Therapy elicits odd reactions because, in a way, it’s like pornography. Both involve a kind of nudity. Both have the potential to thrill. And both have millions of users, most of whom keep their use private. Though statisticians have attempted to quantify the number of people in therapy, their results are thought to be skewed because many people who go to therapy choose not to admit it.
But those underreported numbers are still high. In any given year, some thirty million American adults are sitting on clinicians’ couches, and the United States isn’t even the world leader in therapy. (Fun fact: the countries with the most therapists per capita are, in descending order, Argentina, Austria, Australia, France, Canada, Switzerland, Iceland, and the United States.)
Given that I’m a therapist, you’d think that the morning after the Boyfriend Incident, it might occur to me to see a therapist myself. I work in a suite of a dozen therapists, my building is full of therapists, and I’ve belonged to several consultation groups in which therapists discuss their cases together, so I’m well versed in the therapy world.
But as I lie paralyzed in the fetal position, that’s not the call I make.
“He’s trash!” my oldest friend, Allison, says after I tell her the story from my bed before my son wakes up. “Good riddance! What kind of person does that—not just to you, but to your kid?”
“Right!” I agree. “Who does this?” We spend about twenty minutes bashing Boyfriend. During an initial burst of pain, people tend to lash out either at others or at themselves, to turn the anger outward or inward. Allison and I are choosing outward, baby! She’s in the Midwest, commuting to work, two hours ahead of me here on the West Coast, and she gets right to the point.
“You know what you should do?” she says.
“What?” I feel like I’ve been stabbed in the heart, and I’ll do anything to stop the pain.
“You should go sleep with somebody! Go sleep with somebody and forget about the Kid Hater.” I instantly love Boyfriend’s new name: the Kid Hater. “Clearly he wasn’t the person you thought he was. Go take your mind off of him.”
Married for twenty years to her college sweetheart, Allison has no idea how to give guidance to single people.
“It might help you bounce back faster, like falling off a bike and then getting right back on,” she continues. “And don’t roll your eyes.”
Allison knows me well. I’m rolling my red, stinging eyes.
“Okay, I’ll go sleep with someone,” I squeak out, knowing she’s trying to make me laugh. But then I’m sobbing again. I feel like a sixteen-year-old going through her first breakup, and I can’t believe I’m having this reaction in my forties.
“Oh, hon,” Allison says, her voice like a hug. “I’m here, and you’ll get through this.”
“I know,” I say, except that in a strange way, I don’t. There’s a popular saying, a paraphrase of a Robert Frost poem: “The only way out is through.” The only way to get to the other side of the tunnel is to go through it, not around it. But I can’t even picture the entrance right now.
After Allison parks her car and promises to call at her first break, I look at the clock: 6:30 a.m. I call my friend Jen, who’s a therapist with a practice across town. She picks up on the first ring and I hear her husband in the background asking who it is. Jen whispers, “I think it’s Lori?” She must have seen the caller ID, but I’m crying so hard I haven’t even said hello yet. If it weren’t for caller ID, she’d think I was some sicko prank-calling.
I catch my breath and tell her what happened. She listens attentively. She keeps saying that she can’t believe it. We also spend twenty minutes trashing Boyfriend, and then I hear her daughter enter the room and say that she needs to get to school early for swim practice.
“I’ll call you at lunch,” Jen says. “But in the meantime, I don’t know that this is the end of the story. Something’s screwy. Unless he’s a sociopath, it doesn’t jibe at all with what I saw for the past two years.”
“Exactly,” I say. “Which means he’s a sociopath.”
I hear her take a sip of water and put the glass down.
“In that case,” she says, swallowing, “I have a great guy for you—one who’s not a kid hater.” She also likes Boyfriend’s new name. “In a few weeks, when you’re ready, I want to introduce you.”
I almost smile at the preposterousness of this. What I really need just hours into this breakup is for somebody to sit with me in my pain, but I also know how helpless it feels to watch a friend suffer and do nothing to fix it. Sitting-with-you-in-your-pain is one of the rare experiences that people get in the protected space of a therapy room, but it’s very hard to give or get outside of it—even for Jen, who is a therapist.
When we’re off the phone, I think about her “in a few weeks” comment. Could I really go on a date in just a few weeks? I imagine being out with a well-meaning guy who’s doing his best to make first-date conversation; without knowing it, he’ll make a reference to something that reminds me of Boyfriend (pretty much everything will remind me of Boyfriend, I’m convinced), and I won’t be able to hold back tears. Crying on a first date is decidedly a turnoff. A therapist crying on a first date is both a turnoff and alarming. Besides, I have the bandwidth to focus only on the immediate present.
Right now it’s all about one foot, then the other.
That’s one thing I tell patients who are in the midst of crippling depression, the kind that makes them think, There’s the bathroom. It’s about five feet away. I see it, but I can’t get there. One foot, then the other. Don’t look at all five feet at once. Just take a step. And when you’ve taken that step, take one more. Eventually you’ll make it to the shower. And you’ll make it to tomorrow and next year too. One step. They may not be able to imagine their depression lifting anytime soon, but they don’t need to. Doing something prompts you to do something else, replacing a vicious cycle with a virtuous one. Most big transformations come about from the hundreds of tiny, almost imperceptible, steps we take along the way.
