My therapist didn’t go crazy over night. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. I’d like to believe it was more of a slow steady crumbling over seven years of weekly sessions. In my version of events, she lost her own personal movie plot incrementally, in almost imperceptible movements. Because, if she was certifiable from the beginning? Well, I really don’t want to glance at what that says about me.
I am a distinct blend of Irish Catholic German Jew. My youth was spent pinging between shame and guilt. Twelve years of Catholic school nuns inculcated in me a knee jerk ability to obey and fear and spell. Trust and personal boundaries were life lessons the Josephite nuns nor my family felt compelled to teach. That and balancing checkbooks.
This perfect storm of obedience, shame and fear raised me to trust too deeply and left me with boundaries as porous as Arizona. I grew up incapable of saying no to telemarketers, Jehovah’s Witnesses or men I didn’t want to be with. Physically unable to say “I don’t see this relationship going any where”, I would merely move in with the guy, know that would end things in a few quick brutal months.
So take that neurotic bubble bath: sprinkle in a liberal arts education, fold in a talent for attracting every wounded pigeon and troubled actor/man-boy in New York City and by my late twenties, I professionally aspired to misery. I truly thought part of my job description, as a poor frustrated artist, was to tend and nurture the neat rows of my flowering depression.
I had never been in therapy and was tempted, not to mention heartily encouraged by everyone I knew, which I eventually stopped taking as an insult. A comparatively saner friend from the theater world urgently recommended Paula Snow, M.A., M.F.T. I don’t recall screwing up the gumption to actually make the first appointment, but I’m sure I went to see her because I didn’t know how not to.
Scared for our first session, I stood frozen in front of every piece of clothing I owned. What does one wear to therapy in order to look like you don’t need therapy? I was convinced she would take one gander at my outfit and declare me criminally insane. Lateness only made me panicky, and her fancy office, in a tall tower overlooking Central Park, with framed diplomas and various capital letters and punctuation trailing her name intimidated me into sullen silence.
I sank into the chair opposite her, refusing the couch. After a dull pause I churlishly asked if I was supposed to just start talking. When she snapped back that she would talk too, I instantly relaxed. Snottiness I could deal with. It would be like talking to my mother, except the therapist would kick me out after 50 minutes instead of begging me to move back home. I instantly loved my shiny new therapist because she was reasonably priced and let me smoke. When a handy ashtray and 25 dollar sessions are one’s reasons for choosing a therapist, one might need more than just cheap, smoker-friendly therapy.
Paula Snow, M.A., M.F.T. was an aging Jewish hippie with long shaggy dark hair, wine colored muu muus, black tights, no shoes and stacks of books that looked like she actually read them. She smoked expensive English cigarettes, which meant she was continental and discerning. She was funny, quoted obscure books, spoke passionately to the point of moisture collecting in the corners of her mouth and swore like a sailor, all of which I found deeply reassuring. I was hooked and was rewarded with a regular slot, which nothing, not even waitress shifts, real job interviews or complete poverty would interfere with.
Thanks to Paula’s unbridled attention, my trust issues pulsed like new muscles. As a true child of addiction, trust was my drug of choice. And therapy is one of the best methods of seducing those of us who trust too much. Therapy, followed by cults, then multi-level marketing thrives in no small part due to over-trusters. And how can one over-trust a person with a master’s degree and at least five beautifully fonted letters after their name. And complicated punctuation.
Paula encouraged me to dust off and clean out the cobwebs of the rarely visited attic of my chaotic childhood. She defended me to myself in ways that took years to get used to. No one had ever advocated me to myself and I really needed convincing that the way my life turned out wasn’t my fault. Paula took all that blame away from me and convinced me my parents were the reason I had relationship and financial problems. I was only too happy to pay her to keep telling me that.
Since I chronically cannot keep anything to myself soon all my poor artist friends were going to her. We all loved her cheap prices, funky clothes, how her poodle snoozed in our laps as we performed our fifty minute monologues about how unfair life was. Paula would laugh and clap, encourage us to rag on our nemeses as expensive English cigarette smoke curled in her hair. I trusted her because she reflected back at me what no one else was seeing, and she had no clue or no interest in guiding me how to feel that love/trust for myself.
Suddenly I realized I was twenty-nine and single. Since puberty I had been pimped and primped for matrimony by my endlessly resourceful mother, and as I was staring down the barrel of a double gauge thirty I was convinced if I didn’t get a man stat I’d be a barren spinster forever. Soon I met the man who I determined would be my husband. My pliable intended had parental and financial baggage that matched mine, so we fell in love within a week and he moved in after a month. After four months we were engaged, with a 20 dollar fake pearl ring sealing the deal. As he had an 80-year old waiter pop the question on Valentine’s Day in a singing restaurant in the Village, I could feel my mother’s sigh of relief from deep within a nail salon on the south shore of Long Island.
