It’s a sunny Los Angeles day and I’m in a good mood as I park my car across the street from Wendell’s office. I almost hate being in too good of a mood on therapy days—what’s there to talk about?
Actually, I know better. It turns out that sessions to which patients come with neither a crisis nor an agenda tend to be the most revelatory ones. When we give our minds space to wander, they take us to the most unexpected and interesting places. As I cross from the parking lot to Wendell’s building, I hear a song blasting from someone’s car: Imagine Dragons’ “On Top of the World.” Walking down the corridor to Wendell’s office, I start humming along—but as soon as I open the door to the waiting room, I go silent, confused.
Whoops—this isn’t Wendell’s waiting room. Caught up in the song, I’d opened the wrong door! I laugh at my mistake.
I walk out and shut the door, then look around to get my bearings. I check the nameplate on the door, which confirms that I am, indeed, in the right place. Once more, I open the door, but what I see looks nothing like the room I know. For a moment, I panic, as if in a dream: Where am I?
Wendell’s waiting room has been completely transformed. There’s new paint, new flooring, new furniture, and new art—striking black-and-white photos. Gone are what I assumed to be the hand-me-downs from his parents’ house. Gone is the vase with the cheesy fake flowers and in its place is a ceramic pitcher and cups for water. The only thing that remains is the noise machine that ensures no one can hear what’s being said on the other side of the wall. It feels like I’ve walked into the finished product on one of those home-improvement shows where a space becomes unrecognizable from its original unfortunate state. I want to Ooh and Aah the way the owners do on these shows. It looks beautiful—simple and uncluttered and also a bit quirky, like Wendell.
My usual chair is gone, so I take a seat in one of the new ones with funky steel legs and a leather back. I haven’t seen Wendell for two weeks—I’d assumed his being out of the office meant that he was on vacation, maybe even at the cabin from his childhood with his large extended family. I had imagined all of his siblings and nieces and nephews I’d discovered online and tried to picture Wendell with them, goofing around with his kids or kicking back with a beer by the lake.
But now I realize that this renovation was also taking place. My good mood is dissipating and I start to question if my contentment was real or if I was experiencing a “flight to health” in Wendell’s absence. A flight to health is a phenomenon in which patients convince themselves that they’re suddenly over their issues because, unbeknownst to them, they can’t tolerate the anxiety that working through these issues is bringing up.
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.
But still—no.
“I’m your therapist and a guy,” Wendell says today, adding that we all interact with people in different ways based on any number of things we notice about them. Political correctness aside, we aren’t emotionally blind to qualities like appearance, wardrobe, gender, race, ethnicity, or age. That’s the way transference works. If my therapist were a woman, he says, I’d react to her based on the ways I relate to women. If Wendell were short, I’d react to him as somebody who’s short rather than tall. If . . .
As he talks, I can’t stop staring at the “new” him, trying to make the adjustment. It occurs to me that it wasn’t just that I hadn’t been attracted to Wendell earlier. It was that I hadn’t been attracted to anyone. I was grieving, and it’s only upon my gradual emergence that I’ve begun to feel attraction in the world again.
Sometimes when a new patient comes in, I ask not just “What brings you here?” but “What brings you here now?” The now is the key. Why this year, this month, this day, have you decided to come talk to me? It seemed like the breakup was my answer to “Why now?” but underneath it was my stuckness and my grief.
“I wish I could stop crying!” I’d told Wendell early on when I felt like a human fire hydrant.
But Wendell saw it differently. He’d given me permission to feel and also a reminder that, like so many people, I’d been mistaking feeling less for feeling better. The feelings are still there, though. They come out in unconscious behaviors, in an inability to sit still, in a mind that hungers for the next distraction, in a lack of appetite or a struggle to control one’s appetite, in a short-temperedness, or—in Boyfriend’s case—in a foot that twitched under the covers as we sat in that heavy silence under which lay the feeling that he’d kept to himself for months: whatever he wanted, it wasn’t me.
And still people try to suppress their feelings. Just a week before, a patient had told me that she couldn’t go a single night without turning on her TV, falling asleep to it, and waking up hours later. “Where did my evening go?” she asked from my couch. But the real question was, where had her feelings gone?
Another patient recently lamented, “Wouldn’t it be nice to be one of those people who doesn’t overthink anything, who just goes with the flow—who lives the unexamined life?” I remember saying that there was a difference between examining and dwelling, and if we’re cut off from our feelings, just skating on the surface, we don’t get peace or joy—we get deadness.
So it’s not that I’m in love with Wendell. The fact that I’m finally noticing him not just as a therapist but as a man is simply evidence that our work together has helped me rejoin the human race. I feel attraction again. I’ve even begun dating, dipping my toe in the water.
Before I leave, I ask about the “Why now?” of Wendell’s office renovation, of his beard.
“What made you do all this?” I ask.
The beard, he says, was the result of being out of the office and not needing to shave; when it was time to come back, he decided he liked it. As for the office makeover, he says simply, “It was time.”
“But why now?” I ask, trying to phrase my next question graciously. “It seems like you’d had that furniture for, um . . . a long while?”
Wendell laughs. I didn’t hide the subtext very well. “Sometimes,” he says, “change is like that.”
Back in the waiting area, I move past the new modern-looking screen separating the exit from the seating. Outside, heat mirages rise on the sidewalk, and as I wait for the light, the Imagine Dragons song pops into my head again. I’ve been waiting to smile, ’ey, been holding it in for a while. When the light turns green, I cross and head toward the parking lot but today I don’t go straight to my car. I keep walking up the street until I’m in front of a glass storefront—a salon.
I catch sight of myself in the window’s reflection and stop to adjust my top—the one from Anthropologie, which I’d chosen for tonight’s date—and then hurry inside.
I’m just in time for my appointment at the waxing place.