DANCING WITH MY THERAPIST (PT 1)
The beginning of this uneasy adventure!
Disclaimer: This is completely a work of fiction with no direct or indirect semblance to any of my clients past or present. There’s, however, no doubt that my work as a psychotherapist has had some influence on this creative product but the content is not modelled on any actual person.
I have never been to therapy before. Well, until recently. While I had seen many portrayals in movies – my favourites were The Sopranos and The Gypsy - I still had no idea what an actual therapy looked or felt like. I had a friend who started using therapy long before I even knew something like that existed in Nigeria. His first exposure, though, was not in Nigeria. By my own count, this friend has consulted no less than four therapists in three years. This got me wondering if they were not all just cashing off my friend who seems incapable of doing without a weekly dose of therapy. But I think I kind of understand why he needed therapy like some of us needed TV shows and soap operas. When he first told me his first therapist (in London) diagnosed him of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), I was like “What’s that!?”
He flashed one of his complicated smiles, which could at once be warm and cold, and said “It’s like a world where the whole seasons of the year is happening all at once, every day, throughout the year. Imagine it is raining, sunny, dry, hot, harmattan-cold, breezy, stormy, and humid all at once or in quick succession.” It sounded like something he lifted out of a book.
“No, I can’t imagine that!”
“Exactly!” he said in a semi-baritone that suggested it must be harmattan-cold inside.
Of course, I have always been aware of the weird ways in which my friend’s emotions work: they are often changing fast and coming strong, but also of endlessly rich varieties. Being with him is like dipping one’s hand into a box full of balls of different colors; you’re never sure which you would draw. And I guess that’s also what makes him interesting – his emotional endowment runs across the whole spectrum. He could at one moment be petty and vindictive, and the next be high-minded and sublime. One moment he was advocating for the downtrodden and the forsaken, and in another breath bitching about “ungrateful, selfish, backstabbing” people.
Sometimes, I gauged his mood through the song he’s listening to. You see, my friend did not listen to music to feel good. For him, music was both an extension and a reflection of his feelings. I liked him best when he’s listening to Afrobeats because he was usually at his most playful. I dreaded walking in on him when he’s listening to Enya and the likes. However, the absolutely worst moment to catch my friend was when he’s listening to heavy metal or metallic rock. It was often a sign that something terrible had just happened or was about to happen. Moments like these made me grateful that he had a therapist – grateful that it never fell on me to make him feel better. I did not envy his therapist at all.
The therapist he was currently seeing frequently cropped up in our gist. He had been seeing this one for more than a year and she’s the longest-serving therapist in his employ. She was the first female, too. All his previous therapists had been males. It was interesting that he fought very hard to not have to see her at the time he was shopping for a new therapist. He had just decided to dump his last therapist for a reason he petulantly refused to tell me, and was asking around for a new recommendation. By some freak of fate, he said her name came up twice in the three referrals he got. Reluctantly, and certainly without the intention of settling, he decided to check her out.
Then, he could hardly stop piping about her. She was this, she was that. She was the only one that understands me in the whole world. “Hey, what about me!” I would clap back in my head. “I’ve been your friend for more than four years. It’s not like that’s a walk in the park, you know!”, still in my head.
One notable trait of my friend was that he was incapable of modest speech. He was either blowing hot or cold, waxing lyrical or going mute, sounding poetic or utterly drab. He talked always in passionate hyperbole; it didn’t matter whether he was talking about this new person he just met or about “absolutely idiotic nonentities”. So that the first thing you learned when dealing with him was to never attach any significance to his words beyond the moment they were uttered.
For him, people were either good or bad. And I was either for him or against him. “I need to know where you stand, D”, was a common line he threw at me whenever I dared show ambivalence in my attitude or actions. He, unlike me, was almost always sure of what he wanted or didn’t want; but, perhaps precisely because of this, he was also frequently changing his mind. He was the most unstable, unreliable person I knew. Yet he thought everyone (except him) was fickle. This trait of unpredictability could be absolute fun when he was on a streak of good mood. He could not be outdone when it came to springing surprises. Like the day he showed up at my doorstep on a Friday night and asked me to dress up for a comedy live show being headlined by Basketmouth. But the real surprise came when I discovered that we were to occupy the same table as Funke Akindele and two other celebrities. Such kind of surprises were not uncommon with my friend, but I also knew that they were most often than not the product of some disappointment in another area of his tortured life. The night he showed up at my doorstep unannounced, it was because another person had failed to show up at his.