After a month it was clear he needed therapy as well. Not because of the breakneck velocity of our relationship, no I never questioned that—more it was the fits of sudden rage aimed at me, along with a hairbrush or anything handy that made a great clattering sound as it hit the wall inches from my face. He had never been in therapy either, so I dragged him, kicking and screaming to Paula Snow, M.A., M.F.T.
To her initial credit, Paula admitted she couldn’t ethically see us as a couple, and continue seeing me and him separately. Apparently it was a breach of something official, but in my furtive, denial-frothy mind, who else could help me and help him and help us remain a couple? Friends who had more ‘conventional’ therapy warned me about Paula’s unorthodox measures, but I was relentless in my quest for colossal unawareness. Paula made a healthy seeming compromise—she would see my husband-to-be privately until determining whom best to refer him to. And my fiance soon also loved her poodle, her pandering, and her prices.
To someone immune to personal/professional boundaries, a therapist who gossips about other patients, patients who were not only my friends, but friends I brought to this therapist, didn’t seem at all unethical. It made me feel better about my shortcoming to know that Mindy couldn’t orgasm even through masturbation, that Rebecca was routinely felt up by her dad as a child and bought her a condo out of guilt and that Will slept on the couch because his wife couldn’t bear the sound of him breathing through his nose. Over time it became clear Paula was never going to find another therapist to refer my husband to, and it hardly mattered, since by that point he was so drunk on the Paula Snow M.A. M. F.T. Kool-Aid he was a devotee of the highest order.
Saddled with a hasty marriage, a flailing career and money woes, it took years to dawn on me that Paula’s stacks of books were growing to slightly unhealthy heights, that her cute therapy poodle had grown deeply matted, was smelling rather potently unwell, and that the dust bunnies in the murky office corners were now joined by desiccated piles of dog poo.
I ignored a troubling knot in my stomach that I wasn’t getting better as I dutifully made my way up to the once fancy office every Thursday morning. Even when I discovered Paula was telling my husband deep secrets I confided in her about my troubled marriage, I kept going. If I hadn’t learned to say no to my husband’s deeply premature proposal, then saying no to unhelpful therapy was slightly out of the question. I had placed far too much trust in Paula’s five letters and periods and commas to stop believing she could help me. Ever anti-vigilant, I saw what I chose to see, and allowed myself to be troubled by what I chose to find troubling.
Paula’s office was comprised of a small sitting area, a bathroom, her office and another room- a door that always remained closed. One day I arrived early and desperate to use her bathroom. As I lowered my pants and sat down I realized a plume of cigarette smoke was trailing upwards, behind the shower curtain. By this point Darlene was chain-smoking her Dunhills oddly. She told me that the first five drags were the safest parts of the cigarette. So, after five drags, she would stab that cigarette out and immediately light the next one.
So, I figured she had left the less healthy part of the cigarette burning in the tub. Still seated, pants undone, I pulled the curtain back, happy to be a savior. Her husband Randall stood there smoking, amid a tub full of pots and pans. I tried not to alarm him as I stifled a gasp. He calmly stated it was too cold to smoke outside. As if the other room, with the door always closed never existed. As if he didn’t have any place else to go. Like a home.
I nodded politely, and because I didn’t want him to feel uncomfortable, I crossed my hands in my lap, pretended I wasn’t trying to urinate, but just sitting there, as if we were awkward acquaintances at a cocktail party. We quietly agreed on the unhelpfulness of winter to smokers, then he finished and left. I sat there, trying to quiet the alarm bells in my mind and stop my hands from shaking. Despite the growing sense of calamity, I never told Paula.
After this, I finally allowed myself to think that no one was actually driving this bus. In every life there is a moment when a child realizes that their parent might not always have the child’s best interest at heart. It might be the first time one sees a parent drunk or flirting with another kid’s mom, or shoplifting—but in every person there is that rift when you realize that grown ups doesn’t really know what they are doing.
After a childhood riddled with such moments, but smoothed over with heaping spoonfuls of Irish Catholic denial, my growing pains came late, at the hands of my therapist. And I grew obsessed over the closed door. I’d just talk and smoke and blather with Paula all the while plotting on how best to find what lurked behind it. As if she was reading my mind, a note suddenly appeared one day taped to the door ordering it to never be opened, guarded by big red exclamation points. That was when I knew I had to open the door. This door was my Pandora’s Box and I knew nothing good would come of it, but once opened, I’d at least have the information to make a blunt decision about my crazy therapist and my crazier life.
