Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

The narrator, Lori, is a therapist whose first patient is John, who “expresses annoyance with others and seeks help ‘managing the idiots’” (11). The narrator finds it difficult to focus on John’s finding faults in everyone, and especially his wife, because the therapist’s fiancé has just broken off their engagement and she is feeling sad and hurt. She is having trouble connecting to John, which makes her reflect on how therapists need to find something likeable in all their patients, and have compassion for them.

John is brusque and insulting, comparing the therapist with a prostitute he pays to “release all my pent-up frustration, and nobody has to know! Isn’t that funny?” (17). The therapist suspects she is “dealing with [her] pain the way [she] suspect[s] John has been dealing with his: by covering it up” (18). She also explains that this book “isn’t therapy, but a story about therapy: how we heal and where it leads us” (20), and that therapists deal with the same issues their patients do, which is why they also often have their own therapists. She is about to start going to a new therapist, Wendell.

Lori introduces herself as a patient, by defining a presenting problem: “the issue that sends a person into therapy” (27). She describes the good qualities of her Boyfriend, who is attentive, kind, smart, and gentle, but he is also “an avoidant,” who fails to face difficult situations and choices.

He reveals to Lori that he loves her and wishes to marry her but not with her eight-year-old son Zach living with them, because he has “decided that I can’t live with a kid under my roof for the next ten years” (31). He is a lawyer with two teenage daughters, and he presents his case to Lori as if he were in front of a jury; he wants to be a couple not a family. This reminds Lori of her patients who “present ideal scenarios and insist that they can only be happy with that exact situation” (36), which is impossible, and only an excuse for not acting. Lori is in “a state of shock mixed with bewilderment” (37). 

Lori discusses people’s reactions of irrational fear of exposure when they learn she is a therapist, and compares them to pornography. She then recounts conversations with two of her friends. Allison is married to her college sweetheart, and she dubs the Boyfriend “Kid Hater,” and urges Lori to have sex with someone to “bounce back faster” (44). Jen is also a therapist, and she thinks something about the situation is not right, “it doesn’t jibe at all with what I saw for the past two years” (45). She also suggests Lori might want to go on a date in a couple of weeks with a man Jen knows. Lori usually advises her depressed patients to take life one step at a time. This is what she attempts to do, convinced falsely that she will be fine.

The narrator recounts her experiences while working within the entertainment industry in Hollywood first as assistant to a film producer, then a story editor, a development executive, and finally in series development at NBC. In her first job after college she was in reality “a secretary who rolled the call list all day” (52); the second meant she “worked closely with writers and directors” (53), and in the third Lori was “awkwardly attempting to socialize at lunches and meetings all day” (56). She chose to abandon the film industry for television from a mistaken belief that her obsessive TV-watching meant she should be working there. It would turn out years later she had “solved the wrong problem” (58). 

Lori introduces another patient, Julie, a 33-year-old college professor dying from a rare form of cancer. She is Lori’s next appointment after John, and she notices Lori is still wearing her pajama top, which they both find hilarious, but the question of how to deal with the blunder leads Lori to ponder truthfulness of a therapist to a patient and the boundaries of self-disclosure—sharing personal details with the patient. Julie discovered the first bout of cancer on her honeymoon, but after mastectomy and chemotherapy, she was declared tumor-free. However, six months later a new scan revealed a deadly form of cancer that would eventually kill her. Thus, their sessions became less about “wigs versus scarves, sex and postsurgery body image” (67), and more about Lori trying to “help her come to terms with her death” (70). 

Jen suggests that Lori should see a therapist, as she has been having a bad time in the two weeks since her breakup. She believes that “finding a therapist is a tricky thing” (72): asking for a recommendation offends some people because it implies we think they should be seeing one. In addition, it brings out the curiosity in them about us. Finally, therapists should be unconnected to the rest of your circle. Finding the optimal therapist can be a process that takes time: “The relationship in the therapy room needs to be its own, distinct and apart” (75).

Lori contacts a professional acquaintance for a referral “for a friend” (76) who is high-functioning—reasonably well-adjusted to independent life. She wants a male therapist, married with children: Someone who resembles the Boyfriend, and who will give her an objective opinion of his betrayal: “I’m seeking objectivity, but only because I’m convinced that objectivity will rule in my favor” (78). Her colleague recommends Wendell, who agrees to see her the next morning. She presents her problem to him as an unimportant one. At home bolstered by her decision, she packs Boyfriend’s remaining stuff. 

Upon first entering Wendell’s office, Lori has no idea where to sit as the space is counter-intuitive to what therapists’ offices usually look like (she offers diagrams of her room and Wendell’s for comparison; his is missing the therapist’s chair, but has two sofas). Wendell is quiet and does not initiate the session. Lori starts to talk about Boyfriend, and ponders about the paradox of patients wishing to be themselves for therapists but also to present themselves as assured and calm. She starts sobbing, “my hands are covering my face, my body is shaking” (89).

Wendell tries to determine Lori’s attachment style—the way she forms bonds with people, but remains strangely passive and silent although she expects him to encourage her. As she talks more about Boyfriend, she realizes she knows more about his avoidance issues that she would care to admit, so his behavior should not come as such a huge surprise. She claims, “Half my life is over, and I have no idea what’s going to happen” (94). She understands that her presenting problem hides a deeper issue: “I’m in that space between knowing and not knowing” (97). She leaves the session pondering Wendell’s words that she is “grieving something bigger” (100). 

John repeatedly uses his cell phone during sessions, ignoring his therapist. Lori assesses that he isolates himself in various ways, so she feels she ought to “call him” on his behavior, avoiding what Buddhists term idiot compassion—sparing people’s feelings when we should confront them. After failing to get John’s attention verbally, Lori sends him a text, and after several exchanges, John abandons his phone. Lori relates his isolationism to psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan whose theory defines psychiatry as interactional—the relationship between the therapist and the patient, as opposed to Freud’s intrapsychic—taking place within the mind of the single person.

John talks about Rosie being unreasonable and anxious, jumping on his laptop, peeing on the bed, and biting him. Lori mistakenly believes this is his daughter, while it is his mixed breed dog, which causes some confusion. However, she realizes John has deep feelings for the dog even though he refuses to admit them: “something about love or caring must feel painful for him” (110). This has been the first time he has briefly shown authentic emotion.