Opening movement

The more responsibility I assumed for other people, the more seriously I considered the influence of my own history.

I had grown up with physical abuse, emotional neglect, criticism, and the repeated experience of having my perception dismissed. I knew those experiences had shaped me. The question was whether they might also distort what I saw in the present.

When a supervisor seemed controlling or indifferent, was I accurately perceiving the person in front of me?

Or was I seeing my parents again?

I did not want childhood abuse to cause me to find abuse everywhere. I also did not want the fear of projection to make me ignore genuine mistreatment.

Other people now trusted my judgment. I needed to examine it honestly.

Marjorie O’Israel

I met Marjorie O'Israel through the local clinical-social-work community.

She practiced from an office in her home. Reaching it meant following a curved walkway through a quiet garden filled with flowers and plants. The setting felt removed from the institutional clinics where telephones rang, schedules collided, and someone could interrupt a therapy session because a psychiatrist was ready.

Inside, there was a couch.

I lay back and tried to say whatever entered my mind without editing it into something more reasonable, flattering, or coherent.

Marjorie's approach drew from psychoanalysis, although she adapted the traditional method. Classical analysis might involve four or five sessions each week over several years. That was neither practical nor financially possible for me. She also spoke more than the silent analyst portrayed in familiar images of Freud.

I talked about dreams, anger, authority, my parents, professional conflicts, and the motives I feared might exist beyond my awareness.

I was not there to have Marjorie confirm that I was right about everyone.

I wanted to know when I might be wrong.

That distinction mattered. Seeking therapy was not an attempt to collect another witness against my parents. It was an effort to determine how much of the past remained active within me and whether it could interfere with my work.

The test came sooner than I expected.

Not long after I was asked to resign from Duplin–Sampson, I told her what had happened — the documentation I had let slide, the times I had gone around a supervisor instead of through one, the day a psychiatrist dictated notes into a recorder while a client tried to describe what his medication was doing to him, and I had said something before I had decided whether saying it was wise.

"I wasn't wrong," I told her. "The 'chronic crazies' comment happened. Exactly the way I described it. I know what I heard."

"I believe you," she said. "That was never the question."

I lay there a while without answering.

"Then what is the question?"

"Whether you gave yourself a moment to choose how to respond. Or whether something answered for you before you'd had the chance."

I had told her, in pieces, over months, what my mother did — the unpredictability, the way I had learned to read a room before I had learned to read a book. That day I said it plainly, the way I had not quite said it to anyone outside a clinical file.

"She hit me," I said. "Not once. Regularly. I don't think I've used that word with you before. Hit."

Marjorie did not flinch, and she did not rush to comfort me either. She let the word sit in the room the way she let most things sit there.

"When something felt unjust to you at Duplin–Sampson," she said eventually, "how much time passed between noticing it and saying something?"

Almost none.

"That's the part I want you to look at," she said. "Not whether you were right. I don't doubt you were, mostly. I want you to notice how fast it arrived. Whether there was ever a beat in between — a moment where you were choosing, rather than a moment where you were reacting."

I did not have an answer for her that day.

What I had instead was a memory: my body deciding to speak before my mind had finished deciding whether speaking was strategic. A house where waiting had never been safe. A mother whose temper I had learned to read half a second ahead of, because half a second was sometimes the difference between something and nothing.

I was not manufacturing injustice at Duplin–Sampson. Marjorie never suggested that I was, and it was never my clients I feared misreading. It was narrower than that, and harder to sit with: whether the son of a woman I had learned to flinch around before she moved could ever fully separate justified anger from inherited urgency — whether I would spend a career being right and unemployed for the same reason, again and again, without knowing which part was judgment and which part was the old alarm going off on schedule.

I did not resolve that question on Marjorie's couch. I do not think it resolves in one conversation, or one decade.

If I reacted strongly to someone in authority, I wanted to ask:

What is happening now?

What belongs to the person in front of me?

What belongs to the people who hurt me before?

Sometimes the answer could be both.

Paying for examination

The sessions were an expense Lynn, and I had to absorb ourselves.

We did not have abundant money, even as my practice began growing. But Lynn did not tell me to stop examining myself and find a more conventional job with supposedly better benefits.

She understood that becoming a responsible therapist involved more than earning a degree and satisfying licensing requirements. The person providing therapy had to remain willing to receive help, question himself, and keep learning.

She was not managing my treatment or becoming my therapist.

She respected my decision to undertake it.

That was consistent with the relationship we had created. Lynn did not determine what I should think. She gave me room to examine it.

Clinical hypnosis

Around the same period, I pursued formal training in clinical hypnosis.

I had already experienced the problems created by fear and bodily reactions that did not respond readily to logic. My fear of giving blood was one example. Knowing intellectually that a needle was unlikely to harm me did not prevent my body from reacting as though danger were imminent.

Hypnosis fascinated me because it worked with attention, imagery, expectation, and physical response.

A person afraid of flying might imagine the process in stages: planning the trip, driving to the airport, waiting at the gate, entering the plane, and feeling it leave the ground. Within a relaxed state, each stage could be approached without allowing fear to control the entire experience.

The goal was not magical mind control. It was learning how attention and imagination could change the body’s response to a feared situation.

Hypnosis also gave me another way to understand the relationship between conscious intention and experiences that seem to occur outside deliberate control.

The training added to my clinical abilities, but it also encouraged humility. The mind was more complicated than whatever explanation seemed obvious at first.

Professional community

I remained active in the New Hanover County chapter of the Society for Clinical Social Work.

The meetings gave clinicians a place to discuss ethical questions, difficult cases, continuing education, and the practical challenges of maintaining a practice. I had once entered professional settings wondering whether I belonged. Now colleagues listened when I spoke.

Eventually, I was selected to serve as president of the local chapter.

That title carried a meaning beyond professional prestige.

The boy who could barely speak in school was now expected to lead meetings attended by psychotherapists.

The graduate student whose supervisor had once questioned whether he had the potential for social work was now helping lead a professional organization for clinical social workers.

I had not promoted myself into that position.

My colleagues had chosen me.

Closing

Marjorie helped me continue questioning how the past affected what I saw.

Clinical hypnosis expanded what I understood about fear, attention, and the mind.

My colleagues trusted me with leadership.

None of these things offered absolute proof that every judgment I made would be correct. No therapist reaches a point where selfexamination is no longer necessary.

But I was not practicing in isolation or relying only upon instinct.

I sought therapy. I consulted colleagues. I continued training. I invited scrutiny.

And then, as president, I became responsible for helping other clinicians continue learning too.