Things I Know About My Former Therapist (But Shouldn’t)

Here is a short and incomplete list of things that I know about my former therapist, who I will refer by the pseudonym “Sam Lyman.”

Sam was born a week after her mother turned 17 and because her mother’s youth was robbed from her by this unplanned child, conceived out of wedlock, Sam struggled to attain her mother’s attention and love.

Sam didn’t go right to college after High School, instead working at an office supply store for a year before realizing she was heading down a dead end. She enrolled in the University of Connecticut, where she majored in Marketing, and then went to Law School in Boston.

Sam wanted to remain in Boston, but her boyfriend was scion to a family business in Watertown, CT, and so she moved there so they could marry, a difficult choice for her to subordinate her desires to his requirements.

Sam had a short career as a land use attorney and then, after having two children, opened a modern art gallery with dreams of becoming a painter. The gallery closed after a few years, another dream unfulfilled.

Sam decided to become a therapist because one of her children was helped by a therapist and her best friend is a therapist.

When she was studying for her MSW, she drove from her home in Woodbury to Peekskill, where she caught a long train to NYC, then a subway to school at NYU. The brutality of the commute was, I guess, a way for her to tell me how much she wanted to be a therapist.

But during her education, she was required to enter therapy and she wanted a more personal relationship with her therapist, who (properly) refused and so she quit therapy as soon as she had fulfilled the requirement. So that was jarring.

Sam was never shy about displaying her privilege. Her Watertown office was owned by her husband’s company. One day she told me, “There are some real advantages to having your husband as your landlord.”

Sam is a Democrat but most of her husband’s family is Republican and she abhors their right wing positions but she can’t say anything for fear of upsetting the family that butters her bread.

Sam considers her mother to have been a sadist. This is one example she gave me during a conversation about a sadist in a case study she sent me.

Sam’s son decided not to go to college the day before he was supposed to leave for freshman orientation and she had to talk him into going. He graduated as a Psych major and she hopes he pursues it someday because he has a high EQ, but after he graduated he moved to Austin, TX with some friends and she had no idea what he was going to do for work.

Sam says she is not happy. One day, she was angry at her husband but after taking a walk she concluded that “it’s better to be with someone than not.” She does couples counseling, so this was rather shocking to hear.

Sam absolutely hates to be wrong. “Part of my Psychology is that I hate being wrong,” she admitted. Once, when I stated a fact that she thought to be in error, she looked it up after the session and in the following session brought up that I had been correct by saying, “You really schooled me,” which had not been my intent. I was taken aback that she was so upset that I had been right and she wrong over a trivial bit of current events.

Sam’s best friend in high school was killed by a drunk driver while crossing the street after a party.

Sam deals with emotionally difficult situations by dissociating, which is a form of mental disorder in which one loses touch with their conscious awareness. (An ideal trait for a therapist? You be the judge.)

Sam had been at a party while I was seeing her and was speaking with her niece, Camsie, who, in the midst of the conversation had some kind of cardiac event and keeled over dead right in front of Sam.

This led me to ask if she was religious. “No. No.” And she explained what she believes.

Sam told me that she loves me. “I love you, Matt. I am deeply immersed with you,” she said in May 2021, after having spent eight months increasingly obviously flirting with me, breaking boundaries, and using inappropriate and sexually charged language. “We have to figure out what we are going to do now.”

What I did with that last piece of information was go have a debilitating nervous breakdown.