Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

by Lori Gottlieb

  In his two weeks off, he has grown a beard. He’s also ditched the cardigan for a smart button-down, traded his worn loafers for the same trendy slip-ons John wears, and looks like a completely different person.

  “Hi,” he says, as usual.

  “Wow,” I say, a little too loudly. “So many changes.” I gesture to the waiting room but I’m staring at his beard. “Now you really look like a therapist,” I add as I stand up, making a joke to cover my shock. In fact, his beard looks nothing like those stodgy ones in the long tradition of well-known therapists. Wendell’s beard is stylish. Scruffy. Unkempt. Rakish.

  He looks . . . attractive?

  I remember my earlier denial of any romantic transference with him. And I’d been truthful—as far as I was aware. But why was I so profoundly uncomfortable right now? Had my unconscious been having a passionate affair with Wendell behind my back?

  I step toward his office but stop short at the doorway. His therapy room has also been redone. The layout is the same—the L-shaped couch configuration, the desk, the armoire, the bookshelf, the table with the tissues—but the paint, flooring, rug, art, sofas, and pillows have all changed. It looks amazing! Stunning. Gorgeous. The office, I mean. The office looks gorgeous.

  “Did you use a decorator?” I ask, and he says he did. I figured. If the earlier furniture was his doing, he clearly needed a professional for this. Still, it fits Wendell perfectly. The new Wendell. The spruced-up but still unpretentious Wendell.

  I go to position B, examine the new pillows, and arrange them behind my back on the new couch. I remember how unnerved I felt the first time I sat this close to Wendell, how it seemed too close, too exposed. Now it feels that way again. What if I’m attracted to Wendell?

  My attraction wouldn’t be uncommon. After all, if people find themselves attracted to their colleagues, friends’ spouses, and a variety of men and women they see or meet in the course of a day, why not their therapists? Especially their therapists. Sexual feelings abound in therapy, and how could they not? It’s easy to conflate the intimate experience of romance or sex with the intimate experience of having somebody pay undivided attention to the details of your life, accept you fully, support you without competing agendas, and know you so deeply. Some patients even flirt overtly, often unaware of ulterior motives (throwing the therapist off balance; deflecting from difficult topics; regaining power if feeling powerless; repaying the therapist in the only way the patient knows how to given his or her history). Other patients don’t flirt but vehemently deny any attraction, like John telling me that I wasn’t the kind of person he’d choose as his mistress. (“No offense.”)

  But John often took note of my appearance: “Now you’re looking more like a real mistress” (when I got highlights in my hair); “You better watch out, some people might see some cleavage” (when I wore a V-neck blouse); “Are those your fuck-me shoes for after work?” (when I wore heels). Each time, I’d try to talk about his “jokes” and the feelings underlying them.

  And now here I am, making a stupid joke with Wendell and smiling dumbly. He asks if I’m having a reaction to his beard.

  “I’m just not used to it,” I say. “But it looks good on you. You should keep it.” Or maybe you shouldn’t, I think. Maybe I’ll be too attrac . . . I mean, distracted.

  He raises his right eyebrow, and I notice that his eyes look different today. Brighter? And did he always have that dimple? What’s going on? “I’m asking because how you respond to me is related to how you respond to men—”

  “You’re not a man,” I interrupt, laughing.

  “I’m not?”

  “No!” I say.

  Wendell feigns surprise. “Well, last time I checked—”

  “Right, but you know what I mean. You’re not a man-man. You’re not a guy. You’re a therapist.” I realize with horror that I sound just like John again.

  A few months earlier, I’d found myself struggling to dance at a wedding because of some muscle weakness in my left foot from this mysterious medical condition. At the following week’s session, I told Wendell how sad I had been, watching everyone else dancing. Wendell replied that I could still dance with my good foot, I just needed a partner.

  “Well,” I said. “Isn’t the loss of a partner how I landed here in the first place?”

  But Wendell didn’t mean a romantic partner. He said I could ask anyone—that I could lean on people if I needed support, dancing or otherwise.

  “I can’t just ask anyone,” I insisted.

