The Therapist Who Thought I was Brilliant

And she was right!

When I was near the end of a 25 year mentally and emotionally abusive relationship, I began seeing a trans sex worker who radically changed my life. She took an interest in me and asked me to write about my life and what had brought me to where I was.

What I didn’t know at the time was that her partner was a therapist who was feeding her questions to ask me.

There are dozens of stories there, some of which I may eventually tell. One of them is this one.

I was stuck and unable to make any changes in my life. The trans sex worker exercised the one control she had over me: She said, “If you don’t start exercising and seeing a therapist, I won’t see you again.”

What do you know, I started exercising and seeing a therapist. (Men, amiright?)

I didn’t know how to approach the therapist thing, so she gave me a list, one of whom was a trans therapist. I chose that one.

We only saw each other a few times, but that therapist helped me get to where I needed to be. A funny thing about this is that before I first saw her I sent thousands of words telling my life story. She told me she saw “flashes of brilliance” in my writing, which helped me realize how wise she was.

I was sort of out of control at the time, and before every session I would send her thousands more words. She told me to stop, and threatened to charge me for the time it took to read all this. I eventually realized that she enjoyed my writing enough that it was distracting her and consuming too much of her professional time. Again, such a wise person with such taste.

I told her I didn’t want to make any actual changes in my life, I just wanted to make my current situation work.

“So,” she said, “you can’t tell your partner that you’ve changed jobs at work; you can’t tell him that you’re seeing a sex worker; and you can’t tell him you’re seeing me.

How is this working out for you?”

This was perhaps the most influential thing a person has said to me, and helped push me to do what I needed to do.

Now to swerve to the grossly political, I can’t help but keep thinking about this after certain recent events.

“So you've been calling everyone who disagrees with you a Nazi; you’ve been cutting your family out of your life due to political differences; you’ve been insisting on trans policies that alienate even historically trans-supportive people, and now you’ve lost the White House, the Senate, the House, and the Supreme Court.

How is this working out for you?”