Typically, a patient might have a difficult session about a childhood trauma, then come in the next week and announce that therapy is no longer needed. I feel great! That session was cathartic! A flight to health is especially common when the therapist or patient has been away and in that break, the person’s unconscious defenses take hold. I did so well the past few weeks. I don’t think I need therapy anymore! Sometimes this change is genuine. Other times, patients abruptly leave—only to come back.
Flight to health or not, I’m feeling disoriented. Despite the room’s vast improvement, I sort of miss the old crappy furniture—much the way I’ve felt about the inner transformations I’ve been going through. Wendell was the makeover show that came in and launched my internal renovation, and while I feel so much better now—in the “during,” because unlike décor makeovers, there’s no such thing as “after” until we’re dead—sometimes I think of the “before” with a weird kind of nostalgia.
I wouldn’t want it back, but I’m glad I remember it.
I hear the click of Wendell’s office door and then his footsteps on the new maple floors as he walks out to greet me. I look up and do another double take. Before I didn’t recognize his waiting room, and now I almost don’t recognize Wendell. It’s like somebody’s playing a prank on me. Surprise! Just kidding!
In his two weeks off, he has grown a beard. He’s also ditched the cardigan for a smart button-down, traded his worn loafers for the same trendy slip-ons John wears, and looks like a completely different person.
“Hi,” he says, as usual.
“Wow,” I say, a little too loudly. “So many changes.” I gesture to the waiting room but I’m staring at his beard. “Now you really look like a therapist,” I add as I stand up, making a joke to cover my shock. In fact, his beard looks nothing like those stodgy ones in the long tradition of well-known therapists. Wendell’s beard is stylish. Scruffy. Unkempt. Rakish.
He looks . . . attractive?
I remember my earlier denial of any romantic transference with him. And I’d been truthful—as far as I was aware. But why was I so profoundly uncomfortable right now? Had my unconscious been having a passionate affair with Wendell behind my back?
I step toward his office but stop short at the doorway. His therapy room has also been redone. The layout is the same—the L-shaped couch configuration, the desk, the armoire, the bookshelf, the table with the tissues—but the paint, flooring, rug, art, sofas, and pillows have all changed. It looks amazing! Stunning. Gorgeous. The office, I mean. The office looks gorgeous.
“Did you use a decorator?” I ask, and he says he did. I figured. If the earlier furniture was his doing, he clearly needed a professional for this. Still, it fits Wendell perfectly. The new Wendell. The spruced-up but still unpretentious Wendell.
I go to position B, examine the new pillows, and arrange them behind my back on the new couch. I remember how unnerved I felt the first time I sat this close to Wendell, how it seemed too close, too exposed. Now it feels that way again. What if I’m attracted to Wendell?
My attraction wouldn’t be uncommon. After all, if people find themselves attracted to their colleagues, friends’ spouses, and a variety of men and women they see or meet in the course of a day, why not their therapists? Especially their therapists. Sexual feelings abound in therapy, and how could they not? It’s easy to conflate the intimate experience of romance or sex with the intimate experience of having somebody pay undivided attention to the details of your life, accept you fully, support you without competing agendas, and know you so deeply. Some patients even flirt overtly, often unaware of ulterior motives (throwing the therapist off balance; deflecting from difficult topics; regaining power if feeling powerless; repaying the therapist in the only way the patient knows how to given his or her history). Other patients don’t flirt but vehemently deny any attraction, like John telling me that I wasn’t the kind of person he’d choose as his mistress. (“No offense.”)
But John often took note of my appearance: “Now you’re looking more like a real mistress” (when I got highlights in my hair); “You better watch out, some people might see some cleavage” (when I wore a V-neck blouse); “Are those your fuck-me shoes for after work?” (when I wore heels). Each time, I’d try to talk about his “jokes” and the feelings underlying them.
And now here I am, making a stupid joke with Wendell and smiling dumbly. He asks if I’m having a reaction to his beard.
“I’m just not used to it,” I say. “But it looks good on you. You should keep it.” Or maybe you shouldn’t, I think. Maybe I’ll be too attrac . . . I mean, distracted.
He raises his right eyebrow, and I notice that his eyes look different today. Brighter? And did he always have that dimple? What’s going on? “I’m asking because how you respond to me is related to how you respond to men—”
“You’re not a man,” I interrupt, laughing.
“I’m not?”
“No!” I say.
Wendell feigns surprise. “Well, last time I checked—”
“Right, but you know what I mean. You’re not a man-man. You’re not a guy. You’re a therapist.” I realize with horror that I sound just like John again.
A few months earlier, I’d found myself struggling to dance at a wedding because of some muscle weakness in my left foot from this mysterious medical condition. At the following week’s session, I told Wendell how sad I had been, watching everyone else dancing. Wendell replied that I could still dance with my good foot, I just needed a partner.
“Well,” I said. “Isn’t the loss of a partner how I landed here in the first place?”
But Wendell didn’t mean a romantic partner. He said I could ask anyone—that I could lean on people if I needed support, dancing or otherwise.
“I can’t just ask anyone,” I insisted.
“Why not?”
I rolled my eyes.
“You can ask me,” he said, shrugging. “I’m a good dancer, you know.” He added that he’d studied dance seriously while growing up.
“Really? What kind of dance?” I didn’t know if he was kidding. I tried to picture gawky Wendell dancing. I imagined him getting all tangled up and tripping.
“Ballet,” he said, without a trace of embarrassment.
Ballet?
“But I can do any kind of dance,” he continued, smiling at my incredulity. “I also do swing, modern. What would you like to dance to?”
“No way,” I said. “I’m not dancing with my therapist.”
I wasn’t concerned that he was being sexually suggestive or creepy; I knew that he had no intention of that. It was more that I didn’t want to use my therapy time that way. I had things to talk about, like how I was coping with my medical condition. But part of me also knew that this was just an excuse I was giving myself, that this intervention could be useful, that the movement of dance allows our bodies to express our emotions in a way that words sometimes can’t. When we dance, we express our buried feelings, talking through our bodies instead of our minds—and that can help us get out of our heads and to a new level of awareness. That’s partly what dance therapy is about. It’s another technique some therapists use.