When Wendell was a boy, every August he and his four siblings would pile into the family station wagon and drive with their parents from their Midwestern suburb to a cabin on a lake for a vacation with their large extended family. There were about twenty cousins in all, and the kids would wander as a pack, taking off in the morning, checking back in with the adults for lunch (which they ate ravenously while sitting on blankets spread over a verdant field), and disappearing again until dinnertime.
Sometimes the cousins would go for bike rides, but Wendell, the youngest, was afraid to ride a bike. Whenever his parents and older siblings offered to teach him, he feigned indifference, but everyone knew that the story of an older boy in town who had fallen off his bike, hit his head, and gone deaf from the blow had stuck in Wendell’s mind.
Fortunately, bikes didn’t matter all that much at the cabin. Even when some of the cousins went out on their bikes, there were always enough kids with whom he could swim in the lake, climb trees, and play epic games of capture the flag.
Then one summer, just after Wendell turned thirteen, he went missing. The clan of cousins had returned for lunch, and while they were munching on watermelon, somebody noticed that Wendell wasn’t there. They checked inside the cabins. Empty. Groups dispersed to search for him at the lake, in the woods, around town. But Wendell was nowhere to be found.
After four terrifying hours for his family, Wendell returned—riding a bike. Apparently, a cute girl he’d met by the lake had asked him to go on a bike ride with her, so he went to the bike shop and explained his problem. The owner looked at this eager, skinny thirteen-year-old and instantly understood. He shut down the store, took Wendell to an abandoned lot, and taught him how to ride. Then he gave him a free day’s rental.
Now there he was, riding a bike toward the cabins. His parents cried in relief.
Wendell and the girl from the lake rode together every day for the rest of the trip, and when it was over, they wrote letters back and forth for the next several months. But one day Wendell got a letter from her saying that she was very sorry, but she had found a new boyfriend at her school and would no longer be writing to Wendell. His mom found the ripped page while emptying the trash.
Wendell pretended not to care.
“That year was a crash course in biking and love,” Wendell’s mother later remarked. “You take a risk, you fall down, and you get back up and do it all over again.”
Wendell did get back up. And in time, he stopped pretending not to care. After graduating from college and joining the family business, he couldn’t pretend any longer that his interest in psychology was just a hobby. So Wendell quit and got a doctorate in psychology instead. Now it was his father’s turn to pretend not to care. And like Wendell, eventually his father got back up on that metaphorical bike and embraced his son’s decision.
At least, that’s how Wendell’s mother tells the story.
Of course, she didn’t tell me this story. I know all of this courtesy of the internet.
I wish I could say that I accidentally stumbled on this information, that I needed Wendell’s address to send in a check and typed in his name and—Oh, wow, look what popped up—right there, on the very first page of results, was an interview with his mother. But the only part that would be true is the part where I typed in his name.
A small comfort: I wasn’t alone in Googling my therapist.
Julie once said something to me about a scientist at her university that I’d written about, as if we’d previously mentioned that we both knew him (we hadn’t). Rita once alluded to the fact that she and I had both grown up in Los Angeles, though I’d never told her where I’d grown up. John finished one of his “idiot” rants about a just-out-of-college hire who’d graduated from Stanford with “The Harvard of the West, my ass.” Then, looking sheepishly at me, he added, “I mean, no offense.” He must have known I’d gone to Stanford. I also know that John Googled Wendell to check out his wife’s therapist, because once he complained that Wendell had no website or photo, which immediately made John suspicious. “What’s the idiot trying to hide?” he’d said. “Oh, right—his incompetence.”
So patients do Google their therapists, but that wasn’t my excuse. In fact, it had never occurred to me to Google Wendell until he suggested that by Google-stalking Boyfriend I was holding on to a future that had been canceled. I was watching Boyfriend’s future unfold while I stayed locked in the past. I’d need to accept that his future and mine, his present and mine, were now separate and that all we had left in common was our history.
Sitting at my laptop, I remembered the way Wendell had made this all so clear. Then I thought about how I knew nearly nothing about Wendell other than the fact that he’d trained with Caroline, the colleague who gave me his name. I didn’t know where he’d gotten his degree or what he specialized in or any of the basic information people tend to gather online before seeing a therapist. I’d been so eager for help that I took Caroline’s referral for my “friend” sight unseen.
If something isn’t working, do something different, therapists are taught in training when they’re hitting a wall with a patient, and we also suggest it to our patients: Why continue doing the same unhelpful thing over and over? If following Boyfriend online was keeping me stuck, Wendell implied, I should do something different. But what? I tried closing my eyes and taking some breaths, an intervention that can disrupt a compulsive urge. And it worked—sort of. When I opened my eyes, I didn’t type Boyfriend’s name into Google.
I typed in Wendell’s.
John had been right; Wendell was virtually invisible. No website. No LinkedIn. No Psychology Today listing or public Facebook or Twitter. Just a single link with his office address and phone number. For a practitioner of my generation, Wendell was unusually old-school.
I scanned the search results again. There were several Wendell Bronsons, but none was my therapist. I kept looking, and two pages in, I noticed a Yelp listing for Wendell. It had one review. I clicked.
The reviewer, who went by the name Angela L., had been named an “elite” reviewer for five years in a row, and no wonder. She had posted about restaurants, dry cleaners, mattress warehouses, dog parks, dentists (a revolving door of them), gynecologists, manicurists, roofers, florists, clothing stores, hotels, pest-control companies, movers, pharmacies, car dealers, tattoo parlors, a personal injury lawyer, and even a criminal defense attorney (something about being “falsely accused” of a parking violation, which had somehow become a criminal offense).
