by Phoebe Fox
I was tired, I realized—exhausted. Too much work and not enough sleep was lowering my usual resistance to the knee-jerk responses a good therapist learned to control. It was normal to occasionally feel certain things with my patients—annoyance, frustration, futility, anger. But it was not okay to express them—not if I considered myself a good therapist. And whatever else I doubted myself on—and there was plenty—that was the one thing I knew for sure.
Okay. I took a deep breath, and then another. I just needed to relax, accept what I felt instead of denying it, and then let it go. I told my patients that all the time.
And sleep. God, I needed to get some sleep. Once I caught up, everything would be fine, and I wouldn’t be so tired all the time that my normal filters vanished.
Taking one more breath, I let it out slowly, counting to ten, and then unlocked the door and twisted the knob.
Antonio was up when I came back in, pacing the room. The rest of the group was still in their seats, but they talked among themselves in little subsets—Carolyn and Betty; Sherman, Rebecca, and Elisa. Dina sat slumped down in the chair, arms crossed, looking bored, and Sheila was in her usual position: huddled over her own lap, staring at the floor, her hair curtaining her face.
As soon as they saw me all conversation stopped and Antonio froze in his tracks. Eight pairs of eyes fixed on me, staring in silence.
“I apologize for my comment, Antonio,” I said levelly. “I apologize to all of you. That was out of line.”
His arms hung by his sides like dead pythons, his shoulders hunched and eyebrows drawn, but he made no reply.
I pushed on determinedly. “If I’ve made you feel you’re no longer comfortable with the group, or”—I swallowed hard—“with me as a therapist, I can offer some refer—”
“Are you dumping me?” he asked, his tone sharp.
“What?”
“Are you dropping me from the group? Because I banged that girl?”
“Antonio...” I came fully into the room, headed to my chair, but he put himself directly in my path. I stopped in front of him. “No, I’m not dropping you. I’m...I wanted to give you the chance to take some time to regroup and decide whether I’m the right therapist for you, in light of my inappropriate reaction to your confession.”
From the corner of my eye I saw Dina watching us with a rapacious expression.
“Inappropriate reaction to...Can we just talk normal again? You’re pissed at me, right? Because of that girl? No, no, no—wait—I know. Not because I banged her. You’re mad because I said it wasn’t my fault, right? I’m right, aren’t I?”
His expression was pregnant with all the expectant pride of a remedial student who’s finally sure he has the right answer.
“Yes,” I admitted. “That was what made me angry. But it’s not my place to judge you or to react that way, and I’m sorry. That’s not good therapy. That’s why I thought you might prefer to—”
“The hell with good therapy, Brook.” A few people stirred behind him at his outburst. “You called me on my bullshit.”
I shook my head. “That’s not really how the therapeutic relationship—”
“You’re right—it was my fault. I’m the one that banged that girl. I wanted to bang her—she was hot, and she was practically begging for it. I always want to bang these women. I want to bang you right now.”
I took a step backward.
Antonio held up a hand. “Just making a point. I like banging.” He turned and stepped beside me, so that we were both facing everyone else, and addressed the group. “That’s on me. I gotta know that, right? I gotta cop to that or else I’m not going to be able to figure out how to stop. Right?” He turned toward me again. “Isn’t that what you’ve been trying to get at all this time?”
I opened my mouth, but no proper therapeutic platitude came out of it.
Antonio filled the gap. “But I love Mary Lynn. Honest to God, I do. And my kids. God, my kids...” Tears filled his eyes. “So I gotta accept that I love sex—with a lot of women—but that doesn’t fit with keeping my family together. So I have to choose, right? I mean, really, that’s what it comes down to—I gotta decide which one I want more?”
He was staring at me with a nakedly pleading expression, and I felt the tension in my face soften.
“Well...yes, Antonio. I guess that’s pretty much what it comes down to.” I wanted to say more—felt I should. Antonio was at a really powerful transition point, and my job was to help ease him over it. But I could no more ask him some clinical question about how he felt about that than I could take off my clothes and lie down to let him “bang” me. So we just stood there for a long time, face-to-face, looking at each other as though we were alone in the room.
“So what do you want to do now?” I asked gently.
“Do you think I’m a sex addict?” He directed the question to the group, and suddenly sixteen eyes looked anywhere but at him. Antonio turned back to me. “Do you?” he asked me point-blank.
I knew the “proper” answer: Do you think so? But that wasn’t the one I gave.
“Yes. I do,” I said quietly.
“Shit.” He looked away, toward the floor, then after a few moments met my eyes again. “Will you help me?” He looked around the room. “Alla you guys? Will you help me figure out what to do with that?”
Faces softened, heads nodded, and I heard a few soft “yeses” and “yeahs.”
Antonio looked at me. “Brook? You too? You’ll help me?”
I reached out and laid a hand on his shoulder—under the circumstances I thought a hug might send the wrong message—and squeezed. “Yes, Antonio. I will.”
As I threw my bag into my car and climbed in, I thought about the session.
