T has recently moved her practice into a large building of office suites. She is on the second floor and there are two ways to get to her office. You can take the outdoor staircase that brings you right to the door of her waiting room, or you can enter a lobby on the first floor, take an elevator, and walk down a short hallway to her door.
Whenever I travel by elevator, I am plagued by a sense of impending death for the duration of the trip, so I generally prefer to take stairs when that is an option. However, the last time I showed up for my session it was raining. As the stairway is not covered and especially because it was a chilly day, I opted for the elevator.
Soon after being settled in the waiting room, I was surprised to hear someone trudging up the stairs outside. I was sitting right by the window so could hear them clearly--- stomp, stomp, stomp. It amused me to consider that another client not only shared my slight aversion to elevators, but took it to the further extreme of taking stairs in inclement weather for the sake of avoiding one. I began to be curious as to what the appearance of this fellow phobic client might be, and was even enjoying a sense of anticipation as their steps proceeded towards the door, when in stepped, not another client, but my T-- slightly damp, but smiling and apparently unembarrassed. Somehow the thought that my T might suffer from claustrophobia was not very comforting, but I brushed it aside and in a few minutes we were settled in her office and my session was in full swing.
At the end of it, she asked if I had had any trouble with the door. (At my prior visit, there had been a problem with it automatically locking.) I said no, that everything had been fine. T then commented that she had been out to run a brief errand and was really hoping that the door would not be locked since it was raining. There was my opening. "Yes," I said casually, "I noticed that you came up the stairs in the rain."
Whereupon T burst out with-- "That elevator is so slow! It is the slowest elevator. It drives me crazy! I hate waiting for it, so I take the stairs instead. It is so slow."
I blinked. Surely this much animosity towards an elevator, even a slow one, was indicative of-- something? Displacement, compulsiveness, inability to relax? At any rate, it was not very zen. I couldn't even relate, because while I had noticed the elevator was slow, I had simply taken the opportunity to dawdle about the empty lobby and look at myself in the mirror while waiting for it to descend.
"That's. . . interesting." was all I said.
And I have been left wondering, what sort of a nut climbs an outdoor staircase in the rain and cold because they can't stand to wait for an elevator, and why do I feel I need therapy from this person?
