THERAPY
Shrink Rapt
When I was 11, my parents divorced. To sort through the attendant detritus, my father insisted my siblings and I see a therapist with him. She was a dead ringer for Terri Garr who encouraged us to hit each other with foam batons in order “to get our anger out.” Bop, my sister hit me on the head. BOP, BOP, BOP my brother took to the task with a gusto that freaked the therapist out. I later heard that my dad started dating her. He always did like blondes.
Mad as a Hatter
I arrived from New York to my sister’s house in LA and was immediately led out to the garden and thrust down on a sunbaked chaise. My eighty-something mother, swaddled in blankets, was already in an Adirondack chair. I had to fight the instant crushing claustrophobia I always felt when alone with my mother. Usually, I covered it up by being busy, doing dishes, cooking, generally bodging about. But my little sister, before disappearing to the cool interior of her home, hissed in my ear. “This is why you’re here. Don’t you dare move.”
Untherapy
The closest I’ve come to a psychologist poking around in my psyche was when I was 18 or so and I took a personality test. After filling in all the little circles with a pencil I was ushered into the psychologist’s office. He was sitting behind his desk peering at my test results. I think he was wearing something striped, though that could be a false memory; at any rate he was a pin-stripey sort of character. He looked up at me and said, “The only problem I see here is a remarkably strong interest in boys.” He had a stern and disapproving look on his face which I rather enjoyed. I’d like to think I said something like, “And the problem with that is — ?” Probably I just said something like, “Ok, thanks for letting me know.”
Introduction to Acting
My first brush with therapy came in college, the first semester of my freshman year in an introductory acting class. It was taught by a practicing psychotherapist named Dee Henoch who had a double life as an actress and director. She was dedicated to the school of Method Acting, which as she explained was actually therapy. “The Method,” as she called it, forced actors to reach into their past to summon raw feelings and naked responses to things they had personally experienced. In class, we recreated primal scenes where we were told to briefly inhabit the personas of other people who, at heart, were us. Having started college at 17, I was the youngest person in the class. Luckily, I had plenty of traumatizing life experiences to draw on.
What Does Your Therapist Think?
When my parents came back from their weekly group therapy, run by a woman my father called the lady shrink, they retreated to separate corners of our small New York apartment. My mother sat in her paisley chair in the living room and chain smoked Winstons, while my father put on his Italian slippers and turned on the tube in the den. I learned new vocabulary words each week, like ballbuster and macho, alongside phrases like totally in denial, checked out, passive-aggressive, and control freak, as my parents processed their heated sessions.
A Therapy Love Letter
I went to my first shrink under duress, which is perhaps not that remarkable: don’t all therapeutic forays start in moments of duress? In this instance, however, the duress was not mine but my mother’s, who had run out of ideas for how to cope with my increasingly alarming behavior. I myself refused to admit duress of any sort, despite being sixteen and adrift in my large midwestern high school, where booze and drugs circulated with the same ease as gossip, creating a toxic sludge that I didn’t know how to escape.