Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,152
don’t know what else there is to say about this,” he replied to my eighty-seventh query on that topic. “It sounds like you’ll just have to find a way to write this so that you can write what you want next time.” Then he patted his legs twice and stood, signaling our time was up.
Sometimes a therapist will deliberately “prescribe the problem” or symptom that the patient wants to resolve. A young man who keeps putting off finding a job might be told in therapy that he can’t look for a job; a woman who won’t initiate sex with her partner might be told not to initiate it for a month. This strategy, in which the therapist instructs patients not to do what they’re already not doing, is called a paradoxical intervention. Given the ethical considerations involved, a therapist has to be well trained on how and when to use paradoxical directives, but the idea behind them is that if patients believe that a behavior or symptom is beyond their control, then making it voluntary, something they can choose whether or not to do, calls that belief into question. Once patients realize that they’re choosing a behavior, they can examine the secondary gains—the unconscious benefits it offers (avoidance, rebellion, a cry for help).
But Wendell hadn’t been doing that. He was just reacting to my endless complaints. If I came in upset because my agent once more insisted that nothing could be done and that I had to write this book or I’d never get another book contract, Wendell would question why I couldn’t get a second opinion—or another agent—and I would explain that I couldn’t approach other agents because I had nothing to offer them other than the mess I was currently in. Wendell and I had some version of this conversation often, and finally I convinced both of us that there was just one way out: to keep writing. So I trudged on, now blaming not just myself but also him for my predicament. Of course, I didn’t realize I was blaming Wendell, but my resentment surfaced the week after I emailed my editor and told her I wouldn’t be finishing the book. I’d been edgy all session, unable to share this milestone with him.
“Are you angry with me?” Wendell asked, picking up on my vibe, and suddenly it hit me: Yes! I was furious with him, I replied. And, I added, guess what—I had canceled my book contract, finances and consequences be damned! I was walking around those prison bars! Especially given my mysterious medical condition and its debilitating fatigue, I wanted to be sure that I was using the “good” time I had in a meaningful way. Julie had once said that she finally understood the meaning of the phrase “living on borrowed time”: our lives are literally on loan to us. Despite what we think in our youth, none of us have all that much time. Like Julie, I told Wendell, I was starting to strip my life down to its essentials rather than sleepwalking my way through it, so who was he to tell me to hunker down and write this book? All therapists make mistakes, but when it happened with Wendell, I felt irrationally betrayed.
When I finished talking, he looked at me thoughtfully. He didn’t get defensive, though he could have. He simply apologized. He’d failed, he said, to see something important that was going on between us. In trying to convince him how trapped I was, I left him feeling trapped as well, imprisoned by my perceived imprisonment. And in his frustration, like me in mine, he’d taken the easiest way out: Fine, you’re screwed—write the damn book.
“The counseling I want today is about a patient,” I say now.
I tell Wendell that I have a patient whose wife sees him, Wendell, and that every time I come here, I think about whether she’s the woman I’ve seen leaving his office. I tell him that I know he can’t say anything about a patient to me, but still I wonder if she’s mentioned the name of her husband’s therapist—me—to him. And how should we handle this coincidence? As a patient, I can say whatever I want about any aspect of my life, but I don’t want to cloud his patient’s therapy with my private knowledge of her husband.
“This is the counseling you want?” Wendell asks.
I nod. Given the earlier fiasco, I imagine he’s being extra-careful in how he responds.