When I questioned her about this, she acted as though it was normal and that there wasn’t much she could do about it. However, she’d found a pill vial in his cabinet that she recognized as the same medication she’d been prescribed. When I asked whether her sexual partner knew he had herpes, Laura replied that Ed, her boyfriend of two years, had said he didn’t. “The kind you get if you’re totally filthy.” I asked, “Herpes zoster or herpes simplex?” I continued to wait in what’s called a therapeutic silence-an uncomfortable quiet that’s supposed to elicit truth from the patient. When I asked how I could help her, Laura sat for a long time looking out the window. She’d started out as a secretary but had been promoted to the human resources department. She said she was twenty-six, single, and working in a large securities firm.

She was chic in spike heels, a tailored silk blouse, and a black pencil skirt. Perfect makeup, with bright red lipstick, set off her features. She had masses of shoulder-length blond highlighted hair and her porcelain skin contrasted sharply with her dark eyes. Laura was barely five feet high, with an hourglass figure, huge almond eyes, and such full lips that had it been thirty years later, I would have suspected Botox injections. Luckily I had prematurely white hair in my twenties, which added some much-needed gravitas to my demeanour.

I sat behind my huge mahogany desk looking like a cross between Anna Freud and Joan Crawford. I was newly transformed from a student in jeans and a T-shirt to a professional, decked out in a silk blouse and a designer suit with linebacker shoulder pads, de rigueur in the early eighties. She was referred to me through a general practitioner, who in his recorded message said, “She’ll fill you in on the details.” I don’t know who was more frightened, Laura or I. No one brought this home to me more than Laura Wilkes, my first patient. I had no idea on that first day that psychotherapy wasn’t the psychologist solving problems but rather two people facing each other, week after week, endeavouring to reach some kind of psychological truth we could agree on. Instead, I had to learn how to be flexible as new information trickled in weekly. Fortified with the knowledge I’d acquired, taking comfort in the rules I’d learned, I looked forward to having patients I could “cure.”įortunately, I had no idea at the time what a messy business clinical psychology was or I might have opted for pure research, an area where I’d have control over my subjects and variables. THE DAY I OPENED my private practice as a psychologist, I sat smugly in my office.

Good morning monster