Area Woman Blows Gasket

by Patricia Pearson

  "There is a man," she told me then. "He is an older man, who is ill. But he will get better!"

  It was happy news, except that I didn't know any older men who were ill. I was the one who felt ill with my longing. She watched me pensively, knowing she'd gotten it wrong. The other one I saw was now a few booths down the aisle, with the same display of newspaper clips he had had before, showing that he helped the police find drowned children and stolen jewels. I remember he seduced me with admiring comments about how old my soul was. Then he told me I was allergic to cheese.

  I wonder what else I could learn, if I had four thousand dollars to burn and every seer in the hall got their chance to see right through me. My fortunes would be infinite, my talents manifold, my food aversions legion. I doubt anyone would cough up a forwarding address for the aliens. But there's always hope. That's a prediction the psychics need to bank on.

  You Don't Want to Know What Your

  Therapist Is Thinking

  I was complaining to a friend the other day that I would sooner crawl through a sewer than fly on a plane, to which she replied, "How irrational," and I said, "Yes, I know that, but so is your phobia of cotton batting." Whereupon we agreed that our fears might merit a little bit of therapy.

  So my friend said: I don't know anyone good. Why not shop around?

  Excellent idea, I thought, because I'd been hearing about this trend of on-line therapy. Enterprising psychotherapists the world over have been throwing up Web pages to advertise their skill at plumbing the depths of your soul. All you have to do is submit credit card information and you can get counseling via live chat, video conferencing, or e-mail without ever leaving your home.

  This is actually perfect, because I hate the traditional process of acquiring a therapist. You have to ask around, which gets people gossiping, and in exchange they hand over some name on a piece of paper with an extremely vague testimonial, like: "He's really nice" or "I found hirrl to be quite nice" or "She didn't say one single thing in six months, just stared at me, but she was nice."

  Nice, schmice, what school are they from? Freudian, Jungian, Gestaltian, past-lives, or dolphin-assisted? You have to know where these therapists are getting their theories about you because there isn't one grand therapist perspective on the universe. Some of them are convinced that you were abused as a child; others think you're governed by electric currents in your brain. I know all about this because I have been dogged by ridiculous episodes of anxiety throughout my adult life, and this has flung me onto various mysterious shores. I have collapsed upon the proverbial couches, gasping and sputtering and evincing a terror of getting cancer from barbecued meat or being creamed by an SUV, and at various times I have been told that it is my mother's fault, that patriarchy and internalized anger are to blame, that it's a chemical imbalance, or a repressed memory of being sacrificed to Satan.

  The advantage to cybertherapy is that the therapists trumpet their perspective on their Web pages. Thus we have, for example,"Reality Therapy Online Services" based on "choice theory" as taught at the William Glasser Institute in California. "The goal of reality therapy," states the institute's Web site, "is to help people re-connect." How that works, specifically, is all written out right there for you to scroll through until your head hurts.

  If reconnecting isn't for you, try an e-mail exchange with Dr. Robert F. Sarmiento of Houston, Texas, whose Web site advocates SMART therapy, which is Self-Management and Recovery Training, "based on Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy."

  Alternatively, you can pour your heart out to Alec Gore, a Neuro-Linguistic Programmer who offers "The Road" approach, which distinguishes itself from other therapies, his Web site argues, by being "solution-oriented." Indeed, the boast on Gore's site is that: "You have reached one of the most innovative and effective services in accelerated human change." You have also reached a man who is actually practicing psychotherapy in Hong Kong, and that is one of the most intriguing aspects of online counseling. Patients are no longer confined to therapists within physical reach, which is a tremendous advantage to people outside of major cities and also to people who feel culturally and linguistically displaced. A recent immigrant to the United States, for instance, could perhaps find counseling from her home country on the Net. Write home to France: "J'ai beaucoup d'ennuiV (Translation: "I am le tired.")

  Of course, the disadvantage to this cross-border fluidity is the truly stunning, frontier-style lack of regulation. With therapists available from so many different states and nations, well, Buyer Beware.

