Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,21

me.

John: Who, you?

It was profoundly annoying. What to do with my annoyance? I could sit and wait (and become more irritated), or I could do something else.

I stood up, walked over to my desk, searched through a file, picked up my cell phone, walked back to my chair, and started texting.

It’s me, your therapist. I’m over here.

John’s phone pinged. I watched him read my text, surprised.

“Jesus Christ! You’re texting me now?”

I smiled. “I wanted to get your attention.”

“You have my attention,” he said, but he kept on texting.

I don’t feel like I have your attention.

I feel ignored, and a bit insulted.

Ping.

John sighed dramatically, then resumed his texting.

And I don’t think I can help you unless we’re

able to give each other our full attention.

So if you’d like to try to work together, I’m going

to ask that you not use your phone in here.

Ping.

“What? ” John said, looking up at me. “You’re banning my cell phone? Like I’m on an airplane? You can’t do that. It’s my session!”

I shrugged. “I don’t want to waste your time.”

I didn’t tell John that our sessions aren’t, in fact, his alone. Every therapy session belongs to both patient and therapist, to the interaction between them. It was the psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan who, in the early twentieth century, developed a theory of psychiatry based on interpersonal relationships. Breaking away from Freud’s position that mental disorders were intrapsychic in origin (meaning “in one’s mind”), Sullivan believed that our struggles were interactional (meaning “relational”). He went so far as to say, “It’s the mark of a senior clinician that he or she is the same person in their living room that they are in their office.” We can’t teach patients to be relational if we aren’t relational with them.

John’s phone pinged again, but this time it wasn’t me. He looked between me and his phone, deliberating. As his internal battle waged, I waited it out. I was half prepared for him to get up and leave, but I also knew that if he didn’t want to be here, he wouldn’t have come. Whether he understood it or not, he was getting something out of this. I was likely the only person in his life right now who would listen to him.

“Oh, for God’s sake!” he said, tossing his cell onto the chair across the room. “Okay, I’ll put down the goddamned phone.” Then he changed the subject.

I expected his anger, but for a second it looked as if his eyes had moistened. Was that sadness? Or was that a reflection from the sun streaming in the window? I toyed with inquiring, but there was only a minute left in the session, a time usually reserved for putting people back together rather than opening them up. I decided to file it away for a more opportune moment.

Like a miner spotting a glimmer of gold, I suspected that I’d hit on something.

Today, with much restraint, John stops mid-reach, leaving his vibrating phone alone and continues his story about being officially surrounded by idiots.

“Even Rosie’s being idiotic,” he says. I’m surprised to hear him talk this way about his daughter, who’s four. “I tell her not to go near my laptop, and what does she do? She jumps on the bed, which is fine, but it’s not fine to jump on the laptop that’s on the bed. Idiot! And then as soon as I yell, ‘No! ’ she pees on the bed. Ruined the mattress. She hasn’t peed on anything since she was a baby.”

This story concerns me. There’s a myth that therapists are trained to be neutral, but how can we be? We’re humans, not robots. In fact, instead of being neutral, we therapists strive to notice our very un-neutral feelings and biases and opinions (what we call countertransference), so that we can step back and figure out what to do with them. We use, rather than suppress, our feelings to help guide the treatment. And this story about Rosie raises my hackles. Many parents have yelled at their kids in their less-than-glorious parenting moments, but I wonder about John’s relationship with his daughter. When working with couples on empathy, often I’ll say, “Before you speak, ask yourself, What is this going to feel like to the person I’m speaking to? ” I make a mental note to share this with John one day.

“That sounds frustrating,” I say. “Do you think you might have scared her? A loud voice can be frightening.”

“Nah, I yell at her all the time,” he says. “The louder