His weekly sessions were his favorite engagement. Hanging out with me took the silver medal. Sometimes he manipulated his way into having two sessions a week – he called it an emergency protocol his therapist came up with for when he was having a particularly acute crisis.
I must confess that, more than once, it had crossed my mind that he and his therapist may have just more than mere therapy going on between them. Yet I knew this line of thinking could not be valid. You see, my friend’s life was further complicated by the fact that he was also gay. It’s not impossible that this fact was behind his preference for a male therapist as well as his fastidiousness in selecting a new one. There was a time I recklessly suggested that his emotional difficulties may be due to the fact that he is gay. I wish I had not been so thoughtless. I didn’t think nothing I had ever said had vexed him as much as that statement did. He went incommunicado for two weeks. Later when we reconciled, he said it took him two sessions to work through the psychological impact of what I had insinuated by my statement. He said he did not expect such from me at all. And then after I apologized again, he said he shouldn’t have been so harsh in his reaction, and then said flatly “You simply don’t know shit about being gay.”
I can’t exactly remember the first time I began to muse the idea of talking to a therapist myself. I knew I have repeatedly observed that my friend relied on therapy the same way some of us rely on medicine or prayer. And I have often caught myself wondering what life would be like for him if he did not have the comfort of therapy. Being a woman, I sometimes felt envious of him for having someone who was willing to listen to him week-in week-out and not have to worry whether the person was tired of listening to him or whether he was boring the hell out of the person. Wouldn’t that be nice to have? Someone who supposedly understands you, is willing to understand you and not judge you no matter what you say or who you are. This was a fantasy I definitely owed to my friend. But I never really gave it serious consideration, perhaps because I knew it didn’t come cheaply.
Everything changed when my relationship of two years was terminated in the most brutal manner. It caught me completely off guard and because I didn’t see it coming, it left me broken to the bones. It tore me apart emotionally and I became a living mess. A complete shadow of my previously buoyant self. It shook the very fabric of my self-image. I thought everything I previously thought about myself must somehow be wrong, otherwise this wouldn’t have happened to me.
Interestingly, my friend came strong for me emotionally. It was as if he had suddenly found the role he was fit for – to offer emotional succor to a grieving friend. And he strangely became less unstable himself as though his turbulent inner world suddenly found strength in ministering to my misfortune. It once crossed my mind that could my friend have found a cure for his own inner demons in my own freshly brewed misery. Could there have been some sort of exchange of essence, a transfer of spirits? I knew at the time it was a silly thought but it terrified me briefly nonetheless. I remember even dreaming that I accidentally slipped down a smooth-surface slope into an underground cave full of shrieking Bats. And just as I made to retrace my steps in frantic escape, I heard my friend’s booming voice. He was standing where once there had been nothing but a coven of blood-sucking Bats – my name reverberating through the cavernous underworld. I thought my friend was a vampire and he had been sent to drag me down to hell.
After more than three months of unrelenting and uncharacteristic inner deadness, he suggested I book an appointment with his therapist. It was after he brought it up that I realized fully how much I had hoped he would; how much I wanted to talk to a therapist. Because as close and trusted as my friend was, there were things - things so stupid but serious, petty but grave, silly yet cogent – I still couldn’t allow or imagine myself voicing out to him. I would later realize that it was the very fact of our closeness that made it unthinkable telling him or any other friend those things. I cared too much how I was perceived by them and I wouldn’t risk ruining my respect in their eyes by pouring out the gross and dross of my hurting heart. I have also long realized that while friends are good shoulders to cry or lean on, they are often a risky slate to confess to. Yes, we’re friends today; what happens tomorrow, nobody knows.
A date with a therapist was indeed what I needed. I suspected it must have cost my friend a lot of agonizing moments before he finally made the decision to “share” his therapist. The first time he actually mentioned the idea of seeing a therapist was a month before he eventually offered his own therapist. Back then, he had said; “D…you should consider seeing a therapist.” I felt my body shivered as though a wave of shock was fired through it, but I said nothing in response. Still in a tentative tone of appeal, he continued; “I think you need it.” Still, silence on my part. But I ensured I sniffed out loud to indicate that my silence was not a lack of attention. So, I figured it took him a whole month to eventually settled the question in his mind: to share or not to share my therapist?
