Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,84

couple. Then I imagine Charlotte doing what she does in relationships (avoiding intimacy) and the Dude doing whatever he does in relationships (only Mike knows), and the whole thing blowing up in a spectacular fashion.

But I’m wrong. Today Charlotte believes that I’m going to kill her because as she was leaving her finance job last night to head out for her very first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, some coworkers invited her to join them for drinks and she said yes, because she thought it would be a good networking opportunity. Then she tells me, without a trace of irony, that she drank too much because she was upset with herself for not going to the AA meeting.

“God,” she says. “I hate myself.”

I was once told by a supervisor that every therapist has the experience of seeing a patient with whom the similarities are so striking that this person feels like your doppelgänger. When Charlotte walked into my office, I knew she was that patient—almost. She was the twin of my twenty-year-old self.

It wasn’t just that we looked alike and had similar reading habits, mannerisms, and default ways of thinking (over- and negative). Charlotte came to me three years after she had graduated from college, and while everything looked good on the outside—she had friends and a respectable job; she paid her own bills—she was also unsure of her career direction, conflicted about her parents, and generally lost. Granted, I didn’t drink too much or sleep with random people, but I’d moved through that decade just as blindly.

It may seem logical that if you identify with a patient, it will make the work easier because you intuitively understand her, but in many ways, this kind of identification makes things harder. I’ve had to be extra-vigilant in our sessions, making sure that I’m seeing Charlotte as a separate person and not as a younger version of myself that I can go back and fix. More so than with other patients, I’ve had to resist the temptation to jump in and set her straight too quickly when she plops down in her chair, tells a meandering anecdote, and finishes with a demand couched in a question: “Isn’t my manager unreasonable?” “Can you believe my roommate said that?”

At twenty-five, though, Charlotte has pain but not significant regret. Unlike me, she hasn’t had a midlife reckoning. Unlike Rita, she hasn’t damaged her children or married someone abusive. She has the gift of time, if she uses it wisely.

Charlotte didn’t think she had an addiction when she first entered treatment for depression and anxiety. She drank, she insisted, only “a couple of glasses” of wine each night “to relax.” (I immediately applied the standard therapeutic calculation used when somebody seems defensive about drug or alcohol use: whatever the total reported, double it.)

Eventually I learned that Charlotte’s nightly alcohol consumption averaged three-quarters of a bottle of wine, sometimes preceded by a cocktail (or two). She said that she never drank during the day (“except on weekends,” she added, “because hashtag brunch”) and rarely appeared drunk to others, having developed a tolerance over the years—but she did sometimes have trouble recalling events and details the day after drinking.

Still, she believed there was nothing unusual about her “social drinking” and she obsessed about her “real” addiction, the one that increasingly plagued her the longer she stayed in therapy: me. If she could, she said, she’d come to therapy every day.

Each week after I’d indicate that our time was up, Charlotte would sigh dramatically and exclaim with surprise, “Really? Are you serious?” Then, very slowly, while I stood at the open door, she’d gather her scattered belongings one by one—sunglasses, cell phone, water bottle, hair band—frequently leaving behind something that she’d have to come back for later.

“See,” she’d say when I’d suggest that her leaving items behind was her way of not leaving her session. “I’m addicted to therapy.” She’d use the generic term therapy rather than the more personal you.

But as much as she disliked leaving, therapy was the perfect setup for somebody like Charlotte, a person who craved connection but also avoided it. Our relationship was the ideal combination of intimacy and distance; she could get close to me but not too close because at the end of the hour, whether she liked it or not, she went home. During the week, too, she could get close but not too close, emailing me articles she read or one-liners about something that had happened between sessions (My mom called and