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

During Zach’s first year, while Lori was spending all her time at home, writing and taking care of the baby, she developed a need for more verbal interaction. She started engaging the UPS man (Sam) who delivered her baby stuff in conversations they both found strange and inappropriate. She was thinking it might be better for her if she went back to medical school, so she could become a psychiatrist, but when she called her former dean she suggested a change of course into clinical psychology: “It was shocking how right this felt, as if my life’s plan had finally been revealed” (344). The day she got her degree a few years later, she told it to the deliveryman and he hugged her with joy, revealing that he was also going back to school to become a contractor. They shared a warm moment of support, and several years later Sam built the bookshelves in Lori’s office.

Lori relates an instant where she met one of her patients while getting frozen yogurt with Boyfriend. As a rule, therapists will wait for the patient to acknowledge them or not, depending on whether they feel embarrassed. However, such encounters are also uncomfortable for therapists, as patients rarely know anything about their lives, and seeing them in everyday milieu might distance them from