The Good Therapist

The Good Therapist

This story is just a discussion between two adults, one with a wounded heart and one trying to help the other heal. It's just a conversation without any sex and it's as close to true as I can remember it. This is not a fun read. It won't make you smile, but it might make you feel optimistic at the end.

Let me be clear - this is not a BTB and it's not a RAAC. If you are looking for a story about 3 Navy Seals beating on the guy who stole someone's wife, or a wronged husband leaving his cheating wife destitute and turning tricks, keep looking. You won't find it here. This is about what happens when real people who try to live by their vows are betrayed by those they love and the pain that's left behind.

This is not a work of fiction. Believe me, I wish it were.

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He greeted me at the door with a firm handshake and offered me a chair. He was a bit older than middle aged and had some grey in his hair. There was something comforting about him without being soft and he settled into a chair opposite me. "So, a lot of my clients want to know my credentials and they ask me my general philosophy of counseling and therapy on their first visit. Do you have any questions?"

"Not really. I did my homework. I know your degrees and experience. I saw that you're the official psychologist for the police and fire departments, so I'm guessing you've worked with people going through worse things than me."

"I've worked with my fair share of shooting victims, both the shot and the shooter if that's what you mean. To be honest, a lot of my work is with people having anger issues complicated by alcoholism, but I see my fair share of marriage and divorce issues as well. That's where a lot of my clients begin, but most problems have deeper issues and I try to work them to the surface so they can be dealt with."

I did little more than nod. I had arrived here deep in thought, not knowing what to tell and how to tell it, and I found myself now submerged deeper into the questions I've carried with me for a very long time. Like many who came here, I had too many questions and not enough answers. If I were honest, I'd admit that I was skeptical. Therapy seemed like little more than an intrusion into my personal life where someone I didn't know would project their own values onto me. I was wary, but I had convinced myself to give it a try.

He sat back, crossed his legs, and placed his notebook in his lap. "So, where would you like to start?"

"Well, in the movies they always say to start at the beginning. I guess that's as good a place as any."

He smiled. "I should warn you that the movies get a lot of things wrong. However, in this case they're probably right. Why don't you start at the beginning, and we'll see where it leads?"

"Okay. My name's Charlie Davis, but you know that. I'm an engineer up the road at Harcourt. I suppose if you asked my neighbors, they'd tell you that I'm an antisocial geek. I don't think of myself as a geek, but then most geeks don't."

That got a smile from him.

"I don't really think I'm antisocial, either, but I tend to reject a lot of what goes on around me."

"What do you mean by that?" I guess I'd captured his interest with that one.

"When we first moved into the neighborhood, I was invited to the monthly poker game with the husbands. I wasn't interested. That sort of thing never really appealed to me."

He was smiling. "You mean taking money from your friends isn't your idea of fun?"

Okay. Now I was smiling, too. "Not really. I do some woodworking in my basement. I have some simple tools, nothing fancy, but it's fun. I read, garden some, and I sail when the weather's warm. I've got a little boat that's just big enough for two adults."

"Sounds like a balanced life. I assume you bring your work home with you?"

I shrugged and nodded. How did this guy figure me out so fast? "I'm working my way up the ladder and I'm trying to impress the bosses. Plus, I didn't become an engineer because I hated it. However, I don't want you to think that I ignore my wife. In fact, I make it a point to be as engaged as possible. We cook and do the dishes together, or we used to. I take my wife out on date nights a few times every month, or I did. The truth is for the last year and a half she hasn't been all that interested in spending time with me."

"How long have you two been married?"

"Going on fourteen years now."

"I notice you didn't mention kids."

"Yeah. We bought the house with kids in mind. It was a stretch for us, but we wanted the stability and room to grow. When she finally decided that she was ready to start the family, I felt like all the pieces of my life had falling into place. We tried for about four or five months, and she wasn't pregnant, so of course she decided something was wrong. I tried to encourage her to just relax and let it happen, but she had us going to fertility doctors. My part was easy. A nurse handed me a plastic cup and said, "You know what to do" and smiled. My results came back fine. I honestly don't know what all her tests were like. She never really went into it and when I asked, she was vague. One day she said her tests all came back negative and the next test was invasive, I mean surgical. That seemed extreme to me, and I did finally convince her to take a few months and just see what happened. Two months later she told me that she wanted her tubes tied."

