“I know you. From meetings.” I blurted it out in the middle of my second session. I was afraid that he would one day remember me and then have to kick me out of his practice because we’d sat in meetings together. “From years ago when I lived in Hyde Park.”
He cocked his head to the side and narrowed his eyes. “Ah, right. I thought you looked familiar.”
“Does this mean you can’t treat me?”
His shoulders shook as he burst into elfin laughter. “I hear the wish.”
“What?” I stared at his jolly face.
“If you’re thinking about committing to treatment with me, you’re going to start coming up with excuses about why it won’t work.”
“It was a legitimate fear.”
More laughter.
“What?”
“If you join one of my groups, I want you to tell the group every single thing you remember me sharing during meetings.”
“But your anonymity—”
“I don’t need you to protect me. That’s not your job. Your job is to tell.”
My journal entry after the second session was strangely prescient: I feel nervous about being exposed in therapy about the way I eat… I’ve got a lot of emotion about Dr. Rosen & his role in my life. Fear about my secrets coming out. Fear is so huge.
Dr. Rosen spoke in koans.
“The starving person isn’t hungry until she takes her first bite,” he said.
“I’m not anorexic.” Oh, sure, I’d wished for an attack of anorexia all through high school when I couldn’t stop bingeing on Pringles and Chips Ahoy, but that was never my deal.
“It’s a metaphor. When you let the group in—take that first bite—only then will you feel how alone you’ve been.”
“How do I ‘let the group in’?”
“You share with them every aspect of your life that deals with relationships—friendship, family, sex, dating, romance. All of it.”
“Why?”
“That’s how you let them in.”
Before starting group, you got three individual sessions. In my last one, my shoulders relaxed as I curled into Dr. Rosen’s black leather armchair. I twirled my bracelet with my index finger and slipped my foot in and out of my shoe. I was used to Dr. Rosen; he was my strange old pal. Nothing to fear here. I’d told him that I knew him from meetings, and he said it wasn’t a deal breaker. The only thing left was to hammer out the particulars, like which group would he put me in? He offered a Tuesday morning coed group full of doctors and lawyers that met from seven thirty to nine. A “professionals” group. I hadn’t been picturing men in my group. Or doctors. Or lawyers.
“Wait, what’s going to happen to me when I start group?”
“You’re going to feel lonelier than you ever have in your life.”
“Hold the phone, Harvard.” I bolted straight up in my chair. “I’m going to feel worse?” I’d just met with the dean of students at law school to take out a private health-care loan at 10 percent interest to pay for my new therapy. Now he was telling me that group would make me feel worse than the morning I drove around dribbling plum juice and praying for a bullet to my brain?
“Absolutely.” He nodded like he was trying to knock something off the top of his head. “If you’re serious about getting into intimate relationships—becoming a real person, as you said—you need to feel every feeling you’ve been stifling since you were a kid. The loneliness, the anxiety, the anger, the terror.” Could I go through this? Did I want to? Curiosity about this man, his groups, and how they might score my heart inched out my resistance, but just barely.
“Can I call you to let you know?”
He shook his head. “I need your commitment today.”
I gulped, stared at the door, and considered my options. The commitment scared me, but I was more afraid of walking out of his office empty-handed: no group, no other options, no hope.
“Fine. I commit.” I grabbed my purse so I could slink back to work and fret over what I’d just committed to. “One last question. What’s going to happen to me when I start group?”
“All of your secrets are going to come out.”
4
“Top or bottom?” A portly, balding guy with giant green eyes and wire-rimmed glasses lobbed this opening salvo at me during my first group session. Later, I learned that the guy who started my hazing was Carlos, a sharp-tongued gay doctor in his late thirties who’d been seeing Dr. Rosen for a few years.
“In sex. Top or bottom?” he said.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Dr. Rosen shifting his gaze from one member to another, like a sprinkler on a timer. I smoothed the front of my skirt. If they wanted bawdy, sex-positive Christie, I’d serve her up.
“Definitely top.”
Of course, this Christie was a fabricated version of me who welcomed intrusive questions from strangers with a smile. Underneath my skittering nerves and accelerated pulse, I felt like crying because the authentic answer to the question was that I had no idea how I liked to have sex. I didn’t date guys capable of consistent sex, thanks to their depression and addiction. I said top because I had a foggy memory of pleasure with my high school boyfriend, the basketball star slash pothead who boned me regularly in the front seat of my dad’s Chevy.
Dr. Rosen did a theatrical throat clear.
“What?” It was the first time I looked straight at Dr. Rosen since group started. He’d opened the waiting room door and led me, Carlos, and two other people to a corner office on the opposite end of the hallway from the room where’d I’d had my individual sessions. In the fourteen-by-fourteen group room, there were seven swivel chairs arranged in a circle. Sunlight striped the room from the slats in the mini blinds. In one corner there was a bookshelf, lined with titles on addiction, codependency, alcoholism, and group therapy. On the bottom shelf, a motley
