Rebecca Johnson

When I was 11, my parents divorced. To sort through the attendant detritus, my father insisted my siblings and I see a therapist with him. She was  a dead ringer for Terri Garr who encouraged us to hit each other with foam batons in order “to get our anger out.” Bop, my sister hit me on the head. BOP, BOP, BOP my brother took to the task with a gusto that freaked the therapist out.  I later heard that my dad started dating her. He always did like blondes.

I didn’t see a shrink again until I was in my twenties. Men, it turned out, were a problem for me. I liked them, in theory, but distrusted them in the flesh. This problem could have been easily solved had I been attracted to sane, kind men or even other women but that wasn’t how I rolled.

Naturally, I blame the whole thing on my father, a man who grudgingly accepted the mantle of parenthood without properly thinking it through. Within a year of marrying, my parents had a baby and then another and another and another (me). Four kids in five years. The diaphragm did not turn out to be much of a barrier. My father was forced to put aside his literary aspirations (Fitzgeraldian knockoffs about callow, misunderstood men) and concentrate on writing ad copy to make money.

Being the last of four and indubitably unwanted, I don’t think I ever had a chance for my father’s affection. Plus, I looked a lot like my mother whom he came to hate, as divorced men are wont to do. Not that I cared much. Even as a kid, I could tell that guy was bad news. Did I mention the affair with the shrink? There was also the one with his secretary and the neighbor and so on. For years, my mother would meet women and watch a look of  horror creep on to their face when they realized who she was.

I thought I had managed to escape too much damage from my relationship with my father but when I started dating in my twenties, I could see the ghostly outlines of it emerging in my own love affairs. Not only did I tolerate cold and unfaithful men, I seemed actually to prefer them. If a boyfriend cheated on me, it wasn’t a sign that he was a jerk, it was a sign that he was desirable. Of course other women wanted to be with him! Wasn’t I lucky to have landed such a prize?

Looking back, I am shocked by my blatant self-destruction but when you’re the dust mite in the carpet, it can be hard to see the pattern. As my friends began marrying and starting families, I got that uneasy feeling you get at the sample sale when everyone is snapping up everything but your basket is still empty. If I didn’t buy soon, would there be any left? So I decided to do what people in New York do when they want to change their lives. I went into therapy

Because my problems were with my father, I sought out male therapists. Things began well enough. Being able to talk openly about my hurt and shame  was a relief but once I exhausted the fuckery of his ways, I would inevitably  run out of things to say.  Listening to myself spin the hamster wheel of my dysthymia  filled me with a new form of self loathing. I might live in New York City but I am descended from Baptist farmers, the sort of people who listen to the weather on the radio and worry about the crops getting hailed out. Self-examination is not our long suit.

One day, I was going up in the elevator to see my shrink, a rather dashing Italian named Mannuccio Mannucci. If that guy had been my father, I’d be president. He was an M.D. who worked at a hospital near Gramercy Park. The doors opened and an orderly wheeled a dead body into the elevator. It was covered with a sheet but, I mean, come on. Compared to that guy, my problems were nothing. That afternoon, I told Dr. Mannucci I thought I needed to take a break.

Had I not wanted children, I probably would have left it alone. My twenties were a series of two to three year relationships, none of which ever felt substantial enough for marriage, but then I hit thirty. Tick Tock. Or, as my father once called me, “the old maid auntie.” (You can see why I was messed up about men.) I decided to try therapy again.

Today, if I needed a new psychotherapist, I’d type “Need a good shrink for 30 yr. old with ‘relationship issues’? on my Facebook feed. Within hours, I’d have a handful of recommendations. Back then, you canvassed your friends. My college roommate, a therapist herself, sent me to an oddly wooden former professor who must have been some kind of Freudian because he literally said three words the entire session, unless I mentioned sex, in which case his eyes lit up. After three sessions, I decided to move on.

To save money, I went to the Washington Square Institute in the Village where the therapists are super cheap because they are either just starting out or just coming to the end. My therapist, a white-haired gentleman who had the unsettling habit of always wearing a leather vest with a plaid shirt, was obviously the latter. He was nice, if ineffectual, and it was a pleasant enough way to spend an hour. His main advice to me, “Toughen up”, was a lot easier said than done. Mostly, I relished the minutes in the waiting room beforehand. Everybody looked so New York normal, it reassured me that I was not alone in my neuroses

One day, I went for a session but he never showed up. No phone call. No message. Just me sitting endlessly in the waiting room. Later, he left a message on my answering machine apologizing but I never went back. I didn’t need to pay a man to abandon me. I got that at home for free.

I heard about Tom Levin from the husband of a friend. In retrospect, it’s surprising to me that I took a recommendation from him because he’d been in therapy his entire adult life and was still an irritating narcissist  who was making my best friend miserable but, then again, I figured that also made him something of an expert.

Tom was a short, elderly man with a twinkle in his eye who practiced out of a brownstone on the Upper West side. If he weren’t Jewish, he would have made an excellent Santa. He was a good listener with a healthy repertoire of useful aphorisms — “Don’t just do something, stand there!”— but by the third session, I knew individual therapy still wasn’t for me. Every time I wrote my $125 check for the session, I’d find myself thinking I’d rather have a massage. I’d rather buy a leather jacket. I’d rather get orchestra seats to the ballet. Even though I knew I wasn’t cured, I told Tom, thanks but no thanks.