For some strange reason I couldn’t explain, the mere anticipation of my impending appointment with my friend’s therapist started making me feel better. I could detect some inner thaw in my frozen grief which was, however, not yet visible on the outside. Perhaps months of listening to my friend epiphanized about his therapist had created in me a larger-than-life idea of who this therapist was and what she could do. Perhaps it was the chance to finally fulfill my secret fantasy. Or, even more sinisterly, perhaps I had unconsciously prolonged my own grief as an excuse to finally talk to a therapist. Whatever the cause of this pre-therapy thawing, I knew it could not be noble. Interestingly, when I mentioned these upsetting conjectures to the therapist at our first encounter, she had a very simple explanation for it. She said it was a form of placebo cure caused by a phenomenon known as the expectancy effect. It is when one’s body begins to respond to what one’s mind expects from an anticipated experience. I couldn’t deny the simple elegance of this explanation but I remembered still thinking it was too simple an explanation for something so twisted and dark. And when she suddenly asked, without any prompt, whether I feel guilty about the fact that I began to feel better the moment my friend suggested I see his therapist, I suddenly felt ashamed yet my answer to her question was a weak “no”, signified by an uncertain shaking of the head. She kept quiet for what seemed like an agonizing eternity until I found myself saying, “I think I might have felt a little ashamed of myself.”
It took me a long while before I was ever able to refer to the therapist as “my therapist” when talking with my friend. It was as if there was a tacit agreement that I was only borrowing what was his and, therefore, leaving me no right to refer to it as mine. The first time I did say “my therapist”, I was talking absent-mindedly and it was my friend who called my attention to that fact. Somehow, he didn’t appear to mind the illegal appropriation of his property. In fact, he made a fine joke out of it when he said “finally you declare your independence!” by which, I think, he meant the right to stake a personal claim on what was previously in someone else’s control. By breaking free of this unwritten limitation on my expressive freedom, the last traces of my guilt feeling disappeared and our conversations about our experiences in therapy became less of an exercise in cautious language.
The most difficult aspect of this triad was that while my friend and I almost always exchanged notes on what happened in therapy, there was not a single reference to the other person when either of us was in session with her. As a matter fact, at my first session, when I began talking about a friend of mine who recommended her to me, she had cut me short to ask if this friend of mine is still seeing her. I said yes. She then forbade me from disclosing his identity. I could not fathom the sense or the ethic behind this rule, so I asked her why. She said it is a specific policy of hers to not see two friends (except they are couples or are affected by a shared trauma) and that should this already happen (like in our case), to not enquire into the identity of who the friend is. This way, she is able to ensure that her opinions during sessions with either of them is not colored by her knowledge of the other person. She said very good researchers also do this as a matter of sound scientific procedure; in order for them not to subconsciously influence their subjects, they make sure they blind themselves to which of the groups is experimental and which is the control. She said she likewise considers it good practice in her profession to blind herself to any knowledge that may bias her opinion and thinking about me or my friend.
At this point, I remember wanting desperately to ask if she would also tell my friend the same thing if he tried to mention my name, but I couldn’t. Not after her painstaking and obviously well-thought-out explanation. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that she probably had a more intimate rapport with my friend than she had with me. I suddenly felt like an interloper, as though I had forced my way into a solemn meeting between two sworn friends. I guess this feeling had something to do with the experience of just being unceremoniously dumped.
This feeling, however, did not last long. After about my third visit to the therapist, I was with my friend when he asked me if I told the therapist about him. The question, for some reason, suddenly had me on the defensive.
“What do you mean if I told her about you?”
“I mean did you tell her I was the one who referred you to her?” Something about my friend’s tone made me very uneasy. I felt an accusation coming, so I said “Not really”. “She wouldn’t let me. I mean I tried to but she stopped me short of mentioning your name.”
My friend smiled in what seemed like a relief. I didn’t know what to make of this reaction, so I asked: “What about you? Did you mention it?”
“She wouldn’t let me. I thought she was trying to play us both. Now I see she’s being consistent.” My friend said this last statement as though he actually wished his therapist wouldn’t exhibit such cold consistency. In my mind I knew he must have felt betrayed with a capital B. I was nonetheless not going to allow this to dampen my uneasy excitement at going for session every week. It’s definitely too late for him to withdraw his therapist, because now, she has also become my therapist. Afterall, he himself had recognized and proclaimed my independence.