In an age in which psychotherapy is looked upon with much disdain and bitter criticism, it’s refreshing to know that there are a few people so skilled in the art and science of therapy that, as painful as a journey through the self can be, they can make a person look forward excitedly to each and every weekly session — with a hunger for freedom that person may never have known.

What is underneath the dissatisfaction most people feel in their lives? Why is it that most people grow up chronologically; choose a career based solely on questions of money, security, and convenience; enter stultifying relationships that serve mainly to counteract feelings of incompleteness and insecurity; accept the onset of middle age at 25 or 30; and spend the rest of their lives riding into the sunset, slowly tilting over facedown into their graves, avoiding all the conflicts and fears beyond which lies the jewel inside each one of them? How have these jewels become buried so deeply? How have they become so encrusted with layer upon layer of fear, anger, frustration, and self- hate? If you knew you were going to die tomorrow, how would you feel? Would you feel that you had missed some- thing, that you hadn’t had the chance to live fully, that somewhere inside you lay that jewel that somehow was never allowed to be brought forth into the sunlight? Or would you feel that it wouldn’t matter— the sooner the better as far as you were concerned? Or would you feel that your life right now was so rich and full that you would want to live on forever?

I’d like to share some of my experiences in the last three years of psychotherapy with a psychologist who is one of those special few I described above. It has been a journey through hell and back, and it is by no means over, but the pain at this point is minor compared to what it used to be.

When I first walked into J’s office, I was in the midst of a deep depression. I had recently dropped out of graduate school and had taken on a very menial job, mainly because I didn’t feel I could do any better. As for my social life, I was unable to make any kind of contact with women. I was petrified of them, and at the same time deeply angry at them. I was incapable of dating, and my sexual experiences were limited to once every few years or so. At this particular time the few women who did manage to find their way into my bed were usually off-balance themselves; and the impotence I was experiencing only made matters worse. On top of this, I was struggling with homosexual feelings brought on by a recent confrontation with a gay friend and former employer. I was scared to death that I might be gay. I had twice taken up my friend’s invitation to bed, and had twice run away before letting myself get into anything. I occasionally had suicidal thoughts. I also had a complete collection of phobias, the most serious of which was a fear of open spaces. I would wake up in the morning, lie in bed ruminating for a few hours, get up, get dressed, run from my house to my car, drive to a restaurant, run from my car into the restaurant, eat breakfast in some corner of the place, run back to my car, drive home, run back into my house, ruminate for a few more hours, drive to work, run into the store, work, drive home, run in, go to sleep, and wake up the next morning — only to go through the same routine all over again. My car was a rolling womb, and my home was a permanent tomb. I was 3000 miles away from my par- ents, whom I believed I hated, and from whom I was rapidly withdrawing. In short, I was desperate, and there was no escape in sight.

I called J in answer to an ad he had placed in a newspaper regarding an encounter work- shop he was running. (For reasons which I’m sure the reader can understand, I have chosen to keep J’s name, as well as my own, confidential.) When I went to the workshop, it became immediately apparent that I was desperately in need of one-to-one therapy, so without further ado, we got started.

For my very first session, J took me in the back and put me into the “chairs”: two chairs face each other; the client sits in one, and in the other a per- son significant in his or her emotional life, played either by the therapist or by an imaginary partner projected by the client. On this particular occasion, J played my mother. She (J) said, “I’m your mother, Rick, and I love you.” “Bull- shit!” I said. “You never loved me; you never loved anything!” I continued on in this way, spewing out accusation after accusation for a good five minutes. Finally, Mom said, “Do you love me?” All of a sudden I felt something rise up from deep within my chest. I bent over in pain and listened in utter astonishment as an emotion-laden “Yes” worked its way up through the enormous tension in my stomach and chest...and barely squeaked out of my mouth. I was in tears. Mom said, “Say that you love me. Say that you need me.” The words came out in a whisper. “I love you. I need you. I love you, Mom...I need you.” We did the same thing with my Dad, with similar results. When I left J’s office that day, I knew that I had finally found what I was looking for. I sensed that my search was over, and that I was about to embark on a long, difficult, but fantastic journey.

The first session opened up my feelings for my parents. Within the space of one month, an enormous amount of emotional material came to the surface, accompanied by lots and lots of tears. At the end of the month my parents came out to visit me, and we all went over to J’s office for what turned out to be a seven-hour session. First my mother and I went into the chairs — this time it was the real thing. I took her hands in mine and the first words out of my mouth were, “Why did you hit me so hard?” For 20 years I had completely forgotten a segment of my childhood during which my mother had beaten me brutally with a belt, often raising welts with the buckle. Suddenly all of this had burst into consciousness, and just as suddenly the same thing happened for her. She broke down crying, begging my forgiveness, expressing terrible guilt and remorse. I told her I would try to forgive her, but I was not able to reach out to her due to the tremendous anger I still harbored inside. Then it was my father’s turn. Again I experienced a bursting into consciousness of deeply repressed material. This time I recalled that as a child I used to walk around the house all day, just waiting for him to come home. He was never around, never had much time to spend with me, and I used to occupy myself all day, waiting for him to return. We both recalled a camping trip we had taken when I was nine. This trip had been the shining moment of my childhood. By the end of the session, my Dad and I were crying in each other’s arms.

The next six months were rough. I would wake up in the morning and spend most of the day lying in bed, utterly exhausted. I was wracked with tension, which was centered in my stomach, genitals, chest, and jaw. I worked at night, slept and fantasized during the day, and was totally disoriented. But the depths were being prodded, and I had to let the pain and exhaustion surface.