I looked at the therapist and asked, "Where the hell did that come from? How do you go from 'I need a surgical procedure to find out why I'm not getting pregnant' to 'I don't ever want to have kids' in just two months?"

"You don't. It sounds like something was going on in her mind that she wasn't telling you."

I scoffed. "That may be the understatement of the year, but I never figured out what it was. My life was unravelling around me, and I didn't know it."

"What was your decision?"

I looked at him in confusion. "What decision?"

"About her having her tubes tied. What did you think of that? What did you tell her?"

Now I was feeling ashamed and I'm guessing it showed. "It wasn't really told to me in the form of a question. I tried to have some quiet conversations about it. Whenever I asked her why she changed her mind, I'd get some kind of vague response that didn't amount to anything. If I pushed too hard, she'd start an argument. Arguments have always been her go-to move when she didn't want to talk about something. Anyway, I thought about it for a long time and finally decided that I couldn't force kids on her if she didn't want them. I figured we'd have nieces and nephews soon and we could invest our efforts in them, try to enhance their lives in some way. I was kidding myself, but I was trying to adapt to changes beyond my control."

"So did your life improve?"

"No. It slowly and steadily got worse. In time, she stopped sitting with me after dinner and started spending more time in her sewing room. She converted one of the bedrooms into a sewing room and I figured that under the circumstances it was a good choice. This way she had a passion that she enjoyed. Like I said, I was kidding myself. The conversations grew shorter until it seemed like I was the only one starting them.

"She went from not spending as much time with me, to not having conversations with me, to outright complaining about me. I couldn't do anything right. The lawn wasn't cut when it should be. I didn't do this right or that enough. I've always been the guy who tries to get along, who figures if someone close to me is complaining then more than likely I need to do better. It took me a long time to realize that there was no better that was good enough. That's when I probably made a big mistake."

"What did you do?"

"I decided 'Fuck it!' When she complained, I lost interest and delayed. She wanted this or that, and if she discussed it nicely, I'd try to make it happen. If she wasn't nice, I'd dragged my feet. I think you folks call it 'passive aggressive' or something like that. I was just fed up. I told myself that when she got good and tired of it, then maybe she would sit down and finally talk with me. Then I discovered there was more in the closet than towels."

"What do you mean?"

"I found empty beer cans hidden behind the bath towels. She was drinking behind my back."

He was quiet for a time. I didn't know how to proceed, and I guess he was letting me gather my thoughts. "Did she have a history of drinking?"

"Yeah. When I met her, she was sober. She had decided she had a problem and stopped drinking. I admired that, but I didn't understand what it meant. She had two bad experiences early in our marriage, but they were isolated events, and each time she got back on the wagon."

"What do you mean?"

"Twice I caught her sleeping on the sofa with an empty bottle on the floor once. We were living in a cheap apartment trying to save money for a house, so I figured she was feeling the stress. It didn't happen again. There had never been anyone in my family who had a drinking problem, and I didn't know what to do other than try to be supportive. Sometimes someone would have too much to drink at a party, but I just figured that was a part of life. My parents were never drunk that I could tell. It wasn't until a few years after we bought the house that I started finding the empty beer cans. After that, and I rapidly learned it was a lot worse than I knew. I started finding other empties around the house. A bottle of cognac we'd gotten for a recipe suddenly disappeared. She was isolating herself in a big way by that time hiding out in her sewing room with the door locked."

He was doing what therapists do; he was letting me talk. I'd heard about bad therapists who either drift off when you're talking or interject with too many comments. This guy was just listening, and I had all his attention.

I continued. "She is so good at hiding the truth. I never knew that about her. Her drinking was a lot worse than I thought, but that was only the tip of the iceberg. I learned that later. She was drinking on the way to work, at work, on the way home, after she got home, and it never showed. I mean, look at me! I'm not a little guy, but I'd pass out before I drank that much, and she was functioning."

"Don't kid yourself" he said. "She may not have shown her condition, but the fact that she was drinking that much means she was far from functioning."

