I had another dream about a little baby. It was sitting all by itself on a curb along a roadside. A short time later, I had another; this time the baby had a little bonnet and dress on and was trying to stand up on her own two feet. Another showed her standing and growing. I realized that I was that small child. The dreams were like watching old home movies that had been locked away in a vault of fear. With the therapist’s guidance and support, it was now safe to go back into those devastating feelings of rejection and abandonment. Part of the process was to write out the description of the dream and discuss it at the next session. Reading it out loud to John, I sobbed for that little girl.
The dream work, along with a number of other tools I acquired through hypnotherapy, made it possible to live in a much more honest way. From that grew the confidence to change. I started going to classes at the institute to deepen my understanding about hypnotherapy and the finer nuances of human behavior. Right from the start, it made it much easier to deal with difficult people. Take this one passive-aggressive producer with whom I was working on a major project. He felt that my piano player had done something that wasn’t right and wanted to fire him.
I told John, “If he fires Tim, I can’t bear the thought of breaking in a new piano player. I have to tell him he can’t do that.”
“No, no, no,” John countered. He suggested another strategy.
Staying very calm, I told the producer, “It will be a real hardship for me if you do that, but I can understand your feelings. If you feel you have to do that, I guess I’ll have to deal with it. It will be difficult for me, but I respect your feelings.”
“He’s going and that’s that,” the producer replied. But of course, he never acted on that, and the piano player stayed. With all the passive-aggressive people in my life, I would walk around on eggshells wondering when and if they were going to explode. But if you stand up to them and say in a kind or sometimes forceful way to stop it, they become pussycats. It’s like what’s really behind their anger is this tiny little compliant monster inside of them that isn’t so scary and mean after all.
Here’s one other strange insight that came from these sessions. One of the things I regularly did in nightclubs was go out into the audience and sing and sit in a gentleman’s lap. The audience would get a big kick out of it. When choosing my victim, I would automatically exclude someone with crossed arms and crossed leg body language. John told me, “No, that’s the guy you go to. Try it. You’ll see.” Sure enough, he was right. Those guys were so much more thrilled than my seemingly more open-looking victims. It was very curious.
Ira went for a while, but to a different hypnotherapist. I think he benefited from it, but it was during this time period that I decided to leave. In fact, it was during a therapy session with Ira that I explained to him why I thought it was best to separate.
Hypnotherapy did a lot more than put a stop to my stage fright and fear of flying. It helped unmask the big lies I had been living. If you’re lying to yourself, consciously or unconsciously, you’re not going to change behavior, both yours and that of the people around you. John always said, “You can’t cure anything with a lie!” Understand that lies are not always malevolent or malicious. Sometimes you have to create a fiction in your life to protect yourself from things that had terrified you. But in the long run, if you don’t take care of it, those lies will catch up with you and will exact their due one way or another. I did not want to be one of those sick people crippled in their souls and progressively having pieces of their dying bodies cut away.
Working with John, I was unmasking those lies like peeling away one layer of the onion skin at a time. This work was not for the faint of heart. The journey within one’s self is the most terrifying of all. It takes tremendous courage. There was no longer any denial or rationalizing belief system to counter the hard truth that I had hung in there for so many years with all those lies and self-protecting illusions. That life of quiet but seething desperation would no longer be tolerated. Finally I had a way to unearth the unresolved grief I had buried. I realized how the fear of flying and the stage fright were symptoms of how I had narrowed down and constricted my existence. With my confidence restored, it was easier to say yes to life again. Finally, there was absolutely no turning back.
CHAPTER 20D-Day
It was the big no-no. You don’t fall in love with your therapist. And your therapist isn’t supposed to fall in love with you. That’s what conventional wisdom says. And most of the time, conventional wisdom wins—but not in this case. The more time John and I spent together, the deeper our connection grew.
It certainly was not “love at first sight” on my end. On first impression, John was not the most attractive man in the world just to look at him. Neither did I find his hairpiece to be so appealing. But he did have the most beautiful and penetrating blue-gray eyes. So much for the value of appearances…After separating from Ira, I went out on a few dates, but more than anything else, they convinced me by contrast how my feelings for John had grown into something more serious. And that feeling was mutual.
“You can’t imagine what a wonderful feeling it is to take off my running shoes,” he
