Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,77

for those few who do, a sighting is significant.

Here are some things you can’t do in public as a therapist: Cry to a friend in a restaurant; argue with your spouse; hit the building’s elevator button relentlessly like it’s a morphine pump. If you’re in a rush on your way into the office, you can’t honk at the slow car blocking the entrance to the parking garage in case your patient sees (or because the person you’re honking at might be your patient).

If you’re a respected child psychologist, like a colleague of mine, you don’t want to be standing in the bakery when your four-year-old has a meltdown about not getting another cookie, culminating with the ear-piercing proclamation “YOU’RE THE WORST MOM EVER!” while your six-year-old patient and her mother look on, aghast. Nor, as happened to me, do you want to run into a former patient in the bra section of a department store as the salesperson announces loudly, “Good news, ma’am! I was able to find the Miracle Bra in the thirty-four A.”

When you’re making a restroom run between sessions, it’s best to avoid the stall adjacent to your next patient, especially if either of you is taking a malodorous dump. And if you use the pharmacy across the street from your office, you don’t want to be seen in the aisles buying condoms, tampons, constipation aids, adult diapers, creams for yeast infections and hemorrhoids, or prescriptions for STDs or mental disorders.

One day, while feeling flu-like and weak, I went to the CVS across from my office to pick up a prescription. The pharmacist handed me what was supposed to be an antibiotic, but when I looked at the label, I saw it was an antidepressant. A few weeks earlier, a rheumatologist had prescribed the antidepressant off-label for fibromyalgia, which she thought might explain some lingering fatigue, but then we decided I should hold off due to its potential side effects. I never picked up that prescription, and the rheumatologist canceled it; nevertheless, for some reason, it still sat in the computer, and every time I got a medication, the pharmacist would bring out the antidepressant and announce its name loudly while I prayed that none of my patients were in line behind me.

Often when patients see our humanity, they leave us.

Soon after John began seeing me, I ran into him at a Lakers game. It was halftime, and my son and I were waiting to buy a jersey.

“Jesus Christ,” I heard somebody mutter, and I followed the voice and spotted John ahead of us in the line next to ours. He was with another man and two girls who looked to be around John’s older daughter’s age, ten. A dad-daughter outing, I figured. John was complaining to his friend about the couple in front of them who were taking a while to make their purchase—they kept losing track of which sizes the cashier had said were sold out.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” John said to the couple, his booming voice catching the attention of everyone around us. “They’re out of the black Kobe in all sizes but the small—which is clearly not your size—and they only have the white Kobe in a kid’s size, which is also clearly not your size. But it is the size of these girls here who came to watch a Lakers game, which is starting up in”—here he made a great show of holding up his watch—“four minutes.”

“Chill, buddy,” the guy in the couple said to John.

“Chill?” John said. “Maybe you’re too chill. Maybe you should think about the fact that halftime is fifteen minutes and there’s a sizable crowd behind you. Let’s see, twenty people, fifteen minutes, less than a minute per person—Oh shit, maybe I shouldn’t be so chill!”

He flashed his gleaming smile at the guy, and that’s when John noticed me looking at him. He froze, stunned to see his mistress-hooker-therapist standing there, the one whom he didn’t want his wife or, probably, his friend or daughter to know about.

We both looked away, ignoring each other.

But after my son and I made our purchase, as we were running hand in hand back to our seats, I noticed John watching us from afar, an inscrutable expression on his face.

Sometimes when I see people out in the world, particularly the first time it happens, I ask back in session what the experience was like for them. Some therapists wait for their patients to bring it up, but often, not mentioning it makes