“That’s exciting!” I say when Rita finishes telling me the story. I hadn’t expected this twist at all, and I’m genuinely thrilled for her. But Rita just makes a snorting sound, and I realize she’s missed the forest for the trees.
“What he said was beautiful,” I say. “And that kiss—” I see the beginning of a smile before she suppresses it and her expression turns hard, cold.
“Well, that’s all fine and good,” she says, “but I’m never speaking to Myron again.” She unzips her purse, pulls out a wadded-up tissue, and adds resolutely, “I’m completely done with love.”
I remember Rita’s earlier proclamation: Love is pain. The Myron situation has upended her so because when her heart that had been in a decades-long deep freeze finally began to thaw with Myron in her life, she had tasted hope and then lost it. It occurs to me now that when Rita first came to see me, she was desperate not just because she would be turning seventy in a year, as she reported then, but because Myron’s disappearance had made her wonder the same thing I was wondering when I first saw Wendell: Had the man who’d just left been the “end of the line,” as I’d put it—the last chance at love? Rita, too, has been grieving something bigger.
But now the kiss has presented another crisis for Rita—possibility. And that may feel even more intolerable to her than her pain.
33
Karma
Charlotte is late for today’s appointment because somebody hit her car as she was pulling out of the parking lot at work. She’s fine, she says, it was a minor fender-bender, but it caused the steaming coffee in her cup holder to spill onto her laptop on which she’d composed her presentation for tomorrow and which she hadn’t backed up.
“Do you think I should tell them what happened or just pull an all-nighter?” she asks. “I want it to be good, but I don’t want to seem flaky.”
The prior week, at the gym, she’d accidentally dropped a weight on her toe. The bruise had gotten worse, and she was still in pain. “Do you think I should get it x-rayed?” she asked.
Before that, her favorite college professor had died in a camping accident (“Do you think I should fly to the funeral, even though my boss will be mad?”), and before that, her wallet had been stolen and she’d spent days combating identity theft (“Should I keep my driver’s license locked in the glove compartment of the car from now on?”).
Charlotte believes she’s been hit with a wave of “bad karma.” It seems as if, every other week, there’s another crisis—a traffic violation, an incident with her sublet—and while at first I felt bad for her and tried to help her cope, gradually I noticed that we’d stopped doing any therapy at all. And how could we? By focusing on one external calamity after another, Charlotte has been distracting herself from the real crises in her life—the internal ones. Sometimes “drama,” no matter how unpleasant, can be a form of self-medication, a way to calm ourselves down by avoiding the crises brewing inside.
She’s waiting for me to advise her on what to do about her presentation, but she knows by now that I don’t tend to give prescriptive advice. One of the things that surprised me as a therapist was how often people wanted to be told what to do, as if I had the right answer or as if right and wrong answers existed for the bulk of choices people make in their daily lives. Taped up next to my files is the word ultracrepidarianism, which means “the habit of giving opinions and advice on matters outside of one’s knowledge or competence.” It’s a reminder to myself that as a therapist, I can come to understand people and help them sort out what they want to do, but I can’t make their life choices for them.
When I first started out, though, occasionally I’d feel pressure to give advice of the benign (or so I believed) sort. But then I realized that people resent being told what to do. Yes, they may have asked to be told—repeatedly, relentlessly—but after you comply, their initial relief is replaced by resentment. This happens even if things go swimmingly, because ultimately humans want to have agency over their lives, which is why children spend their childhoods begging to make their own decisions. (Then they grow up and plead with me to take that freedom away.)
Sometimes patients assume that therapists have the answers and we simply aren’t telling them—that we’re being withholding. But we aren’t out to torture people. We hesitate to give answers not only because patients don’t really want to hear them, but also because they often misconstrue what they hear (leaving us thinking, for instance, I never suggested you say that to your mother! ). Most important, we want to support their independence.
But when I’m in Wendell’s office, I forget all this, along with everything else I’ve learned about advice-giving over the years: that the information the patient presents to you is distorted through a particular lens; that the presentation of the information will change over time as it becomes less distorted; that the dilemma may even be about something entirely different that has yet to be uncovered; that the patient is sometimes gunning for you to support a particular choice and this will become more clear as your relationship develops; and that the patient wants others to make decisions so that she doesn’t have to take responsibility if things don’t work out.
Here are some questions I’ve asked Wendell: “Is it normal for a fridge to break after ten years? Should I keep this one longer or pay to repair it?” (Wendell: “Are you really here to ask me something you can ask Siri?”) “Should I choose this school for my son, or the other one?” (Wendell: “I think you’ll benefit more from understanding why this decision is so hard for you.”) Once he said, “I only know what I would do. I don’t know what you should do,” and instead of absorbing his meaning, I replied, “Okay, then, just tell me—what would you do?”
Behind my questions lies the assumption that Wendell is a more competent human being than I am. Sometimes I wonder, Who am I to make the important decisions in my own life? Am I really qualified for this?
Everyone wages this internal battle to some degree: Child or adult? Safety or freedom? But no matter where people fall on those continuums, every decision they make is based on two things: fear and love. Therapy strives to teach you how to tell the two apart.
Charlotte once told me about a commercial she saw on television that made her cry.
“It was for a car,” she said, then added dryly, “I can’t remember which car, so clearly the commercial wasn’t very effective.”
The ad, she said, is set at night, and there’s a dog at the wheel. We see the dog driving through a suburban neighborhood, and then the camera pans to the interior, in the back, where there’s a puppy in a car seat, barking away. Mommy Dog keeps driving, glancing in the rearview mirror, until the smooth ride lulls the puppy to sleep. Mommy Dog finally pulls into her driveway, lovingly gazing at her sleeping pup, but the second she kills the motor, the puppy wakes up and once again starts barking away. With a resigned look on her face, Mommy Dog turns the car back on and starts driving again. We get the sense she’ll be driving around the neighborhood for quite a while.