December 19, 2024

Photo: Molly Matalon

No one gets married thinking they’ll get divorced, in the same way we don’t board a plane expecting to crash. But I really never thought I would get divorced. Especially not just after giving birth to my first child and especially not in the shadow of my husband’s new relationship with a celebrity. In this season of shock and mourning, over a year after the end of my marriage was made public, I deeply miss the life of invisibility I created for myself as a psychologist specializing in women’s mental health.

During graduate school for clinical psychology, I learned about transference: the way a patient uses the anonymous therapist as a fun-house-mirror reflection of their own unresolved relational needs. The patient and therapist piece together a deeper understanding of the patient based on the echoes of outside relationships that inevitably play out in the therapist’s office. As a therapist, part of what I could offer my patients was the experience of being in relation with someone else without the complexities of a personal relationship. I was never meant to be fully known to them. Research consistently indicates that the strongest predictor of success in therapy is the therapeutic alliance — the rapport between therapist and patient — and traditionally, therapists rigorously protect this for our patients with clear boundaries. By reducing the white noise of personal information, or self-disclosures, therapists provide patients with a unique opportunity to feel connected to another person by care alone. To be there in feelings and not in facts was the superpower I had always wanted.

Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photo: Getty Images

By Madame Clairevoyant

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A biweekly newsletter interrogating modern family life, written by Kathryn Jezer-Morton.