  “Why not?”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “You can ask me,” he said, shrugging. “I’m a good dancer, you know.” He added that he’d studied dance seriously while growing up.

  “Really? What kind of dance?” I didn’t know if he was kidding. I tried to picture gawky Wendell dancing. I imagined him getting all tangled up and tripping.

  “Ballet,” he said, without a trace of embarrassment.

  Ballet?

  “But I can do any kind of dance,” he continued, smiling at my incredulity. “I also do swing, modern. What would you like to dance to?”

  “No way,” I said. “I’m not dancing with my therapist.”

  I wasn’t concerned that he was being sexually suggestive or creepy; I knew that he had no intention of that. It was more that I didn’t want to use my therapy time that way. I had things to talk about, like how I was coping with my medical condition. But part of me also knew that this was just an excuse I was giving myself, that this intervention could be useful, that the movement of dance allows our bodies to express our emotions in a way that words sometimes can’t. When we dance, we express our buried feelings, talking through our bodies instead of our minds—and that can help us get out of our heads and to a new level of awareness. That’s partly what dance therapy is about. It’s another technique some therapists use.

  But still—no.

  “I’m your therapist and a guy,” Wendell says today, adding that we all interact with people in different ways based on any number of things we notice about them. Political correctness aside, we aren’t emotionally blind to qualities like appearance, wardrobe, gender, race, ethnicity, or age. That’s the way transference works. If my therapist were a woman, he says, I’d react to her based on the ways I relate to women. If Wendell were short, I’d react to him as somebody who’s short rather than tall. If . . .

  As he talks, I can’t stop staring at the “new” him, trying to make the adjustment. It occurs to me that it wasn’t just that I hadn’t been attracted to Wendell earlier. It was that I hadn’t been attracted to anyone. I was grieving, and it’s only upon my gradual emergence that I’ve begun to feel attraction in the world again.

  Sometimes when a new patient comes in, I ask not just “What brings you here?” but “What brings you here now?” The now is the key. Why this year, this month, this day, have you decided to come talk to me? It seemed like the breakup was my answer to “Why now?” but underneath it was my stuckness and my grief.

  “I wish I could stop crying!” I’d told Wendell early on when I felt like a human fire hydrant.

  But Wendell saw it differently. He’d given me permission to feel and also a reminder that, like so many people, I’d been mistaking feeling less for feeling better. The feelings are still there, though. They come out in unconscious behaviors, in an inability to sit still, in a mind that hungers for the next distraction, in a lack of appetite or a struggle to control one’s appetite, in a short-temperedness, or—in Boyfriend’s case—in a foot that twitched under the covers as we sat in that heavy silence under which lay the feeling that he’d kept to himself for months: whatever he wanted, it wasn’t me.

  And still people try to suppress their feelings. Just a week before, a patient had told me that she couldn’t go a single night without turning on her TV, falling asleep to it, and waking up hours later. “Where did my evening go?” she asked from my couch. But the real question was, where had her feelings gone?

  Ano
ther patient recently lamented, “Wouldn’t it be nice to be one of those people who doesn’t overthink anything, who just goes with the flow—who lives the unexamined life?” I remember saying that there was a difference between examining and dwelling, and if we’re cut off from our feelings, just skating on the surface, we don’t get peace or joy—we get deadness.

  So it’s not that I’m in love with Wendell. The fact that I’m finally noticing him not just as a therapist but as a man is simply evidence that our work together has helped me rejoin the human race. I feel attraction again. I’ve even begun dating, dipping my toe in the water.

  Before I leave, I ask about the “Why now?” of Wendell’s office renovation, of his beard.

  “What made you do all this?” I ask.

  The beard, he says, was the result of being out of the office and not needing to shave; when it was time to come back, he decided he liked it. As for the office makeover, he says simply, “It was time.”

  “But why now?” I ask, trying to phrase my next question graciously. “It seems like you’d had that furniture for, um . . . a long while?”

  Wendell laughs. I didn’t hide the subtext very well. “Sometimes,” he says, “change is like that.”

