She told her husband she was going out for groceries, and it was true, but there was something she didn’t mention: her therapy session, a rendezvous she took by phone, in her parked car, venting as her hummus grew warm.
“It feels strange to be secretive,” the environmental consultant from Somerville said. “But we’re having some friction about being stuck in close quarters, and who else would I be talking about right now?”
Privacy is one of the central tenets of therapy. Some psychiatrists or therapists have two doors, one for patients leaving, another for those coming. Others use white noise machines or soundproof their doors. What happens on the couch is supposed to stay on the couch.
But Governor Charlie Baker has urged us all to stay in our homes. That means we’re all together all the time, and if therapy is going to happen, it’s likely by phone or video chat (even though mental health workers are considered “essential” and allowed to keep their offices open).
But how do you talk privately — in some cases about the people causing you stress? — when those people are three feet away, 24 hours a day, seven days a week?
Clients are hiding in their bathrooms to re-litigate old wrongs, cruising the sidewalks as they analyze marital interactions, and sitting in their vehicles crying and gesticulating alone as neighbors wonder what’s going on. (Perhaps we should repurpose Logan Airport’s Cell Lot as a therapy lot.)
In South Grafton, Mary Trodella, a single mother and a graphic designer who works full time, takes her therapy sessions from her Honda CR-V because she doesn’t want her 12-year-old son to overhear her unvarnished fear and frustration.
“The mantra I’ve learned to use is, ‘Everything is going to be OK,’” she said. “But when I’m feeling like, ‘Holy [expletive], school is closed until May 4, how am I going to do this?’ I don’t want to scare him.”
Trodella tells her son why she’s heading to the car but not driving anywhere, but not everyone wants to be so honest.
A client of Debbie Offner, a clinical psychologist in Newton, told her boyfriend she needed to mail a letter and then did her session hiding in her building’s stairwell.
“Their problems started before coronavirus,” Offner said, “but now everything is amplified because you’re stuck together. Your whole life becomes the people in your house.”
Speaking of those people in the house: Video chats are opening up their lives to mental health workers in a whole new way. One of Offner’s teenage clients regularly talks about dad being a yeller. In the last FaceTime session, done from the client’s bedroom, Offner herself heard the dad yelling in a nearby hallway.
“You’re brought into the household,” she said. “It’s like doing a home visit.”
Privacy concerns are not just about what happens in the patient’s home, said Newton clinical psychologist Samuel Roth If the provider is also working from home — and some are — the provider’s family or roommates could overhear a conversation, or the client could get a glimpse into the therapist’s life during a video chat.
Are those your wedding pictures on the wall behind you? What’s that noise in the background?
“Suddenly there is a lot of new information,” said Roth, who emphasized that he is still working from his office.
Beyond the specifics of what’s being said, the intimacy of the therapist-client relationship might feel surprising to family members.
“You may have a way of being with your therapist that is different than how you are with your partner or children,” Roth said. “They might feel excluded from a very personal dialogue.”
Sometimes it’s the therapist escaping to the car, as with a Cambridge therapist who conducts phone sessions while parked in front of her house. But even in that bubble, privacy issues emerge. “A friend came to drop off some toilet paper and started to approach me," said the therapist, who asked to remain anonymous, “and I had to scribble a sign that said, ‘working, can’t talk.’”
Beth Teitell can be reached at beth.teitell@globe.com. Follow her @bethteitell.