In Which We See Each Other In Person

Back in April, well before things fell off a cliff, Sam started talking about returning to the office. She asked me how I would feel about seeing her in person again. I told her my instinct would be to want to give her a hug, which she said was a touching thing to say and that of course she would want to hug me.

Though I was aware that therapists don’t generally go around hugging their patients, if I knew then what I know now about boundaries, that would have been a red flag. As Appelbaum and Gutheil (2007) note, “Physical contact between therapist and patient, even when intended to be supportive, can be misinterpreted and can lead to boundary problems.” These small things piled up to a large conclusion that I was very special to her.

At our first session after my breakdown, when I had realized I could no longer trust the truth of anything she had said to me, or what feelings of hers it may have represented, I asked her about that.

Matt: Six weeks ago you brought up being back in the office and I said my instinct would be to give you a hug…Everything that happened since notwithstanding, were you going to do that?

Sam: Yes, I would give you a hug. Why wouldn’t I give you a hug? Why wouldn’t I want to hug you?

Now, here in August, with the prospect of resuming in person only a few weeks off, I wondered how I would react to seeing her in person again. I was filled with dread. We’d just had this intimate experience in which she talked to me like a friend about her niece’s death. And in the last few minutes of that session, when we finally turned to me, I brought up her asking, before vacation, “what if you didn’t get everything wrong?” Her answer shocked me:

I was referring to my own feelings as well. That you didn’t get that wrong. That even if I hadn’t said anything, I think you were feeling that from me anyway, even if I didn’t put it in words. That was how I always thought about it. And how I felt about it.

I may have buried the lede here: All the talk about how I had been wrong about everything and the previous month of working to figure out how I had gotten everything wrong… POOF. I hadn’t gotten anything about her feelings wrong. Which I knew, deep down. Now she’s telling me that she did have feelings for me. And thinking about it, she kind of always had been telling me that, in the references to her own countertransference. But what I was transferring and what she was countertransferring was never part of the discussion. We should have dwelt on mine (if there was in fact transference in play, which at this point I doubt), but she should have kept hers to herself, since acknowledging it made her feelings part of the conversation and foremost in my mind.

I had been gaslit again and the impossible conflict between what I knew for sure and what she had been working on me to believe was where all of the anxiety, the sleeplessness, the trying to reconcile everything that had happen for 28 hours a day had come from.

So I decided that for the next session, I wouldn’t appear on Zoom, I would drive to her office in Watertown and see what it was like to be in a room with her. I texted her to make sure she would be there. And as I drove, I realized that the route through Woodbury was going to take me by her house, whose address I knew from my long ago attempt to find a deli to deliver Matzo Ball Soup to her when her son got Covid. But the place my GPS directed me to was a downscale condo development, which didn’t seem right given all she’d told me about her circumstances.

When she opened the door, I recalled the conversation about a hug when we were next together, so I opened my arms and she responded by opening hers. But it was a nothing of a hug, totally perfunctory. I was tentative because I didn’t want to put too much emotion into it and she (later) said that while she would have “preferred a full body hug,” she was concerned about eliciting feelings in me. (So why, then, tell me she would have preferred a full body hug? Another great question.)

I mentioned trying to see her house on the way and my surprise at what was at her address and she told me GPS always gets it wrong and gave me proper directions to it for my ride home. She asked me why I wanted to see her house and I told her it was because I was interested in knowing more about her. This led immediately back to the conversation about friendship. I told her that her opening up to me about her niece’s death felt like a significant moment for us. She agreed that she wouldn’t have been able to talk to me about that until recently and that was indeed a measure of her trust in me and our closeness. (Here, she was telling me that she felt her absolute closest to me after I had already broken down, not before saying I love you.)

Devereux (2014) warns that “self-disclosure by therapists, particularly of personal losses or vulnerabilities, can create role confusion and emotional entanglement for clients.” Bingo.

I interpreted this as another in a recent line of indications that Sam’s feelings for me were indeed special, deeper than she would have felt with and more open than she would be with other patients. This gave me hope for a relationship with her beyond therapist-patient. Not romantic, but something more like friends at some point after therapy ended, which I was becoming pretty clear needed to be soon. This visit was the beginning of the end.

Later, when the legal wrangling began, she used my driving past her house to accuse me of surveilling her. If I had been capable of laughing, I would have laughed, recalling that I had told her I’d deliberately avoided driving by her office because I wanted to keep to boundaries and her telling me in response that she had driven around my home town when she happened to be in it, to get closer to me. It would have been lovely to put that to her on the witness stand.