  Back in the waiting area, I move past the new modern-looking screen separating the exit from the seating. Outside, heat mirages rise on the sidewalk, and as I wait for the light, the Imagine Dragons song pops into my head again. I’ve been waiting to smile, ’ey, been holding it in for a while. When the light turns green, I cross and head toward the parking lot but today I don’t go straight to my car. I keep walking up the street until I’m in front of a glass storefront—a salon.

  I catch sight of myself in the window’s reflection and stop to adjust my top—the one from Anthropologie, which I’d chosen for tonight’s date—and then hurry inside.

  I’m just in time for my appointment at the waxing place.

  Part Four

  Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.

  —Ralph Waldo Emerson

  46

  The Bees

  A minute before Charlotte’s appointment, I get a text from my mother. Please call me. She doesn’t normally send texts like this, so I dial her cell. She answers on the first ring.

  “Don’t be alarmed,” she says, which always means that something alarming has happened. “But Dad’s in the hospital.”

  My hand tenses on the phone.

  “He’s fine,” she says quickly. Fine people aren’t admitted to the hospital, I think. “What happened?” I ask.

  Well, she says, they don’t know yet. She explains that my father was eating lunch when he said he didn’t feel well. Then he started shaking and had trouble breathing, and now they’re at the hospital. It looks like he has an infection but they don’t know if it’s related to his heart or something else. He’s fine, she keeps repeating. He’ll be fine. I think she says this as much for herself as for me. We both want—need—my father to be fine.

  “Really,” she says, “he’s fine. Here, see for yourself.” I hear her mumble something to my father as she hands him the phone.

  “I’m fine,” he says by way of hello, but I can hear his labored breathing. He tells me the same story about having lunch and not feeling well, leaving out the shaking and difficulty-breathing parts. He’ll probably be out by tomorrow, he says, once the antibiotics kick in, though when my mom gets back on the phone, we wonder whether it’s something more serious. (Later that night, when I go to the hospital, I’ll see that my father looks pregnant—his abdomen filled with fluid—and that he’s on several different IV antibiotics because a serious bacterial infection has spread throughout his body. He will be hospitalized for a week, the fluid around his lungs aspirated, his heart rate stabilized.)

  But right now, getting off the phone with my parents, I realize that I’m twelve minutes late for Charlotte’s appointment. I try to shift focus as I head to the waiting room.

  Charlotte jumps up from her seat when I open the door. “Oh, phew!” she says. “I thought maybe I had the wrong time, but this is always my time, and then I thought I had the wrong day, but no, it’s Monday”—she holds up her phone to show me the date—“so then I thought maybe, I don’t know, but here you are.”

  This all comes out as one long sentence. “Anyway, hi,” she says, moving past me into my office.

  This may seem surprising, but when therapists are late, many patients are shaken. Though we try to avoid this, every therapist I know has let a patient down this way. And when we do, it can bring up old experiences of distrust or abandonment, leaving patients feeling anything from discombobulated to enraged.

  In my office, I explain that I was on an urgent phone call and apologize for the delay.

  “It’s fine,” Charlotte says nonchalantly, but she seems out of sorts. Or maybe I am, after the call with my father. I’m fine, he had said. Just like Charlotte says it’s fine. Are they both really fine? Charlotte fidgets in her chair, twirling her hair, looking around the room. I try to help her locate herself by meeting her eyes, but they’re darting from the window to a picture on the wall to the pillow she always keeps on her lap. One leg is crossed over the other, and she’s rapidly kicking that leg in the air.

  “I wonder what it was like for you, not knowing where I was,” I say, remembering how, a few months ago, I’d been in the same position, sitting in Wendell’s waiting room and wondering where he was. Killing time on my phone, I noticed that he was four minutes late, then eight. After ten minutes, the thought crossed my mind that maybe he’d been in an accident or fallen ill and was at this moment in the emergency room.