  The first time I launched myself into this world of anonymous therapists I surfed aimlessly, and eventually decided to submit my neurosis at random to three different therapists. I prattle-typed to each about my phobia of not smoking and, come to think of it, my phobia of the dentist and of flying, and how I lapsed into this sort of obstinate paralysis when it came to self-improvement of any kind, really, and was also horrified of diets and Pilates and climate change and. . . .

  It eventually occurred to me that successful patients in the world of cyberpsychology really have to know how to type. Ambrose, for instance, types like a chicken pecking for seeds, bent over his keyboard with two cocked fingers and a focused gleam in his eye. He pulls off a sentence in the time it takes me to speed-type the entire plot of a dream I've just had about Gwyneth Paltrow and her baby, Apple, and how for some reason I moved in with them, and then I pulled a one-hundred-year-old hair out of my mouth that belonged to an ancient mariner. And what if a prospective patient had writer's block? What if the very act of writing made them feel inadequate and consequently more depressed?

  In any event, a couple of days after I sent the e-mail about smoking, I received the following message: "Be a non-smoker in 7 days!!! With Kick-It. Guaranteed." Oh, that perky spam. If you think hucksters aren't monitoring psychotherapy exchanges along with everything else, you can now put that delusion to rest.

  Next, from Adriane St. Clare, a psychologist in Fortuna, California, I received this message in reply to my cry for help:"Your problem of paralysis and inability to stop smoking may be related to the anisorder you suffered from earlier in your life." Hmmm. Interesting. Anisorder? What is that? A typo? He concluded: "I would highly recommend a face-to- face treatment, such as EMDR, to assure the most effective results." Oh, EMDR. Bight. And that would be what?

  To decipher babble, please provide credit card info here.

  Some weeks later Dr. Rob Sarmiento of Houston, to whom I shelled out forty U.S. dollars, sent me a kind e-mail suggesting that I do the "reality check" quiz on his site and otherwise try to engage in cognitive-behavioral therapy. "You might also want to observe what urge-causing thoughts you have when you feel like smoking, such as 'I need a cigarette' or 'I can't quit.'"

  Amazing! Those really are the urge-causing thoughts that I have!

  "Once you have identified the thoughts," Sarmiento continued, "you can start questioning them, for example, 'How uncomfortable will it be on a one-to-ten scale, with ten being boiled in oil?'"

  That's hard. I don't know. I've never been boiled in oil. Nor have I ever had my head sawed off with a butter knife, which I suspect would also hurt worse than quitting smoking, but I just don't see them as competing options.

  Not to knock Dr. Sarmiento, because he then sent me an envelope full of fridge magnets with reality check lists on them, and a wallet card proclaiming itself an Official Human Being License.

  Let me tell you: I may have been a smoker, but I'm no rodent, or a plant either, and I have the papers to prove it.

  The Five-Minute Phobia Cure

  Leafing through Psychology Today in the allergist's office the other day, I came across an ad for a Five-Minute Phobia Cure. Apparently, a Dr. Roger Callahan of Indian Wells, California, has pioneered a new psychological technique called Thought Field Therapy, whereby phobias and other traumas can be fixed with a few light karate chops to your collarbone and forehead.

  Phobias, Callahan has explained on such early morning
shows as Good Morning America, are perturbances in the "energy field" of a thought. You must physically remove the perturbances in order to get on with the business of riding in elevators without screaming or staying calm in the presence of spiders.

  Well, I'm tired of getting absolutely hysterical on airplanes. So I procured a video copy of the Five-Minute Phobia Cure for forty dollars and gave it a try. Callahan, who looks disconcertingly like Burt Reynolds, demonstrates his theory by plucking paper clips from an elastic band. One thought field perturbance down, four to go. Pluck, pluck. He must be on to something. Never mind the complex inner labyrinth of neuroses so revered by psychoanalysts. People want their problems fixed, and they want them fixed NOW. Okay?

