“I wonder what it was like for you, not knowing where I was,” I say, remembering how, a few months ago, I’d been in the same position, sitting in Wendell’s waiting room and wondering where he was. Killing time on my phone, I noticed that he was four minutes late, then eight. After ten minutes, the thought crossed my mind that maybe he’d been in an accident or fallen ill and was at this moment in the emergency room.
I debated whether to call and leave a message (to say what, I’m not sure. Hi, it’s Lori. I’m sitting in your waiting room. Are you in there, on the other side of the door, writing chart notes? Eating a snack? Have you forgotten me? Or are you dying?). And just as I was thinking about how I’d need to find a new therapist, in no small part to process my old therapist’s death, the door to Wendell’s office opened. Out walked a middle-aged couple, the man saying “Thank you” to Wendell and the woman smiling tightly. A first session, I speculated. Or the disclosure of an affair. Those sessions tend to run over.
I breezed past Wendell and took my place perpendicular to him.
“It’s fine,” I said when he apologized for the delay. “Really,” I continued, “my sessions go over sometimes too. It’s fine.”
Wendell looked at me, his right eyebrow raised. I raised my eyebrows back, trying to preserve my dignity. Me, get all worked up because my therapist was late? C’mon. I burst out laughing, and then some tears escaped. We both knew how relieved I was to see him and how important he had become to me. Those ten minutes of waiting and wondering were definitely not “fine.”
And now—with a forced smile on her face, her leg jerking like she’s having a seizure—Charlotte is reiterating how fine it was to wait for me.
I ask Charlotte what she thought had happened when I wasn’t there.
“I wasn’t worried,” she says, even though I said nothing about worry. Then something catches my eye through the large wall-to-wall window.
Flying in dizzyingly fast circles a few feet behind the right side of Charlotte’s head are a couple of very kinetic bumblebees. I’ve never seen bees out my window, several stories high, and these two look like they’re hopped up on amphetamines. Maybe it’s a bee mating dance, I think. But then a few more fly into view, and within seconds, I see a swarm of bees buzzing in circles, the only thing separating us from them being a huge sheet of glass. Some are starting to land on the window and crawl around.
“So, you’re going to kill me,” Charlotte begins, apparently unaware of the bees. “But, um, I’m going to take a break from therapy.”
I look away from the bees and back to Charlotte. I’m not expecting this today, and it takes a moment for what she just said to register, especially because there’s so much movement in my peripheral vision and I can’t help but follow it. Now there are hundreds of bees, so many that my office has become darker, the bees pressed up against the windowpanes and blocking out the light like a cloud. Where are they coming from?
The room is so dark that Charlotte now notices. She turns her head in the direction of the window and we sit there, saying nothing, staring at the bees. I wonder if she’ll be upset by the sight of them, but instead she seems mesmerized.
My colleague Mike used to see a family with a teenage girl at the same time I saw a couple. Every week about twenty minutes in, this couple and I would hear an eruption from Mike’s office, the teenager screaming at her parents, storming out, slamming the door; the couple yelling after her to come back; her yelling “No!” and then Mike coaxing her back, calming everyone down. The first few times this happened, I thought it would be upsetting for the couple in my office, but it turned out it made them feel better. At least that’s not us, they thought.
I’d hated the disturbance, though—it always broke my focus. And in the same way, I’m hating these bees. I think about my dad in the hospital, ten blocks away. Are these bees a sign, an omen?
“I once thought about becoming a beekeeper,” Charlotte says, breaking the silence, and this is less surprising to me than her sudden wish to leave. She finds terrifying situations thrilling—bungee jumping, skydiving, swimming with sharks. As she tells me about her beekeeper fantasy, I think that the metaphor is almost too neat: this job that would require her to wear head-to-toe protective clothing so she wouldn’t get stung and would allow her to master the very creatures that might hurt her, harvesting their sweetness in the end. I can see the appeal of having that kind of control over danger, especially if you grew up feeling like you had none.
I can also imagine the appeal of saying you’re leaving therapy if you were inexplicably left in the waiting room. Has Charlotte been planning to leave, or is this an impulsive reaction to the primal fear she felt a few minutes ago? I wonder if she’s drinking again. Sometimes people drop out of therapy because it makes them feel accountable when they don’t want to be. If they’ve started drinking or cheating again—if they’ve done or failed to do something that now causes them shame—they may prefer to hide from their therapists (and themselves). What they forget is that therapy is one of the safest of all places to bring your shame. But faced with lying by omission or confronting their shame, they may duck out altogether. Which, of course, solves nothing.
“I decided before I came in today,” Charlotte says. “I feel like I’m doing well. I’m still sober, work is going fine, I’m not fighting as much with my mom, and I’m not seeing the Dude—I even blocked him on my phone.” She pauses. “Are you mad?”
Am I mad? I’m certainly surprised—I thought she’d moved past her fear of being addicted to me—and I’m frustrated, which I admit to myself is a euphemism for mad. But underneath the anger is the fact that I worry for her, perhaps more than I should. I worry that until she has had practice being in a healthy relationship, until she can find more peace with her dad than bouncing between pretending he doesn’t exist and becoming devastated when he shows up and inevitably disappears again, she’ll struggle and miss out on much of what she wants. I want her to work through this in her twenties rather than her thirties; I don’t want her to squander her time. I don’t want her to one day panic, Half my life is over. And yet I also don’t want to discourage her independence. Just as parents raise their kids to leave them one day, therapists work to lose patients, not retain them.
Still, something feels rushed about this decision and perhaps comfortably dangerous for her, like jumping out of a plane with no parachute.
People imagine they come to therapy to uncover something from the past and talk it through, but so much of what therapists do is work in the present, where we bring awareness to what’s going on in people’s heads and hearts in the day-to-day. Are they easily injured? Do they often feel blamed? Do they avoid eye contact? Do they fixate on seemingly insignificant anxieties? We take these insights and encourage patients to practice making use of them in the real world. Wendell once put it this way: “What people do in therapy is like shooting baskets against a backboard. It’s necessary. But what they need to do then is go and play in an actual game.”
The one time Charlotte got close to having a real relationship, about a year into her therapy, she abruptly stopped seeing this guy but refused to tell me why. Nor would she tell me why she didn’t want to talk about it. I was less interested in what had happened than in what made this—of all the things she’d told me about herself—the Thing That Cannot Be Discussed. I wonder, today, if she’s leaving because of that thing.