by Phoebe Fox
“Yeah, I know. I just like it. Is it okay with you?”
“Whatever you like.” Stirring sugar into my coffee, I gave him my neutral professional smile. “So what did you want to talk to me about?”
“Oh, boy,” he said. “This is harder than I expected. Okay, here goes.” He took a long breath and then let it out in a whoosh. “Look, Doc…I haven’t always been the nicest guy in the world, and I’ve done some not-so-great things in the past. To some specific people. Female people,” he said. “And the thing is…I finally realize I need you.”
Guilt flared up in me—along with a secret little thrill at his words I tried to ignore as I fixed a regretful expression onto my face. “Oh, Chip—” I said gently.
“This Breakup Doctor thing you do now...do you think you could help me make things right with some of them?”
I blinked. “What?”
He took a gulp of tea, an audible swallow. “I need to fix some things. Make amends. Whatever you want to call it. There are some women who...well, who probably hate me. And with reason. I can’t really live with that anymore.”
I leaned back in the upholstered chair, hoping to create some distance between his steady gaze and my heated face. “You…you want to hire me? To what, counsel your exes?”
“No, no. I just want to apologize for the things I did to them and, if they’ll give it, ask for their forgiveness.” He looked down at his glass. “That’s not really something I’m so great at.”
“But…I don’t get it. What can I do?”
“I don’t know. I guess help me do it. Especially the ones who’d rather see me dead than have a conversation with me.”
“Wow.”
He arched one of those slanting brows and a smile ghosted across his mouth. “Yeah, well, I did some pretty awful things to some of them.”
“Chip, I don’t know. I don’t even think I’d know where to begin. This is something you have to find in yourself and—”
“I know! I will—I’m not asking you to do it for me. But...” He let out another sigh and played with the unused straw he’d never bothered unwrapping. He spoke without ever raising his eyes to mine, his long black lashes fanning over his cheeks. “You’re the easiest person I ever talked to, Doc. You never made me feel like a jerk or an idiot—even when I was one. This kind of thing...it’s not easy for me. I’m afraid I’m going to screw it up. Get frustrated and turn back into who I used to be. ‘Sometimes people act hostile when they’re really afraid of being vulnerable.’ You remember saying that to me?” His eyes shot briefly up to mine before dropping to the table again, and I felt my heart soften at the naked uncertainty I’d seen there. “I really heard that. And I hated you for it then—but I get it now. I don’t want to do that again, Doc. I don’t want to be that guy again.” He dragged in a breath and made a visible effort to look directly at me.
This truly was a changed Chip. It was impressive how far he’d come—and what he wanted to do was so healthy: righting past wrongs to move forward. Despite my lingering embarrassment, I couldn’t suppress a little twinge of pride that I’d played a part in his transformation.
“This is admirable, Chip,” I said genuinely. “Of course I’ll help.”
He smiled fully for the first time since we’d sat down, and my breath caught at the way his face lit up with it. “Thank you!” he blurted out. “Thanks, Doc! That’s awesome!” He reached a hand across the table for a handshake, and accidentally knocked his tea over. I pushed back quickly to save my dress.
“Oh, crap—sorry,” he said, reaching for his napkin and dabbing ineffectually at the table. “That didn’t get all over you, did it?”
I had to laugh at his sudden little-boy demeanor as I reached over with my own napkin to help. “It’s fine—no worries.” We had insufficient napkin for the spill, and I started to stand to get more when he caught my hand with his and kept me from leaving.
“Hey,” he said. “No bullshit—thanks. This means more than you know. You’re helping me be the man I want to be.”
A little shiver crested my shoulders—at the touch or the sentiment I wasn’t sure.
five
Here’s something they don’t tell you in grad school as a psych major: When awaiting your very first group therapy session ever outside of the mockups you did in class, your feet will sweat, your armpits will prickle, and your heart will beat fast enough to convince you that you are having a panic attack.
Jumping right into the idea had seemed fabulously proactive. But now that I was here, in a meeting room at the Fort Myers Yacht Club that Sasha had procured for me through an ex, waiting for the first attendees of the first Breakup Doctor group session to show up, I wondered what the hell I’d been thinking.
I’d mentioned the sessions on each of my radio appearances over the last two weeks, and Lisa Albrecht, my editor at the Tropic Times newspaper, had graciously posted a sidebar on it in the paper (graciousness from acerbic Lisa still freaked me out). Still, I’d been half-surprised when I began getting queries about it. Twenty-two people had inquired; ten of those had signed up, but now, at nine fifty, with the session scheduled to start at ten, I was pretty sure no one was going to show.
I was just about to pack up and flee when the first people began trickling in. Three women filed through the doorway, one after the next, but clearly not together as they found seats at a scattered distance from one another in the circle of chairs I’d created. I got a shy smile from one, a quick glance from another, and a third who avoided eye contact altogether.
“Hi, how are you?” I said. My relief made my greeting sound slightly manic, and I forced myself to sit back and simply offer what I hoped was a confident, welcoming expression as people continued to file in.