  Okay. The therapy sequence in the video involves a guy in a red T-shirt, who must be Callahan s apprentice, posed like an aerobics instructor at the front of a class and taking you through the following paces. First he gets you to summon a mental picture of your phobia, which "brings up the thought field." In my case, the image of strangely elated Arab men taking control of my airplane, which was supposed to be flying from Toronto to Cancun but instead is being steered into Mount Rushmore, comes obediently into view. Then you must do this:

  Tap four or five times under your eye, then under your arm, then on your collarbone, then your hand. Waggle your eyes, hum a tune, and count to five.

  Voila.

  I wanted to test this cure, but since my plane phobia would entail driving to the airport and plunging off a roof, I enlisted Ambrose instead.

  "Can you just come down here for a second and try this phobia cure?" I asked.

  "Go away," he responded, sensing trouble. "I'm reading."

  "Please, just for five minutes! I want to see if it cures your horror of mayonnaise."

  "No."

  My husband is what Callahan calls a "skeptical stranger." Skeptics are perfect for demonstrating the efficacy of thought field therapy, Callahan claims, because they're not suggestible. Bribed with the promise that I'd vacuum the car, Ambrose finally agreed to watch the video. He tapped under his eye, on his arm, and at his collarbone, sighing loudly. He waggled his eyes.

  I whipped out ajar of Hellmann's."Arrrrggghhhhhhhhr he shouted.

  On the video, the words "psychological reversal" flashed on the screen. Callahan believes that some people are subject to psychological blocks, or reversals, that make them impervious to his treatment. Thus, he has devised a thirty-second treatment for your treatment block.

  "Tap on your hand and say three times: I accept myself even though I have these problems."

  Ambrose went along, glaring at me, then repeated the phobia cure of tapping, humming, and counting.

  "So, now what do you think?" I asked, approaching tentatively with my jar.

  "GET AWAY FROM ME WITH THAT MAYONNAISE!"

  Maybe we did it wrong. Callahan has tapped on people on all the major American network talk shows, to great effect.

  If you reject the theory that phobias are random electromagnetic perturbances in the brain, you have many other theories to choose from: early childhood trauma, instinct, atavism, and generalized anxiety, to name a few. According to William I. Miller, author of a fascinating book called The Anatomy of Disgust, many phobias are really a conflation of fear and disgust, relating to our need for an ordered universe. We are horrified by disorder and chaos, such as weeds growing pellmell in a garden, overly lush vegetation, or the body turned inside out— oozing, slimy viscera, what Miller calls "thick, greasy life." So, people have phobias of eggs, vomit, honey, and other slippery substances, which are really an anxiety about the corruptible boundaries of the body.

  Interesting. Unlike pure fear, which invites a fight-or-flight response, the nature of the horrifying is the apprehension that there is no escape. To fight the dandelion or sunny-side-up egg would involve touching it, which evokes terror of contamination. To flee it would mean that it wasn't all around you, and even in you, which in itself is the essence of what's horrifying. Mad cow disease. Avian flu. SARS."The disgusting can possess us," Miller writes, and "fill us with creepy, almost eerie feelings of not being quite in control, of being haunted."

  We fear being overrun, and we also fear falling apart. Try this. Nothing is quite so disgusting in the mouth as a single hair, as proved in an experiment Miller cites in which a group of toddlers under observation, quite possibly including my own, happily ate dog feces, grasshoppers, and a whole small dried fish but completely freaked out about hair being in their mouths or on their tongues.

  We are also horrified by the uncanny: "the unsettling-ness of the effigy," explains Miller. Clowns, for instance. They confuse our perceptions of real and unreal. Particularly, I would say, when the clowns turn out to be serial killers, as in the news about John Wayne Gacy of Chicago, who made a point of (a) entertaining children at local hospitals as well as painting his own self-portrait, as a clown, and then (b) murdering thirty-three boys and burying them under his house. He dedicated his life to becoming a case in point.

  Interestingly, phobias almost never arise from smell or sound, at least in humans. Disgusted by poo, yes, but phobic, no. Appalled by the sound of Britney Spears, certainly, but no compulsion to run away in panic unless you're Avril Lavigne. It's different for animals. My dog has a phobia of me biting into a Macintosh apple. When I do this, he streaks out of the room as if his tail is on fire. Don't ask me why he tolerates the sound of a chewed-on carrot. I'd chalk that one up to Roger Callahan's random perturbance. Wouldn't you?