A lot can happen in the space of a step.
Somehow I manage to wake my son, prepare breakfast, pack his lunch, make conversation, drop him at school, and drive to work, all without shedding a tear. I can do this, I think as I ride the elevator up to my office. One foot, then the other. One fifty-minute session at a time.
I enter my suite, say hello to colleagues in the hallway, unlock the door to my office, and go through my routine: I put away my belongings, turn off the phone ringers, unlock the files, and fluff the pillows on the couch. Then, uncharacteristically, I take a seat on it myself. I look at my empty therapist chair and consider the view from this side of the room. It’s oddly comforting. I stay there until the tiny green light by the door flicks on, letting me know that my first patient is here.
I’m ready, I think. One foot, then the other. I’m going to be fine.
Except that I’m not.
4
The Smart One or the Hot One
I’ve always been drawn to stories—not just what happens, but how the story is told. When people come to therapy, I’m listening to their narratives but also for their flexibility with them. Do they consider what they’re saying to be the only version of the story—the “accurate” version—or do they know that theirs is just one of many ways to tell it? Are they aware of what they’re choosing to leave in or out, of how their motivation in sharing this story affects how the listener hears it?
I thought a lot about those questions in my twenties—not in relation to therapy patients, but in relation to movie and TV characters. That’s why, as soon as I graduated from college, I got a job in the entertainment business, or what everyone called, simply, “Hollywood.”
This job was at a large talent agency, and I worked as the assistant to a junior film agent who, like many people in Hollywood, wasn’t much older than me. Brad represented screenwriters and directors, and he was so boyish-looking, with his smooth cheeks and mop of floppy hair he’d consta
ntly swat from his eyes, that his fancy suits and expensive shoes always seemed too mature for him, like he was wearing his father’s clothing.
Technically, my first day on the job was a trial. I’d been told by Gloria in human resources (I never learned her last name; everyone called her “Gloria-in-human-resources”) that Brad had narrowed down his assistant candidates to two finalists, and each of us would work for a day as a test run. On the afternoon of mine, returning from the Xerox room, I overheard my prospective boss and another agent, his mentor, talking in his office.
“Gloria-in-human-resources wants an answer by tonight,” I heard Brad say. “Should I pick the smart one or the hot one?”
I froze, appalled.
“Always pick the smart one,” the other agent replied, and I wondered which one Brad considered me to be.
An hour later, I got the job. And despite finding the question outrageously inappropriate, I felt perversely hurt.
Still, I wasn’t sure why Brad had pegged me as smart. All I’d done that day was dial a string of phone numbers (repeatedly disconnecting calls by pressing the wrong buttons on the confusing phone system), make coffee (which was sent back twice), Xerox a script (I pushed 10 instead of 1 for number of copies, then hid the nine extra screenplays under a couch in the break room), and trip over a lamp cord in Brad’s office and fall on my ass.
The hot one, I concluded, must have been particularly stupid.
Technically, my position was “motion-picture literary assistant,” but really I was a secretary who rolled the call list all day, dialing the numbers of studio executives and filmmakers, telling each person’s assistant that my boss was on the line, then patching my boss through. It was widely known in the industry that assistants were expected to listen in silently on these calls so that we’d know what scripts had to be sent where without the need for instructions later. Sometimes, though, the parties on the calls would forget about us, and we’d hear all kinds of juicy gossip about our bosses’ famous friends—who’d had an argument with a spouse or which studio executive was “very confidentially” about to be sent to “producers pasture,” shorthand for being given a vanity production deal on the studio lot. If the person my boss was trying to reach wasn’t available, I’d “leave word” and move on to the next name on the hundred-person call sheet, sometimes being instructed to strategically return calls at inopportune times (before nine thirty a.m., because nobody in Hollywood arrived at work before ten, or, less subtly, during lunch) in order to miss the person on purpose.
Although the movie world was glamorous—Brad’s Rolodex was filled with the home numbers and addresses of people I’d admired for years—the job of an assistant was its opposite. As an assistant, you fetched coffee, made haircut and pedicure appointments, picked up dry cleaning, screened calls from parents or exes, Xeroxed and messengered documents, took cars to the mechanic, ran personal errands, and always, without fail, brought chilled bottled water into every meeting (never saying a word to the writers or directors present, whom you were dying to meet).
Finally, late at night, you’d type up ten pages of single-spaced notes on scripts that came in from the agency’s clients so that your boss could make insightful comments in meetings the next day without having to read anything. We assistants put a lot of effort into those script notes in order to demonstrate that we were bright and capable and could one day (please, God!) stop doing assistant work, with its mind-numbing duties, long hours, minimal pay, and no overtime compensation.
