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

During an emergency session, Rita reveals her reason for starting therapy is that she had a male friend, Myron, who came to live in her building a year before, and with whom she formed a strong, platonic friendship. Over time, though, she started developing romantic feelings, but then he announced he had met someone on Tinder, and she cut him out of her life. This was her precipitating event (the event that makes one decide to go see a therapist). Although Myron wanted to stay in touch and left her messages, Rita rebuffed him, until the day before the emergency session he accosted her at the parking lot, telling her he had broken up with Randie, was missing Rita terribly, and wanted to be with her. Rita reacted by closing off her emotions and slapping him after he kissed her. The event was so distressing for her because it represented “possibility. And that may feel even more intolerable to her than her pain” (455). 

Charlotte keeps coming up with external excuses not to go into the internal struggle that is key for her therapy sessions. Lori ponders the patients’ need to be told what to do, casting the therapists in the role of surrogate parents, which the patients then resent, because they want to feel in control. She is aware that in Wendell’s office she behaves in a similar way.

Charlotte displays signs of alexithymia (inability to access how she feels). When she starts crying over a commercial, Lori understands that the mommy dog driving a puppy in a car to keep it asleep moves Charlotte because she has never had that sort of stability in her childhood, having had to self-parent most of the time. Now she feels compelled to make the wrong choices because of her repetition compulsion: “For Charlotte, stability and its attendant joy isn’t to be trusted; it makes her feel queasy, anxious” (465). She decides to go on a date with The Dude, even though she knows she should not. 

Lori recalls a conversation with her hairstylist, Cory, who likens therapy to people’s confessions in his studio. After his clients tell him about their problems, he replies with “Just be,” meaning, “Maybe they’d be happier if they didn’t try to change things” (472). Lori reflects how Cory—a lonely gay man who uses random sex as a distraction—would benefit from therapy, but she chooses not to “proselytize.”  

Julie’s cancer is back and she faces a tough decision of which organs she can afford to live without. She suffered a miscarriage at eight weeks pregnant, then again conceived, and lost the second baby as well. She decides with her husband to try once more, and if it is not a success, they will have a baby via surrogate, or adopt. This is when she learns: “Her cancer was back, and spreading” (483). She and Matt first laugh at the absurdity of it all, “And then they cried. They cried as hard as they’d laughed” (485). Julie has her first big fight with Matt, who breaks and cries, “Can’t we have one night off from cancer?” (488), which makes Julie feel selfish and self-centered, because she is sometimes jealous of his health. Lori tells her Matt needs space to show more of his humanity. Julie has developed a fantasy that she would like to help him find a future wife while she is alive, of which Lori disapproves. She focuses Julie on verbalizing things she will miss: Matt, herself, and life. They end the session by swearing loudly to relieve the terrible burden of imminent death. 

As Lori began her internship at a clinic located in a basement of an office building, she and her colleagues failed to notice the way life began to speed up with the advent of new technologies. People seemed to be afraid of loneliness but also reluctant to connect with others, so they spent most of their time on their phones. Meanwhile, fewer people went into therapy and relied more on medication, spurred by aggressive advertising for pharmaceutical companies (in 2008, 26% of population was on psychiatric medication). As Lori’s supervisor said, “Today, everybody moves at the speed of want” (509). Lori even considers hiring a branding specialist for her practice, as many other therapists do, offering impossible speed of cure. She relates her discomfort at the idea of robots and AI replacing traditional therapy. 

During a session with Wendell, Lori finally tells him about her medical issues, admitting she has been feeling “anxious about pretty much everything” (519). She believes the story of her symptoms is about avoidance, but Wendell emphasizes that it is also a story of uncertainty. Lori has been developing a self-sabotage defense mechanism to cope with uncertainty, “I can engineer my own death rather than have it happen to me” (525). Lori cites scholar and psychiatrist Irvin Yalom, who defines therapy as “an existential experience of self-understanding” (527). According to him, there are four ultimate existential concerns: Death, Isolation, Freedom, and Meaninglessness (both literally and metaphorically). 

After a month’s absence, John returns to therapy, having decided to share with Lori the story of his son, Gabe. When Gabe was six, they drove to Legoland for a long weekend that John promised would be free of otherwise constant job-related phone calls. During their ride, John’s phone rang and he could not let it go. The atmosphere turned tense between John and Margo, and as he reached for the phone an SUV hit them, killing Gabe. John feels guilty but also blames Margo, even though they learn that the SUV driver was intoxicated: “It’s the not knowing that torments John” (547).

John then relates his latest dream, of a 16-year-old Gabe who is about to take his driving test. While he is away, Margo calls John and tells him his mother is trying to reach her, and he instructs her not to answer because it will be bad news. After a long while, the examiner (who turns out to be John’s mother) returns alone, telling John a man talking on his cell phone caused Gabe’s death. John knows that man was he. Finally, John breaks open and cries for his son and his mother, after Lori has offered the possibility that he would be a better parent if he allowed himself the full range of emotions.