TRANSCRIPT
I would like to share a story from back when I was a therapist. Usually, I don’t talk at all about anything that happened in my relationship with my clients because it would break confidentiality. But this one I can tell.
It started in the year 2004 when I got my first full-time private practice. I was actually working from home in the West Village, in Greenwich Village, in New York City, in downtown Manhattan. It was scary. I wasn’t working at a clinic. I had no boss anymore. I had all my own clients. They’d come into my home, which by day would become a therapy office. It was exciting. It was new. It was like, wow, I really made it. This was my goal: to have my own private therapy office, no longer have a boss, no longer work at a clinic. I was 32 years old at the time.
Well, one day I was out walking on my block and I passed a woman. She looked like she was about my age, and I realized that I recognized her. I realized that I had done her psychotherapy intake back when I was working at a clinic. I’d done hundreds and hundreds of psychotherapy intakes. Often, I didn’t end up seeing the client, except one time when I did their initial intake and I would have to refer them to a different therapist in the clinic.
But I looked at this woman, and I was pretty sure, yeah, I did her psychotherapy intake. I sat with her for an hour. I couldn’t remember when. I couldn’t remember any details of her life, but it was maybe a year or two before. She had red hair. Remember that? She was kind of pretty. And I was looking at her, and she looked at me, and she also recognized me. And this is part of why, from the look on her face, that I realized it was something awkward that I had done her intake. She looked down; she didn’t want to make eye contact with me.
Sometimes, living in New York City, this would happen. I would run into people that I’d been their therapist or I’d done their intake, and they told me all sorts of personal stuff about their lives. Perhaps like being abused as kids or embarrassing or painful things that they did or very vulnerable times in their life, being hospitalized, perhaps having been sexually abused by a family member, things like that. Things that they didn’t really want to associate anymore publicly. They didn’t want to have to see me and remember me.
So whenever I saw people in this kind of situation and I realized I had been in a therapeutic role and they didn’t want to initiate contact and they looked down, I would look down too and just pass them, not bother them anymore. So that’s what I realized when I looked at her. She looked down, and she looked kind of maybe embarrassed, a little bit like she didn’t want me to know her. And so I respected that. And so I looked down, said nothing.
But then it got awkward because I started realizing I was seeing her on the street often. I realized I saw her once going into a building like three doors down, and I was like, I felt sorry for her. I felt bad for her. Who wants to see someone who did their intake and knows all sorts of personal information about her, even though I didn’t remember any of it? But who wants to see them on their block all the time?
So basically what I did is I tried to be very respectful, and for several years I ignored her, just completely pretended I’d never seen her before. She never made eye contact with me again. I never made eye contact with her again. I’d sometimes see her with her husband, her kids, walking the dog, that kind of thing.
And then one day, a strange thing happened. I was watching a movie, a science fiction movie about a world in which people couldn’t have children, in which people had become sterile. And as I was watching it, the main character came on the television screen, and it rang a bell. She had reddish hair, and I looked at her, and suddenly I realized, I know that woman. I did her psychotherapy intake. And it was bizarre. I was like, oh, I didn’t know she was a famous actress. She never told me that in the intake.
And then suddenly I realized, Daniel, this is the world-famous actress Julianne Moore. She was never your psychotherapy client. You never saw her in a session. You don’t know who she is personally at all. She’s a world-famous actress, and you’ve probably seen her on the news or you’ve read about her in the newspaper. You’ve seen clips, and you live in the West Village in New York. The West Village in Greenwich Village in New York is full of rich and famous people. She just happens to be your neighbor.
Yeah, you live in a little studio apartment in a building that has 15 or 20 apartments, and she lives in the entire building three doors down. That’s the exact same size, and she owns the entire 15, 20 million dollar building herself. She doesn’t know who you are. The reason she’s looking down when she sees you is she thinks you know her because she’s famous, and she doesn’t want to make eye contact with an ogling fan.
And the reason that I look down is because I completely misinterpreted her look. I thought she knew me. She didn’t know me at all. I didn’t know her at all. And actually, it was a very interesting thing to consider what the reality of the situation was and just how easily I could misinterpret human dynamics. And also how actually by talking about this now, I’m not breaking her confidentiality at all.