He nodded and suggested I join his Tuesday night group. Group therapy? I scoffed inwardly at the notion, picturing Bob Newhart and his band of polyester neurotics. But then he mentioned the cost, about 1/3 of individual therapy and the Scottish part of me kicked in. Oh, well, why not?

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“What is she doing here?” a blustery blond fellow fumed the night Tom introduced me to the group. What a jerk, I thought, as I tried to disappear into my seat. I couldn’t understand why nobody told him to shut the fuck up. But I did learn my first of many valuable lessons — it might have felt like it was about me, but it really wasn’t. Unlike the rest of life, where most of us seek to avoid conflict, group therapy is the place where you remove your filters to say exactly what you are feeling, even if it makes other people uncomfortable. In real life, blustery blond would have fumed silently, throwing me an occasional evil eye and I would have thought, what’s his problem? In group, the jerk gets to say what he thinks.

We weren’t there to be friends, we were there to work on what was broken. To do that, you need to break a few things along the way, including other people’s feelings. As I would learn, the blustery blond had a long history of anger towards women, beginning with the mother who had not adequately protected him from an abusive stepfather. He wasn’t angry with me — though truth be told, he never did like me — he was angry with her. But I was there in the room, so I absorbed the blow, just as every other woman in his life had done.

Group therapy can claim a few fathers. One was a tuberculosis doctor at Massachusetts General hospital at the turn of the century. To conserve time and money, he gathered his less wealthy patients into one meeting to give them instructions on treatment. As time passed, he saw the salutary value of  the group itself for supporting patients who had been isolated from society over a highly contagious disease. It’s the same principle that led to Alcoholics Anonymous, where the focus is less on psychiatric theory and more on the effects of companionship among like-minded people. 

Another father was Jacob Moreno, an eccentric Romanian Jew who studied medicine in Vienna during the 1920s  under Sigmund Freud. Heavily influenced by Viennese theater and the concept of role playing, Moreno invented the so-called “psychodrama” in which patients assume different  roles in order to act out their conflicts. Where Freud was concerned with the unconscious, Moreno saw therapy as a way to heal the damage by rewriting the dramas of early life. You can watch him in action in this YouTube video link. The resemblance to the actor Peter Lorre  is not random — the actor was one of Moreno’s earliest followers.

In the 1970s, Irvin Yalom, M.D., a psychiatry professor at Stanford University, published The Theory and Practice of Group Therapy which codified the theories of the practice and has been used steadily since then for teaching purposes. ( It is currently in its 18th printing.) In over 800 pages, Yalom outlines how the group setting can heal patients by instruction, empathy, catharsis and the sense of altruism that comes from helping others. While the therapist is always present, the instigators of change are other patients. Having observed thousands of hours of group therapy, Yalom can estimate the age of a group by listening to a recording of a session. If people repeatedly  say, “I think you should…” it means the group is young and recently formed. People don’t end up in therapy because they don’t know what to do; the end up in therapy because they don’t know how to do it.

After that bumpy first night, I kept my mouth shut for a few weeks, silently riveted by how these total strangers talked so openly about their innermost lives. There was only one other woman in the group; the other six members were all men and  I learned plenty by just listening. Looks, for example, matter a lot to men. One guy, an amiable Goldman Sachs banker from an orthodox Jewish family was forever going on and on about how his wife wasn’t attractive enough. It made no sense because he himself, while possessed of a good personality, was five foot five, balding, and wore glasses. “I don’t understand the problem,” I finally blurted out one night. “It’s not like you are Warren Beatty.” He looked stunned when I said it, as if it had never once occurred to him that he could be judged by the same standards he was applying to his wife. A few years later, he told me it had been one of the most eye-opening moments of his life.

Eventually, I became restless. Most people have one really big problem in their life that they endlessly hurl themselves toward, like a Labrador with a ball. If I was going to be in that room, I needed to throw my own ball. I began by telling the group about a man in my life I couldn’t shake. We’d only briefly dated in my early twenties, but over the years we continued to sleep with each other intermittently, even when we were both involved with others. I knew it was wrong. I knew I didn’t want to marry him — he was arrogant and unfaithful the brief time we had been a couple, but the sex was kind of otherworldly.

Usually, my problem in life was ambivalence — I kind of liked things, but I also kind of didn’t — so walking away from something that made me feel so intensely was daunting. What if I never met someone who made me feel that way again? When I complained about his sway over me,  my girlfriends nodded sympathetically — after all, they’d read the same Victorian novels —hello Heathcliff! — but when I told the men in group about the relationship, they did not mince words. You are completely wasting your time, they said. It’s not the kind of thing a therapist would say — even if she was thinking it — but hearing it from these men whom I’d (slowly) learned to trust, was life-changing. Of course it was just lust. Of course it was keeping me from committing to someone else. Men have no problem understanding that feelings can be purely sexual but for women of my generation, we tended to  equate passion with love, at least when we’re young. (In general, I’m wary of generational broadsides but the hook-up culture, which I completely missed, does seem like a game-changer in this regard.) Hearing all this from my newly improvised family, this band of brothers who had no reason to lie, was deeply powerful. In one night, an entire decade of stupid evaporated.

