Dead End or Cul-de-Sac
(Part 2 of the story of my psychedelic-enhanced journey to mental health)
I was energized after my therapist had helped me to discover that my life had been dominated by a sense of shamefulness that I had believed unquestioningly but was really a fiction that I had invented as a young boy. I had spent much of the last few days reformulating the narrative of my life, seeing for the first time the role that my shame had played in my younger self’s actions and decisions. I wasn’t inherently a curmudgeon! It was my false sense of shame that caused me to hate dancing and to leave parties early.
I found that I grew angry at the shame. I hated it for “ruining” my life. I wanted it gone. I wanted nothing more to do with it. I was hopeful that identifying the shame and figuring out that it was unjustified would make it disappear. But it didn’t.
So I tried to analyze the shame, to write about it that I might better understand it and how to banish it. But I didn’t want to just write about the shame in some personal journal that no one would ever read. I wanted to share these thoughts with my therapist in the hope that she would better understand where I was coming from and help me make the shame go away.
I had her business e-mail address because we used it to schedule appointments. So I spent hours writing and sending her long and thoughtful e-mails about the events in my life and how I believed that shame had affected or influenced them. I found the process of thinking through the events and issues and writing them down to be very therapeutic and useful in gaining perspective. But I desperately wanted objective feedback on my thoughts and conclusions.
Being so energized, I took the next therapy appointment the following week. I was anxious to discuss the issues that I had written to her about, but my therapist had other plans. She explained that she doesn’t read substantive e-mails from her clients because that would take too much time and it didn’t respect necessary boundaries. She was pleased that I had had some insight about my personal motivations, but she wanted to focus on what she described as the addictive parts of personality, particularly my being significantly overweight. Then she started to ask me questions about my eating habits and how I came to be over 210 pounds despite standing only 5’5”.
I can’t remember ever deflating so fast. She was right about my weight. I had been only about 150 pounds when I got married 40 years earlier, but that wasn’t the point. I started the session full of excitement about my recent self-discoveries regarding my shame. The therapist not only minimized the importance of my revelations, she made me feel ashamed of my eating habits. It felt like she was using shame to manipulate me into self-improvement. I felt horrible. She squashed my pride and activated my most hated emotion against me.
I don’t remember very much of the rest of the session except desperately wanting it to be over. When I went home and told my wife about the therapist bursting my bubble, Andrea was very sympathetic. She hadn’t been happy about the progress of our couples therapy either. She appreciated my revelation about shame, but she didn’t see much progress on our issues as a couple. Like me, she queried whether the therapist could possibly plan any sensible path for us when she didn’t seem to care whether we came to an appointment together or whether one of us took the appointment solo.
But I wasn’t ready to give up on the therapist, at least yet. I was still enamored of the breakthrough that I had made with her. I could see how my shame had created major barriers between Andrea and me, and I thought that continuing to explore it might help to overcome some of those barriers. Ultimately, we decided to give the therapy another month and then decide what to do.
During that month Andrea and I did a couple sessions together, but I did most of them solo, and Andrea had only one solo session herself. Neither one of us liked them any better. I did make some progress: shamed by the discussion of my weight, I joined Weight Watchers (just as COVID hit, so my very first in-person meeting was cancelled and everything went virtual). I was aware enough to recognize that the therapist was using shame to manipulate me into taking an action that I might not have taken without the manipulation, but that didn’t make me like it.
When the month for making our decision about the therapy was nearly up, with only one appointment remaining, Andrea and I had another discussion about what to do. Although I continued to dread talking with the therapist, I had come to like the opportunity that therapy gave me to introspect and understand myself better. Andrea hadn’t had that experience. She hadn’t learned anything significant and new about herself, and she didn’t see the therapeutic process helping us make progress as a couple.
Ultimately we decided to find a different therapist. I thought we should tell her in person. Andrea didn’t see any need to go in person, so I attended our final session solo.
I’ll never forget that final session. I was incredibly nervous in the waiting room beforehand. I felt very vulnerable to the therapist, and there was probably a part of me that expected her to shame me for our decision to stop working with her.
But that’s not what happened. When I was called into her office, even before she could greet me, I said, “This is going to be our last session together.” I saw her visibly blink in surprise, and she asked me to explain. I told her that Andrea and I had decided to continue couples therapy, but we believed she wasn’t a good fit for us. I asked her whether she knew of another therapist in the area that she would recommend to us.
To her credit, she didn’t try to change our minds. Nor did she ask for the reasons that we found her not to be a good fit. But she didn’t recommend a different therapist for us either.
Instead, she told me that most other therapists that we might contact about couples therapy would likely do it differently than she did. Other couples counselors, she explained, would work as a team of three: one therapist just for me, another one just for Andrea, and a third therapist for the two of us together as a couple. I asked why she didn’t do it that way, and she replied that it just wasn’t her preferred approach.
I didn’t say it to her, but the three-therapist approach made a lot of sense to me. It allowed me to pursue my own personal self-improvement with a counselor who would be focused on me, not on Andrea and me as a couple. And vice-versa. I felt somewhat angry that she had never explained this to us before, and it reinforced Andrea’s and my decision to change therapists.
I am very glad that the therapist didn’t make leaving her harder than it needed to be. And she never used shame to try to manipulate me into staying. In fact, I felt more respected and less shamed in that final session than in most of the previous ones.
Still, it was hard to cut the cord. It felt like failure. We hadn’t yet contacted any substitute therapists, so we had no idea what to expect. It felt wasteful to start all over again from scratch. But it turned out to be one of the best decisions we had ever made.