  I debated whether to call and leave a message (to say what, I’m not sure. Hi, it’s Lori. I’m sitting in your waiting room. Are you in there, on the other side of the door, writing chart notes? Eating a snack? Have you forgotten me? Or are you dying?). And just as I was thinking about how I’d need to find a new therapist, in no small part to process my old therapist’s death, the door to Wendell’s office opened. Out walked a middle-aged couple, the man saying “Thank you” to Wendell and the woman smiling tightly. A first session, I speculated. Or the disclosure of an affair. Those sessions tend to run over.

  I breezed past Wendell and took my place perpendicular to him.

  “It’s fine,” I said when he apologized for the delay. “Really,” I continued, “my sessions go over sometimes too. It’s fine.”

  Wendell looked at me, his right eyebrow raised. I raised my eyebrows back, trying to preserve my dignity. Me, get all worked up because my therapist was late? C’mon. I burst out laughing, and then some tears escaped. We both knew how relieved I was to see him and how important he had become to me. Those ten minutes of waiting and wondering were definitely not “fine.”

  And now—with a forced smile on her face, her leg jerking like she’s having a seizure—Charlotte is reiterating how fine it was to wait for me.

  I ask Charlotte what she thought had happened when I wasn’t there.

  “I wasn’t worried,” she says, even though I said nothing about worry. Then something catches my eye through the large wall-to-wall window.

  Flying in dizzyingly fast circles a few feet behind the right side of Charlotte’s head are a couple of very kinetic bumblebees. I’ve never seen bees out my window, several stories high, and these two look like they’re hopped up on amphetamines. Maybe it’s a bee mating dance, I think. But then a few more fly into view, and within seconds, I see a swarm of bees buzzing in circles, the only thing separating us from them being a huge sheet of glass. Some are starting to land on the window and crawl around.

  “So, you’re going to kill me,” Charlotte begins, apparently unaware of the bees. “But, um, I’m going to take a break from therapy.”

  I look away from the bees and back to Charlotte. I’m not expecting this today, and it takes a moment for what she just said to register, especially because there’s so much movem
ent in my peripheral vision and I can’t help but follow it. Now there are hundreds of bees, so many that my office has become darker, the bees pressed up against the windowpanes and blocking out the light like a cloud. Where are they coming from?

  The room is so dark that Charlotte now notices. She turns her head in the direction of the window and we sit there, saying nothing, staring at the bees. I wonder if she’ll be upset by the sight of them, but instead she seems mesmerized.

  My colleague Mike used to see a family with a teenage girl at the same time I saw a couple. Every week about twenty minutes in, this couple and I would hear an eruption from Mike’s office, the teenager screaming at her parents, storming out, slamming the door; the couple yelling after her to come back; her yelling “No!” and then Mike coaxing her back, calming everyone down. The first few times this happened, I thought it would be upsetting for the couple in my office, but it turned out it made them feel better. At least that’s not us, they thought.

  I’d hated the disturbance, though—it always broke my focus. And in the same way, I’m hating these bees. I think about my dad in the hospital, ten blocks away. Are these bees a sign, an omen?

  “I once thought about becoming a beekeeper,” Charlotte says, breaking the silence, and this is less surprising to me than her sudden wish to leave. She finds terrifying situations thrilling—bungee jumping, skydiving, swimming with sharks. As she tells me about her beekeeper fantasy, I think that the metaphor is almost too neat: this job that would require her to wear head-to-toe protective clothing so she wouldn’t get stung and would allow her to master the very creatures that might hurt her, harvesting their sweetness in the end. I can see the appeal of having that kind of control over danger, especially if you grew up feeling like you had none.

  I can also imagine the appeal of saying you’re leaving therapy if you were inexplicably left in the waiting room. Has Charlotte been planning to leave, or is this an impulsive reaction to the primal fear she felt a few minutes ago? I wonder if she’s drinking again. Sometimes people drop out of therapy because it makes them feel accountable when they don’t want to be. If they’ve started drinking or cheating again—if they’ve done or failed to do something that now causes them shame—they may prefer to hide from their therapists (and themselves). What they forget is that therapy is one of the safest of all places to bring your shame. But faced with lying by omission or confronting their shame, they may duck out altogether. Which, of course, solves nothing.