Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,78

it bigger, the elephant in the room, and acknowledging the encounter feels like a relief. So the following week in therapy, I asked John what it was like to see me at the Lakers game.

“What the fuck kind of question is that?” John said. He let out a sigh, followed by a groan. “Do you know how many people were at the game?”

“A lot,” I said, “but sometimes it’s strange seeing your therapist outside of the office. Or seeing their children.”

I’d been thinking about the look on John’s face as he watched me run off with Zach. I privately wondered what it was like for him to see a mother hand in hand with her son, given the loss of his own mother when he was a boy.

“You know what it was like seeing my therapist and her kid?” John asked. “It was upsetting.”

I was surprised that John was willing to share his reaction. “How so?”

“Your son got the last Kobe jersey in my daughter’s size.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, so that was upsetting.”

I waited to see if he’d say more, if he’d stop with the jokes. We were both quiet for a bit. Then John began counting. “One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi . . .” He shot me an exasperated look. “How long are we going to sit here saying nothing?”

I understood his frustration. In movies, therapist silences have become a cliché, but it’s only in silence that people can truly hear themselves. Talking can keep people in their heads and safely away from their emotions. Being silent is like emptying the trash. When you stop tossing junk into the void—words, words, and more words—something important rises to the surface. And when the silence is a shared experience, it can be a gold mine for thoughts and feelings that the patient didn’t even know existed. It’s no wonder that I spent an entire session with Wendell saying virtually nothing and simply crying. Even great joy is sometimes best expressed through silence, as when a patient comes in after landing a hard-won promotion or getting engaged and can’t find the words to express the magnitude of what she’s feeling. So we sit in silence together, beaming.

“I’m listening for whatever you have to say,” I told John.

“Fine,” he said. “In that case, I have a question for you.”

“Mmm?”

“What was it like for you to see me?”

Nobody had ever asked me that before. I thought for a minute about my reaction and how I would convey it to John. I remembered my irritation with the way he was talking to that couple at the front of the line and also my guilt at silently cheering him on. I, too, wanted to get back in the stadium before the second half started. I also remembered, when I was back at my seat, glancing down and noticing that John and his group were sitting courtside. I saw his daughter showing him something on his phone, and as they were looking at it together, he put his arm around her and they laughed and laughed, and I was so touched that I couldn’t take my eyes off them. I wanted to share that with him.

“Well,” I began, “it was—”

“Oh, Jesus, I was kidding!” John interrupted. “Obviously I don’t care what it was like for you. That’s my point. It was a Lakers game! We were there to see the Lakers.”

“Okay.”

“Okay what?”

“Okay, you don’t care.”

“Damn right, I don’t.” I saw that look on John’s face again, the one I noticed when he was watching me run with Zach. No matter how I tried to engage with John that day—by helping him to slow down and notice his feelings, by talking about his experience with me in the room, by sharing some of my experience in our conversation—he remained closed off.

It wasn’t until he was leaving that he turned back to me from the hallway and said, “Cute kid, by the way. Your son. The way he held your hand. Boys don’t always do that.”

I waited for the punch line. Instead, he looked me right in the eye and said, almost pensively, “Enjoy it while it lasts.”

I stood there for a second. Enjoy it while it lasts.

I wondered if he was thinking about his daughter—maybe she’d outgrown letting John hold her hand in public. But he’d also said, “Boys don’t always do that.” What did he know about raising boys, being the father of two girls?

It was about him and his mother, I decided. I tucked away the exchange for