Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,85

acted crazy, and I didn’t yell at her), or photos of various things she found amusing (a license plate that read 4EVJUNG—not taken, I hoped, while she was inebriated behind the wheel).

If I tried to talk about these things during our sessions, Charlotte would brush them off. “Oh, I just thought it was funny,” she said about the license plate. When she sent an article on an epidemic of loneliness among her age group, I asked about its resonance for her. “Nothing, really,” she replied with a perplexed look on her face. “I just thought it was culturally interesting.”

Of course, patients think about their therapists between sessions all the time, but for Charlotte, keeping me in mind felt less like a stable connection and more like a loss of control. What if she relied on me too much?

To deal with that fear, she’d already left our therapy and returned twice, always struggling to stay away from what she called her fix. Each time, she quit without notice.

The first time, she announced in session that she “needed to quit and the only way I’ll do it is if I leave quickly.” Then she literally got up and bolted from the room. (I’d known something was up when she hadn’t unpacked the contents of her bag onto the armrests and left the blanket draped over the chair.) Two months later, she asked if she could come back “for one session” to discuss an issue with her cousin, but when she arrived, it was apparent that her depression had returned, so she stayed for three months. Just as she started feeling better and began to make some positive changes, an hour before her session, she sent me an email explaining that once and for all, she needed to quit.

Therapy, that is. The drinking continued.

Then one night Charlotte was driving home from a birthday party and crashed into a pole. She called me the next morning, after the police had issued her a DUI.

“I didn’t see it at all,” she told me after she arrived wearing a cast. “And I don’t just mean the pole.” Her car had been totaled but, miraculously, she’d ended up with just a broken arm.

“Maybe,” she said, for the first time, “I have a drinking problem, not a therapist problem.”

But she was still drinking a year later, when she met the Dude.

29

The Rapist

At John’s appointment time, my green light goes on. I walk down the hall to the waiting room, but when I open the door, the chair John usually takes is empty, save for a bag of takeout. For a minute I think he might be in the restroom down the hall, but the public key is still hanging on the hook. I wonder if John’s running late—after all, presumably he ordered the food—or if he’s decided not to come today because of what happened last week.

That session had started off uneventfully. As usual, the delivery guy brought our Chinese chicken salads, and after John complained about the dressing (“too saturated”) and the chopsticks (“too flimsy”), he got right down to business.

“I was thinking,” John began, “about the word therapist.” He took a bite of his salad. “You know, if you break it in two . . .”

I knew where this was going. Therapist is spelled the same way as the rapist. It’s a common joke in the therapy world.

I smiled. “I wonder if you’re trying to tell me that sometimes it’s hard to be here.” I’ve certainly felt that with Wendell, especially when his eyes seem to bore into me and there’s no place to hide. By day, therapists hear people’s secrets and fantasies, their shame and their failures, invading the spaces they normally keep private. Then—boom—the hour’s over. Just like that.

Are we emotional rapists?

“Hard to be here?” John said. “Nah. You can be a pain in the ass, but this isn’t the worst place to be.”

“So you think I’m a pain in the ass?” It took some effort not to emphasize the I, as in “So you think I’m a pain in the ass?”

“Of course,” John said. “You ask too many damn questions.”

“Oh? Like what?”

“Like that.”

I nodded. “I can see how that might annoy you.”

John brightened. “You can?”

“I can. I think you’d rather keep me at a distance when I’m trying to get to know you.”

“And heeeeeere we go again.” John rolled his eyes dramatically. At least once a session, I bring up our pattern: my trying to connect with him; his trying to flee. He