28
Addicted
Chart note, Charlotte:
Patient, age twenty-five, reports feeling “anxious” for the past few months, though nothing of note has recently occurred. States that she is “bored” at her job. Describes difficulty with parents and a busy social life but no history of significant romantic relationships. Reports that to relax, she drinks “a couple glasses of wine” nightly.
“You’re going to kill me,” Charlotte says as she saunters in and slowly settles herself into the oversize chair diagonally to my right, arranges a pillow on her lap, then tosses the throw blanket over it. She has never sat on the couch, not even at the first session, instead making the chair her throne. As usual, she takes her belongings out of her bag, one by one, unpacking for her fifty-minute stay. On the left arm of the chair, she places her phone and pedometer; on the right, her water bottle and sunglasses.
Today she’s wearing blush and lipstick, and I know what that means: she’s been flirting again with the guy in the waiting room.
Our suite has a large reception area where patients wait to be seen. Leaving their appointments is more private—there’s an exit through an interior corridor that leads to the building’s hallway. Patients generally keep to themselves in the waiting room—but Charlotte has something going on.
The Dude, as Charlotte calls the object of her flirtation (neither of us knows his name), is my colleague Mike’s patient, and he and Charlotte have their sessions at the same time. According to Charlotte, the first time the Dude showed up, they noticed each other immediately, stealing glances over their respective phones. This went on for weeks, and after their sessions, which also ended at the same time, they’d exit through the interior door only to steal more glances at each other in the elevator before going their separate ways.
Finally, one day, Charlotte came in with news.
“The Dude just talked to me!” she whispered, as if the Dude could hear her through the walls.
“What did he say?” I asked.
“He said, ‘So, what’s your issue?’”
Great line, I thought, impressed despite its cheesiness.
“So here’s the part where you’re going to kill me,” she said that day. She took a big breath, but I’d heard this refrain before. If Charlotte drank too much the previous week, she’d open the session with “You’re going to kill me.” If she’d hooked up with a guy and regretted it (as happened often), she’d open with “You’re going to kill me.” I was even going to kill her when she put off researching graduate-school options and missed the application deadlines. We’d talked before about how underneath the projection was a deep sense of shame.
“Okay, you don’t want to kill me,” she conceded. “But, ugh. I didn’t know what to say, so I froze. I completely ignored him and pretended to text. God, I hate myself.”
I imagined the Dude at that very moment sitting in my colleague’s therapy room just a few doors away and recounting the same incident: I finally spoke to that girl in the waiting room, and she completely rejected me. Ugh! I sounded like an idiot. God, I hate myself.
Still, the next week, the flirtation continued. When the Dude walked into the waiting room, Charlotte told me, she opened with a line she’d been rehearsing all week.
“You want to know what my issue is?” Charlotte asked him. “I freeze when strangers in waiting rooms ask me questions.” That made the Dude laugh, and they were both laughing when I opened the door to greet Charlotte.
Upon seeing me, the Dude blushed. Guilty? I wondered.
As we walked toward my office, Charlotte and I passed Mike, who was approaching to collect the Dude. Mike and I met each other’s eyes then immediately looked away. Yup, I thought. The Dude has told him about Charlotte too.
By the following week, the waiting-room banter was in full swing. Charlotte told me that she asked the Dude his name, and he replied, “I can’t tell you.”
“Why not?” she asked.
“Everything in here is confidential,” he said.
“Okay, Confidential,” she shot back. “My name’s Charlotte. I’m going to go talk about you with my therapist now.”
“Hope you get your money’s worth,” he said with a sexy grin.
I’d seen the Dude a few times, and Charlotte was right, he had a killer smile. And while I didn’t know the first thing about him, something in me sensed danger for Charlotte. Given her history with men, I had a feeling the whole thing would end badly—and two weeks later, Charlotte walked in with an update. The Dude had come to his session with a woman.
Of course, I thought. Unavailable. Just Charlotte’s type. Charlotte, in fact, had used that same expression every time she mentioned the Dude. He’s so my type.
What most people mean by type is a sense of attraction—a type of physical appearance or a type of personality turns them on. But what underlies a person’s type, in fact, is a sense of familiarity. It’s no coincidence that people who had angry parents often end up choosing angry partners, that those with alcoholic parents are frequently drawn to partners who drink quite a bit, or that those who had withdrawn or critical parents find themselves married to spouses who are withdrawn or critical.
Why would people do this to themselves? Because the pull toward that feeling of “home” makes what they want as adults hard to disentangle from what they experienced as children. They have an uncanny attraction to people who share the characteristics of a parent who in some way hurt them. In the beginning of a relationship, these characteristics will be barely perceptible, but the unconscious has a finely tuned radar system inaccessible to the conscious mind. It’s not that people want to get hurt again. It’s that they want to master a situation in which they felt helpless as children. Freud called this “repetition compulsion.” Maybe this time, the unconscious imagines, I can go back and heal that wound from long ago by engaging with somebody familiar—but new. The only problem is, by choosing familiar partners, people guarantee the opposite result: they reopen the wounds and feel even more inadequate and unlovable.
This happens completely outside of awareness. Charlotte, for instance, said that she wanted a reliable boyfriend capable of intimacy, but every time she met somebody who was her type, chaos and frustration ensued. Conversely, after a recent date with a guy who seemed to possess many of the qualities she said she wanted in a partner, she came to therapy and reported: “It’s too bad, but there just wasn’t any chemistry.” To her unconscious, his emotional stability felt too foreign.
The therapist Terry Real described our well-worn behaviors as “our internalized family of origin. It’s our repertoire of relational themes.” People don’t have to tell you their stories with words because they always act them out for you. Often they project negative expectations onto the therapist, but if the therapist doesn’t meet those negative expectations, this “corrective emotional experience” with a reliable and benevolent person changes the patients; the world, they learn, turns out not to be their family of origin. If Charlotte works through her complicated feelings toward her parents with me, she’ll find herself increasingly attracted to a different type, one that might give her the unfamiliar experience she’s seeking with a compassionate, reliable, and mature partner. Until then, every time she meets an available guy who might love her back, her unconscious rejects his stability as “not interesting.” She still equates feeling loved not with peace or joy but with anxiety.