One day, I was early and she was running late. This was my chance. I sat, sweating, trying not to listen to Paula cackle behind the cracked and peeling door to her office. Finally I braved up.
Holding my breath, hands shaking, I tiptoed over and opened the door and quickly covered my gasping mouth.
Inside was an active volcano ten feet high and twenty feet around of shoes, books, clothes, pots, newspapers, food, bed sheets and lamps, files and underwear reaching up to the ceiling. The mound evoked the obsessive towers Richard Dreyfus built in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”. Richard Dreyfus’s Devil’s Tower of mashed potatoes convinced him ‘this means something’. I found my Devil’s Tower. This meant something. Finally I could not help but realize that something was not only not right, but had moved out of the building a long time ago.
After finding the Devils Tower of crap, I confided my doubts about Paula to my husband, despite her confiding in him my doubts about him, but he wouldn’t hear of it. We now fought over my lack of faith in Paula- which was a nice change of pace from fights about money and our bad sad marriage.
Of course I kept seeing Paula. Even knowing what I knew, even after seven years I still hadn’t developed the ability to say no and protect myself, even after most of her other patients gave up on her. Somehow their ‘therapy’ worked, and they left as soon as they became aware of her flowering mental illness. But my husband and I could not only not imagine leaving Paula, we played the violins on deck full out as the great ship sank.
We somehow decided it was our job to help her even if she was unable or unwilling to help us. She started calling us at home at odd hours to borrow prescription pain medication, or to help her move out of her apartment when she was evicted, and then out of her office, when she was evicted from there. We lent her thousands of dollars, we found her cheap apartments, but there was always a byzantine reason she couldn’t take our help or get her own Vicodin or pay us back or move to Brooklyn. We listened to her spittle-riddled tirades about her treacherous family, her landlords, her narcoleptic husband—the patient became the therapist and we were as helpful to her as she had been to us—which is to say not much at all.
My marriage died completely around the time Paula told my husband ‘If Kathleen was on a plane and she knew it was going to crash, she’d be too timid and afraid to tell anyone.” My husband believed her. And I did too. She might have been completely deranged, but she was right, because she was the crashing plane, and I was still securely fastened into my seat, refusing to even use my seat cushion as a flotation device. Being mocked by a crazy person for pretending they are not nuts was the apex of my zenith. I went as deep into the failure as I could, in order to begin the long climb out.
Bu this point Paula was living in a storage unit in Soho and still seeing patients, who brought her groceries in a motel lobby in the meat-packing district. And because I stubbornly still believed that loyalty was more important than pain and suffering, I refused to leave my marriage or my therapist—so they both left me. When I learned Paula told her patients that I owed her thousands dollars in back fees and that I was singly responsible for her homelessness, my groundless, magical faith in fancy cigarettes and capital letters trailing names finally evaporated.
I moved to Los Angeles, where I avoided men and therapy like the plague of locusts I had allowed them to be- and my completely denuded new life was mine to rebuild from the ground up. It was very crunchy and healing in Laurel Canyon, surrounded by trees and dogs and other people’s money, but finally the throes of divorce grief overwhelmed me.
I found a new therapist, a lovely older English woman whose office was clean, bright and smoke free. Her trousers had crisp seams due to spray starch and her hair was as tailored as her blouse. There was no extra room full of secrets, no feces, no narcoleptic husband, just Anne Klein separates and unscented candles and Abyssinian cats chosen for their inability to shed.
It took months to truly open up, but it took years to accept my responsibility for maintaining a seven year relationship with an crazy bad therapist who I allowed to cause true damage to my life. And worst of all, it was the longest relationship of my life. It lapped my sad little starter marriage by three years.
But, over time, as I spoke and the lovely older English woman listened in discreet horror, I discovered just how much I had been raised to defer, to bestow trust and belief on my betters and superiors; but I had taken this belief system to self-abnegating heights. Through the grueling and painful trench work of real, honest therapy and bracing, unflattering self-knowledge, I grew up, found self and self-esteem and became my own kind of better. I only learned how to trust others once I learned how to trust myself.
Life, a good life (to me) is about determining the borders of your self. And it is not always a very large soul invasion that makes you decide that boundaries are not just helpful for bumpy color coded wall maps but good around the surface of you physically and emotionally. It takes a long time to find out where your boundaries lie, and these lines are mutable, not fixed like in atlases or Thomas Guides. But once you determine where you end and others begin, and you respect those boundaries, you are in good, healthy territory.
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