Chapter 38 Legoland

"You know why I'm late?" John says as soon as I open the door to the waiting room. It's fifteen minutes past the hour, and I'd assumed he wasn't coming. A month went by before he responded to my message after his no-show—he'd unexpectedly resurfaced and asked to come in. But maybe, I thought before he arrived, he got cold feet. Indeed, on the walk down the hallway, John goes on to say that after he pulled into the building's parking lot, he sat in his car, debating whether to come upstairs. The attendant asked for his keys, but John said he needed a minute, so the attendant told him to pull over toward the exit, and by the time John decided to stay, the attendant informed him that the lot was full. John had to find a spot on the street and sprint the two blocks to my building.

"Can't a person have a minute to sit in his own car and collect his thoughts?" John asks.

As we enter my office, I think about how beleaguered he tends to feel. Today he looks ragged, exhausted. So much for his sleep medication.

John lowers himself onto the couch, kicks off his shoes, then stretches out, lies down, and adjusts his head on the pillows. Usually he sits cross-legged on the sofa, so this is a first. I notice, too, that there's no food today.

"Okay, you win," he begins with a sigh.

"Win what?" I ask.

"The pleasure of my company," he deadpans.

I raise my eyebrows.

"The explanation to the mystery," he continues. "I'm going to tell you the story. So, lucky you—you win."

"I didn't know we were competing," I say. "But I'm glad you're here."

"Oh, for Chrissake," he says. "Let's not analyze everything, okay? Let's just do this, because if we don't start now, I'm two seconds away from leaving."

He rolls over to face the back of the couch, and then, very quietly, says to the fabric, "So, uh, we were going on a family trip to Legoland."

According to John, he and Margo were driving down the California coast with the kids to Legoland, a theme park in Carlsbad, for a long weekend away when they had a disagreement. It had been their policy never to argue in front of the children, and up to that point, they'd both kept their promise.

At the time, John was in charge of his first television show, which meant that he was on call day and night in order to get each week's episode out. Margo also felt overwhelmed, taking care of two young kids and trying to keep up with her graphic-design clients, but while John got to interact with adults all day, Margo was either "in Mommy-land," as she put it, or working at her home computer.

Margo looked forward to seeing John at the end of the day, but at dinner he would answer calls while she gave him what he termed the death stare. When things got so busy that John couldn't make it home for dinner, Margo would ask him to turn off his cell at bedtime so that they could catch up and relax together without interruption. But John insisted that he couldn't be unreachable.

"I didn't work this hard all these years only to get this opportunity and see my show fail," he told her. And, indeed, it was off to a rocky start. The ratings were disappointing, but critics raved about the show, so the network agreed to give it more time to find an audience. The reprieve was a short one, though; if the ratings didn't improve quickly, the show would be canceled. John doubled his efforts and made some changes (including "firing some idiots"), and the show took off.

The network had a hit on its hands. And John had a very angry wife on his.

With the show's success, John got even busier. Did he remember that he had a wife? Margo asked him. What about his kids, who, when Margo called out, "Daddy's here!" ran to the computer instead of the front door because they were so used to talking to Daddy on a screen? The younger one had even begun calling the computer Daddy. Yes, Margo conceded, John spent time with them on weekends, playing with them in the park for hours, taking them on outings, and horsing around with them at home. But even then, the ringing phone never left his side.

John didn't understand why Margo was making such a big deal out of this. When he became a father, he was surprised at how intense and immediate the bond was. His connection with his babies felt so powerful—fierce, even. It reminded him of the love he'd had as a boy for his mother before she died. It was a kind of love he didn't even experience with Margo, though he loved her deeply, despite their disagreements. The first time he'd seen her, she was standing across the room at a party, laughing at something some doofus had said. Even from afar, John could see that it was the laugh of somebody being polite but thinking, What an idiot.

John was smitten. He walked over to Margo, made her laugh for real, and married her a year later.

Still, the way he loved his wife was different from the way he loved his kids. If his love for his wife was romantic and warm, his love for his kids was like a volcano. When he read Where the Wild Things Are to them, and they asked why the Wild Things wanted to eat the kid, he knew exactly why. "Because of how much they love him!" he said, pretending to swallow them as they giggled so hard they could barely breathe. He understood that devouring love.

So what if he took calls when he was with his kids? He spent time with them, they adored him, and it was his professional success, after all, that provided them with the kind of financial security that he wished he'd had growing up as the son of two teachers. Yes, John was under a lot of pressure at work, but he loved creating characters and making up entire worlds as a writer—the very craft that his father had always aspired to. Whether by luck or talent or a combination, John had achieved both his and his father's dreams. And he couldn't be two places at once. The cell phone, he told Margo, was a gift.

"A gift?" Margo had said.

Yes, replied John. A gift. It allowed him to be at work and at home at the same time.

Margo thought that was precisely the problem. I don't want you to be at work and at home at the same time. We aren't your coworkers. We're your family. Margo didn't want to be midsentence or mid-kiss or mid-whatever with John, only to be interrupted by Dave or Jack or Tommy from the show. I didn't invite them into our home at nine p.m., she said.