I gathered my thoughts for the next bit. This was going to take everything I had. "It was late spring, and I wasn't finding all those empties around the house, so I figured she was doing okay. She was attending AA once a week, sometimes twice, and another self-help group for depression. I figured things were looking up. Like I said, I really didn't understand alcoholism.

"It was a Saturday and I decided to take her out for a nice lunch at a local seafood place. It was called The Crab Shack and we lived about six blocks away. It was a nice walk. The cherry trees and the daffodils were in bloom. We settled into a table and enjoyed our lunch. We each had a beer, but just one. The restaurant and bar were actually two rooms separated by a substantial wall. When we were finished, I excused myself and went to the men's room which meant that I had to walk through the bar. You couldn't see into the bar from where we were sitting. I came back and then she went off to do the same. When she came back, she told me that she'd just seen a friend from one of her groups in the bar and wanted to say hello. I said, 'Great! I'd love to meet them!' thinking that maybe if I'm somehow integrated into it, then things won't get out of control.

"'Oh no!' she said. 'It's all supposed to be anonymous. I can't do that. You just go on home, and I'll be along in a few minutes.' That's when the alarm in my head started going off."

He was shaking his head. "It doesn't really work that way."

"I figured that out months later. Right then, I figured that alcohol was my enemy, and I was scared. Still, you don't spy on your wife, right? That's a slippery slope and if you get caught it's not good. I reluctantly headed home and hoped I'd see her not far behind me." I paused as I replayed that day in my mind. "It was six hours. I was losing my mind and it took all the willpower I had not to go back and confront her. Six fucking hours, but she walked into the house seemingly as sober as when I'd left her. Naïve me, I was grateful."

"I take it there was more going on besides her drinking?"

"Yeah, but I didn't learn that until recently."

"So what happened next?"

"Well, like I said, I was grateful. It seemed like she had resisted the urge to drink. Remember, I was still learning just how well she could hold her alcohol and how deceptive she could be. A few weeks later she fell apart. She was abusive and she wasn't hiding the drinking as well. Things in the house were at an all-time low. She finally told me how much she was drinking, or she told me something closer to the truth. I don't think she ever told me the whole truth. That's when I learned she was drinking and driving.

"I was scared in a big way. I started talking to a very few close friends that I trusted. I was torn between not embarrassing her and trying to save her life. Then it got worse. I started thinking of her driving drunk. What if she killed someone? I don't care how well you can hold it together for your husband, at some point you're not making good decisions behind the wheel. Could I ever forgive myself if she hurt someone? Could she ever forgive me if I ratted her out to the police? No husband should ever be in the position where they need to make that decision!"

"What did you do?"

"I started talking about her going someplace where they could help her. I'd been told about a place an hour down the highway that had a good reputation. I guess she was rattled by her own behavior at that point, and eventually she agreed to go. Now that I think about it, maybe some of the people at her AA meeting said the right things when she mentioned it. I'll never know. Anyway, one day in early July she packed a bag and I drove her down. There was an admission process where they asked her some questions. I remember her admitting that she'd had several drinks already that day. Like I said, I had no idea. I tried not to look surprised because I didn't want her to think I was judging her. Eventually, we said goodbye and she went off to her room. The same person who interviewed her sat down with me and told me about the Sunday afternoon programs they had for me. That was my first indirect introduction to Al-Anon. I went down there every Sunday, sat through a two-hour lecture, and then I got to spend a little time with her. They didn't let her have much free time; they kept her pretty busy."

"Did you get anything out of their program?"

"Did I? Yes, I learned a lot. I started going to an Al-Anon meeting close to home for a bit, but most of the people there had drink-related issues from their childhood. They had parents who drank, that sort of thing. They were scarred and talked about 'the adult child'. I just had a wife who went nuts for a while. Her alcoholism didn't form my adult personality, so I had a hard time relating."

He was giving me "the look".

"I'm not saying it didn't hurt, but I was a fully formed adult when I finally encountered alcoholism. I understood it was about her problems, not some kind of failure on my part. I'll admit it took a while for me to get to that point, but after that there didn't seem to be much there for me."

I was still getting "the look".

