Before I begin the next part of this story—the weeks when everything collapsed—I need to give you a framework. Without it, what follows might seem fragmented, confusing, or even contradictory. Trauma has a way of rearranging memory. It is not stored like ordinary experience, and trying to reconstruct it twenty-five years later means working with flashes, impressions, and emotional truth rather than perfect chronology.

So this chapter is different. It is not a scene. It is not dramatized. It is the scaffolding you'll need.

What Collided

What happened in the late summer and fall of 2000 did not come from one cause. It came from many things colliding all at once:

Lynn's longstanding illness taking a sudden and terrifying turn for the worse;

My clients' symptoms worsening unpredictably;

A deeply destabilizing outside influence on those clients;

The arrival of multiple grievances against me;

The beginning of a malpractice suit;

All of this happened at the same time as I was experiencing what psychology identifies as one of the greatest stressors a human being can endure: the belief that the person you love as a spouse might die.

It didn't matter that Lynn didn't die then.

What mattered was that I believed—down to my bones—that I could lose her at any moment.

The emotional impact was the same.

My nervous system registered it as imminent death, not possibility.

A Note About What This Book Is Not

Some of my clients during this time had complex trauma histories. A few had been diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder (DID). During this period, cultural narratives about Satanic Ritual Abuse, the broader Satanic Panic, and debates about false memories were circulating—particularly online, as the internet was becoming more accessible in the late 1990s.

I mention these topics only because they will factor into what follows—into the confusion and intensity of those months, and into the allegations that would later be made against me.

But this is not a book about DID.

This is not a book about conspiracy theories or clinical debates.

If you're curious about those subjects, resources exist.

That is not the story I am telling here.

The Influence I Underestimated

In the months before everything fell apart, an outside figure—whom I'll call John F.—had already begun involving himself with several of my most vulnerable clients.

He called himself a "support person." He had no training. No license. No professional oversight.

And I already had reason to be alarmed.

In early spring of 2000, a client I'll call Tracy came to me for therapy.

She had traveled to Wilmington with John, seeking safety from an abusive partner back in New Jersey. John had positioned himself as her support person who would help her. John, despite his lack of training, had diagnosed her with DID and had made her believe that this was her condition.

When Tracy came to my office, we started talking and I began with no assumptions. I began with the Dissociative Experiences Scale (specifically DES-II) and noticed that she wasn’t relating to those experiences that are expected to occur with those who have DID or a similar diagnosis.

As I listened—carefully, over about three sessions—a different picture formed.

Tracy had been through severe domestic violence.

She had PTSD.

Her symptoms were consistent with trauma—with how the mind protects itself after prolonged terror—not with dissociation into distinct identities – not with such a extreme form of a dissociative disorder.

We talked her what we were seeing from this test. We talked about trauma responses.

She began to understand that she wasn't fragmenting. She was surviving.

Then John made a sexual advance.

When Tracy rejected him, she became frightened.

John was living in the home of another client—a woman I'll call Darla, whom he had referred to me. After Tracy's rejection, John began suggesting to Darla that Tracy had been flirting with Darla's husband. Tracy was terrified this would destabilize the household, that she would lose the safety she had come here to find.

She told me what had happened.

I felt something I rarely allow myself to feel: rage.

Not just clinical concern. Not therapeutic curiosity. Rage.

He had brought her here under the guise of safety.

He had convinced her she was sick in ways she wasn't.

He had positioned himself as the only person who could help her.

And then he had made a sexual advance.

That is not support.

That is predation.

With Tracy's permission, I decided to call John—hoping, somehow, that if I expressed her concerns calmly, he might understand the harm he was causing.

On my way out of the office that afternoon, I stopped at a pay phone. I wanted to reach him before Tracy got home, before the situation could escalate.

When he answered, I explained—carefully, professionally, that Tracy felt uncomfortable, that she was worried about the tension in the household.

What happened next told me everything I needed to know about who John F. really was. What I had been hearing about him seemed hard to believe that he could have been getting away with what was alleged. I had been in denial but now I saw what he was.

He didn't express concern. He didn't ask how he could make things right.

He was indifferent. Cold.

He criticized Tracy as being disrespectful.

I stood there, gripping the phone, feeling my hand clench around it.

I wanted to say: You're only saying this because we're talking on the phone. If we were face to face, you wouldn't dare.

But I didn't say anything.

Because anything I said could make things worse for her.

I hung up and stood there for a moment, letting the reality settle.

John F. didn't care about the people he claimed to support.

He cared about control.

About access.

About his own needs.

I learned that the next day she had bought a train ticket and returned to New Jersey and moved into a Domestic Violence Shelter. I rejoiced that she was safe. I was glad she had escaped.