The night before the trip to Legoland, Margo asked John if he would please stay off the phone during their vacation. It was family time away, and it was just three days.

"Unless someone's dying," Margo had pleaded—which John took to mean Unless there's an emergency—"please don't pick up the phone on this trip."

To avoid another fight, John agreed.

The kids couldn't wait to go to Legoland—they'd been talking about it for weeks. On the drive down, they wriggled in their seats, asking every few minutes, "How much longer?" and "Are we almost there?"

The family had decided to take the scenic route along the beach instead of the freeway, and John and Margo distracted the kids by having them count the boats in the ocean and play a game in which they'd make up silly songs together, each person adding a lyric more hilarious than the last until they were all cracking up.

John's phone was quiet. The night before, he'd warned the show's crew not to call.

"Unless someone's dying," he'd told them, quoting Margo, "find a way to handle it yourselves." They weren't complete idiots, he assured himself. The show was doing well. They could manage whatever came up. It was three fucking days.

Now, making up silly songs in the car, John glanced over at Margo. She was laughing the way she'd laughed with him at the party where they'd met. He hadn't seen her laugh like that in—well, he couldn't remember how long. She placed her hand on his neck, and he melted into it, responding in a way he hadn't in—again, he couldn't remember how long. The kids were jabbering away in the back. He felt a sense of peace, and an image popped into his mind. He imagined that his mom was looking down from heaven or wherever the hell she was, smiling at how well things had turned out for her youngest son, the one he'd always believed was her favorite. Here John was, with his wife and kids, now a successful television writer, heading to Legoland in a car full of laughter and love.

He remembered sitting in the back seat himself as a young boy, squeezed in the middle between his two older brothers, his parents in the front, his dad driving, his mom riding shotgun and navigating, all of them making up song lyrics and laughing their heads off. He remembered trying to keep up with his older brothers when it was his turn to add a line, and how his mom delighted in his wordplay.

"So precocious!" she'd exclaim each time.

John didn't know what precocious meant. He assumed it was a fancy way of saying "precious"—and he knew that, to his mom, he was the most precious of the boys, not the "mistake" his brothers teasingly called him because he was so much younger than they were but instead, as his mom said, a "special surprise." He remembered seeing his mom put her hand on the back of his father's neck, and now Margo was doing this for him. He felt optimistic; he and Margo would find their way back to each other.

Then John's phone rang.

The ringing phone was sitting on the console between him and Margo. John glanced at it. Margo gave him the death stare. John remembered his instructions to his staff to call only in case of emergency—unless someone's dying. He knew that today's shoot was on location. Had something gone wrong?

"Don't," Margo said.

"I just need to check who it is," John replied.

"God damn it," Margo hissed, the first time she'd sworn in front of the kids.

"Don't ‘God damn it' me," John hissed back.

"We've been away only two hours," Margo said, her voice rising, "and you promised you wouldn't do this!"

The kids went silent, and so did the phone. The call had gone to voicemail.

John sighed. He asked Margo to look at the caller ID and tell him who had called, but she shook her head and turned away. John reached for the phone with his right hand. Then they collided with a black SUV coming straight at them.

Strapped in their booster seats were five-year-old Gracie and six-year-old Gabe. Irish twins, born just a year apart and inseparable. The loves of John's life. Gracie survived along with John and Margo. Gabe, seated directly behind John and at exactly the point of impact, died at the scene.

Later, the police would try to piece together what had caused the tragedy. The two witnesses from nearby cars weren't much help. One said that the SUV veered across the lane, taking the curve too quickly. The other said that John's car didn't adjust to the position of the SUV coming around the curve. The police determined that the driver of the SUV had a blood-alcohol level above the legal limit, and he was put in jail. Manslaughter. But John didn't feel absolved. He knew that at the very moment the SUV had rounded the curve, he'd looked away for a millisecond—or he possibly had, though he thought his eyes had stayed on the road as he felt for the phone with his hand. Margo didn't see the SUV coming either. She was looking out the passenger window, toward the ocean, fuming at John while refusing to check his phone.

Gracie couldn't remember a thing, and the only person who saw what was about to happen seemed to be Gabe. The last time John heard his son's voice, it was a piercing scream with one long word: "Daddyyyyyyy!"

The phone call, by the way, was a wrong number.

As I listen, I'm overwhelmed with heartbreak—not just for John but for his entire family. I'm holding back tears, but John, on the couch, has turned to face me now, and I see that his eyes are dry. He seems removed, distant, just as he had when he told me about his mother's death.

"Oh, John," I say, "that's—"

"Yeah, yeah," he interrupts, his tone a taunt, "it's so sad. I know. It's so fucking sad. That's all everyone said when it happened. My mom dies. It's so sad. My kid dies. It's so sad. Obviously. But that doesn't change anything. They're still dead. Which is why I don't tell people. And why I didn't tell you. I don't need to hear how fucking sad it is. I don't need to see people's faces get that sad, stupid look of pity. The only reason I'm telling you is that I had a dream the other night—you shrinks like dreams, right? And I haven't been able to get it out of my head and I thought—"

John stops, sits up.

