Why Your Shrink Hates You: A True Story
Haven’t you been wondering after all these years in therapy why you’re not getting any better?
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Admit it. Haven’t you been wondering after all these years in therapy why you’re not getting any better…why you still can’t a decent job, apartment, mate, or sell your screenplay? Every once in a while doesn’t a little hint of doubt enter your mind that maybe your shrink, let’s call him Dr. Speilvogel, doesn’t really understand you, maybe even doesn’t like you very much?
Do you also feel--but would hate to admit--that Dr. S. has every reason not to like you. That you’re a slimy, unlovable toad whom no one, starting with your mother, could possibly love? And that therapy isn’t working because you’re so hopeless that even the great Dr. S., world-renowned for his expertise in curing the most hopeless cases, can’t do a thing for you?
Does this state of affairs feel right, feel normal, feel like the way it’s supposed to be? If so, join the club. The best-kept secret in shrinkdom is that, like male gynecologists who go into their specialty because they hate women, shrinks go into theirs because they hate people. The next best-kept secret is that the most hateful shrinks attract the most self-hating patients. It’s a serendipitous arrangement that can go on for years. I should know, I did it for years.
I started my career on the couch at the tender age of 14 with a social worker named Mrs. Palmer at the family service agency in the suburb where I grew up. My mom was hysterical because she thought I was screwing around, which back in those prehistoric, pre-legal-abortion days was considered the first step on the road to unwed motherhood and a life on the skids. In reality I’d barely engaged in serious necking, but my mom was in the throes of a midlife crisis brought on by the combination of a cheating husband and a nubile daughter feeling her sexual oats.
To be fair, I wouldn’t have won any teenage good behavior medals myself. In my family, “communication,” the sine qua non of happy family life, had ground to a halt—if it had ever existed.
Mrs. Palmer was a large, motherly looking lady whom I hoped would be able to talk some sense into my mother. I now find it hard to believe, but I spent three years seeing this lady weekly, during which I mostly discussed what I was reading and got warned about the dangers of premarital sex. It seems Mrs. Palmer was so thrilled by having a client who was actually literate that she couldn't resist the temptation to turn our sessions into English classes. I specifically remember her lending me one of her favorites, The Green Kingdom, about a land where everything was green, including the people. She was avid to know what I thought of it, and to please her I tried to come up with interesting psychological insights about what greenness meant to me. At the time it didn’t mean much. What did mean a lot was that at 16 I was madly in love with an older man of 26 who wanted me to sleep with him. He’d spend all weekend trying to get me into the sack, and Mrs. Palmer would spend our weekday session trying to talk me out of it. She won. He broke up with me because I wouldn’t have sex with him. I was devastated, and wound up losing my virginity a year later to some callow college boy I didn’t even like.
The final straw for me was her defense of my parents when at 17 they wanted to bank all my summer earnings so I’d spend them in a way they approved of. I finally quit counseling, older, if not wiser. Looking back, I don’t think Mrs. Palmer actually hated me, because such strong emotions had been bred out of her, but she surely must have disliked me. I think I frightened her. A somewhat vague, prissy, WASPy sort, she was terrified of the intense rage that flared between me and my mother, and certainly didn’t want to be in the same room with it. So, polite to a fault, she discussed literature instead.
The war between me and mom continued unabated, but we finally agreed to a truce based on her promise to pay my room and board in a women’s residence while I attended City College if I’d agree to see another shrink. Anything seemed preferable at that point to suburban incarceration, so at the tender age of 19 I wound up on the couch of Dr. Matthew Besdine of West End Avenue, who actually had some sort of reputation in the shrink field. He had written and lectured about his grand theory of what was causing the malaise of modern life—that women were too domineering and men were too passive.
I, of course, was a prime example of a domineering woman.
This was in pre-feminist times, so his theory sounded perfectly logical to me, especially since everyone had always told me I was too loud and pushy. Dr. Besdine, whose woman-hating knew no bounds, hated my mother even more than he hated me and referred to her regularly as “the battle-axe,” which at the time I found rather reassuring. However, I’m sure he thought of me as the mini battle-axe since, in response to my unhappy tales of sleeping around in search of love, he’d call me things like a frigid nymphomaniac. He was quite pleased with his cleverness in coming up with that label, which was one of the few things he ever said to me because he slept through most of our sessions. Under the guise of being a traditional psychoanalyst he’d placed his couch in such a way that his patients couldn’t see him during sessions, but he’d give himself away by snoring loudly at regular intervals. When I confronted him with falling asleep on me, he said it was because I was boring. Well, what could I say to that? I knew he was right.
I spent four years with Dr. Besdine having my dismal opinion of myself confirmed. It never occurred to me that I should leave because I wasn’t getting better, since I had no concept of what better might be, and Dr. Besdine didn’t seem to have a clue either. If you were born blind how can you imagine what it would be like to see? Besdine himself was so passive and disinterested that eventually I just drifted away. He didn’t seem to notice.
