It was a whole new form of TMI.
After eight years of rawdogging life, I recently restarted therapy. In my short time with my new therapist, whom I’ll call Hollie, themes have emerged: my tendency to people-please; the way I intellectualize (instead of feel) my feelings; my inclination to make myself small in service of others.
Hollie has been especially curious about the last piece: “What’s that all about?” she’s asked more than once. Why this preoccupation with disappearing myself? I have a big personality. I make friends easily. I have been told—and felt—throughout my life that I am someone who has those elusive qualities of magnetism and charisma. I know these are good things, and I’m grateful for them.
But over the past few years, I’ve also started to feel guilty about them. With certain friends and family members—or even people I’ve just met, the ones (I’ve deemed) socially awkward or shy, who withdraw in groups, or never share stories as exciting as mine—I’ve started to make a habit of trying not to overshadow them. (Questions you may be asking right now: Who appointed me resident emotional lifeguard? And is it possible I’m not as charming as I think I am? Both are great questions I don’t have answers to yet.)
If, for example, I’m at a party with Catherine, Carol, and Kayla, and Catherine and Carol keep engaging me but ignoring Kayla because Kayla is bitchy and aloof, I will tell myself it’s not Kayla’s fault that she’s bitchy and aloof—she has childhood trauma! She had a rough week!—and assume the responsibility of propping her up. (I may even, for a deluded moment, wonder if it’s somehow my fault that she is bitchy and aloof.) I will talk about myself less, trying to steer the conversation toward her. “Here!” I’ll be saying, “she’s more interesting and important than I am!”
I have also noticed myself going to friends less for advice, even when I desperately want it; glossing over details of my life (if I share them at all) so as not to take up too much of their energy; apologizing if I feel like I’ve monopolized their time or overshared or created emotional labor for them. This goes for everyone, including some of my dearest, most generous friends.
I may make myself the lifeguard, but at some point I decided I was also the wave.
Hollie’s prodding forced me to think about when and why I’d become so hyperaware of the space I take up, and a memory shook loose: My previous therapist, Maggie, the one I’d seen eight years prior, for more than a decade, had said I was too much. Or not said, wrote, in a chapter about me in an anthology by multiple psychoanalysts. I had forgotten all about it.
When Maggie first asked permission to write about me, it was an easy yes. As a journalist and author, I think writers need as much encouragement as they can get, and I’m stoked when I can give it. I genuinely did not think twice about giving my OK. I should have. I should have thought twice and thrice and then said no.
I have made a meal out of my own experiences in many writing projects (like the one you’re reading right now). I have crafted personal essays about compulsive shopping and anxiety and ADHD and diet culture. In 2025, I published a memoir, I’ll Look So Hot in a Coffin: and Other Thoughts I Used to Have About My Body. As someone always looking for narrative ground to mine, my life has been dependably rich.
What I’m saying is that when my therapist asked for permission to make me her material, I did not hesitate because I was thinking about it as a writer, not as a client in her care. She asked if I was sure. She checked and double checked. I waved her away. Consciously, at least, I saw no issue. Though I don’t remember experiencing this, I would not be surprised if I felt flattered and special at being chosen.
If you’ve been in therapy, you know that boundaries are important, if uncomfortable at first. You relay intimate details of your life to someone who does not reciprocate. For years I knew virtually nothing about Maggie: not whether she was married or had kids, not where she lived, not her exact age. Different therapists have different thresholds when it comes to boundaries. An old boyfriend once told me with glee that he had finally gotten it out of his shrink that she was a Yankees fan. That morsel had taken years. There are clinicians who tend toward more self-disclosure than others, and I probably would have found that alluring when I first started therapy in my late 20s, but I came to appreciate the not-knowing. I came to appreciate the solid, unwavering boundaries Maggie had erected.
They crumbled so gradually and in such seemingly innocuous ways that I barely noticed. Over the years, Maggie had started sharing more of her own life as a way of relating to mine, always with a self-conscious, “I shouldn’t really be telling you this” or “I don’t usually do this” tacked on. I came to learn that she was married and had no children of her own but was a stepmother. I knew that, like me, she’d been on Weight Watchers. Eventually, I knew that her husband (whom I’d ended up meeting in passing in her office a few times) had gotten very sick and died. I knew that not long after, she had a new boyfriend. I knew she had aspirations to write and publish. Eventually, I knew, I had the power to help her do that.
Because publishing a book takes a really long time, the chapter wasn’t a constant topic of discussion during my twice-weekly sessions. It floated in the background and occasionally popped to the fore, like when Maggie mentioned inviting me to the book-release party and then a few weeks later backtracked, saying it was probably not a good idea.
She told me that colleagues at her psychoanalytic institute had voiced concerns about her writing about a client in active treatment, and I reassured her that it was fine. (Hey, who’s the patient here?)
If you’re thinking this all sounds pretty messed up (gold star for you and your mental health!), it gets thornier: The topic of my therapist’s chapter was transference and countertransference. I know this because Maggie asked me to read the chapter before she submitted the final draft to her editor. I said no thanks. She insisted. I didn’t feel like I had a choice.