"Margo heard me scream last night. I woke up screaming at four in the fucking morning. And I can't be doing shit like that."

I want to say that what John sees in me isn't pity at all—that it's compassion and empathy and even a kind of love. But John doesn't let anyone touch or be touched by him, which leaves him alone in already isolating circumstances. Losing somebody you love is such a profoundly lonely experience, something only you endure in your own particular way. I think about how gutted and alone John must have felt as a six-year-old when his mom died and then again as a dad when his own six-year-old died. But I don't say that right now. I can tell that John's feeling what therapists call flooded, meaning that his nervous system is in overdrive, and when people feel flooded, it's best to wait a beat. We do this with couples when one person is so overwhelmed by anger or hurt that all he can do is lash out or shut down. The person needs a few minutes for his nervous system to reset before he can take anything in.

"Tell me about the dream," I say.

Miraculously, he doesn't balk. I notice that John isn't fighting me right now, and he hasn't once looked over at his phone today. He hasn't even taken it out of his pocket. He simply sits up, folds his legs under him, takes a breath, and begins.

"So, Gabe is sixteen. I mean, he was, in the dream—"

I nod.

"Okay, so he's sixteen and he's taking his driving test. He's been waiting for this day and now it's here. We're standing outside by the car in the parking lot at the DMV and Gabe looks so confident. He's started to shave, and I see some stubble, and I notice how grown up he's become." John's voice breaks.

"What was that like, seeing him so grown up?"

John smiles. "I felt proud. So proud of who he was. But also, I don't know, sad. Like he was going to leave for college soon. Did I spend enough time with him? Had I been a good father? I was trying not to cry—in the dream, I mean—and I didn't know if these were tears of pride or regret or . . . who the fuck knows. Anyway—"

John looks away, like he's trying not to cry now.

"So we're talking about what he's going to do after the test—he says he's going out with some friends—and I'm telling him to make sure never to get in the car if he's been drinking or if his friends have. And he says, ‘I know, Dad. I'm not an idiot.' The way teenagers do, you know? And then I go on to tell him never to text and drive."

John laughs, a dark laugh. "How on the nose is this dream, Sherlock?"

I don't smile. I bring him back by waiting.

"Anyway," he continues, "the examiner walks over, and Gabe and I give each other a thumbs-up—like the day I dropped him off at kindergarten right before he walked into his classroom. A quick You'll do great. But something about the examiner makes me nervous."

"How so?" I ask.

"I just have a bad feeling about her. Unsettling. I don't trust her. Like she's got it in for Gabe and he won't pass the test. Anyway, I watch them pull away. I see Gabe make his first right turn out of the driveway and it goes well. So I start to relax, but then Margo calls. She says that my mom keeps calling and Margo wants to know if she should pick up the phone. In the dream my mom is still alive, and I don't know why Margo's asking me this, why she doesn't just answer the goddamned phone. Why the hell wouldn't she pick up? So she says, ‘Remember, we agreed, don't pick up the phone unless somebody's dying?' And all of a sudden I think that if Margo picks up the phone, it means my mom is dying. That she'll die. But if Margo doesn't pick up, nobody's dying—my mom's not dying.

"So I say, ‘You're right. Whatever you do, don't pick up the phone. Let it ring.'

"So we hang up and I'm still waiting for Gabe at the DMV. I look at my watch. Where are they? They said they'd be back in twenty minutes. Thirty minutes go by. Forty. Then the examiner returns but Gabe isn't there. She walks toward me, and I know.

"‘I'm sorry,' she says. ‘There's been an accident. A man on his cell phone.' And that's when I see that the examiner is my mom. She's the one telling me that Gabe is dead. And that's why she was calling Margo over and over, because somebody was dying—it was Gabe. Some idiot on a cell phone killed him while he was taking his driving test!

"So I say, ‘Who is this man? Have you called the police? I'll murder him!' And my mom just looks at me. And I realize that the man is me. I killed Gabe."

John takes a breath, then continues his story. After Gabe died, he says, he and Margo bitterly blamed each other. In the emergency room, Margo growled at John, "A gift? You said the phone was a gift? Gabe was the gift, you fucking moron." Later, after the toxicology report indicated that the driver was drunk, Margo apologized to John, but he knew that deep down, Margo still blamed him. He knew because, deep down, John blamed her. Part of him felt that she was responsible, that if she hadn't been so stubborn and had just looked at the caller ID, John would have had his hand on the wheel and reacted more quickly to the swerving drunk driver, getting them out of harm's way.

The terrible thing, he says, is that nobody will ever know who was responsible. The driver might have hit them anyway, or they might have avoided him if they hadn't been distracted by their argument.

It's the not knowing that torments John.

I think about how it's the not knowing that torments all of us. Not knowing why your boyfriend left. Not knowing what's wrong with your body. Not knowing if you could have saved your son. At a certain point, we all have to come to terms with the unknown and the unknowable. Sometimes we'll never know why.

"Anyway," John says, returning to the dream, "at that point I wake up screaming. And you know what I say? I yell, ‘Daddyyyyyyy! ' Gabe's last word. And Margo hears this and freaks out. She runs into the bathroom and cries."

"Did you?" I say.