But most striking about Angela L. wasn’t the sheer number of reviews; it was how aggressively negative nearly all of them were.
FAIL! she’d write. Or DUMBASSES! Angela L. seemed to be horribly disappointed with everything. The way her cuticles were cut. The way a receptionist spoke to her. Even when she was on vacation, nothing escaped her scrutiny. She’d post reviews while at the rental-car booth, at the hotel check-in, upon arrival in her room, in seemingly every place she ate and drank during her trip, and even out at the beach (where she’d once stepped on a rock in what was supposed to be silky white sand and claimed that it had injured her foot). Invariably, everyone she encountered was lazy or incompetent or stupid.
She reminded me of John. And then it occurred to me that maybe Angela L. was Margo! Because the one person in the world that Angela L. didn’t feel pissed off at or treated unfairly by was Wendell.
He got Angela L.’s very first five-star review.
I’ve been to many therapists—no surprise there—but this time I feel like I’m making real strides, she wrote. She went on to gush about Wendell’s compassion and wisdom, adding that he was helping her to see how her behaviors were contributing to her marital difficulties. Because of Wendell, she added, she had been able to reconcile with her husband after they’d separated. (So not Margo.)
The review had been posted a year ago. Scanning her subsequent entries, I noticed a trend. Gradually, her string of one- and two-star pans became three- and then four-star praise. Angela L. was becoming less angry at the world, less prone to blaming others for her unhappiness (what we call externalizing). There was less raging at customer-service reps, fewer perceived slights (personalization), more self-awareness (acknowledging, in one review, that she could be difficult to please). The quantity of posts had dropped off too, making the endeavor seem less obsessive. She was approaching “emotional sobriety”—the ability to regulate one’s feelings without self-medicating, whether that medication comes in the form of substances, defenses, affairs, or the internet.
Kudos to Wendell, I thought. I could see Angela L.’s emotional evolution through the progression of her Yelp reviews.
But just as I was admiring Wendell’s skill, I came across another irate one-star review from Angela L. It was for a shuttle service, a downgrade from an earlier four-star review she’d given the company. Angela L. seemed livid that the bus played loud Muzak and the driver couldn’t turn it off. How could they “attack” riders like this? Three paragraphs later, punctuated by multiple ALL CAPS and exclamation marks, Angela L. ended the review with I’ve used this company for months, but no more. Our relationship is over!!!
Her dramatic breakup with the shuttle service after all those more balanced reviews might have been expected. Like many people, she’d probably backslid, regretted it, realized she’d hit bottom, and decided that moderation wasn’t enough; she had to quit Yelp entirely. And so far she had—that had been Angela L.’s final review, posted six months ago.
But I wasn’t ready to quit my Google-stalking. Half an hour later, my cursor hovered over the interview with Wendell’s mother. The therapist I knew seemed both grounded and unconventional, tough and gentle, confident and awkward. Who had raised him? I felt like I’d found the mother lode—so to speak.
Of course, I clicked.
The Q&A, which turned out to be a ten-page family history, appeared on the blog of a local organization that was documenting the lives of notable families who had lived in that Midwestern town for half a century.
Both of Wendell’s parents, I learned, had grown up poor. His maternal grandmother died in childbirth, so his mom went to live with her father’s sister in a small apartment, and their family became hers. Wendell’s father, meanwhile, had become a self-made man, the first in his family to go to college. It was at this large state university that he met Wendell’s mother, the first woman in her family to get a college degree. After they married, he started a business, she gave birth to a brood of five, and by the time Wendell was a teenager, the family had become spectacularly wealthy—one of the reasons for the interview I was reading. Apparently, Wendell’s parents gave away much of their wealth to charitable causes.
By the time I got to the names of Wendell’s siblings and their spouses and children, I had become as unhinged as Angela L. I researched Wendell’s entire family—what they did for a living, what cities they were in, how old their kids were, who was divorced. None of this was easy to find; my mission involved extensive cross-referencing and hours of time.
Admittedly, I knew a few things about Wendell from comments he’d strategically dropped into our sessions. Once, after I said, “But it’s not fair!” about the Boyfriend situation, Wendell looked at me and replied, kindly, “You sound like my ten-year-old. What makes you think life is supposed to be fair?”
I took in his point, but I also thought, Oh, he has a kid around my son’s age. When he tossed me these morsels, they felt like unexpected gifts.
But that night on the internet, there was always another lead, another link. He’d met his wife through a mutual friend; his family lived in a Spanish-style house that, according to Zillow, had doubled in value since they’d bought it; recently, when he’d needed to reschedule our appointment, it was because he was presenting at a conference.
By the time I finally shut down my laptop, the night was over and I felt guilty, empty, and exhausted.
The internet can be both a salve and an addiction, a way to block out pain (the salve) while simultaneously creating it (the addiction). When the cyber-drug wears off, you feel worse, not better. Patients think they want to know about their therapists, but often, once they find out, they wish they hadn’t, because this knowledge has the potential to contaminate the relationship, leaving patients to edit, consciously or not, what they say in their sessions.
I knew that what I’d done had been destructive. And I also knew that I wouldn’t tell Wendell about it. I understood why, when a patient inadvertently reveals knowing more about me than I’ve shared and I ask about it, there’s a slight hesitation while the person decides whether to be honest or lie. It’s hard to confess to stalking your therapist. I was ashamed—of invading Wendell’s privacy, of wasting away the evening—and I vowed (perhaps like Angela L.) never to do it again.
Still, the damage had been done. When I went back to Wendell the following Wednesday, I felt weighed down by my newfound knowledge. I couldn’t help thinking that it was only a matter of time before I’d slip up—just like my own patients did.