Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,80

which immediately made John suspicious. “What’s the idiot trying to hide?” he’d said. “Oh, right—his incompetence.”

So patients do Google their therapists, but that wasn’t my excuse. In fact, it had never occurred to me to Google Wendell until he suggested that by Google-stalking Boyfriend I was holding on to a future that had been canceled. I was watching Boyfriend’s future unfold while I stayed locked in the past. I’d need to accept that his future and mine, his present and mine, were now separate and that all we had left in common was our history.

Sitting at my laptop, I remembered the way Wendell had made this all so clear. Then I thought about how I knew nearly nothing about Wendell other than the fact that he’d trained with Caroline, the colleague who gave me his name. I didn’t know where he’d gotten his degree or what he specialized in or any of the basic information people tend to gather online before seeing a therapist. I’d been so eager for help that I took Caroline’s referral for my “friend” sight unseen.

If something isn’t working, do something different, therapists are taught in training when they’re hitting a wall with a patient, and we also suggest it to our patients: Why continue doing the same unhelpful thing over and over? If following Boyfriend online was keeping me stuck, Wendell implied, I should do something different. But what? I tried closing my eyes and taking some breaths, an intervention that can disrupt a compulsive urge. And it worked—sort of. When I opened my eyes, I didn’t type Boyfriend’s name into Google.

I typed in Wendell’s.

John had been right; Wendell was virtually invisible. No website. No LinkedIn. No Psychology Today listing or public Facebook or Twitter. Just a single link with his office address and phone number. For a practitioner of my generation, Wendell was unusually old-school.

I scanned the search results again. There were several Wendell Bronsons, but none was my therapist. I kept looking, and two pages in, I noticed a Yelp listing for Wendell. It had one review. I clicked.

The reviewer, who went by the name Angela L., had been named an “elite” reviewer for five years in a row, and no wonder. She had posted about restaurants, dry cleaners, mattress warehouses, dog parks, dentists (a revolving door of them), gynecologists, manicurists, roofers, florists, clothing stores, hotels, pest-control companies, movers, pharmacies, car dealers, tattoo parlors, a personal injury lawyer, and even a criminal defense attorney (something about being “falsely accused” of a parking violation, which had somehow become a criminal offense).

But most striking about Angela L. wasn’t the sheer number of reviews; it was how aggressively negative nearly all of them were.

FAIL! she’d write. Or DUMBASSES! Angela L. seemed to be horribly disappointed with everything. The way her cuticles were cut. The way a receptionist spoke to her. Even when she was on vacation, nothing escaped her scrutiny. She’d post reviews while at the rental-car booth, at the hotel check-in, upon arrival in her room, in seemingly every place she ate and drank during her trip, and even out at the beach (where she’d once stepped on a rock in what was supposed to be silky white sand and claimed that it had injured her foot). Invariably, everyone she encountered was lazy or incompetent or stupid.

She reminded me of John. And then it occurred to me that maybe Angela L. was Margo! Because the one person in the world that Angela L. didn’t feel pissed off at or treated unfairly by was Wendell.

He got Angela L.’s very first five-star review.

I’ve been to many therapists—no surprise there—but this time I feel like I’m making real strides, she wrote. She went on to gush about Wendell’s compassion and wisdom, adding that he was helping her to see how her behaviors were contributing to her marital difficulties. Because of Wendell, she added, she had been able to reconcile with her husband after they’d separated. (So not Margo.)

The review had been posted a year ago. Scanning her subsequent entries, I noticed a trend. Gradually, her string of one- and two-star pans became three- and then four-star praise. Angela L. was becoming less angry at the world, less prone to blaming others for her unhappiness (what we call externalizing). There was less raging at customer-service reps, fewer perceived slights (personalization), more self-awareness (acknowledging, in one review, that she could be difficult to please). The quantity of posts had dropped off too, making the endeavor seem less obsessive. She was