My WEIRD First Therapy Appointment; Part 2

I quickly realised, when I was asked to say what I wanted, that it was disturbingly hard to narrow that down.

“Tough thoughts?” Doctor Samson asked as he waited for me to find the words I was looking for.

“No,” I said. “Well, yeah, sort of.” I covered by taking a sip of my beer, and wondered if the whole beer thing was a ruse to give me something I could hide behind a little like that.

“Goals, especially personal goals that aren’t connected to work, or more concrete accomplishments, can be tough,” Doctor Samson said. “Most of us men, from an early age, we’re taught to focus on what’s in front of us, not what’s going on inside us. Sports kids, which it sounds like you were with swimming, keep that sort of thing rolling - practice for the next game, the next meet, the next competition. And that can be a pretty healthy way to get through the awkwardness of our teenage years; focusing on the physical can help us get out anger and frustration in a healthy way and figure out ways to regulate ourselves. The issue is that we all have internal goals we want to reach. Sometimes, they’re social - meet a girl, make some new friends. Sometimes they’re related to our bodies - fitness, weight loss, style or aesthetic. And sometimes they’re deeper, like challenges to our sexuality, or even our gender or the way we express it. Let me say this - there’s no right answer for what your goals are with therapy, and you aren’t locked into those goals in this session, or the next one, or any after that. You can finesse, reword, or completely pivot whenever you want. Your answer now is just a starting place, like the first rock in a whole pile of rocks that might one day become a building, or a statue, or an entire mountain. Wherever we’re going with the pile, you still gotta have Rock Number One.”

I nodded and sighed, clenching my jaw a few times. “I guess… I think the easy answer is that I want to get to a place where I’m not having panic attacks anymore, but for that to happen, I probably need to go a level deeper. So even if it sounds stupid, I just want to get back to my ‘normal’ from a week and a half ago.”

“OK,” the Doctor nodded. “I think it’s really interesting you push back on yourself for your gut reaction being too easy. Panic attacks are no joke.”

“You don’t need to tell me that,” I grimaced.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” he chuckled. “But what I will say is that clearly something changed, if these panic attacks are new, and sometimes it’s important to be able to hit back at the thing that’s right in front of us before we tackle the root of the problem.”

“Isn’t that the opposite of the whole ‘we’re trained from an early age to focus on the thing in front of us’ speech?” I asked.

“Good point,” he laughed and paused to take another sip from his beer. “But you also can’t remove the stump of a tree from your yard until you’ve cut the sucker down first.”

I snorted softly and smirked. “I’m really hoping the panic attacks don’t last long enough to be a tree. I’d rather them not get past the sapling stage.”

“Fair point,” he said. “Alright - two goals. Reduce, or hopefully stop, these panic attacks, and ‘get back to normal.’ To be up front, you’re not going to find a psychologist or therapist anywhere who will promise you can achieve those goals. What I can do is promise that we’ll try to figure out what a new, healthy normal looks like for you because we can rarely go back in time, but we can identify the things that made that previous time seem better than the current one and try to find ways to put building blocks back in the right spots.”

I shook my head and took a long breath. “You’re pretty liberal with the metaphors, huh?”

He snorted and shrugged. “Maybe I am, but did it make sense?”

“Man, if we’re going to be laying down new building blocks, I think I might need to start with expanding the foundation of my life by… a lot,” I said.

“Alright. So let’s circle back to the beginning,” he said. “What happened a week and a half ago to get you to pick up the phone and book all this therapy?”

I blew out a long breath, then took another long swig from my beer. Doctor Samson smirked a bit and took a sip of his own beer knowingly. The problem was that I wasn’t really sure where to start, and ‘at the beginning’ was complicated. I’d told most of it to my girlfriends - everything except the insane ‘magic app’ stuff - and now Dayana knew most of it too. But telling someone, telling a stranger… How did I even start to give him all the context? How did I get him to understand how we felt about each other, how I knew where Cass was at and could trust her?

If someone I met told me their life had changed like mine had in the last week and a half, I’d think they were insane.

I took another breath in, and once my lungs were full I thought, Fuck it. If I was going to talk to someone, it might as well be this weird therapist with a ridiculous mustache who handed out beers as part of his intake process. What could possibly go more wrong?

“My fiancee Cassidy and I have been together since our last year of high school,” I said. “It’ll be our eighth anniversary in September, and we’ve been engaged for about ten months now. We went to college together, but in our third year Cassidy had a mental health crisis and dropped out. She’s worked mostly online jobs since then and became a cosplay model and her career has been going well, and she’s been really focused on our relationship. But every few months, she would have another brief fight with depression - nothing super worrying, and always short, so I didn’t push her too hard towards therapy before now. Well, it turned out that her depression was out of guilt over her actions when we were younger. She-”

“Robbie,” Doctor Samson interrupted me, his voice soft and apologetic but firm enough to stop my progress. “I appreciate the succinct backstory, but I noticed something about the way you’re talking, and I’d like you to try making a bit of a shift. Everything you’ve told me so far has been Cassidy-focused. She’s obviously a very important part of this and of your life, but the time we have in this room is about you. So when you’re telling me what happened, I need you to focus on you. What happened to you, what you did, what you were feeling, what you experienced. Can you try that out?”

I cleared my throat and shifted uncomfortably. “I guess?”

“OK,” he nodded. “Continue. What happened?”

I took another breath, trying to figure out how to word things. “I agreed to- This already feels weird,” I said.

“You can use ‘we’ statements where you need to,” Doctor Samson chuckled.

“We were going on a working vacation for her,” I said. “I’d gotten up pretty early to make sure everything was packed and ready to go because I’m a planner. And I usually drive, so I got us on the road with plenty of time to make it to Lake Powell for the departure time with her colleagues. But I noticed Cassidy was acting kind of weird that morning, so I tried the little ways I usually pick up her mood. They worked a bit, but not for long. Then, around halfway through the drive, she-” I paused again, trying to find a way to say it that was ‘me focused’ like he wanted. “My fiancee told me that she had cheated on me a lot during the first three years of our relationship. I was shocked and almost didn’t believe her because the story sounded so insane. Including the numbers. Hundreds of other girls and women, all a secret from me. People I went to school with - high school and college. Adults I knew. And strangers. Always women, she stressed, and never in our home. And never my family. And even though it sounded insane to me, I believed her. I believed it happened, and she did it, and I was mad. Furious. Disgusted. But I also believed that she was sorry. Deeply sorry. I hurt for her, and that made me madder because I knew I deserved to be mad at her. That I needed time… to process it. But we were on the road to spend a week on a lake surrounded by her coworkers. I couldn’t accept her apology yet, not really, and I thought her plan to repent was fucking insane. But with everything that’s come out of it, it’s really fucking hard to hold onto the logic that I am still mad, and frustrated, and hurt, and sometims even disgusted with her.”

My throat felt raw all of a sudden, and I took another drink of my beer, my knuckles brushing my cheek as I tilted the can back to empty it into my mouth and finding I was leaking tears.

“I’m going to make a professional guess that part of that difficulty has to do with your girlfriend waiting out there with your fiancee,” Samson said, standing up and heading for his desk. “I think we’re going to need another round, brother.”

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