My third fling with therapy was with a brilliant guru-like psychiatrist named Jack who lured patients into his web with the promise that if you tried hard enough you could be just like him. He broke every boundary with patients, including conducting sessions in the bathroom shirtless while shaving.
Jack was a lot smarter than Dr. Besdine, which made him even more dangerous, and he too had a theory about life. He believed that thoughts and feelings were separate, and if you just paid attention to your thoughts and ignored your feelings you’d be on the road to mental health. He was proud of the way he’d manage to ignore all his own feelings. His favorite question when asked about a course of action, was “does it make sense?”
Jack would argue you to the ground about why doing things his way made more sense. He once spent a whole session trying to convince me that it made more sense to use handkerchiefs because tissues were a waste of money. He didn’t insist on being paid because he thought therapy should be free. He considered his patients his ”friends.” This was OK with me because mom had stopped paying by this time. I enjoyed his groups, where he held court by dispensing approval to the members who were most like him, i.e. the ones who were best at skewering others with brutal honesty, or at being condescending. Since I was fairly articulate, I got pretty good at this game.
I must have gotten wiser with age, however, because after two years with Jack it occurred to me that I wasn’t getting any better and maybe it was his fault. He had taught me how to think on my feet—it was talk fast or get stilletoed in those groups—but paying attention to my thoughts hadn’t made me less depressed or gotten me love, work I liked or a thinner body. It certainly hadn’t helped me get along with my mother, whom I hadn’t spoken to for a year on Jack’s advice. As a matter of fact I just felt guiltier every time I gave in to those pesky feelings when they insisted on rearing their ugly heads. I finally figured out that it didn’t make a whole lot of sense to be in a therapy that made me feel guiltier when I felt paralyzed with guilt already.
After telling Jack how full of it he was, I stormed out of his office, proud that I’d had the guts to tell him off. I later heard from other group members that he’d been screwing a number of his female patients for years. This, after he’d told me that having sex with patients wouldn’t make sense. I figured he hadn’t made a play for me because I was too overweight for his tastes, the first time my weight had actually done me some good.
After quitting Jack, I stayed away from therapy for a long time, figuring I was probably better off fat, depressed and lovelorn that in the clutches of a madman. However, many years post-Jack, I again found myself in desperate straits. I’d been dumped by a higher class of guy this time—a corporate lawyer instead of my usual poverty-stricken loser—but it happened two weeks after I’d moved in with him, so I was not only sans boyfriend but sans apartment, a much worse fate in New York City.
As I gazed with suicidal thoughts upon the hideous painting of a screaming skull on the wall of a roach-infested sublet, I knew I’d have to enter the fray once more.
This time I was a little smarter. I asked a friend whose opinion I respected and she recommended I try her shrink, Jim Walters. I went to him, and mirabile dictu, actually got better.
I’d been unhappy in my job as a caseworker and Jim convinced me I was a writer, which changed my life. He also convinced me not to break up with my on-again, off-again boyfriend, Ira, whom I later married. I thought I was happy with Ira until he left me for a younger woman many years later. To his credit Jim later admitted he’d totally missed Ira’s asshole side. .
When I started seeing Jim I was leery. This guy can’t be a real shrink, I thought. He doesn’t have a fancy office, doesn’t radiate self-assurance or charisma, doesn’t charge exorbitant fees, wears jeans, and has an annoying habit of laughing at his own jokes. Although he says wise things that make me think, he also talks too much and sometimes I have to interrupt him. Even worse, he seems to think I should trust my own judgement, frequently admits to being wrong, and doesn’t give me a hard time about anything. He makes it clear that he likes me. Can someone like that really know what he’s doing?
When doubts crept in I’d have to remind myself that, like Groucho, who wouldn’t belong to any club that would have him, my tendency was to only feel really comfortable only with a shrink who hated me.
I finally got some insight into why shrinks hate their patients. A sex therapist I interviewed explained that the problem with shrinks is that they’re notorious co-dependents, unhappy people who feel fulfilled only when they’re trying to reform an alcoholic, addict or other ne’er- do-well. Like the wife who falls apart when her alcoholic hubby goes on the wagon, many shrinks don’t have lives of their own, but live through their patients. For the shrink to feel better, i.e. superior, the patient has to feel worse. Shrinks get to avoid facing their own problems by focusing on other people’s. Like vampires, they require their daily ration of blood in the form of human misery.
Although all shrinks have co-dependent tendencies, the good ones will admit it. Jim knew his own flaws. Like me, he was an aspiring writer. Although he never published, he convinced me to leave social work and become a real writer. He explained, “Erica, you’re not as crazy as I am. You don’t have to become a shrink.”
I started looking for another shrink again recently when pandemic anxiety and depression hit. Jim is in his nineties now and I’m sure doesn’t use Zoom. No luck. Jim spoiled me.
Unfortunately, good shrinks are the exception, not the rule. You can always spot them though, by the humility they display when it comes to understanding the complexity of the human psyche, i.e. your psyche, and most of all, by their readiness to have a good laugh at their own expense. I’m still looking.
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Erika, this is fabulously told and written. You have excellent choice in topic and I love your commentary and style. Don't stop!