I’d been a good student in school—I made the honor roll every semester, worked hard in my classes, built relationships with my professors to make sure I was doing everything exactly right. When I began practice I carried that philosophy with me—I’d help my patients by being the perfect therapist, doing everything by the book. Despite my mom’s view that I’d chosen the second-tier road to becoming a therapist, I’d decided deliberately to pursue an LMHT license. It allowed me to start working with patients sooner than slogging through a PhD, and I had no interest in treating people with pharmaceuticals. I wanted to help them talk through their troubles, to get into the trenches with them, let them feel there was someone on their side, and use the tried-and-true techniques to help them.
But being the Breakup Doctor didn’t seem to lend itself to standard clinical practices. Every broken heart was different, and every person needed something unique to figure out how to heal it.
Although...it was the same with any other psychological issues, wasn’t it? Maybe it wasn’t that my patients and my practice had changed. Maybe I had.
My outburst with Antonio had thrown me. Yes, I’d realized a long time ago—with Lisa Albrecht, my editor at the paper and my first client—that sometimes it was more effective to be direct with my clients, to call them on behaviors that in my old practice I’d have spent weeks or months slowly getting them to see for themselves.
But I’d never flat-out yelled at a client before. I’d never attacked his behavior so directly.
Half of me was waiting for the avalanche to drop: the recrimination, guilt, self-doubt that had been my loyal companions for so long.
But I felt...good. There was no denying that Antonio had had a breakthrough today—a meaningful one. Was it less powerful because he got pushed there, instead of gently shepherded along to the finish line?
And the way everyone else had jumped in to help him be honest with himself, to support him...
Whenever Sasha and I had our hearts broken—or even just our egos bruised—we’d always taken solace in each other. We were a community of two, creating an environ
ment where we could talk it out—often ad nauseam—where we could work through what had happened for as long as it took, cheering each other on the whole way. So often the worst part of a breakup was the feeling of being alone in your emotional pain—Sasha and I had never had to do that.
By the time everyone in the group started to weigh in with Antonio, to offer encouragement and support, it felt just like that to me.
I hadn’t known exactly what the Breakup Doctor support groups would entail, what they would look like. When we first started them I wasn’t even sure they were a good idea—heartbreak was so personal.
But it was also universal. And being able to share your deepest wounds with people you trusted, who understood your pain because they were feeling something similar—that was the key to getting past it.
I wasn’t a good Breakup Doctor because of years of study, or my insight into psychological practices and my expert application of the theories in the field. It was simply because I’d had my heart broken—stomped on—and I knew what it felt like.
Just like everyone else in that room.
The thought should have made me feel inadequate.
But instead, I drove down McGregor with a nonstop grin on my face.
Ben came over at six to pick me up for our date, Jake bursting through the door ahead of him to greet me with his big goofy grin and a paw to my groin.
I sidestepped. “Ah-ah, boy. Sit.”
Jake whined, wagging his tail, but I didn’t look at him, meeting Ben’s eyes with a wink. When Jake still didn’t calm down, I let myself greet Ben instead with a hug and a kiss, which sent Jake into a fresh frenzy of left-outness, thrusting his nose between our bodies and then pulling back to bark at us.
Finally I turned back to the dog. “If you want some love, then sit.”
Down went his butt.
“Jakie!” I exclaimed in shock. What the hell—it actually worked. I leaned over and started agitating his floppy ears, Jake groaning in pleasure. “Good boy! Good boy, you smart, smart dog!” I gushed.
At my excited tone Jake got charged up again, doing the bunny hop around me and Ben and giving out gleeful little yips.
Oops. Adelaide said not to overpraise him, I remembered too late.
I was too happy to see them both, though, and too thrilled to see any kind of progress with Jake’s obedience.
“Okay, crazy, torque it back,” Ben said, laughing at the dog’s antics. He looked back at me with the smile still on his face. “Well, you seem to be handling him awfully well.”
I shrugged. “No big deal.”
“Pretty impressive, actually. I know Jake.”
A sheepish grin crept over my lips. “I have to confess I got a coaching session from your mom.”
“You did? She didn’t say.”
I’d promised not to reveal Jake’s knocking her down. “Because I asked her not to tell you how grossly incompetent I was with him at first. But you’re right—she’s a dog genius. How is she?”
“She’s in pretty good spirits, actually, just a little stir-crazy.”
An impulse struck me, and I grabbed it: “Let’s go get her.”
He shot a quizzical look at me. “For date night?”
“Well, we don’t have to. It just must be hard for her to be cooped up. She seemed like a pretty active woman.”
“She usually is,” he admitted.
“Hang on.” I darted into the den, Jake right behind me, then grabbed yesterday’s newspaper and brought it back to Ben in the living room, Jake still bounding happily after me as if we were in the world’s best game of chase. Next to my most recent column—about getting out of a volatile relationship before you got badly hurt—was an ad for the summer movie series downtown in Centennial Park.
“Look—I saw this this afternoon. We can even take Jake.”
