“What does that mean?” I asked.
“Max once had lunch at his house—”
“He served me a ham sandwich,” Max said. Ham? Dr. Baruch Attah Adonai served tref to a patient? “He used to be less Jewish. His über-Jew thing started when he married his second wife.”
Maggie leaned over and told me she was once “very close” with Dr. Rosen’s ex-wife, who was anorexic and cheated on Dr. Rosen with a man she met at the Checkerboard Lounge. “I think it was a Black man.”
“Guess that explains your reaction to my Luther Vandross dream,” I said to Dr. Rosen. He clutched his belly and laughed.
Max mentioned that Dr. Rosen took an extended leave of absence in the early nineties for an undisclosed reason. Brad and Lorne debated whether it was treatment for sex addiction or codependence.
With each revelation, my stomach clenched tighter. The shiny Dr. Rosen who lived in my imagination, to whom I gave the power over my deepest desires, was splattered with mud with each new divulgence. I curled my lips over my teeth and pressed down hard.
Max turned to Dr. Rosen and slapped his forearm. “Remember when you had diarrhea for months? When was that? Eighty-nine? Ninety-one?” The rest of the group called out different years. Why did they know about Dr. Rosen’s bowels?
I wanted to vaporize and float out of the room and out of treatment. Max and Maggie were fire hydrants gushing story after story about Dr. Rosen dating back to the first Reagan administration—when I was still in junior high. That time his dog ran away. That summer he wore seersucker. That time he had to physically restrain Maggie from attacking Max and broke one of her ribs. In fifteen minutes I learned more about my therapist than I had in the past three-plus years. The blank slate was slathered in muck.
Dr. Rosen smiled in his usual unguarded way. He wasn’t embarrassed by these disclosures. I looked around the room—no one else was alarmed. Their bodies were loose in their chairs. These stories were like family lore shared around the Thanksgiving table year after year. If Max stopped in the middle of a story, then Maggie or Brad would keep going. So many stories. So much history. So many layers of shit slathered on my Dr. Rosen.
Until this moment, I’d admired what an iconoclast Dr. Rosen was, even when my friends who saw other therapists raised their eyebrows when I told them about Baby Jeremiah, the cocktease prescription, my nightly calls to Rory and Marty. I believed Dr. Rosen was courageous, smart, and gifted at treating addicts like me. But now I worried that he was something else: deeply flawed and possibly negligent. Maybe even dangerous.
The longer I sat and listened to my new group mates laugh about the past, the more nauseated I felt. They all had marriages, children, and careers. Maggie was a grandmother. None of them were desperate for something like I was, though Brad definitely fixated on increasing his net worth. None of them needed Dr. Rosen to be the powerful Oz and not an ordinary con man as much as I did.
Dr. Rosen cocked his head toward me and smirked. “Yes?”
“I have nothing to add to this trip down memory lane.”
“Did you want to share something? You were mumbling under your breath?” Maggie said through her innocent-as-Grandma smile.
Everyone stared at me. My hands were shaking as if I’d stepped up to a podium to address hundreds of people, not a circle of six. “Look, I’m here to get into healthy relationships and start a family of my own. I don’t want to know about Dr. Rosen’s fecal history.” I turned to Dr. Rosen and asked my favorite question: “How is this going to help me?”
Before he could answer, Max did. “How do you know it’s not helping you?”
“Listening to stories about his history as a shrink with bad boundaries is helping me?”
“Why not?”
Max knew nothing about me. I glanced at the clock again. Why couldn’t I make my feet move to the door? Why was I putting myself through this? This group—all of this therapy—might never lead to any of the things I wanted. I might come here faithfully twice a week, pay my seventy bucks a session, and still die alone.
Grandma Maggie held up her left hand and pointed at her wedding band. “Dr. Rosen is really good at getting women like you married. You’ll see. I got married two years ago.” Maggie was easily in her midsixties and had been with Dr. Rosen since George H. W. Bush was vice-president. It was hardly consoling to think I had decades to go before settling down and starting a family.
“Six months,” I said. “If my life isn’t better by July, then I’m leaving.” Never mind the five-year timeline I started with at my first appointment. I’d been in treatment with Dr. Rosen for three and a half years, had now signed up to come three sessions a week and spend eight hundred dollars a month on therapy. The stakes had risen. I wanted results.
“Threatening to leave is an interesting way to build trust and intimacy.” Max smirked.
“I come here three times a week—”
“So do I,” Lorne said.
“Me too,” said Patrice.
“This really is a cult.” Everyone laughed. “Six months.”
“Would you leave Tuesday-morning group too?” Dr. Rosen asked.
“Yes. All or nothing. Six months.”
That evening, I sat in my office as the sun slunk below the horizon. I typed a search into Google: “Therapists in Chicago.” A list of links appeared. A psychologist named Linda, an analyst named Francis, who was in the same building as Dr. Rosen. I imagined calling Linda or Francis, but it felt impossible. It took too much energy to fill someone new in. The apples. The worms. Jeremy. The Intern. Dr. Rosen and my first two groups had taught me to eat, sleep, and have sex. I’d miss Dr. Rosen and his goofy-ass laugh. I’d miss my Tuesday-morning crew. The first session in the “advanced”