"What?"

"Cry."

John shakes his head.

"Why not?"

John sighs, as if the answer's obvious. "Because Margo's in the bathroom having a breakdown. What am I gonna do, have a breakdown too?"

"I don't know. If I had that kind of dream and woke up screaming, I might be pretty shaken by it. I might feel all kinds of things—rage, guilt, sadness, despair. And I might need to let some of it out, open the pressure valve a bit. I don't know what I'd do. Maybe I'd do what you did, which is also a reasonable reaction to an intolerable situation—numb out, try to ignore what I felt, hold it together. But I think at some point I'd just explode."

John shakes his head. "Let me tell you something," he says, locking his eyes on mine. There's an intensity in his voice. "I'm a parent. I have two girls. I won't let them down. I will not be a basket case and ruin their childhoods. I will not leave them with two parents who are haunted by the ghost of their son. They deserve better than that. What happened isn't their fault. It's ours. And it's our responsibility to be there for them, to have our shit together for them."

I think about his idea of having his shit together for his kids. How he feels that he failed Gabe and doesn't want to fail the others. How he feels that keeping the pain locked up will protect them. And I decide to tell him about my father's brother, Jack.

Until he was six years old, the age that John was when his mother died and the age Gabe was when he died, my father believed that he and his sister were their parents' only kids. Then one day, my father was rummaging around in the attic and came across a box of photos of a little boy, from birth all the way to about school age.

"Who's that?" he asked his dad. The boy was my father's brother, Jack, who had died at age five from pneumonia. Jack had never been mentioned before. My father was born a few years after his death. His parents believed that not talking about Jack was a way of keeping their shit together for their kids. But their six-year-old was shocked and confused. He wanted to talk about Jack—Why didn't they tell him? What happened to Jack's clothes? His toys? Were they in the attic with the photos? Why didn't they ever talk about Jack? If he—the little boy who would one day be my father—died, would they forget all about him too?

"You're so focused on being a good dad," I say to John, "but maybe part of being a good dad is allowing yourself the full range of human emotions, of really living, even if living fully can sometimes be harder than not. You can feel your feelings privately, or with Margo, or here with me—you can let them out in the adult sphere—and doing that might allow you to be more alive with your kids. It might be a different way of keeping your shit together for them. It might even be confusing for them if Gabe is never mentioned. And allowing yourself to rage or cry or sit with the despair at times might be more manageable if Gabe were given some air in your household and not tucked away in a box in the proverbial attic."

John shakes his head. "I don't want to be like Margo," he says. "She cries at the slightest things. Sometimes it seems like she'll never stop crying, and I can't live that way. It seems like nothing has changed for her and at some point, you have to make a decision to move on. I've chosen to move on. Margo hasn't."

I picture Margo sitting on the couch near Wendell, hugging my favorite pillow and telling him how alone she feels in her pain, how she's bearing it all herself while her husband is in his closed-off world. And then I think about how alone John must feel, watching his wife's pain and not being able to bear the sight of it.

"I know it looks that way," I say finally. "But I wonder if part of why Margo is like this is that she's been doing double duty. Maybe all of this time, she's been crying for both of you."

John's forehead furrows, then he looks down at his lap. A few tears land on his black designer jeans, slowly at first, then quickly, like a waterfall, faster than he can wipe them, and finally he stops trying. These are the tears he's been holding in for the past six years.

Or maybe more than thirty.

While he's crying, it occurs to me that what I'd seen as a theme with John—the argument with Margo about letting their daughter have a cell phone, the back-and-forth with me about using it in my office—had far deeper meaning than I'd realized. I remember holding hands at the Lakers game with my son—Enjoy it while it lasts—and John's comment when he arrived today. "You win . . . the pleasure of my company." But perhaps he won the pleasure of mine. After all, he chose to come here today and tell me all of this.

I think, too, about how there are many ways to defend oneself from the unspeakable. Here's one: you split off unwanted parts of yourself, hide behind a false self, and develop narcissistic traits. You say, Yeah, this catastrophic thing has happened, but I'm A-Okay. Nothing can touch me because I'm special. A special surprise. When John was a boy, wrapping himself in the memory of his mother's delight was a way to shield himself from the horror of life's utter unpredictability. He may have comforted himself this way as an adult too, clinging to how special he was after Gabe died. Because the one certainty that John can count on in this world is that he is a special person surrounded by idiots.

Through his tears, John says that this is exactly what he didn't want to happen, that he didn't come here to have a breakdown.

But I assure him that he's not breaking down; he's breaking open.

Chapter 39 How Humans Change

Theories involving stages abound in psychology, no doubt because their order, clarity, and predictability are appealing. Anyone who has taken an introductory psychology course has likely encountered the developmental-stage models posited by Freud, Jung, Erikson, Piaget, and Maslow.

But there's one stage model I keep in mind nearly every minute of every session—the stages of change. If therapy is about guiding people from where they are now to where they'd like to be, we must always consider: How do humans actually change?