Within days, she was on a train home. When she told me she had a ticket, I felt relief wash over me—pure, uncomplicated relief.

She was going to be safe.

I didn't try to keep her as a client.

I didn't ask if she wanted to continue therapy remotely.

I was just glad she was finding a safe place to be.

I even wrote a poem later in a series using vampires as metaphors—called "The Great Escape."

I ended all contact with John after that.

And I began to see the pattern.

If John actually wanted to help Darla—the client whose home he had moved into, where he received free room and board as a "support person" - then her recovery, her healing, her improvement would make him unnecessary.

His support depended on people staying unwell.

Advice That Came Too Late

A few months later—this would have been June, before Lynn's health took its sudden turn—I brought my concerns to my colleagues.

I didn't violate confidentiality. I didn’t name clients specifically but a larger pattern of what he was doing that was beyond being a support person but which my colleagues could understand as actions only a therapist with credentials should be doing.

But I explained what I had seen: a man with no training, no credentials, acting as a therapist. Living in clients' homes. Getting free room and board as long as they stayed sick. Making sexual advances on vulnerable women. Twisting their perceptions. Convincing them they were more ill than they were.

My colleagues' guidance was firm:

"If any of your clients continue seeing him, you should stop treating them."

That conversation happened before Lynn got sick. Before the collapse. Before the grievances.

At the time, it felt like something I could manage: a boundary to hold, a situation to monitor, a warning I took seriously.

What I didn't know—what no one could have predicted—was how deeply intertwined his influence would become with the weeks when everything else fell apart.

I didn't know he had been involving himself with other clients.

I didn't know he was drafting grievances that would arrive within weeks.

By late July, when Lynn first struggled to breathe, several of my clients were already destabilizing.

Their symptoms were worsening.

They were calling more frequently.

The stories they brought into sessions were darker, more chaotic, more frightening—to them, and eventually, to me.

The therapeutic distance I had always been able to maintain, the steady, grounded witness, was beginning to erode.

What My Evaluators Saw—And What They Didn't Ask

After everything had collapsed, I sat for psychological evaluations ordered by the licensing board.

I was grieving.

I had been dissociating.

I was terrified that Lynn might die.

My world had been breaking in multiple directions at once—my clients destabilized by an outside influence, grievances arriving with allegations I didn't recognize, my practice unraveling while the person I loved most was fighting to breathe.

Not one evaluator asked if anything catastrophic had happened.

They didn't ask if someone in my life had gotten gravely ill.

They didn't ask if I'd recently experienced what psychology recognizes as one of the greatest stressors a human being can face: the belief that your spouse is dying.

They didn't ask about the timing of the grievances or the nature of the outside influence on my clients.

They didn't take a complete history.

They administered projective tests—ink blots, standardized questionnaires.

When I mentioned John's influence on my clients, one evaluator asked me directly:

"Do you care about your clients?"

They evaluated me in crisis without knowing I was in crisis.

And they drew conclusions that would define me for decades:

Poor reality testing Lack of empathy Manipulativeness One even suggested the possibility of a schizophrenia-spectrum condition

These conclusions described someone I had never been.

Not in the years of work across multiple clinical settings -inpatient psychiatric hospitals, residential settings, crisis intervention, public outpatient mental health settings, private practice - with hundreds of people who had consistently told me I was easy to talk to, that they knew I cared, that empathy was central to how I worked.

Not in my psychoanalysis with Marjorie O'Israel, work I had undertaken specifically to ensure that my childhood trauma wouldn't impair my ability to care for others.

Not in my supervision and therapy with Chris Hauge, DSW, LCSW, who had watched me grow from volunteer to intern to licensed clinician.

Not with Lynn, who had known me at my most vulnerable and most capable.

In the twenty-five years since, I have been in continuous therapy.

In recent years, as a Peer Support Specialist, people consistently tell me I truly care, that I have strong empathy.

No clinician who has actually known me—who has treated me, supervised me, worked alongside me—has supported those conclusions.

No one has ever diagnosed psychosis or problems with reality testing.

But in that moment, those words became my official record.

The mental health field I had devoted myself to—the field that had saved me from my own childhood trauma, the field I had prepared so carefully to enter—had looked at me at my most broken and seen someone I had never been.

They had assessed the worst two months of my life as though it represented all the years I had served others.

It wasn't just a misdiagnosis.

It was erasure.

And it would shape everything that followed.

Where the Story Picks Up Again

What follows—beginning in the next chapter—is my best reconstruction of those weeks.

Not a perfect timeline.

Not a legal document.

But the lived truth of collapse.

We begin in late July 2000, when Lynn first struggled to breathe.

Everything changes from there.