Of course, there was plenty more stupid to come. The guiding principle behind group therapy is that people will recreate the dramas of their life in that very room, thus providing a chance to (theoretically) work out conflict in a safe environment. One day, one of the men in the group admitted he was attracted to me. Physically, he was my type. I had glimpsed him entering Tom’s brownstone my first night, basketball in hand, and had been worried he might be in group. Attraction can be such a distraction. But, as I got to know him, my attraction dimmed. Like me, he suffered from a low level dysthymia that made him seem… sleepy, like life was altogether too much for him. If I felt things too much; he felt things too little. I was fond of him, but in a brotherly way. Instead, I had a thing for  the most obnoxious individual in the group, a wired, well-dressed retail executive with a cocaine problem who rarely showed up, and when he did, seemed strangely hostile to me. Sexy! I was too embarrassed even to tell the group about my infatuation but I decided to see that as a positive step. Being able to identify a self-destructive tendency had to be some kind of progress.

About a year into group, a friend set me up on a blind date with a divorced father of three. He laughed a lot, asked good questions and was reading The Starr Report when I approached him at the bar (it had just been published). When he kissed me at the end of the night, I felt a flutter in my solar plexus. The next week, I told the group about the date. I was surprised when they were supportive. Didn’t they see how different we were? He had children, he worked on Wall Street, he liked to watch football and had given me a blank look when I mentioned Joan Didion, the patron saint of neurasthenic journalists.

So what if you’re not exactly alike? the group asked. The banker certainly knew a lot more than I did about European history, philosophy and capital markets (still not clear what those are). They thought he sounded fine. Better than fine. I tried to defend my position but the act of articulating my objections only brought their weakness into sharper focus. And this, I think, is the magic of therapy. When we are forced to put our feelings into words, they must live (or die) on their own. Sunlight slays stupid.   

In general, Tom followed Irving Yalom’s prescriptives and maintained a distance to what happened in group. We would talk, he would listen. Occasionally, he even slept, which I forgave him for; we could be insufferably dull. But on the night I told the group about the banker, he tipped his own hand  when he said, “He must really like you to be with you.” If all our epiphanies in life were accompanied by the sound of a gong, this would have been the moment the mallet hit the brass. Apparently, I am kind of a pain in the ass!

Of course, I had always thought this, so I’d tried to keep myself  hidden, lest I be fully seen. I now realize how many people feel this way. As Yalom writes, one benefit of group is realizing that you are never the first person to have felt something. “There is,” he notes, “nothing new under the sun when it comes to human behavior.” Really, what was I afraid of? Not being liked? I already knew how that felt. From as far back as I could remember, I had been my father’s unwanted fourth and now my own therapist, my father figure manqué, was confirming my fears. He must really like you, to be with you. I should have been shredded; instead, I laughed.  

Therapy is not just about just reliving the past. It’s about reliving it in a way that is no longer devastating. “What is important,”  Yalom writes, “is not only that early familial conflicts are relived but that they are relived correctively.”  Feeling unloved by a father  at six is devastating, being told you’re difficult by a father figure at 30 is survivable, especially if you have your own powers of observation. Tom (who died in 2009) was a brilliant therapist, but I could also see his weaknesses. He didn’t suffer fools gladly (a distinct handicap for a therapist), he could be grumpy and narcissistic, and he once gave me some poetry he had written after 9/11, which was just embarrassing. It wasn’t that the poetry was bad, it was that he had violated the transactional covenant of therapy — I paid him to listen to me; he didn’t pay me to read his poetry.

If Tom thought I was a pain; I saw the ways in which he was also a pain. We’re all complex beings, with strengths and weaknesses. With Tom, I was given a chance to redo one of the most critical relationships of my life, not as a child but as an adult capable of defending herself. It would take me years to understand how life-altering that insight was, but after that night, my life shifted in a way that I never could have anticipated.

Eventually,  I married the banker (best decision I ever made) and had two children of my own. One night, a full five years after I had begun group therapy, a new woman showed up in group. Every session, she would weep and gnash her teeth about her terrible divorce. I did my best to be sympathetic, even though it got pretty old after a few weeks (she singlehandedly convinced me that whatever my next career after journalist was going to be, it wouldn’t be therapist). One night, she looked at me and said, “I don’t even  know why you’re here. There’s nothing wrong with your life.”  

There were still things wrong with my life. My career was a solid meh. My pregnancies were disastrous. My father continued to be a source of stress right up until the moment he died of a heart attack on the sidewalk outside of his apartment. (He was so ill kempt, the person who found him thought he was homeless.) But these things are the stuff of life. Thanks to my many years in therapy, I could deal with them without falling apart. I had been sticking around out of inertia and a vague feeling of wanting to help others. Her comment made me see I was like one of those has been high school stars who keep showing up to the games even though their time has come and gone. The next session, I said my goodbyes and reclaimed my Tuesday nights.