"Yeah, I know. I've heard about codependency. I've got a lot of it, but for better or worse she's solved that problem for me. Okay, you can put that down as something we need to discuss. Anyway, after four weeks she came home all bright eyed and bushy tailed. She was a new woman, or I guess she was the same woman I fell in love with. Except, of course, she wasn't. She quit drinking for a while, but then went back to it. I still had no idea. That's what haunts me; I was clueless all along. I wonder now if we ever really learned to talk with each other? How could she hide it from me so effectively for so long?"

"Alcoholics are very good at that."

"Who's talking about alcohol?"

"What? I'm sorry. Did I miss something?"

"No, but I sure did. I missed it all."

"What aren't you telling me?"

"Things seemed close to normal after she came home, at least for a time. She doubled up on her meetings and was gone more nights than she was home. I figured that was part of the program and she was working to stay sober, so I wasn't complaining. The communication improved a little for a time, but not a lot and not for long. I knew from my own Sunday afternoon meetings that they told her not to make any big decisions for at least six months once she went home. She made it almost to four. She was always that way. No matter what anyone told her, she knew better. Anyway, it was mid-November when she told me she was leaving me, and she wanted a divorce. After everything we'd been through, I was still blindsided. I never saw it coming. My attitude about marriage was always that you stayed, and you worked it out. We had been happy minus some issues I still didn't understand, but where was this coming from? I tried to talk with her about it, but she mostly threw insults at me. I took a pretty good beating for a time, but I stayed in it trying to understand. It wasn't until she told me flat out that I hadn't amounted to anything and that she'd lost respect for me that I felt myself let go.

"I remember that night like it was yesterday. I said, 'You can say whatever you want about me, but I've been a good husband to you. I stood by you when you needed me. I kept you safe. I worried over you. I deserve your respect!' She just shrugged, turned, and walked away." I was livid just thinking back to that moment.

He took his time and let me get past my anger. "I see it all the time. When a man wants to be free, he apologizes and gets free. He may not mean the apology, but he usually offers one. When a woman wants to be free, and her husband is trying to hold the marriage together despite her efforts, eventually she insults him as much as she needs and as hurtful as she requires until he finally lets go. She will insult his job, his friends, his social standing, his income, and if all else fails, she will insult his sexual performance."

"Oh, I got that one, too. It hurt, but I chose to ignore it. I figured that was just part of the divorce playbook. It was the loss of respect that really hit home. It was like I picked up a white-hot iron from the fire; I just reflexively let go and stepped back. She struck something very primal in me."

He was listening intently and taking notes.

"After that, I didn't say much. I was dead inside. I told you that people think I'm a geek, even if I don't think so. It was that way all through school. I got used to being on the outside looking in, but I told myself that whatever the cool kids thought of me, I was the serious one. I lived a life I could be proud of even if they didn't see it. When we got married, I felt like I finally found the one person who valued me. When she said she didn't respect me, something broke inside. Two weeks later she moved out and into an apartment on the other side of town, and I was left to try to figure out what the hell had happened? Fourteen years of marriage down the drain and I didn't understand why?"

"That's rough. That really isn't fair to you. She owes you a truthful explanation. That may be one of the things we can work on."

"Oh, it gets better. Truth isn't really her strong suit. She communicated off and on during December. There were things she wanted, mail that was coming to the house, that sort of thing. Did I mention she was seeing a psychiatrist through all this? He was prescribing anti-depression drugs going back maybe two years and they were talking. I think he had a hand in what happened next. Anyway, I went through Christmas and New Year's and that whole Y2K thing alone. There were predictions that our computers at work would all fail, all our work would disappear, and it would be a disaster. They didn't; it wasn't. We had backed everything onto extra disks and disconnected them from the mainframe just in case. It was all a big fizzle. Then one day, it was a weekend, she came over to talk and she told me she wouldn't be available for about 10 days. I wasn't sure why she was telling me this because I'd made it a point not to bother her. It was always her reaching out to me when she needed something, so I wouldn't know if she were in town or not. Anyway, she was going on a cruise with some guy. I remember thinking 'That was quick!' I told some friends about it, and they looked at me like I was the biggest fool on the face of the Earth. They were surprisingly gentle about it, but they made me see the truth. She didn't just meet him; she'd known him all along. He'd been in the background all through the drinking, the constant criticism, the rehab, and the decision to end the marriage, and I never had a clue.