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

Lori describes Wendell’s waiting room that is as unusual as his office, “the aesthetic in here is Grandma’s hand-me-downs” (118). She has brought pages of notes she made while having forced conversations with Boyfriend. This continues for several weeks, and despite Wendell’s interjections that her behavior is masochistic and unhelpful, Lori perseveres with her obsession, trying to “prove a point rather than have an interaction in earnest” (123). She “Google-stalks” Boyfriend, agonizing over his apparently calm life: “‘Did I matter?’ I ask over and over” (124).

Wendell tells her that she enjoys suffering too much, instead of focusing on the pain of loss. They also discuss that Lori has chosen the seat farthest from Wendell, which few patients do. This speaks to her distancing herself from unappealing prospects, such as the truth of Boyfriend’s lack of connection to children. He tells her it is important to acknowledge that “feelings don’t have to mesh with what you think they should be” (129). He explains how pain exists through time, and that Lori has “lost my relationship in the future” (133), because of her projected ideals. She needs to live in the present and accept the pain and “the loss of my future” (133). 

Working for NBC, Lori can experience the creation of two legendary TV shows: ER and Friends. She enjoys the faster pace of TV production, but when she meets an ER doctor, Joe, who consults for the show, she feels a deeper need to visit real emergency rooms, which soon becomes her hobby. Joe suggests she might want to go to medical school, which she at first dismisses, as she is on a career path and 28 years old.

She starts to change her mind about medicine after she attends a neurosurgery, where she “felt a sense of awe” (140). The calm of the operating room appeals to her as it is different from the frenetic pace of the studio. Finally, an experience with a woman suffering from ravages of diabetes and her empathy for Lori’s struggle make her decide, “I want real life—real people—to be my world” (146). 

When Julie learned of her diagnosis, her friend Dara, who has a son with severe autism, sent her a short essay “Welcome to Holland” by Emily Pearl Kingsley, a parent of a child with Down syndrome, which Lori quotes in its entirety. Utilizing a metaphor of a desired journey to Italy which changes for an unexpected stay in Holland, Kingsley speaks about how even when we do not get the imagined perfect experience of having a child because of a child’s illness, there are still joys to be found in exploring the new place at which we have arrived. Dara wishes Julie to understand there is a future she can build despite her diagnosis.

Julie compares her situation with Dara’s, as her friend has had to learn how to cope with a child that put strains on her marriage, her work, and her life. She has also learned how to enjoy her son and her life in the new circumstances. Julie decides to learn how to live more fully while accepting that she must give up most of her dreams. However, the experimental treatment she receives works and her tumors disappear, so she and her husband decide that they wish to start a family, regardless of many fears: “It didn’t matter if they ended up in Italy or Holland or someplace else entirely” (160). 

Lori informs her son of her breakup with Boyfriend. He is visibly upset, but she finds suitable examples from his everyday life to help him understand. However, Zach suddenly starts to worry if people are killing bananas by plucking them off the tree, and if the tree suffers as well. This is his way of dealing with the immediate hurt that follows the news. Lori tells him “it’s possible that sometimes we hurt it anyway, even though we really, really don’t want to” (163). He seems to accept the explanation, but then he finds the board game he used to play with Boyfriend and says he does not like it anymore and will not play it. 

In her gross anatomy class, Lori and her colleagues dissect a male and female corpse, dubbed Harold and Maude. Over the course of the semester they learn about Harold and Maude’s lives through their bodies, and although their professors remind them to pay attention to their own emotions in the process, Lori feels most of them neglected to do so: “we weren’t sure what our emotions were or what to do with them” (171). She recalls the dissection of Harold’s penis that caused most of her male colleagues to flee the room. Lori’s way of dealing with the stress of her studies was to write her own and other people’s stories for newspapers, and as she pondered which branch of medicine she might want to practice, she found herself facing a changed reality of medicine that grew more impersonal by the day. She was 33 years old, and had a desire to start a family at some point, so she finally decided to turn to journalism.

John refuses to talk about his childhood, although Lori suspects he must have experienced trauma as his mother died in a car accident when he was six years old. Lori emphasizes that talking about parents in therapy is not about blame, but about how they have shaped our adult responses. She suspects John may have a narcissistic personality disorder—there are 10, divided into three clusters: A (Paranoid, Schizoid, and Schizotypal), B (Antisocial, Borderline, Histrionic, and Narcissistic), and C (Avoidant, Dependent, and Obsessive-Compulsive). Patients who seek therapy largely belong to cluster B.

Historically, doctors used to think personality disorders were incurable as opposed to mood disorders (depression and anxiety), because mood disorders are ego-dystonic (“people suffering from them find them distressing” (184)), while personality disorders are ego-syntonic (people “believe that others are creating the problems in their lives” (184)). However, disorders cover a wide spectrum of symptoms and levels of disturbance, and “having traits of a personality disorder” (184) does not necessarily imply the person suffers from it. Lori thinks diagnoses are useful but should not limit the therapist’s thinking.

John surprises Lori by ordering lunch to her office, and after his exaggerated reaction to mayonnaise in his sandwich, she decides to humor him and share lunch with him while he tells her about dreaming about his mother, which upsets him when “He just wants peace” (194). 

Lori relates the story of Zach’s conception. Because she is nearing 40 and without a partner, she opts for a sperm donor. Thus begins a long process of trying to find a suitable candidate, and Lori describes herself as “desperate, but picky” (197). She becomes friendly with Kathleen, one of the staff members at a clinic, who acts as her guide through the process and finds her “the whole package”: a man with “good health, good looks, strong intelligence, and a winning personality” (201). However, Lori discovers his sperm is out of stock and she would have to wait. She decides to contact a young filmmaker, Alex, whom she met and liked, to ask him if he would be the donor. Against odds, he agrees and they flesh out a contract and all the details, until, in the final stages he decides not to go through with it, which leaves Lori feeling desperate again. Several months later, Kathleen informs her that the original sperm donor is available again, and Lori decides to go through with the artificial insemination.

Wilfred Bion, a mid-20th century British psychoanalyst, postulated that therapists “should approach their patients ‘without memory or desire’” (217), implying commitment to the present moment and openness to different possibilities. Lori finds this approach too limiting but, as a patient, wishes she could erase her memory or desire for Boyfriend. She cries inconsolably during a whole session with Wendell, and Wendell participates in her grief by offering a silent but supportive presence. At first, she apologizes for the tears, but then accepts them when Wendell urges her to try to be kind to herself during the sessions, and afterwards she feels a huge sense of relief. Lori ponders the complexity and unpredictability of grief in people’s lives: we mourn the actual loss and what the loss represents for us. The therapist’s task is to help their patient “edit” their story and reach into their most authentic self to “get to the deeper meaning of the story” (230).