Which was how we found ourselves sitting on the grassy banks of the Caloosahatchee River with several hundred other Fort Myers residents at sunset—well after eight o’clock in summertime—Adelaide, Ben, and me on blankets, Jake pinballing on his leash between us, too excited to sit, bags of sandwiches and a bottle of wine in a cooler, waiting for the outdoor movie to start.
I unpacked the sandwiches on the blanket we’d brought, while Ben got his mom settled in a chair we’d carried out and tried to contain Jake, who was greatly overstimulated to be out with all of us: surrounded by other people, a plethora of kids charging around the grass between the many blankets and chairs spread out on the lawn. The family next to us was enchanted with the dog, and Jake agreeably sprawled himself across their blanket as their three kids—ranging from age seven down to around three—literally climbed all over him like baby goats.
We ate as the sun began to sink into the river, conversation relaxed and easy. I’d forgotten matches for the candle Ben had tossed in with our things, and the couple on the other side of us offered a lighter. We shared our napkins with them when the woman accidentally put her leg into a deviled egg, laughing with her as she wiped the yolk from her calf. When the movie started—The Princess Bride—the kids settled down and Jake stretched out on his back between our blanket and theirs, staring up at the sky with a look of sleepy contentment on his face as the oldest girl absently stroked his belly.
Adelaide leaned back in her chair with her leg propped on the cooler, the ice pack Ben had remembered to bring her resting on her bad knee. We sat beside her in stadium chairs, and as Princess Buttercup began her grand adventure, I leaned into Ben’s side and relaxed into his solid hold.
sixteen
Chip was waiting in a corner sitting area when I walked into the Hot Pot Monday afternoon; now that Jake was at least somewhat settled at my house, I’d decided it was best to keep an extra layer of distance between Chip and me. Especially after his disturbing message Friday night. An array of pastries and a still-steaming cup of coffee waited for me on the low wooden cocktail table between two orange sofas, and a broad smile stretched Chip’s face as though our texts had never happened.
“I couldn’t remember how you take your coffee, so I brought over all the sugars and creamers and stuff, and I didn’t know what you liked here, so I got one of everything,” he announced as I sat on the love seat facing his.
We needed to talk about his inappropriate comment and the texting in general before we discussed anything else. “Chip—” I began.
“So now that Katie’s done,” he cut in, “I spent all weekend working on my next amends I have to make. I really need your help for this, Doc. I already started the letter.” He leaned forward to pull his phone from his pocket.
“Before we do that—”
“Hang on—I don’t want to lose my train of thought. ‘Dear Amanda—I know you think I hate you after the things I called you the day we broke up—’”
“We need to talk about the other night.”
“‘But I don’t hate you. You probably hate me. I don’t really think those things about you—but I stand behind what I said about your mom, LOL—’” He looked up, those oceanic eyes sparkling with amusement, as if waiting for me to laugh with him.
“Chip, please stop avoiding this.” I kept my voice quiet but firm.
Lowering the phone, he let out a sigh and scrubbed a hand down his face, smoothing his goatee. “I was really hoping we could just ignore it and it would go away,” he said finally, setting the phone beside him.
A half smile leaked across my lips. “Not really how therapy works. That’s kind of the opposite of therapy, actually.”
“Are you going to fire me?” he asked, and his nervous-little-boy expression made me want to smooth the furrows from his face.
Shaking my head, I said, “This isn’t a formal course of therapy, Chip. And that’s not my intention.” Over the weekend I’d considered ending whatever this unusual association we were att
empting was, but I knew Chip responded to guidance and structure, firm boundaries. I just needed to reestablish them. “But there can’t be any more late-night texting.”
“Yeah, I know. I was just in a bad way and—”
My palm came up to stop him. “Regardless of the situation, there are...limits in our relationship.”
“What if it wasn’t so late? Can I text then?”
“We talk here. I want to help you, Chip—I’m very much on your side. But I can’t allow one person special privileges, or I have to offer them to all my clients. And you can see that that would be overwhelming.”
One of those slanted brows lifted, along with a corner of his mouth, and he leaned forward. “I didn’t think I was a client, Doc. I thought we were more than that.”
I pushed as far back as the small sofa would allow, then wished I hadn’t given in to the urge to retreat. “That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. This is inappropriate behavior. You’re...you’re flirting.” Heat speared into my face as the accusation fell out, and I dropped my gaze to my hands clutched on the sofa cushion.
“Well, it took you long enough to notice.”
My eyes shot back to Chip. The smile on his face had softened, and he wore that disarmingly sincere expression I’d begun seeing more and more often.
And for once I was rendered speechless. What was I supposed to say to that? Patients got crushes on their therapists—it was called transference. But I’d never had one just baldly state it before.
Silence dropped like a sandbag and lingered for long, uncomfortable moments. I was still staring at him, and I shook myself back into focus. “That’s...that’s not allowed,” I said foolishly.
All amusement had vanished from his expression. “I can’t help it, Brook.”
“That’s not true!” My outburst startled us both. I cleared my throat. “That’s not true, Chip. That’s what we’re trying to get at—that you do have control of your actions, if not always your feelings. We all do.” The familiar, therapeutic language soothed me.