We had two men—Antonio Moretti, a tall, good-looking dark-haired man, the first to sign up for the group—and an older gentleman with thinning salt-and-pepper hair and kind brown eyes that drooped at the outside corners, giving him a slightly sad look. Sherman Schmidt, I remembered from the signup list. Every other attendee was female—but not a bad ratio, I thought. In total we had nine; we’d had a dropout at the last minute—“We got back together,” the woman had explained sheepishly.
At exactly ten o’clock, I took a deep breath. “Ladies,” I began, then cleared my throat to remove the quaver in my voice and smiled at Antonio and Sherman. “Gentlemen.” A couple of people tittered. “Good morning,” I tried again, and this time the group gradually quieted down. “I’m Brook Ogden—um, the Breakup Doctor. Well…let’s go around the room and introduce ourselves. And you might say a little something about why you’re here. Would you like to start?”
I looked at the woman to my left, a mousy brunette with her head tipped down toward her lap. In the silence that fell, broken only by the shifting of chairs and bodies, she glanced over at me and shook her head.
She was obviously either terribly shy or not comfortable enough yet to share, so all I said was, “Okay. How about you?” nodding encouragingly to the dark-haired woman beside her.
“Well, I’m Elisa. And I’m here because of a breakup.”
Yes, clearly. The beginning was bound to be awkward, but things would get better once we got the ball rolling. I took a deep breath and tried again. “Okay, Elisa, thanks.” I indicated the woman beside her, who gave her name as Carolyn and appended, “Breakup.” The next woman and the older man followed suit. The rustlings in the room got louder.
“How about you?” I asked the petite woman who was next in the circle, hearing an edge of desperation in my voice. Please let her say more than three words.
She let out a noisy sigh and rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “I’m Dina. And big surprise! I’m here because of a breakup!” She said it in a singsong, like you’d speak to a stupid child.
I forced a chuckle. “I guess we can assume we’re all here beca
use of breakups, huh?”
“You think?” She heaved herself backward in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest.
I was losing the group already, and we weren’t five minutes into it.
“Well, I’m Betty Mitchell,” the woman directly to my right spoke up. She was older, perhaps in her late fifties, and had a kind face. “And I haven’t had a breakup, so that shakes things up a little.” She laughed uncomfortably. “My husband and I are still living together, trying to work it out, but he’s told me he’s not sure he ever loved me, so...Well, that’s not the most fun thing in the world.” She gave a smile that trembled around the edges, and before I could check myself I laid a hand on her knee.
“It gets better, Betty,” I said quietly. “I promise.”
I heard a snort across from me, and looked up to meet Dina’s scornful expression. “Awesome,” she muttered.
I looked directly at her and made myself offer a pleasant expression. “Dina, let’s go back to you. Would you like to talk more about what brings you here?”
“I thought you were the expert.”
“I am trained as a therapist, yes,” I said neutrally. “But we work together in counseling. This is a partnership. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about your situation.”
“I don’t think so.”
I didn’t even know what to say to that. I glanced around the circle. Most of the attendees looked confused or uncertain. Skepticism was creeping across the faces of a couple of them.
Why did this woman even come here?
“Well,” I said, clearing my throat. “Would anyone else like to share a bit more to get us started?”
No. Apparently no one at all would like to do that.
“Okay,” I said into the heavy silence. I reached into my bag and brought out the prop I’d thought of last night: a hand-held garden cultivator, its three pristine bent prongs glinting with reflected light betraying the fact that I’d never actually used it.
“This is a cultivator, for those of you who don’t garden. Like me,” I said with a smile. “I had to actually look up the name of it last night.” A couple of the women giggled. “This sucker’s kind of intimidating-looking, to me,” I went on, turning it so the sharp ends of the prongs bristled at the group. “It can hurt you accidentally if you aren’t careful with it. It can be used as a weapon.” I batted it in the air as if bludgeoning a head. “But it can also be used to ready the ground for planting something new and fruitful.” I turned it prongs-down and made a raking motion with it. “And so it reminded me of relationships. And of what we’re hoping to do in here.”
“Ha!” Betty cackled, and Elisa and Antonio shot me a grin.
“Nice one, Brook,” Antonio said.
“You gonna use that on us if we piss you off?” came a voice, and I didn’t have to look to know who it was.
“Of course not, Dina.”
“Hey, JK,” she said. “Don’t get your bra in a bunch.”
This was when psychology was hard. When the human response—to bite Dina Jones’s head off, to say something scathing to put her in her place, or to poke her in the eyes, the way my basic nature was strongly suggesting was a great strategy—directly conflicted with the clinical one that would yield positive, constructive results. Which in this case, I decided, was to ignore her provocations the way I would a tantruming child—pretty much what she was.
“We need some way to honor the person sharing and remind ourselves that we won’t interrupt,” I went on. “Even in support. It’s hard to talk about some of this, and sometimes we need the space of silence to formulate our thoughts. So who wants the claw first?” I held it up, prongs toward me.
A derisive noise emanated from the Dina portion of the circle.
“Dina, you seem to have some thoughts about this process,” I said calmly. “Would you like to talk about those with the group?”