Many people have heard of transference, which the American Psychological Association defines in part as “a patient’s displacement or projection onto the analyst of those unconscious feelings and wishes originally directed toward important individuals, such as parents, in the patient’s childhood” and “unconscious repetition of earlier behaviors and their projection onto new subjects.” I remember hearing the word for the first time in the 1999 movie Mumford, in which Hope Davis plays a woman who falls in love with her therapist and—thanks to her memories of college psychology courses—chalks it up to transference: “I have taken my feelings of gratitude and relief and transferred them onto you,” she tells Dr. Mumford. “I have taken all those warm, grateful emotions and confused them with feelings for you so that now I am under the delusion that I am in love with you.”
Countertransference—which I hadn’t heard of until reading Maggie’s draft—is, according to the APA, “the therapist’s unconscious (and often conscious) reactions to the patient and to the patient’s transference.” The way I understand it is that even though many of us think of therapists as objective, stoic entities, they are in fact living, breathing humans with their own histories and experiences that can affect their interactions with us. Countertransference isn’t inherently good or bad.
The day Maggie handed me her pages to read, she asked that I stay in touch; that if I had any strong reactions while reading, to let her know. That night, as I sat on my bed with the manuscript splayed out, I sent her an email: “I know you’re worried about my reading this, and I’m okay. My reaction right now is unexpected (at least I didn’t expect it, maybe you did): I’m feeling sort of anxious and sort of angry. But I’m not falling apart, so that’s good!”
My phone rang immediately and I let it go to voicemail. She implored me to call her back. I did. I don’t remember that conversation, but I can see through subsequent emails that we discussed ways for her to further anonymize me: “I am still editing a bit in an effort to disguise you as much as possible. The issue here is to protect your identity. I do want you to feel comfortable and safe,” she wrote. “Please let me know how best to proceed with this. As you know there is a bit of a time crunch.”
Reading her chapter meant facing paragraphs like this about myself: “She overwhelmed me from the beginning—in our very first session. She came in and appeared to make herself immediately at home. She sat on the couch in a seemingly relaxed manner and began talking right away. I noticed that her voice was pleasant but loud, and that she used a kind of singsong tone, dramatic but affectless, with whatever she was talking about… She spoke with assurance and with a sense of familiarity, as if we were old friends.”
And this: “Greta [writer’s note: that’s me] has a quick wit and a caustic sense of humor, and her cheerful, upbeat façade is striking. She can be quite entertaining. And then there are the clothes—the costumes, in fact. Her dress is chic and trendy, sometimes flamboyant. As I said, I was wowed by her external presentation and, for quite some time, continued to feel small, weak, and barely visible in contrast. Mostly, I was struck dumb. I had nothing to say.”
Instead of choosing a pseudonym herself, Maggie had asked over email whether I had a preference. “Greta,” I wrote. “I don’t know where that came from. We can analyze it on Tuesday.” Then I inserted a smiley face.
My people-pleasing knew no bounds back then.
The parts of the chapter that made my head hurt most were the ones that revealed how self-conscious I had made her. She wrote that she started taking extra time before our sessions to make sure her hair and makeup were just so. “I continued to be extremely aware of Greta’s physical appearance, admiring more and more her hair color, her make-up, her fashionable clothing,” she wrote. “I suddenly, without consciously deciding to, began to remark on her clothing in a complimentary way. Greta easily tolerated this. ‘Where did you get that handbag?’ I would exclaim. ‘I love it.’ Or, ‘That dress is fabulous, I want it.’ What was I doing? It was, indeed, yet another enactment. I was letting Greta know about my envy of what she had.”
Truly, what the fuck. (And what the fuck not because she had these feelings—feel what you feel, girl!—but because I had to read about them.)
Maggie’s chapter ended in a neat bow, prognosticating an optimistic future for me: “As her experience of herself has deepened, so has her ability to understand it, to think about it, and to verbalize it in the analytic context. I think she will accomplish these goals.”
As a writer, I’m suspicious of bows. I know from experience how crucial it is, when trying to sell your writing, to have a tidy resolution. And I know from experience that these resolutions are often fabricated or at the very least idealized. Every editor wants a happy ending, so providing one becomes paramount for a writer desperate to get published. It’s not that I didn’t share Maggie’s optimism about my future. I just—at least in retrospect—think I would have had a fighting-er chance to accomplish those goals had my therapist not written about me and made me read it. Maybe years later, I wouldn’t be trying to figure out with Hollie why I had the instinct to shrink myself.
This experience ultimately felt exploitative, like I was a lab specimen, which was especially painful given one of my recurring therapy topics at the time: early-childhood medical trauma.
The therapy may have been beneficial in many ways, but the chapter wasn’t, for me or for us. It felt like another block in our Jenga stack of (apparent) transference and countertransference. It was, I think, the thing that toppled us.
I still believe our sessions were fair game for Maggie to take and write about. But I also feel pretty strongly that I should not have been involved in that process. A friend studying to be a therapist tells me that consent from the client is often encouraged. Fine, fair. But once Maggie had my yes, that’s all she needed. Everything that came after was for her benefit, not mine. It was (if I can get slightly psychoanalytic for a sec) a further enactment of her countertransference. Like her boots and her makeup before it, I suspect she wanted me to look at her and give my stamp of approval.
All these years later, it’s at least a piece of the puzzle as to why I am perpetually trying to make myself small. I’m hoping it’s the first step toward allowing myself to feel big again. To be loud and singsongy and at home without self-criticism or judgment. And to invite those who feel overwhelmed by me or outraged that I take up so much of the spotlight to go ahead and step out of it.
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