Taking Care of Business

It’s Monday. I rarely see clients on Mondays. It’s a day for catching up with my reading,(professional journals and books and the new waiting room “Oprah” magazine, before it goes out to the waiting room!) returning calls to prospective clients, paying bills and doing paperwork. Every other Monday I have lunch with my friend Doriana, a Neuropsychologist and Italian born. But not today.

While I talk about Mondays as “my day off,” I’m still hard at work taking care of some of the important aspects of being a psychotherapist –the minutiae of running a business. For example, in my office sits a bright red suede loveseat. I fell in love with it two years ago, and since then its cheerful red has become somewhat soiled and dirtied by the fingers of anxious clients. While waiting for Carpet Busters to arrive and perform miracles on the couch, I return a call to a guy called Steve, from a health club in Watertown. He wants to know if I’d like to be the exclusive therapeutic referral source for clients from their fitness club membership. This “referral source” honor will cost me $800 per year, and for this I get to be the only psychotherapist who advertises in the foyer of the health club. I tell him that I’ll get back to him. My practice is already full, and don’t know if I can handle any more referrals. I call a colleague, Bettina Dee, a wonderful EMDR therapist in Watertown Square, and ask her if she’s interested in using the advertising slot. She is and says that she’s very appreciative of the opportunity. Bettina moved to the Boston area from California, where she had a thriving clinical practice. She’s just launching her practice here, where her clinical specialty is working with women who have had traumatic birth experiences.

As I type, I have a very friendly young man here from Carpet Busters in Waltham, MA, cleaning both the couch and my carpeting. When I pointed out the love seat and the specific areas I wanted him to concentrate on, he said, “I bet that’s tear-stained.” Good observation. And coffee-stained, pen-blotched and greasy where anxious people have grasped the arms of the couch and clung on for dear life. If only a fresh couch could be a fresh start for all the couples who sit on this couch, working so hard to make their relationships work.

As Guy, the carpet man, works on cleaning my rugs and couch, we chat backwards and forwards about what I do and about where I’m from, and about his business. It turns out that he’s been to Portsmouth in the south of England. Like 250 million other people I’ve met in the last 20 years while living in the US, he comments that he “loves” my accent. By the end of the visit, bringing cleanliness and order to my cozy little office, he’s pronouncing the word “dirty” with a delightful British accent as “dirty” with a “t” instead of a “d” – as in “dur-dee.” I point it out to him and he looks embarrassed, but seems pleased. When people tell me they love my accent, I frequently tell them that I like theirs. Most Americans are stunned. “I have an accent?” is a frequent response. I have one adolescent client who loves country and western music. On one occasion, she was playing me her favorite C&W song, I put on a southern accent and sang along with her. She shrieked and told me to stop. "It freaks me out that you sound like that!" she said. I've never done that again. Accents are very powerful things, don't you know.

After Guy leaves, I sit and admire my slightly damp, but nonetheless clean couch and the rug whose colors are now more apparent than before, smothered as they were previously beneath the salt staining and trampled in mud from the after-effects of a New England winter. I return a couple of new client calls and emails. The first appointment for a new client or clients is nearly always the hardest one to make. Other people’s busy lives and a busy clinical practice make for scheduling challenges, and it’s interesting how different people handle the challenge. Sometimes prospective clients become frustrated and angry at playing phone tag as we try to find a mutually convenient time for the initial session. Sometimes they act apologetically and guilty for being so “difficult” to meet with, as if they are doing it on purpose. Yes, folks…even the first few telephone calls are therapeutically valid as far as I’m concerned!

Dori, the Executive Director of the non-profit agency next door, is in today. I give her Guy’s number in case she should need her office carpets cleaned, and she comes into my office to look at his handiwork. Dori is a great writer, and I ask her if she would be willing to edit my web pages text for grammatical errors and run-on sentences. Affirmative. I’ve been working on the text for so long that I’m making things over-complicated in my attempts to be succinct. The web designer is all set to launch the site as soon as he has the text and I need to also get a photograph taken. Photographs. Always a challenge. I’ve lost some weight recently and seem to be continuing to lose. Do I post a photograph at my current weight, or post a photo that’s a few years older figuring that I’ll look like that before too long anyway? I’ll mull this one over. Meanwhile, I’ll let you know as soon as the site is launched.