My new life with three group sessions per week: I went to group before work on Monday and Tuesday; on Thursdays I went in the middle of the day. “Long lunch,” I called it. I worked from nine thirty in the morning until seven at night, unless there was a project that required me to stay late. At night, I’d log off and walk home to my new apartment across the street from Clare, who’d recently gotten engaged to Steven. Instead of entrenching myself as their third-wheel roommate, I’d rented a one-bedroom in a high-rise on Clark and Maple from Kathryn, a Rosen-patient in the Friday women’s group. While I missed Clare’s company, it felt good to spread out into all corners of my new space and to watch the sunset from my western windows. Dr. Rosen viewed this move to a place of my own as evidence that I was making space for a romantic relationship. I narrowed my eyes when he said that, afraid to abandon my skepticism, solid as shale, for flimsy, see-through hope. On the weekends, I’d go to 12-step meetings and spend at least half a day at the office, reviewing documents and proving (to myself) that I deserved to be at Skadden. Behind the regular hum of my life, I waited for Something Big to happen. I waited for the “advanced” group, which I imagined as a blowtorch aimed straight at my heart, to work its magic on me. But there was no magic, no sparks flying from a naked flame, no fast-tracking my ability to attach to other people. There was sitting in the circle and talking, listening, feeling—the same things I’d been doing since I started with Rosen.
The six-month clock ticked on.
There were a few changes. The first thing was that I contracted severe constipation. My bowels would release only every eight days, so I walked around for seven days with a dull throbbing in my lower belly. It hurt to bend down. It hurt to run. It hurt to sneeze. I felt fatter than my fattest PMS day. My digestive system had turned off as soon as I started the new group. Nothing was moving through me. If this was the only gift of the new group, then I didn’t want it. To console myself, I would flip the calendar to July like a kid counting the days until Christmas, except instead of anticipating a jolly man in a red suit with presents, I imagined how I would terminate my relationship with my elfin therapist who promised I wouldn’t die alone. When I complained in Monday group about my constipation, it spurred Max to remind Dr. Rosen of his legendary diarrhea in the late eighties. When I asked what I should do about the constipation, Max would bark, “Maybe if you didn’t have a six-month deadline, you wouldn’t be so full of shit.”
On Tuesday mornings, I told my original group that I had no idea what to do in the new group. I tried to describe how it felt to have no idea what to do with my hands or my voice for ninety minutes straight. Patrice shook her head. “She’s doing just fine in there.”
“It doesn’t feel like group therapy. No one except Lorne comes in with any issues. They chitchat like old friends. No one knows about my pinworm or my eating disorder or how I debased myself with Jeremy. They don’t seem to care about anything but what’s right in front of them.”
“And the problem is…?” Dr. Rosen asked.
The problem was that I sat through two hundred seventy minutes of therapy per week and didn’t feel any better.
During Monday/Thursday sessions, I felt like a stranger who wandered into someone else’s family reunion. Pulsing through each conversation were layers of history, memory, story, and relationships that I couldn’t access. When Max or Lorne asked me how I was doing, I voiced my heart’s most immediate desire.
“Seriously, how can I get rid of this constipation?”
“Lots of water,” Dr. Rosen said. “You could also try psyllium husk. That’s the active ingredient in Metamucil.” Apparently, I was now paying eight hundred forty dollars per month to learn about the active ingredient in a laxative.
In Monday/Thursday group, Dr. Rosen didn’t give prescriptions. Nobody called anyone else to get to sleep or to discuss their after-dinner fruit binges. For ninety minutes twice a week, we sat in the circle and pinged off each other. Brad would talk about getting cheated out of a commission at work, and Max would call him out for being pathologically obsessed with money. Patrice would complain about the partners in her practice, and Dr. Rosen would confront her on not owning her authority as the most senior member of her practice. If I was quiet for too long, Max would turn to me and ask how many months until I quit. I’d ignore him and ask Dr. Rosen how this was helping.
“Of course it’s helping you.” Max sighed with annoyance.
“But nothing’s changed except my bowels.”
“That’s bullshit. And you know what?” Max said, his voice raised. “Stop trying to convince us you’re pathetic. Just stop. It’s annoying.”
No one could shame like Max. When he shook his head and sighed with disgust, I felt chastened. When I looked to Dr. Rosen for guidance or comfort, I saw only his inscrutable smile, so I shifted my gaze to a blotch in the carpet shaped like Australia.
A few minutes later, Dr. Rosen turned to me. “Why don’t you ask Max to tell you all the reasons you aren’t pathetic?”
My chest constricted. In the split second before I took Dr. Rosen’s suggestion, I imagined Max repeating the same messages that thundered through my head: It’s your own fault you’re alone. You’re untreatable. You are pathetic! Planting my feet on the ground, I looked directly at