In the 1980s, a psychologist named James Prochaska developed the transtheoretical model of behavior change (TTM) based on research showing that people generally don't "just do it," as Nike (or a new year's resolution) might have it, but instead tend to move through a series of sequential stages that look like this:

Stage 1: Pre-contemplation

Stage 2: Contemplation

Stage 3: Preparation

Stage 4: Action

Stage 5: Maintenance

So let's say you want to make a change—exercise more, end a relationship, or even try therapy for the first time. Before you get to that point, you're in the first stage, pre-contemplation, which is to say, you're not even thinking about changing. Some therapists might liken this to denial, meaning that you don't realize you might have a problem. When Charlotte first came to me, she presented herself as a social drinker; I realized that she was in the pre-contemplation stage as she talked about her mother's tendency to self-medicate with alcohol but failed to see any connection to her own alcohol use. When I challenged her on this, she shut down, got irritated ("People my age go out and drink!"), or engaged in "what-aboutery," the practice of diverting attention from the difficulty under discussion by raising a different problematic issue. ("Never mind X, what about Y?")

Of course, therapists aren't persuaders. We can't convince an anorexic to eat. We can't convince an alcoholic not to drink. We can't convince people not to be self-destructive, because for now, the self-destruction serves them. What we can do is try to help them understand themselves better and show them how to ask themselves the right questions until something happens—either internally or externally—that leads them to do their own persuading.

It was Charlotte's car accident and DUI that moved her into the next stage, contemplation.

Contemplation is rife with ambivalence. If pre-contemplation is denial, contemplation might be likened to resistance. Here, the person recognizes the problem, is willing to talk about it, and isn't opposed (in theory) to taking action but just can't seem to get herself to do it. So while Charlotte was concerned by her DUI and the subsequent mandate to participate in an addiction program—which she grudgingly attended and only after failing to take the course in time and having to hire a lawyer (at great expense) to get her deadline extended—she wasn't ready to make any changes to her drinking.

People often start therapy during the contemplation stage. A woman in a long-distance relationship says that her boyfriend keeps delaying his planned move to her city, and she acknowledges that he's probably not coming—but she won't break up with him. A man knows that his wife has been having an affair, but when we talk about it, he comes up with excuses for where she might be when she's not answering her texts so that he doesn't have to confront her. Here people procrastinate or self-sabotage as a way to stave off change—even positive change—because they're reluctant to give something up without knowing what they'll get in its place. The hiccup at this stage is that change involves the loss of the old and the anxiety of the new. Although often maddening for friends and partners to witness, this hamster wheel is part of the process; people need to do the same thing over and over a seemingly ridiculous number of times before they're ready to change.

Charlotte talked about trying to "cut back" on her drinking, about having two glasses of wine each night instead of three or skipping cocktails at brunch if she would be drinking again at dinner (and, of course, after dinner). She could acknowledge the role that alcohol was playing in her life, its anxiety-muting effects, but she couldn't find an alternative way to manage her feelings, even with medication prescribed by a psychiatrist.

To help with her anxiety, we decided to add a second therapy session each week. During this time, she drank less, and for a while she believed that this would be enough to control her drinking. But coming twice a week created its own problems—Charlotte was once again convinced that she was addicted to me—so she went back to the once-a-week schedule. When, in an opportune moment (say, after she'd mentioned getting drunk on a date), I'd bring up the idea of an outpatient treatment program, she'd shake her head. No way.

"Those programs make you stop completely," she'd say. "I want to be able to have a drink at dinner. It's socially awkward not to drink when everyone else is."

"It's socially awkward getting drunk too," I'd say, to which she'd reply, "Yeah, but I'm cutting back." And by then it was true; she was cutting back. And she was reading up on addiction online, landing her in stage three, preparation. For Charlotte, it was hard to concede the lifelong fight she'd been in with her parents: "I won't change, Mom and Dad, until you treat me the way I want to be treated." She'd made a subconscious bargain that she'd change her habits only if her parents changed theirs, a lose-lose pact if there ever was one. In fact, her relationship with her parents couldn't change until she had something new to bring to it.

Two months later, Charlotte waltzed in, unpacked the contents of her bag onto the arms of her throne, and said, "So, I have a question." Did I know of any good outpatient alcohol-treatment programs? She had entered stage four, action.

In the action stage, Charlotte dutifully spent three nights per week in an addiction-treatment program, using the group as a substitute for the wine drinking she used to do at that time. She stopped drinking entirely.

The goal, of course, is to get to the final stage, maintenance, which means that the person has maintained the change for a significant period. That's not to say that people don't backslide, like in a game of Chutes and Ladders. Stress or certain triggers for the old behavior (a particular restaurant, a call from an old drinking buddy) can result in relapse. This stage is hard because the behaviors people want to modify are embedded in the fabric of their lives; people with addiction issues (whether that addiction is to a substance, drama, negativity, or self-defeating ways of being) tend to hang out with other addicts. But by the time a person is in maintenance, she can usually get back on track with the right support.

Without wine or vodka, Charlotte was able to focus better; her memory improved, and she felt less tired and more motivated. She applied to graduate school. She got involved with a charitable organization for animals that she felt passionate about. She was also able to talk with me about her difficult relationship with her mother for the first time in her life and begin to interact with her in a calmer, less reactive way. She stayed away from "friends" who invited her out to have just one birthday drink—"Because you only turn twenty-seven once, right?" Instead, she spent the night of her birthday with a new group of friends who served her her favorite meal and toasted her with a creative assortment of festive nonalcoholic drinks.