  EFFORTS AT ESCAPE

  La Dentista

  The other day I was in Mexico, puttering about contentedly as I shopped for market silver and fantasized about buying a villa, when all of a sudden my tooth burst into the sensory equivalent of the helicopters roaring onto the beach in Apocalypse Now, with Wagner blasting from loudspeakers, the sound of gunfire, and everyone screaming on the ground.

  "Don't worry about it," I muttered to my traveling companion over breakfast, chewing pan dulce on the other side of my mouth and clutching my jaw while seeing stars every time I sipped my hot coffee. "I'll be fine."

  Of course, this is what you say when you are in a small mountain village in central Mexico and you have no interest, WHATSOEVER, in seeking out a dentist on the unpaved main street, where dengue fever is warned of in posters peeling from adobe walls and all the dogs are three-legged.

  "I'll just take some Advil," I added, holding my head very still. Twelve hours later I had run out of all the available Advil in the town of Tepoztlan, and was crawling around a suburb in the nearby city of Cuernavaca, with an address for la dentista in my hand, written on the back of a hotel envelope by the hotel manager's wife. Apparently, the wife had advised the manager that one of their patrons had been spotted with a dining room napkin wrapped around her jaw and tied at the top of her head in a bow. The manager told the front desk clerk, and she put me in touch with the dentist by telephone.

  Unfortunately, owing to my inability to speak passable Spanish and the dentist's reciprocal inability to speak English, all I knew for certain was the time of my appointment. I was fairly sure, however, that the dentist had said, before hanging up: "We don't use drills here. We only use powder and air."

  Thus I found myself nagged forward through the dark and confusing residential streets of Cuernavaca by my curiosity as much as my pain. "What the hell kind of dentistry involves the deployment of powder and air?"

  At last my companion and I found the right house, walled in and barb-wired like all of the other compounds in this posh neighborhood, suggesting that Mexico City's crime wave had lapped over the volcanic ridges that surround the capital, enclosing its outrageous pollution, and spilled into this smaller metropolis forty-five minutes away. After a spell of anxious silence, a maid let us through the ten-foot gate, then down a cobbled drive lined with flowering forsythia, and into a reception area on the side of the white stone house. She flipped on the light and nodded shyly, indicating that we were to wait. We bided our t
ime with Latino celebrity magazines— a spread of photos of Julio Iglesias's daughters wedding; gossip about who amid Mexico's Who's Who had taken a bribe.

  Fifteen minutes elapsed in this quiet white-washed room, and then the dentist suddenly poked her head in. She was a petite woman in glasses with a bob of chestnut hair. She apologized for her tardiness, explaining that her children were a handful this evening because of the excitement of la Dia de los Muertes, or the Mexican Day of the Dead. I wondered why she had agreed to see me at all, under the circumstances, but was in no mood to politely protest.

  La dentista ushered me into a dimly lit room that boasted one dental chair and an instrument table. The paint was peeling off the ceiling, I noticed when I was made to recline. There weren't any model teeth sitting on shelves or brochures for bleaching procedures, or framed Monet posters on the walls. Much less cupboards or an assistant. On the other hand, there was no lite rock playing from hidden wall speakers, either. Think of that. To have your teeth drilled without the sonic accompaniment of *NSync is a brilliant innovation in dentistry, in my view. On the other hand, the ambience was such that the torture scene from Marathon Man did flash through my mind as I stretched my mouth wide. (Perhaps you'll recall that film, in which Dustin Hoffman has his teeth drilled without anesthetic, one after the other, by a mad dentist in an empty warehouse until he confesses to not flossing.)

  "Do you have dollars?" la dentista asked. I shook my head no. She tapped my troubled tooth experimentally and I yelped. This seemed to surprise her. "Sorry," she murmured. In retrospect, I realized that she had not asked me if I had dollars. She had asked me if I had pain: dolor. Now, she was proceeding on the assumption that I had neither dollars nor pain, which perhaps accounts for what she did next.