Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

Lori relates an instant where she met one of her patients while getting frozen yogurt with Boyfriend. As a rule, therapists will wait for the patient to acknowledge them or not, depending on whether they feel embarrassed. However, such encounters are also uncomfortable for therapists, as patients rarely know anything about their lives, and seeing them in everyday milieu might distance them from therapy. Additionally, Lori could not introduce her patient to Boyfriend because it would break confidentiality (he jokes, “dating a therapist was like dating a CIA agent” (351)).

Therapists must restrict their behavior in public to acceptable displays, in case a patient sees them, which can be stifling, and sometimes impossible. Thus, when Lori accidentally runs into John at a Lakers game, they both pretend not to know each other, but she witnesses his rude behavior and the way he looks at Lori with Zach, “an inscrutable expression on his face” (357). She mentions the encounter during the next session but he is unapproachable and remains distant except for saying that Zach was cute and that she should enjoy his displays of affection, while they last, which Lori connects to John and his mother. 

Succumbing to an impulse, Lori googles Wendell and finds an article in which his mother details the family history. This is something patients frequently do, as they feel the relationship with their therapists is too one-sided. However, once they have learned things about them, they often find it difficult to continue therapy without unconsciously editing what they say. While searching for information about Wendell, Lori comes across a poster named Angela L. who leaves mostly negative, angry comments about everything. She externalizes (“blaming others for her unhappiness” (369)) and personalizes (registering many things as personal insults and slights). However, as she starts seeing Wendell (whom she judges favorably), she begins to gain more self-awareness. Lori feels like Angela L. in her obsessive search and vows never to do it again. However, she “felt weighed down by my newfound knowledge” (375). 

Charlotte is aged 25, and she comes to Lori presenting as anxious and bored by her job. She also reports drinking “‘a couple glasses of wine’ nightly” (376). She flirts with a man she has seen in the waiting room as he has therapy at the same time with Lori’s colleague, Mike. She calls him, “The Dude,” and they progress to exchanging banter until he starts coming in with a woman who might be his girlfriend.

Lori relates how everybody is unconsciously attracted to “a sense of familiarity” (380), and how we tend to replicate relationships we have learned as children (what Freud termed repetition compulsion), hoping for a different outcome. The Dude is attractive for Charlotte because he is unavailable and unstable, and when she dates someone who is different “To her unconscious, his emotional stability felt too foreign” (382). Lori feels Charlotte is very similar to herself when she was her age and this can make therapy difficult, because there is danger of self-projecting. Additionally, although Lori believes she is “addicted to therapy” (388), it takes a DUI to make her realize, “I have a drinking problem, not a therapist problem” (391). 

During one of the sessions John lets slip that he apparently has a son named Gabe. Immediately after, he exits the office and does not come back. The following week he leaves a message saying he will not be continuing with therapy, using laughter and levity as a protective mechanism.

Lori ponders the old joke about therapist consisting of two words: “the rapist”; she asks herself, “Are we emotional rapists?” (393). John mentions that he might be having issues with potency and talks about being outnumbered by females in his home (this is when he mentions Gabe’s name). Lori believes the session has provoked projective identification (in projection a person attributes to another the feelings they have; in projective identification they evacuate those feelings into another, making them feel such feelings), as she cannot stop thinking about who Gabe might be. She decides to leave a message for John that he is welcome to return to therapy and discuss matters further.

Lori remembers her final year of graduate school, when she performed her first individual, unsupervised therapy session, with a young architect named Michelle, who was severely depressed. She calls the process “a trial by fire” (413). The hospital expects her to gather Michelle’s history and “establish some rapport with her” (413). However, Michelle immediately starts sobbing and continues for a long time. Lori describes her own unease in the situation, being unsure how best to proceed, but once she verbalizes that Michelle seems depressed, the word releases the patient’s fears of speaking about how she feels, “She’s never been in therapy before but knows she needs help” (418).

Lori realizes after a while that the clock has stopped and she has no idea how much time has passed. She panics but Michelle tells her the time (there is another clock behind Lori). Her supervisor commends her while stressing she needs to take the patient’s history, and that if she does not know something, she should always remain honest and authentic. Over time, Lori develops a gauge for first sessions: “Did the patient feel understood?” (422).