But there was one addiction she couldn't quite kick: the Dude.

Full disclosure: I disliked the Dude. His swagger, his dishonesty, his dicking Charlotte around—literally and figuratively. One week he was with his girlfriend, the next he wasn't. One month he was with Charlotte, the next he wasn't. I'm onto you I wanted my look to say when I opened the waiting-room door and saw him sitting near Charlotte. I felt protective, like the mommy dog in the driver's seat in the car commercial. But I stayed out of the fray.

Charlotte would often wiggle her thumbs in the air while narrating the latest installment: "And then I said . . ." "And then he's like . . ." "And then I'm like . . ."

"You had this conversation in text?" I asked, surprised, the first time she did this. When I suggested that discussing the state of their relationship via text might be limiting—you can't look into somebody's eyes or take someone's hand to offer reassurance even though you're upset—she replied, "Oh, no, we use emojis too."

I thought of the deafening silence and twitching foot that clued me in to Boyfriend's desire to break up; had we been texting about the movie tickets that night, he might have waited months more to tell me. But with Charlotte, I knew I sounded like an old fogy; her generation wasn't going to change, so I'd have to change to keep up with the times.

Today Charlotte's eyes are red. She found out on Instagram that the Dude is back with his supposedly ex-girlfriend.

"He keeps saying he wants to change, but then this happens," she says, sighing. "Do you think he'll ever change?"

I think about the stages of change—where Charlotte is, where the Dude might be—and about how Charlotte's father's constant disappearing act is being replayed with the Dude. It's hard for her to accept that while she might change, other people might not.

"He won't change, will he?" she says.

"He may not want to change," I say gently. "And your father might not either."

Charlotte squeezes her lips together, as if considering a possibility that had never occurred to her before. After all of her efforts to try to get these men to love her the way she wants to be loved, she can't change them because they don't want to change. This is a familiar scenario in therapy. A patient's boyfriend doesn't want to stop smoking pot and watching video games on weekends. A patient's child doesn't want to study harder for tests at the expense of doing musical productions. A patient's spouse doesn't want to travel less for work. Sometimes the changes you want in another person aren't on that person's agenda—even if he tells you they are.

"But—" she says, then stops herself.

I watch her, sensing the shift happening inside her.

"I keep trying to get them to change," she says, almost to herself.

I nod. He won't change, so she'll have to.

Every relationship is a dance. The Dude does his dance steps (approach/retreat), and Charlotte does hers (approach/get hurt)—that's how they dance. But once Charlotte changes her steps, one of two things will happen—the Dude will be forced to change his steps so that he doesn't trip and fall down, or he'll simply walk off the dance floor and find somebody else's feet to stomp on.

Charlotte's first drink after four months of sobriety happened on Father's Day, when her dad was supposed to fly into town to be with her but canceled at the last minute. That was three months ago. She didn't like that dance, so she changed her steps. She hasn't had a drink since.

"I need to stop seeing the Dude," she says now.

I smile as if to say, That sounds familiar.

"No, really—I mean it this time," she says, but she smiles too. It's been her mantra for months while in preparation. "Can I change the time of my appointment?" she asks. Today she's ready for action.

"Of course," I say, recalling that I'd suggested this before so that Charlotte wouldn't have to sit with the Dude in the waiting room each week, but Charlotte hadn't been ready to consider it. I offer her a different day and time and she puts the appointment into her phone.

At the end of our session, Charlotte gathers up her myriad belongings, walks to the door, and, as always, stops, stalling. "Well, see you on Monday," she whispers, knowing we've pulled one over on the Dude, who will likely wonder why Charlotte's not there at their regular Thursday time. Let him wonder, I think.

As Charlotte heads down the hallway, the Dude comes out of his session, and Mike and I nod hello, poker-faced.

Maybe the Dude told Mike about the girlfriend, and they spent the session talking about his tendency to juggle people, to mislead, to cheat. ("Oh, so that's his issue," Charlotte once said after he'd done this to her twice.) Or maybe the Dude didn't mention it to Mike at all. Maybe he's not ready to change. Or maybe he's just not interested in changing.

When I bring this up in my consultation group the next day, Ian says simply, "Lori, three words: not your patient."

And I realize that, like Charlotte, I need to release the Dude too.

Chapter 40 Fathers

During a belated New Year's cleaning, I come across my grad-school coursework on the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl. Scanning my notes, I begin to remember his story.

Frankl was born in 1905, and as a boy, he became intensely interested in psychology. By high school, he began an active correspondence with Freud. He went on to study medicine and lecture on the intersection of psychology and philosophy, or what he called logotherapy, from the Greek word logos, or "meaning." Whereas Freud believed that people are driven to seek pleasure and avoid pain (his famous pleasure principle), Frankl maintained that people's primary drive isn't toward pleasure but toward finding meaning in their lives.

