I wonder if you have ever been in such a situation, where you had assumed one thing only to have an entirely different thing be true. I don’t refer to thinking someone would turn left and have him turn right, but rather in a Wile E. Coyote sense, where you assume you are standing on solid ground only to find yourself hovering over an abyss. In my experience, as in the coyote’s, the remembered sensation of solid earth sustains you for a while . . . but eventually you fall.
I fell after the Angel Game. While it was happening, I kept telling myself that I was in a real therapy session, and this couldn’t be serious. But when it was over, I stopped resisting. Not that I willingly entered whichever misty dimension my therapist occupied, I just decided to endure it for the rest of our time together, sort of like sitting quietly when I visit my parents and Fox News is on.
Once the angel cards were away and forgotten, we lurched into a new area of exploration: Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life, a well-worn copy of which the therapist produced from her bag of tricks and wielded with the zeal of an evangelist. I have long been familiar with Ms. Hay’s work, having had second-hand dealings with her while working in a Chicago publishing house toward the end of the last century, and I respect her basic thesis of a mind-body connection. Her theory that complex psychological issues can be revealed by a cursory review of one’s physical ailments, however, strikes me as being as ludicrous as phrenology; so naturally, this was the encore to the Angel Game. With as little to go on as the words shoulder, feet, and jaw—the chronic pains I had described earlier—the therapist flipped through the pages and concocted her diagnosis, a Byzantine saga of literal and figurative burdens with masculine and feminine undertones. I was literally speechless, which suited her approach perfectly, my sore foot being a better source of psychological insight than anything I might actually say or think. “Does that sound right?” she asked at last, clearly feeling that she was as reasonable as could be. Indeed, she had a professional air about her, no doubt feeling on solid ground with irrefutable written evidence to back up her claims. It was like talking to a preacher about his bible or an astrologer about his charts: everything can be explained in their paradigm except for the things that can’t be, which are conveniently ignored.
It was at this point that I decided to pretend I was in a psychic’s parlor rather than on a therapist’s couch. I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me earlier as I love consulting the supernatural and see psychotherapy as an unpleasant but necessary chore. But that’s like saying that I love chocolate cake and see green beans as an unpleasant but necessary chore: if I want to address a real health problem, I’m not going to unwrap a Hostess Ho Ho.
It’s lucky that I adopted this attitude when I did, as having come to a verdict, it was time for us to discover the underpinnings of my condition. This was a journey, she explained, that we were going to undertake together, into murky and potentially dangerous territory, with her as my guide. It felt like a lecture on natural history presented by Ronald McDonald. By this time, I strongly suspected that, despite her professional tone, her methodology was not going to be approved by the American Psychological Association. But I have to confess to being taken aback when she stared into my eyes and announced that the time had come for past-life regression.
To be continued.