“I thought that was your job?” she snapped. “You’re the Breakup Doctor, right? I thought we were paying you to tell us what to do, not make us do all the work. I thought you were going to make it better.”
Even in the face of her rage, a wash of sympathy came over me—because in a flash I thought I understood where it came from. Dina was young and pretty, with a mass of perfectly highlighted curls and the face of an adorable pixie. I suspected she was the kind of girl who’d made me entirely insecure in school—the popular girl who led a charmed life.
And someone had broken her heart. If I was right about Dina, it might be the first time that had happened. And it probably shook everything she thought she knew about her life and herself. Dina didn’t know how to handle what most of us had learned to deal with, at least on some level, from a young age: rejection. Like a hurt dog, she was snapping at anyone who approached her to help.
“You’re in some pain right now, aren’t you, Dina?” I said gently.
“No. I’m not in pain,” she sneered. “I’m pissed. At my asshole ex. And right now at you, because you want us to strip it all down and give it to you right in the feels. But why should we trust you? What makes you so much better than us?”
Once upon a time I prided myself on my therapeutic demeanor—and not just in the office. Like my old professor Janet Evanston, who’d never let on that she was brimming with homicidal rage until she snapped and tried to stab her husband, I thought that what made a therapist good was her ability to stay neutral, collected, always a calm, confident authority figure.
But I’d learned after having my own breakup breakdown that that was a lie. It might have been good clinical therapy, but the kind of work I was doing now was all about human connection. Being real. So it was time to take down my own guard if I wanted anyone in this group to feel safe enough to let down theirs.
I turned to look directly at Dina. “I’m not better than you, Dina—any of you.” I stood up and took a deep breath as all eyes glued onto me. Then I slowly unbuttoned my blouse, turned around, and slid one sleeve down my arm to reveal my own badge of shame—the one I’d never shown nor confessed to anyone but Sasha: my donkey tattoo. I was one treatment into the removal process, but I knew it was still clearly visible against my pale shoulder, huge and colorful—with a huge equine hard-on behind a vivid red void sign, over the caption, “No More Jackasses!”
I listened to the group take a collective gasp, and then I heard a few hesitant laughs, and then the entire room burst out in guffaws. I felt my face heat up, but I calmly rebuttoned my shirt and then turned to face everyone head-on, waiting out their amusement.
“I’m Brook, and I lost my mind after my last breakup, because I felt powerless and unwanted and small. I stalked my ex, almost had the world’s worst rebound sex,” I added wryly when the laughter finally subsided, thinking of Chip, “and wound up getting a drunken tattoo one night. Knowing what to do—and not to do—doesn’t always mean you do it. That is, if I’d even been sober enough to make that judgment call,” I said sheepishly, and the class laughed again—with me this time, not at me.
“I’ve fought some of the same battles a lot of you are facing,” I went on. “And I still am, and I’ll probably fight more in the future. But this last time through the wringer I learned that you can’t keep it all bottled up—you have to let it out. And you can’t do it alone—you have to be brave enough to share it with people who care about you. You have to let yourself be vulnerable enough to accept help. I hope that’s part of what we’re able to offer one another as we work through our situations in here.”
At first I wasn’t sure what the slapping sound was, or where it started. But then I realized that the woman whose husband didn’t love her anymore—Betty—was clapping. A second later someone joined her—Carolyn, an older woman in a twinset and pearls. And then the woman beside her, and Antonio and the other man, Sherman, and in just a few seconds the whole circle had erupted in applause,
the participants smiling, laughing, shooting me thumbs-up and “okay” signs.
Dina Jones was not clapping—slumped back in her chair, arms still crossed over her body. But I hoped that as the weeks went on, even Dina might find some relief here.
“My husband left me for a younger woman,” the carefully groomed Carolyn blurted out as the clapping died down. “I’ve been stewing in that for more than a year. I feel ugly and undesirable and old.”
I turned to look at her. “Carolyn, thanks for telling us that. It takes courage to talk about the vulnerable parts.”
“My girlfriend dumped me because she got a psychic reading that told her she was going to meet the love of her life.” This was Elisa, the dark-haired woman two seats to my left. There was laughter and a few snickers. “I know!” she said. “I feel like an idiot for being with this woman. And extra stupid because I...” Her voice broke, but she went on: “I actually loved the moron. What does that say about me?”
“It says you’re human, and you invested in someone you cared about, Elisa,” I said. “You’re not responsible for her decision-making process.”
She nodded, shrugged, and then gave a weak smile.
“I’m Antonio,” the dark-haired man said into the commotion, and everyone quieted at his loud tone. “I’m here ’cause my wife wants to leave me...because I’ve been cheating on her a little bit.” He had the grace to look embarrassed. “I’m hoping you guys can help me turn this thing around.”
“Admitting it’s the first step, honey!” Betty called out. “It’s great that the spirit is willing, but you gotta keep that flesh in your pants!”
The group laughed.
One by one each spontaneously shared their stories—and how their broken relationship made them feel—everyone but Dina, that was, and the mousy-haired girl who sat watching everyone else share like a scared rabbit. But no one had left.