He was in his thirties when World War II broke out, putting him, a Jew, in jeopardy. Offered immigration to the United States, he turned it down so as not to abandon his parents, and a year later, the Nazis forced Frankl and his wife to have her pregnancy terminated. In a matter of months, he and other family members were deported to concentration camps, and when Frankl was finally freed, three years later, he learned that the Nazis had killed his wife, his brother, and both of his parents.

Freedom under these circumstances might have led to despair. After all, the hope of what awaited Frankl and his fellow prisoners upon their release was now gone—the people they cared about were dead, their families and friends wiped out. But Frankl wrote what became an extraordinary treatise on resilience and spiritual salvation, known in English as Man's Search for Meaning. In it, he shares his theory of logotherapy as it relates not just to the horrors of concentration camps but also to more mundane struggles.

He wrote, "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances."

Indeed, Frankl remarried, had a daughter, published prolifically, and spoke around the world until his death at age ninety-two.

Rereading these notes, I thought of my conversations with Wendell. Scribbled in my grad-school spiral were the words Reacting vs. responding = reflexive vs. chosen. We can choose our response, Frankl was saying, even under the specter of death. The same was true of John's loss of his mother and son, Julie's illness, Rita's regrettable past, and Charlotte's upbringing. I couldn't think of a single patient to whom Frankl's ideas didn't apply, whether it was about extreme trauma or an interaction with a difficult family member. More than sixty years later, Wendell was saying I could choose too—that the jail cell was open on both sides.

I particularly liked this line from Frankl's book: "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."

I'd never emailed Wendell for anything other than scheduling issues, but I was so stunned by the parallel that I wanted to share it with him. I pulled up his email and typed, This is what we were talking about. The trick, I suppose, is to find that elusive "space."

A few hours later, he replied.

I've always appreciated Frankl. Beautiful quote. See you Wednesday.

It was typical Wendell—warm and genuine but clearly stating that therapy takes place face-to-face. I remembered our first phone call, when he'd said almost nothing, and how surprisingly interactive he was once we met.

Still, I carried around his reply in my head all week. I could have sent that quote to various friends who would have appreciated it too, but it wouldn't have been the same. Wendell and I existed in a separate universe where he saw me in ways that even those close to me didn't. Of course, it's also true that my family and friends saw aspects of me that Wendell would never see, but nobody would quite understand the subtext of my email as precisely as Wendell would.

The following Wednesday, Wendell brings up the email. He tells me that he shared the quote with his wife, who, he says, is going to use it for a talk she's giving. He's never mentioned his wife, though I know everything about her from my long-ago Google binge.

"What does your wife do?" I ask as if I haven't seen her LinkedIn profile. He tells me about her work at a nonprofit.

"Oh, interesting," I reply, but the word interesting sounds unnaturally high-pitched.

Wendell watches me. I quickly change the subject.

For a split second, I think about what I might do if I were the therapist here. Sometimes I want to say, I wouldn't do it that way, but I know that's like back-seat driving. I need to be the patient, which means I need to relinquish control. It may seem like the patient controls the session, deciding what to say or not, setting the agenda or topic. But therapists pull the strings in our own ways—in what we say or don't say, what we respond to or hold on to for later, what we give attention to and what we don't.

Later in the session, I'm talking about my father. I tell Wendell that he'd been in the hospital again due to his heart condition, and though he's okay now, I'm afraid of losing him. I'm aware in a new way of just how frail he is, and I'm starting to absorb the reality that he won't be here forever.

"I can't picture a world without him in it," I say. "I can't imagine not being able to call and hear his voice or ask his advice or laugh together about something we both find funny." I think about how there's nothing in the world like laughing with my dad. I think about how knowledgeable he is on almost any topic and how fully he loves me and how kind he is—not just to me, but to everyone. The first thing people say about my father isn't how smart or funny he is, though he is both. The first thing they say is "He's so sweet."

I tell Wendell about the time I was in college on the East Coast, missing home and unsure if I wanted to stay there. My father heard the pain in my voice and got on a plane and flew three thousand miles to sit with me on a park bench across from my dorm, in the cold winter weather, and just listen. He listened to me for two more days, and I felt better, and he went home. I haven't thought about this in years.

I also recount what happened this past weekend after my son's basketball game. As the boys ran off to celebrate their victory, my father took me aside and told me that he'd just been at a friend's funeral the day before. After the funeral, he explained, he'd gone up to the friend's daughter, now in her thirties, and said, "Your father was so proud of you. Every conversation we had, he'd say, ‘I'm so proud of Christina,' and he'd tell me about all you were doing!" This was absolutely true, but Christina was shocked.

"He never told me that," she said, bursting into tears. My father was floored until he realized that he wasn't sure if he'd told me how he felt about me. Had he done it at all—or enough?

"So," my father said outside the gym, "I want to make sure that I've told you how proud of you I am. I want to make sure you know." He said it in such a shy way, obviously uncomfortable having this kind of interaction; he was used to listening to others but keeping his emotional world to himself.

"I know," I said, because my father had communicated his pride to me in countless ways, though I wasn't always listening as well as I should have been. But that day I couldn't help hearing the subtext: I'm going to die sooner rather than later. We stood there, the two of us, hugging and crying as people passing by tried not to stare, because we both knew that this was the beginning of my father's goodbye.

