I say I do. I mean, “my friend” does. We exchange some pleasantries and then hang up.
At this point, all I know about Wendell is what Caroline has just told me and that there’s two-hour free parking in the lot across the street from his office. I know about the parking because when Caroline texts me his phone number and address a minute after our call, I realize that my bikini-wax place happens to be on the same street (Not that I’ll be needing those services for the foreseeable future, I think, which makes me start crying again).
I pull it together long enough to dial Wendell’s number, and of course I get voicemail. Therapists rarely answer their office phones so that patients won’t feel rebuffed if they call in a crisis and their therapists have only a few minutes between sessions to speak. Colleague-to-colleague calls are made via cell phone or pager.
I hear a generic outgoing recording (“Hi, you’ve reached the office of Wendell Bronson. I return my calls during business hours Monday through Friday. If this is an emergency, please call . . .”), and after the beep I leave a concise message with exactly the information a therapist wants—name, one-liner about why I’m calling, and return phone number. I’m doing well until, thinking it might get me in to see him sooner, I add that I’m also a therapist, but my voice cracks as I say the word therapist. Mortified, I cover with a cough and quickly hang up.
When Wendell calls me back an hour later, I try to sound as together as possible as I explain that I just need a little crisis management, a few weeks to “process” an unexpected breakup, and then I’ll be good to go. I’ve done therapy before, I say, so I come “preshrunk.” He doesn’t laugh at my joke so I’m pretty sure he has no sense of humor, but it doesn’t matter because I don’t need a sense of humor for crisis management.
This is, after all, just about getting me back on my feet.
Wendell says about five words the entire call. I use the term words loosely because it’s more like a bunch of Uh-huhs before he offers a nine o’clock appointment the next morning. I accept and we’re done.
Although Wendell didn’t say much, our conversation provides me with immediate relief. I know this is a common placebo effect: patients often feel hopeful after making that first appointment, before even setting foot in the therapy room. I’m no different. Tomorrow, I think, I’ll get help with this. Yes, I’m a mess now because this whole thing is a shock, but soon I’ll make sense of it (that is, Wendell will confirm that Boyfriend is a sociopath). When I look back, this breakup will be a blip on the radar screen of my life. It will be a mistake that I will have learned from, the kind of mistake my son calls “a beautiful oops.”
That night before I go to sleep, I gather up Boyfriend’s things—his clothes, toiletries, tennis racket, books, and electronics—and pack them in a box that I’ll give back to him. I take the Costco pajamas out of my drawer and find a Post-it with a flirtatious note that Boyfriend had stuck on one of them. When he wrote that, I wonder, did he already know he was leaving?
At a case consultation I went to the week before the breakup, a colleague brought up a patient who found out that her husband had been leading a double life. Not only had he been having an affair for years, but he’d gotten the woman pregnant and she was about to have his baby. When his wife discovered all of this (was he ever going to tell her?), she no longer knew what to make of her life with him. Were her memories real? For example, that romantic vacation—was her version of the trip accurate or was it some fiction, given that he was having his affair at that time? She felt robbed of her marriage but also of her memories. Likewise, when Boyfriend put the Post-it on my pajamas—when he bought me the pajamas in the first place—was he also secretly planning his kid-free life? I frown at the note. Liar, I think.
I walk the box out to the car and place it on the front seat so I’ll remember to drop it off. Maybe I’ll even do it in the morning, on the way to my appointment with Wendell.
I can’t wait for him to tell me what a sociopath Boyfriend is.
7
The Beginning of Knowing
I’m standing in the doorway of Wendell’s office, trying to figure out where to sit. I see a lot of therapy offices in my profession—my supervisors’ offices during training, my colleagues’ offices that I visit—but I’ve never seen one like Wendell’s.
Yes, there are the usual diplomas on the walls and therapy-related books on the shelves, along with the conspicuous absence of anything that might give away his personal life (no family photos on the desk, for instance; just a lone laptop). But instead of the standard setup of the therapist’s chair in the middle of the room with seating against the walls (during internship, we learned to sit close to the door in case “things escalated” and we needed an escape route), Wendell’s office has two long sofas on the far walls arranged in an L-shape with a side table between them—and no therapist chair at all.
I’m flummoxed.
Here’s a diagram of my office:
And here’s a diagram of Wendell’s office.
Wendell, who is very tall and very thin with a balding head and the stooped posture of our profession, stands there waiting for me to take a seat. I consider the possibilities. I assume we won’t sit side by side on the same sofa, but which sofa does he typically take? The one by the window (so he can escape through that if things escalate)? Or the one by the wall? I decide to take a seat by the window, position A, before he closes the door, walks across the room, and relaxes into position C.
Generally when I see a new patient, I’ll open the conversation with an icebreaker like “So, tell me what brings you here today.”
Wendell, however, says nothing. He just looks at me, his green eyes questioning. He’s wearing a cardigan, khakis, and loafers, like he came straight from Therapist Central Casting.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi,” he replies. And he waits.
About a minute passes, which is longer than it sounds, and I try to gather my wits so that I can clearly lay out the Boyfriend situation. The truth is, every day since the breakup has been worse than the night of the breakup itself because now a glaring void has opened up in my life. For the past couple of years, Boyfriend and I had been in constant contact throughout our days, had said good night every bedtime. Now what was he doing? How had his day gone? Did his presentation at work go well? Was he thinking about me? Or was he glad to have gotten the truth off his chest so he could go search for somebody who was kid-free? I’ve felt his absence in every cell of my body, so by the time I get to Wendell’s office this morning, I’m a wreck—but I don’t want that to be his first impression of me.
Or, to be honest, his second or hundredth.
An interesting paradox of the therapy process: In order to do their job, therapists try to see patients as they really are, which means noticing their vulnerabilities and entrenched patterns and struggles. Patients, of course, want to be helped, but they also want to be liked and admired. In other words, they want to hide their vulnerabilities and entrenched patterns and struggles. That’s not to say that therapists don’t look for a patient’s strengths and try to build on those. We do. But while we aim to discover what’s not working, patients try to keep the illusion going to avoid shame—to seem more together than they really are. Both parties have the well-being of the patient in mind but often work at cross-purposes in the service of a mutual goal.