deep in your cells that you matter is part of the alchemy that takes place in good therapy.

The humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers practiced what he called client-centered therapy, a central tenet of which was unconditional positive regard. His switch from using the term patient to client was representative of his attitude toward the people he worked with. Rogers believed that a positive therapist-client relationship was an essential part of the cure, not just a means to an end—a groundbreaking concept when he introduced it in the mid-twentieth century.

But unconditional positive regard doesn’t mean the therapist necessarily likes the client. It means that the therapist is warm and nonjudgmental and, most of all, genuinely believes in the client’s ability to grow if nurtured in an encouraging and accepting environment. It’s a framework for valuing and respecting the person’s “right to determination” even if her choices are at odds with yours. Unconditional positive regard is an attitude, not a feeling.

I want more than Wendell’s unconditional positive regard—I want him to like me. My question, it turns out, isn’t only about discovering whether I matter to Wendell. It’s also about acknowledging how much he matters to me.

“Do you like me?” I squeak out, feeling pathetic and awkward. I mean, what can he possibly say? He’s not going to say no. Even if he doesn’t like me, he could throw it back to me by asking, “What do you think?” or “I wonder why you’re asking this now?” Or he could say what I might have said to John if he’d asked me this question early on. I would have told him the truth of my experience, which might have been less about whether I liked him and more about how hard it was to get to know him when he kept me at arm’s length.

But Wendell does none of that.

“I do like you,” he says in a way that makes me feel he means it. It sounds neither rote nor gushy. It’s so simple—and so unexpectedly moving in its simplicity. Yes, I like you.

“I like you too,” I say, and Wendell smiles.

Wendell says that while I want to be liked for being smart or funny, he was talking about liking my neshama, which is the Hebrew word for “spirit” or “soul.” The concept registers instantly.

I tell Wendell about a recent college graduate who, considering a career as a