"As your eyes are opening, his are beginning to close," Wendell says now, and I think about how bittersweet but true that is. My awakening is happening at an opportune moment.

"I'm so glad I have this time with him and that it can be so meaningful," I say. "I wouldn't want him to abruptly die one day and feel like it's too late, that I waited too long for us to really see each other."

Wendell nods, and I feel queasy. All of a sudden I remember that Wendell's father had died ten years ago very unexpectedly. In my Google search, I'd come across his father's obituary after I read the story of his death in his mother's family interview. Apparently, Wendell's father had been in seemingly perfect health when he'd collapsed at dinner. I wonder if my talking about my father this way might be painful for him. I also worry that if I say any more, I'll give away how much I know. So I pull back, ignoring the fact that therapists are trained to listen for what patients aren't saying.

A few weeks later, Wendell comments that for the past couple of sessions, I seem to have been editing myself—ever since, he adds, I sent him the Viktor Frankl quote and he'd mentioned his wife. He wonders (what would we therapists do without the word wonder to broach a sensitive topic?) how the mention of his wife has affected me.

"I haven't really thought about that," I say. It's true—I've been focused on hiding my internet search.

I look at my feet, then at Wendell's. Today's socks are a blue chevron pattern. When I lift my head, I see that Wendell is looking at me with his right eyebrow raised.

And then I realize what Wendell is getting at. He thinks that I'm jealous of his wife, that I want him all to myself! This is called romantic transference, a common reaction patients have to their therapists. But the idea that I have a crush on Wendell strikes me as hilarious.

I look at Wendell, in his beige cardigan and khakis and funky socks, his green eyes staring back at me. For a second, I imagine what it must be like to be married to Wendell. In a photo I'd found of him and his wife, they were at a charity event, arm in arm and all dressed up, Wendell smiling at the camera and his wife looking at him adoringly. I remember feeling a twinge of envy when I saw that photo, not because I was envious of his wife but because they seemed to have the kind of relationship I wanted for myself—with someone else. But the more I deny the romantic transference, the less Wendell will believe me. The lady doth protest too much.

There are about twenty minutes left in the session—even as a patient, I can feel the rhythm of the hour—and I know that this façade can't last forever. There's only one thing to do.

"I Googled you," I say, looking away. "I stopped stalking Boyfriend, and I ended up stalking you. When you mentioned your wife, I already knew all about her. And your mother." I pause, especially mortified by this last part. "I read that long interview with your mom."

I get ready for . . . I don't know what. Something bad to happen. A tornado to enter the room and alter our connection in some intangible but irreparable way. I wait for everything to feel distant, different, changed between us. But instead, the opposite happens. It feels as though the storm came in, passed through the room, and left not ruins but a clearing in its wake.

I feel lighter, relieved of a burden. Sharing difficult truths might come with a cost—the need to face them—but there's also a reward: freedom. The truth releases us from shame.

Wendell nods, and we sit there in a wordless conversation. Me: I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done that. That was so invasive. Him: It's okay. I understand. It's natural to be curious. Me: I'm happy for you—for the loving family that you have. Him: Thank you. I hope you will have this one day too.

And then we have a version of that conversation aloud. We also talk about my curiosity. Why I kept it a secret. What it was like to hold that secret and also know so much about him. What I imagined would happen between us if I revealed it—and how it feels now that I have. And because I'm a therapist—or maybe because I'm a patient and I just need to know—I ask him what it's like to learn that I stalked him. Is there anything I found that he wishes I didn't know? Does he feel different about me, about us?

Only one of his answers shocks me: He has never seen the interview with his mother! He didn't know it existed online. He knew that his mother had done an interview for that organization, but he thought it was for their internal archives. I ask if he worries that other patients might come across it and he sits back and takes a breath. For the first time, I see his forehead scrunch up.

"I don't know," he says after a beat. "I'll have to think about it."

Frankl's quote pops into my mind again. He's making space between stimulus and response in order to choose his freedom.

Our time is up, so Wendell gives his legs the usual two pats and stands. We head for the exit, but at the threshold, I stop.

"I'm sorry about your father," I say. After all, the jig is up. He knows I know the whole story.

Wendell smiles. "Thank you."

"Do you miss him?" I ask.

"Every day," he says. "Not a day goes by that I don't miss him."

"Not a day will go by that I won't miss my father either," I say.

He nods, and we stand there, thinking about our fathers together. When he steps back to open the door for me, I see a hint of moisture in his eyes.

There's so much more I want to ask him. Is he at peace with where things were left when his father collapsed? I think about the ways in which sons and fathers can get tangled up in expectations and yearnings for approval. Did his father ever tell him he was proud of him, not despite his rejecting the family business and carving out his own path but because of it?

I won't learn more about Wendell's father, but we'll have many discussions in the coming weeks and months about mine. And through these discussions, it will become clear that by seeking a male therapist, I had hoped to get an objective opinion on the breakup, but instead, I got a version of my father.

Because my father, too, shows me how it feels to be exquisitely seen.