The Wrong Extension
Part three of "On Friction" — a series on relationship, protocol, and repair
Back in pre-internet days, in the 1990s, I arrived a few minutes late to an afternoon therapy appointment in what would become a decade-long relationship with my therapist. I checked in at the front desk, and the receptionist phoned back to let her know I’d arrived. Then I waited, and assumed she’d come out to walk me back within a minute or two, like she always had. A few more minutes passed that felt like forever. Something felt off, and my mind started filling the emptiness: maybe she was making me wait on purpose. This was a lesson about lateness. She was probably punishing me for something I didn’t mean to do.
None of that was true. She eventually appeared looking genuinely confused, and when she glanced at the front desk, the receptionist wore an “I fucked up” look. The message had gone to the wrong extension. My therapist didn’t know I’d been sitting there fantasizing quiet punishments while she waited too long in her office, unaware I had arrived.
We had a shortened session that day. She had gently asked me about, and I was willing to let her know, what I’d been conjuring up in the waiting room. I somehow was able to describe my inner landscape as if it were an Edward Hopper painting. There was no lesson. No punishment. It was just a wrong number, nothing more. She simply apologized, and we explored where the stories I’d built in my mind might have come from. What silence and waiting meant to me in childhood. I gleaned more out of that one mishap than a dozen ordinary sessions.
That’s rupture and repair, and it’s a bit different than what I was exploring in my earlier essays where I describe Williams holding her glass of water in a kitchen after a tryst, contrasting it with the leftover ache after protocol-driven psychotherapy treatments. That kitchen was about a single moment. One encounter and a values conflict, no second chance to build from that. This wants something a single encounter can’t offer. Repetition. A breach happens. Conflicts get hammered out, named, feelings sat with, mended imperfectly — again, and then again — until something starts to loosen. Learning that tiny violations aren’t that unusual, and they’re survivable. They don’t end relationships. Mendings tend to come in “good enough” relationships more often than not.
Long before any of us are old enough to sit alone in waiting rooms, we’ve learned some version of this from whoever raised us, over and over. Even through an old fairytale or two. Children getting lost in a forest. A caregiver missing a cry, misreads a message, or looks away when we needed something else — and then comes back. The children who grow up secure aren’t the ones who never experience miscommunication. They’re the ones whose misattunements eventually got followed up by somebody coming back to check.
Many of us didn’t get quite enough of that. I likely did not. That’s why a wrong phone extension mattered more than it should have. It was a minor clerical error. But it hit like an old family pattern, and what made it useful wasn’t that my therapist was perfect. It’s that when the misreading happened, she had the capacity, the emotional availability, to sit with me in it, without shame, until I could see it hadn’t meant what I imagined.
