The first couch

With a brief reading of the first lines.

My first therapist was Dr. Glenn Galloway.  I was a freshman at the University of Michigan, and I was a mess. Dr. Galloway’s office was in downtown Ann Arbor on the second or third floor of an old office building.  I remember there was the local headquarters of the John Birch Society down the hall. I was with Dr. Galloway for about four years until he left Ann Arbor. 

I came to him in the nick of time.  When we started talking—or, rather, when I did—I couldn’t believe how much goo was inside me.  It just kept coming and coming, from some kind of inexhaustible emotional pump, all of it strange and newly-revealed, all of it I’d kept private and secluded for years and years.  All my secrets and shame, all my murderous thoughts, all my unspeakable sexual desires. Un-bottled-up.

None of these I’d ever expressed to anyone before.  I was re-creating trauma—is there a word for “trauma” that hasn’t become neutered?—with the original cast, at least conjured by my sobbing memory.  There it was, gushing out of me like emotional projectile vomiting.  This Dr. Galloway never blinked an eye. 

Well, metaphorically, since I couldn’t see him.  I was on the couch.  What a classic position!  It’s become a cartoon cliché now, the patient on the couch, and the doctor with a pad—Dr. Galloway did take notes—in anxious acceptance. It feels strange to lie, or lay, on an analyst’s couch for the first time, or even for the second and third time.  I felt naked, literally.  I think sometimes I might have even folded my hands across my clothed crotch reflexively.  I wanted to make my body smaller.  Throw me a blanket! I wanted to say.  Can I wear dark glasses?

What shame and secrets?  What unspeakable sexual desires?

You may ask.  And I’ll tell you—if you reveal yours to me.

Still there?

I believe I came to see him three times a week.  Back then—back then, I was drowning. I can hear his voice.  Soft, soothing, probing.  Nothing seemed to faze him.  Nothing was astonishing. 

He wouldn’t tell me anything about himself.  Was he married? 

“Hmm, why do you ask?”

“Just curious!”

“What makes you curious?”

Maddening, but, those were the rules. He never broke them, though I tried hard and cleverly.

“How long have you been married?”

“Clever.”

How many buckets of tears did I accumulate?  Lots of leaks in that room. (Which was soundproof, by the way. Had two doors.) Anyone who has left their therapist’s office after weeping uncontrollably knows what it’s like to try to instantly become a normal person, especially when there’s someone in the waiting room. Hurry by.   

He wasn’t perfect. He fell asleep once while I was in the middle of my relating some agony. I started hearing sleeping noises. Not snoring but, you know, that deep breathing of sleep.

“Hey!” I said. “You’re asleep!”

He woke up. Made me feel a tad less interesting, at least for a while.

He was an interpreter of dreams.  That came with the package.  You can unlock these Hieronymus Bosch films in my head?  These sweat- and screaming-inducing nightmares?  He did.  At least, his take made sense to me.  They weren’t just blood-soaked glyphs!  They were telling me something. They became useful.

“This clearly means that…”

I told him everything.  This was before I started lying to my therapists.  And withholding.  I was too scared and desperate to hide anything.  All the mess came out.  When people talk about therapy, they often describe it as work.  “I did the work,” they say.  “I’m better at relationships now.  But I did the work.  I put in the hours.”

If you’re drowning, and you don’t want to drown, you’ll put in the work, a kind of desperate clawing.  I was too desperate to lie.

I kept these things inside like a hoarder, until he opened the house and started pointing, “You have to get rid of this.  It’s taking up too much room.”

“I need that!”

“No you don’t.  You’re fine without it.  Get something beautiful instead.  And useful.”

Really?

The one thing, above all, in four years, that Dr. Galloway gave me was the assurance that I wasn’t the one, the only.  I wasn’t the only one who felt these so-called appalling emotions. Who wanted these heretofore unspeakable desires met. That can take years to learn, and to believe.

“You mean,” I asked, I’m sure more than once, “that stuff isn’t abnormal?”

“No.”