A few months into the job, it became apparent that while the hot ones at my agency got all the attention—and there were many hot ones in the assistant pool—the smart ones got assigned all the extra work. In my first year there, I slept very little because I was reading and writing comments on a dozen scripts a week—all after hours and on weekends. But I didn’t mind. In fact, that was my favorite part of the job. I learned how to craft stories and fell in love with fascinating characters with complicated inner lives. As the months went by, I got slightly more confident in my instincts, less worried about sharing a silly story idea.
Soon I was hired as an entry-level film executive at a production company, with the title story editor; here I got to participate in meetings while another assistant brought in the bottled water. I worked closely with writers and directors, hunkering down in a room and going over material scene by scene, helping to make changes the studio wanted without having the writers, who often felt protective of their material, fly into a rage or threaten to quit the project. (These negotiations would turn out to be great practice for couples therapy.)
Sometimes, to avoid distractions at the office, I’d work with filmmakers early in the morning in my tiny starter apartment, picking up breakfast snacks the night before while thinking, John Lithgow is going to be eating this bagel in my crappy living room with the hideous wall-to-wall carpet and popcorn ceilings tomorrow! Could it get any better than this?
And then it did—or so I thought. I got promoted. It was a promotion I’d worked hard for and wanted very badly. Until I actually got it.
The irony of my job was that a lot of the creative work happens when you don’t have much experience. When you’re just starting out, you’re the behind-the-scenes person, the one who does all the script work at the office while the higher-level people are out wooing talent, lunching with agents, or stopping by movie sets to check in on the company’s productions. When you become a development executive, you go from being what’s known as an internal executive to an external one, and if you were the social kid in high school, this is the job for you. But if you were the bookish kid who was happiest working intently with a couple of friends in the library, be careful what you wish for.
Now I was out awkwardly attempting to socialize at lunches and meetings all day. On top of that, the pace of the process began to feel glacial. It could take ages—literally years—for a film to be made, and I got the sinking feeling that I was in the wrong job. I’d moved into a duplex with a friend, and she pointed out that I’d been watching a lot of TV every night. Like, in a pathological way.
“You seem depressed,” she said with concern. I said I wasn’t depressed; I was just bored. I hadn’t considered that if the only thing that keeps you going all day is knowing you’ll get to turn on the TV after dinner, you probably are depressed.
One day around this time, I was sitting at lunch in a perfectly nice restaurant with a perfectly lovely agent who was talking about a perfectly good deal she had made when I noticed that four words kept running through my mind: I. Just. Don’t. Care. No matter what the agent said, these four words played in a loop, and they didn’t stop when the check came, nor did they stop on the drive back to the office. They rattled around in my head the next day, too, and for the next several weeks, until finally I had to admit, months later, that they weren’t going away. I. Just. Don’t. Care.
And since the only thing I did seem to care about was watching TV—since the only time I felt anything (or, perhaps more accurately, the only time I felt the absence of something unpleasant that I couldn’t quite put my finger on) was when I was immersed in these imaginary worlds with new episodes arriving weekly like clockwork—I applied for a job in television. Within a few months, I began working in series development at NBC.
It felt like a dream come true. I thought, I’ll get to help tell stories again. Even better, instead of developing self-contained films with neatly crafted endings, I’ll get to work on series. Over the course of multiple episodes and seasons, I’ll have a hand in helping audiences get to know their favorite characters, layer by layer—characters as flawed and contradictory as the rest of us, with stories that are just as messy.
It seemed like the perfect solution to my boredom. It would take years for me to realize that I’d solved the wrong problem.
5
Namast’ay in Bed
Chart note, Julie:
Thirty-three-year-old university professor presents for help in dealing with cancer diagn
osis upon returning from her honeymoon.
“Is that a pajama top?” Julie asks as she walks into my office. It’s the afternoon after the Boyfriend Incident, right before my appointment with John (and his idiots), and I’ve almost made it through the day.
I give her a quizzical look.
“Your shirt,” she says, settling onto the couch.
I flash back to the morning, to the gray sweater I intended to wear and then, with a sinking feeling, to the image of the sweater laid out on my bed next to the gray pajama top I’d taken off before stepping into the shower in my post-breakup daze.
Oh God.
On one of his Costco runs, Boyfriend had gotten me a pack of PJs, their fronts emblazoned with sayings like AREN’T I JUST A FUCKING RAY OF SUNSHINE and TALK NERDY TO ME and ZZZZZZZZZZ SNORE (not the message a therapist wants to send her patients). I’m trying to remember which one I wore last night.
I brace myself and glance down. My top says NAMAST’AY IN BED. Julie is looking at me, waiting for an answer.
Whenever I’m not sure what to say in the therapy room—which happens to therapists more often than patients realize—I have a choice: I can say nothing until I understand the moment better, or I can attempt an answer, but whatever I do, I must tell the truth. So while I’m tempted to say that I do yoga and that my top is simply a casual T-shirt, both would be lies. Julie does yoga as part of her Mindful Cancer program, and if she starts talking about various poses, I’d have to lie further and pretend that I’m familiar with them—or admit that I lied.
I remember when, during my training, a fellow intern told a patient he would be out of the clinic for three weeks, and she asked where he was going.
“I’m going to Hawaii,” the intern said truthfully.
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone_A Therapist, HER Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed Page 3