If You're in My Office, It's Already Too Late by James J. Sexton

Author:James J. Sexton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

Chapter 21

WE KNOW WHAT WE KNOW UNTIL WE MAY NOT WANT TO KNOW IT

We deny realities all the time—about ourselves, about our partners. Denial is a protective measure. It’s a deeply human instinct. It’s often heartbreaking, occasionally noble.

And it’s almost never helpful, at all.

One client, Theo, literally walked in on this scene (as he described it to me): He came home early to find his wife sitting at the kitchen counter; the normally made bed was unmade (he could see into the bedroom from the living room of their small apartment); and the shower was occupied. By Terry, a friend of Theo’s.

Theo’s wife said that Terry had come over to help her fix the garbage disposal in the kitchen sink, which had jammed and broken. He got dirty doing it, of course, so he took a shower.

Theo chose to believe this.

Three months later, when he walked in on his wife giving Terry a blowjob in the kitchen, he assumed, correctly, that Terry hadn’t been fixing the disposal. He had just used it that morning and it seemed to be working fine. To his credit, Theo didn’t go nuclear, didn’t go Lorena Bobbitt on Terry. He just turned around, walked out the front door, called my office, and came in for a consultation a few hours later.

It’s amazing the lengths to which people will go to believe what they want to believe. Sometimes, it takes seeing a text between their spouse and a third party that reads “Thanks so much for the sex! Glad my husband will never read this” before they’ll accept what’s going on. (That’s not a hypothetical. That, verbatim, is the godawful pedestrian message one client happened to see.) Once, I had a man come into my office and say about his wife, “I don’t know, she’s been really distant lately.”

“Okay. Tell me what’s going on,” I said.

“She’s saying she wants to separate.”

“Have you been having problems?”

“No.”

“Have there been any dramatic changes in your life circumstances or her behavior?”

“She’s lost a lot of weight. But that’s because she’s been going to the gym lately. She has this trainer she’s good friends with, and she talks to him a lot.”

“How often?”

“They talk every day, maybe two times a day.”

(Later, when I got hold of a copy of the phone bill, I saw that over the previous two months, his wife and the trainer had texted each other 877 times.)

This is where I felt entitled to say, “You think she might be having a relationship?”

“Nah, I don’t think so. She says they’re just friends. She’s not the type to have an affair. She’s not really that interested in sex. We’ve only had sex once a month for the last few years, even less in the last year.…”

I often wonder: Do these people hear the stuff coming out of their own mouths?

Of course, the opposite happens, too, and this is where I start feeling more like a private eye with a paranoid client rather than a legally bound truth-teller. Not infrequently,

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