Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,82
ashamed—of invading Wendell’s privacy, of wasting away the evening—and I vowed (perhaps like Angela L.) never to do it again.
Still, the damage had been done. When I went back to Wendell the following Wednesday, I felt weighed down by my newfound knowledge. I couldn’t help thinking that it was only a matter of time before I’d slip up—just like my own patients did.
28
Addicted
Chart note, Charlotte:
Patient, age twenty-five, reports feeling “anxious” for the past few months, though nothing of note has recently occurred. States that she is “bored” at her job. Describes difficulty with parents and a busy social life but no history of significant romantic relationships. Reports that to relax, she drinks “a couple glasses of wine” nightly.
“You’re going to kill me,” Charlotte says as she saunters in and slowly settles herself into the oversize chair diagonally to my right, arranges a pillow on her lap, then tosses the throw blanket over it. She has never sat on the couch, not even at the first session, instead making the chair her throne. As usual, she takes her belongings out of her bag, one by one, unpacking for her fifty-minute stay. On the left arm of the chair, she places her phone and pedometer; on the right, her water bottle and sunglasses.
Today she’s wearing blush and lipstick, and I know what that means: she’s been flirting again with the guy in the waiting room.
Our suite has a large reception area where patients wait to be seen. Leaving their appointments is more private—there’s an exit through an interior corridor that leads to the building’s hallway. Patients generally keep to themselves in the waiting room—but Charlotte has something going on.
The Dude, as Charlotte calls the object of her flirtation (neither of us knows his name), is my colleague Mike’s patient, and he and Charlotte have their sessions at the same time. According to Charlotte, the first time the Dude showed up, they noticed each other immediately, stealing glances over their respective phones. This went on for weeks, and after their sessions, which also ended at the same time, they’d exit through the interior door only to steal more glances at each other in the elevator before going their separate ways.
Finally, one day, Charlotte came in with news.
“The Dude just talked to me!” she whispered, as if the Dude could hear her through the walls.
“What did he say?” I asked.
“He said, ‘So, what’s your issue?’”
Great line, I thought, impressed despite its cheesiness.
“So here’s the part where you’re going to kill me,” she said that day. She took a big breath, but I’d heard this refrain before. If Charlotte drank too much the previous week, she’d open the session with “You’re going to kill me.” If she’d hooked up with a guy and regretted it (as happened often), she’d open with “You’re going to kill me.” I was even going to kill her when she put off researching graduate-school options and missed the application deadlines. We’d talked before about how underneath the projection was a deep sense of shame.
“Okay, you don’t want to kill me,” she conceded. “But, ugh. I didn’t know what to say, so I froze. I completely ignored him and pretended to text. God, I hate myself.”
I imagined the Dude at that very moment sitting in my colleague’s therapy room just a few doors away and recounting the same incident: I finally spoke to that girl in the waiting room, and she completely rejected me. Ugh! I sounded like an idiot. God, I hate myself.
Still, the next week, the flirtation continued. When the Dude walked into the waiting room, Charlotte told me, she opened with a line she’d been rehearsing all week.
“You want to know what my issue is?” Charlotte asked him. “I freeze when strangers in waiting rooms ask me questions.” That made the Dude laugh, and they were both laughing when I opened the door to greet Charlotte.
Upon seeing me, the Dude blushed. Guilty? I wondered.
As we walked toward my office, Charlotte and I passed Mike, who was approaching to collect the Dude. Mike and I met each other’s eyes then immediately looked away. Yup, I thought. The Dude has told him about Charlotte too.
By the following week, the waiting-room banter was in full swing. Charlotte told me that she asked the Dude his name, and he replied, “I can’t tell you.”
“Why not?” she asked.
“Everything in here is confidential,” he said.
“Okay, Confidential,” she shot back. “My name’s Charlotte. I’m going to go talk about you with my therapist now.”