The Therapist Who Wasn’t

This is the story of Dr. Churl.

I have already confessed that I have some small mental issues… specifically, I have persistent depressive disorder (PDD), which is sort of like Depression’s little brother. I have, naturally, sought to treat the condition medically. Usually this means chemicals. That is, I take anti-Depressant medications.

Occasionally, though, I have also sought what is known as Talk Therapy, that’s where you go and meet face to face with a doctor or other specialist and chat with them about what you feel and why. For me, this has been at least as effective as medications, though not always, and sometimes my therapists have been good, sometimes quite bad.

However, among the therapists I’ve had who were not good, one stands out. Strangely, I can’t recall his name. I have the odd habit of not being able to recall the names of people who have offended me or even actively harmed me. For some reason, their names fade away. Maybe it is the secret tool of my vindictive id—the denial of the very existence of my enemies, to consign them to limbo.

Anyway, his name was something like Churl. That wasn’t actually it, of course. But there was a C and an H involved somewhere along the line. So, Churl will do for the moment.

I got his name off a list of providers that my insurance company had given me. I called each therapist on the list, one after another, working my way from A down. Some of the doctors didn’t call back. One, a somewhat stridently ideological individual, did not want to deal with a “male.”

After getting through the Bs, I came to the Cs, and Dr. Churl. He agreed to see me. We made an appointment and a week or so later I found myself at his office.

It was a nasty little place in a shared office complex in an upscale neighborhood. When I say it was little, I mean little. It had just barely enough room for two chairs and his desk. What made it feel all the more tight was that he was a big man, and he thus loomed over you as he squatted in his chair across the room.

We began. I tried to get to the point. This meant that I needed to talk about the unpleasant feelings I‘d been having, particularly those of my being without worth, and that meant in turn my crying.

I looked up and realized that he was staring down at with a look of, well, disgust. What I’d thought was honesty about my emotions, he felt to be unmanly. In his eyes, I realized, I was nothing but a wimp. A weakling. A man who had never been shown how to be a man, or else had ignored the lesson. And, bluntly, he then told me so.

This was, of course, exactly what he should not have said to me because a part of my problem was that I didn’t feel I had lived up to the role assigned to me by society…at least as society was when I was growing up in the late 1950s and early 1960s. What I needed was someone to tell me I had actually done rather well. I’d been a decent father and husband, and, if I hadn’t made a fortune, I’d been passible in the money department. And as for working hard and being stoic, those I had down pat.

But he did not say these things. He did not reassure me. He was, instead, a constant reminder of my failings.

What was worse was that he decided that my parents were the problem. They had…he decided… been unfeeling and cold. And, so, he went on, all my problems spun out of that relationship. He had me reading Alice Miller’s The Drama Of The Gifted Child, which is an important book, maybe even a classic…but it had nothing to do with my situation. My parents were unfailingly kind. Though he wouldn’t hear a word of that.

Finally, and logically (if incorrectly), he decided I suffered from grandiosity, another symptom of the Millerian child. I believed (he said) that I could do things which I actually couldn’t (“delusions of adequacy”), and then suffered from the agonies of the damned when I realized my true and many limitations.

And what grandiose goals had I set for myself? Well, for one thing, to make a living as a professional writer…clearly, he said, I didn’t have the talent. I should abandon that futile dream. The fact that I was a professional writer at the time—specifically, a journalist—was beside the point. He had made his judgement. The facts were not to get in the way.

As I say, I stayed with him far longer than I should have. I should have abandoned him as a tragic waste of human life, not to mention a threat to my mental health, after the first session. But, I didn’t. He was a therapist, by God. And a doctor. I assumed he knew what he was doing. I thought he might be able to help.

I’m not quite sure what made me realize that he wasn’t doing me any good. I think I just woke up one day and understood that he was dangerous to me. So, I canceled my next appointment, and when he phoned to ask why, I made up some story about going back to graduate school, and never saw him again.

In retrospect, I suspect the real problem was not my mental illness, but his. I think he was some sort of narcissist. I think his purpose in my “therapy” was to denigrate me, to prove his own superiority, and to demonstrate his ability to dominate others. In other words, he was a bully, and the worst thing about it all is that I let him bully me, because I thought he was helping me. He definitely wasn’t.

An aside, in the few months I knew him, I never once saw him laugh or smile. He never reacted well to one of my jokes, even to be polite. I later read that this is a sign of a bad therapist. Had I but known…

Anyway, time went on. I profited a couple of ways from my experience with him. For one thing, I learned to be more selective in my next choice of a therapist. For another, I used him as inspiration. I do very short, limited animation videos as a hobby, and he provided excellent subject matter for one of them. It even got me an award from a little video contest I entered.

But I did worry, and I still worry, about the harm he may have done to his patients. I mean, I’m only mildly neurotic, and he still managed to do me some real injury. What, I wondered, did he do to others…to those more vulnerable than I was?

And besides, I did want a little revenge.

So, I tried to track him down. I envisioned confronting him…maybe even bring his case to the attention of the authorities.

But…that was when I discovered I couldn’t recall his first name, and I was only about 75% sure of his last. And, more, by this time we had moved to New Mexico, where I was caring for my parents. That meant I couldn’t simply drive over to his office and seek him out, or at least note down the name on his door. (Even if I could recall his exact address, which I couldn’t.)

I turned to the web…did some searches…working with various versions of his name, or as much of it as I could recall…and found nothing.

Finally, I gave up. It seemed the universe did not intend me to find my therapeutic tormentor.

I wonder what happened to him. The most obvious, if least satisfying answer is that he just retired and is somewhere even now in comfortable circumstances, making life miserable for someone near and dear to him. Or, more interesting if less probable, he finally went too far…some patient committed suicide, or (better) turned on him. And, now he has lost his license, can no longer practice, and sits out the remainder of his life in bitterness and rebuke.

But, well…

I am a story-teller by inclination, and I can’t help myself.  I’ve worked up two more stories for him…those are complete fictions, based on neither evidence nor reasoning. They are simply tales, myths, but with a certain charm for all that…

In the first story, it turns out that he has genuinely vanished. He knew that eventually his patients would discover his actual nature…would realize that he had hurt rather than helped them…and so, fled before their anticipated fury. And, as a final triumph, an exquisite last act of gaslighting, he covered all his tracks and traces. Not even his birth certificate remains. Thus, his sadism…for how can he be guilty if you doubt he really existed?

Impressive and perhaps chilling…the stuff of horror movies… (what happens when one of his former patients encounters him by accident? As I say, the stuff of stage and screen.)

Now, the second story

In it, karma is the prime mover, and the central character…

In this other tale, what happens to the good doctor is akin to my own suppression of his memory…that just as I cannot fully recall his name, so too the universe has perceived his cruelty, and sought out a fitting reward.

To wit, how better to injure a narcissist than to condemn him to obscurity?

And so, the reason I cannot find him is that he, now, begins …

His slow, deliberate, and total erasure. So that, in the end, all he did, and all he might have done… all the cures he did not administer, all the psychic injuries he caused…nothing will remain.

And he will vanish…or, rather, blur into nothingness, like a watercolor in a cold winter rain…

The reds and blues and yellows washing to gray, to earth…

To absolute…to deadly…and fatal…

Oblivion.