What Does Your Therapist Think?
Deirdre Mendoza
Naomi Koffman
When my parents came back from their weekly group therapy, run by a woman my father called the lady shrink, they retreated to separate corners of our small New York apartment. My mother sat in her paisley chair in the living room and chain smoked Winstons, while my father put on his Italian slippers and turned on the tube in the den. I learned new vocabulary words each week, like ballbuster and macho, alongside phrases like totally in denial, checked out, passive-aggressive, and control freak, as my parents processed their heated sessions.
When I was in the tenth grade, after a hormonal glumness had consumed me — and a plastic baggie filled with weed was found in an unmarked shoebox in my closet — I got what many of my privileged New York friends had: my own therapist.
Dr. Elaine was long-haired and nasal, an overeducated free spirit who favored black turtlenecks and oversized belts and smelled of Herbal Essence shampoo. We met weekly in her office on the bottom floor of a brownstone in the West Village, where she served Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies and chamomile tea. She often talked more about the indignities of her own life than I did of mine. But there was something liberating about having an adult reveal how she felt after her divorce (depressed) or why she never had kids (suddenly she was 40!) or why she went on the pill (she was in charge of her body).
In fact, the more she talked about herself, her life decisions and her own occasional bouts of the blues, the more I accepted the idea that feeling down and rudderless was perhaps something we all had to manage. There were times we swam and times we floated; the trick was not to sink.
I cultivated a new identity as a person in treatment who knew what a session was, a person who was willing to open things up and see what lurked below the surface, a person unafraid to speak about my parents’ routine yelling matches, my mother’s daytime drinking, or my shame about her midday naps that ended when my dad got home from work. And when my mother (who had clocked in many years of individual therapy in service to her troubled childhood) could not soothe my anxious mind, she reverted to a familiar and persistent question: “What does your therapist think?”
I brought my tortured poetry and some secrets that only my best friend knew to my weekly sessions with Dr. Elaine. I brought triumphs and questions and fraught feelings too big for an only child’s teenage mind. In Elaine’s office, I was a different me, a more mature, analytical me, a person who admitted to things I did not dare tell my parents. Sexual experimentation, Quaaludes, Cs in geometry, unrequited love affairs, and the origins of punk rock were among the fluid topics we discussed. It felt like I’d become an honorary member of the adult world. Elaine didn’t judge or diminish me, or make me think I was the only one who sometimes had trouble finding purpose or meaning in what life had to offer. She was wry and unconventional in her approach. I remember laughing in our sessions more than I cried, at least in the beginning.
“Just keep making things,” Elaine said to me as I stood in the doorway at one of our last sessions before heading to college in Massachusetts. “And do what you want to do, not what anyone else thinks you should do.”
When I moved to Los Angeles in the early 1990s, seeking fortune in Hollywood, I realized I must continue with my self-realization in order to swim. I worked for agents and managers, PA’d on commercials and film sets, freelanced for magazines, and survived a series of shady living situations and bad boyfriends. I got fit at yoga classes, went to all-night parties, took up tennis, and eventually found a good therapist.
It wasn’t that I was particularly screwed up in my mid-twenties, just a bit melancholy and insecure. Looking back, I think that self-help — now known by its less pejorative, more righteous term, self care — had become a default setting. Along with getting a job, finding a supportive friend group and a lover or two, I believed therapy was something that calibrated an imbalanced self. It was the place you went to understand why you were who you were and possibly what you were on the verge of becoming.
On Thursdays after work, I drove in my Toyota Corolla down Beverly Glen to the Mediterranean-style home office of Marlene M. She had good cheekbones, which were featured in black and white photos of herself with anti-war politicos. And she had once been on a soap.
“Tell me, Deirdre,” she’d say, “how are you doing?” And soon I was back in my familiar place, talking about my fears and my sadness, my weekly workplace fuckups, my recent break-ups, my hopes for a fulfilling future, and my newfound obsessions.
Today, I give Marlene credit for helping me get to the altar. I was never keen on commitment, having experienced too many heavy scenes from a marriage (think George and Martha). But I’d met a good guy, an artist, at a screenwriter’s party in Laurel Canyon, and, after a few years of living together in youthful bliss in a downtown loft, a marriage proposal was on the table. Marlene had encouraged me to create an image board with things I wanted, the pieces I hoped to put in place. A partner that looked strangely like my future husband was featured in the images I’d torn from the pages of Sunset magazine. I took that as a sign.
I didn’t do talk therapy during nearly two decades of marriage and child rearing. Maybe there was too much to say, or maybe there just wasn’t time. When I suggested we see a counselor at the end of the marriage, my husband shook his head. “Nah,” he said, “that’s your thing.”
Today, as the virus forces us to live inside our screens, accompanied — or not — by estranged lovers, cherished partners, anxious children, or young adults who’ve returned to the nest, we share a collective and constant state of panic. If life in quarantine were a sound it would be the searing, high-pitched test of the Emergency Broadcasting System. A sound we can’t escape while entering public spaces, or hiding in our beds with our phones glued to our palms; it’s the primordial frequency known to creatures on the verge of extinction. Consequently, therapists are in hot demand.
I now have friends on both coasts who are therapists, including my next door neighbor, who came over for a backyard drinking session with his husband in the early weeks of quarantine. “This is a time when people really need a good therapist,” he said. “And I tell them — with transparency — that we’re all struggling, too.”
This revelation, that therapists are as vulnerable as mere mortals, equally depleted by world events and setback by loss, is weirdly reassuring. These same folks that attempt to mitigate our grief by laughing with us, offering tissues, and reframing our vision of the world, are also upset by personal skirmishes, or the sight of an un-holstered mask at the supermarket, or the weaponized rants heard in the Twittersphere. Their joy gets cancelled, too.
As I sat with my neighbors, under an orange tree, living the life I was so lucky to have shaped and could now enjoy, I drank wine and felt momentarily impervious to harm or pending doom. None of us had answers about when there would be relief from this illness and suffering. Still, we floated together on this lazy afternoon.
Deirdre Mendoza
Deirdre is an L.A.-based journalist whose writing has been published in Ms Magazine, LA Weekly, Daily Variety, WWD, The Los Angeles Times and The Miami New Times.