Nine months after the first session, J brought a middle-aged couple in to one session to do some role-playing. During one heavy scene, Mom, played by the woman, was taunting Dad, played by the man. He was in tears, and he stood behind me and said, “Don’t let her talk to me like that, Rick. Stand up for the both of us. Do it for me.” Something inside me snapped — an enormous wave of anger rushed through me, and I screamed, at the top of my lungs and right at the woman’s face, “You idiot! You idiot! I hate you! I HATE YOU!!!” The room was silent. Never in my life had I done anything like that. I had never been able to express anger, and had never yelled at anyone in my life. I can still hear that blood-curdling scream. It wasn’t the last, but it was the loudest, and it was from deep, deep in my guts, deeper than anything that came after it.

That scream opened up some big doors. Several months later I began dating and having sexual experiences with women. This went on for about six months, and then I had a face-to-face confrontation with my homosexual feelings. I was no longer able to run away from these feelings, so I began exploring the gay realm. I went to the bars, the baths, and anyplace else I could go in order to find out whether or not I was gay. However, I always kept one shaky foot in the door of the heterosexual world, out of fear of being trapped in the homosexual world. Had I been able to immerse myself totally in homosexuality, perhaps I would have discovered much sooner than I did that I was heterosexual by nature, and that the gay feelings merely provided me with an escape from my conflicts with women. On another level, they had represented unfulfilled needs in relationship to my father. In other words, they had sprung out of the vacuum created by my father’s absence during my childhood.

In July of last year, my parents came back for a second session. This time Dad was first. We sat in the chairs and I told him of my lack of respect for him. To my surprise and utter delight, he started to get angry. I had never seen him get angry in my life. Suddenly I respected him! Then J had me ventilate some anger with the “bataca,” a foam rubber bat that the client beats against the ground while verbalizing anger. (The anger must be genuine; forced anger falls flat and provides no relief for the client. It takes a skilled therapist to tap into this genuine anger.) When my father saw how much anger I still carried around inside, it shook him up. Then he said that if he were to take that bataca and swing it, my yelling would be a whim- per by comparison. We invited him to try it. After some hes- itation, he took the bataca in hand and started to beat it against the floor, yelling about how stupid he had been as a father, and how blind he had been to the plight of his own children. My heart ached as he pounded that thing and screamed his lungs out. It was a moment I’ll never forget as long as I live.

Since that day, Dad and I have had a fantastic relationship, and his belief in me is without bounds. I’ve always wanted a close relationship with my father and now I have it. It’s on an adult-to-adult level, and it is one of the most wonderful things in my life. I would love to have the same kind of relationship with my mother; however, she did not take advantage of our last session. She saw the anger all right, but she was unwilling to face it, nor was she willing to face her own feelings. We’re hoping to bring her around next session, though.

Following the above session, the focus of therapy centered on my sexuality. I experimented with swinging, as well as casual sex in general, but quickly tired of that. Then I renewed my attempts to establish an intimate relationship with a woman. I have been dating quite a bit lately, but am still looking for a special woman. Currently J and I are working on what will be perhaps the most difficult phase of this entire journey — the emergence of my masculinity and the freedom this will give me in my relationships with women — and in my life in general.

I’ve come a long way from the basket case who used to run back and forth from his house to his car. I feel about 20 years older inside. My social relationships are much different and much healthier than they were three years ago. I no longer entertain any doubts about my sexual identity. The homosexual feelings crop up occasionally, but only in proportion to the strength of the inner conflicts being dealt with at the time. It is no longer necessary to act on these feelings, and there will come a time when there is no longer any need for their existence, at which time they will die out, allowing my heterosexuality to express itself without inhibition. The fear of open spaces is still there, and in fact is being intensified by the magnitude of the present conflict we are working on, that of the most deeply repressed anger I have — the anger at my mother for the childhood beatings. However, if you can see the connection in the previous sentence, you should have no difficulty in believing me when I say that I stopped worrying about this fear long ago. When this deep- est conflict is resolved, the fear of open spaces will no longer have any reason for existence, and will evaporate along with the remnants of all the other vestigial phobias attached to it.

One of the most fascinating developments in this whole process has been the recent emergence of my inner creativity and its expression in the arts, especially music. It’s a thrill to see ideas spring from my mind that I never believed I had the capacity to generate.

I often wonder how many people experience the kind of pain I’ve talked about, and I often wonder if there is anything I can do about it. To those who are old enough to be responsible for themselves, I can only say that you must do something about this pain. You cannot ignore it for the rest of your lives; it won’t just go away. You must seek the right kind of help, and you must find the courage within yourselves to travel your respective journeys. Happiness, inner peace, freedom from conflicts of the past — these are all far more important than any of the financial goals most of us strive for in our lifetimes. There will always be conflict, but the difference between a healthy person and a neurotic one (or worse) is that the healthy per- son deals with conflict entirely in the present, and has devel- oped the tools to resolve it: whereas the neurotic, upon encountering conflict, is immobilized by recycled, unresolved conflicts from the past, and as a result is unable to cope successfully. The healthy person, free from this outdated anger and fear, can live fully in the present and can appreciate the beauty in everything the world has to offer, from the tiniest, most insignificant things to the most awesome wonders of the universe. The neurotic, saddled with these persistent aches and pains from the past, knows no pleasure and suffers through a marginal existence, never once being able to look out of his black cloud at the world just on the other side.

Regarding those who are too young to know what they need to do, their parents can change their lives immeasurably with one small gesture. This gesture, however, requires a great deal of courage. Often when I’m in public places, I get the chance to see parents interacting with their children. By far the most common kind of interaction is an expression of the parent’s own frustrations, inadequacies, and unresolved conflicts. The child is punished or scolded for virtually everything he or she does, and is prohibited from expressing any of the normal impulses and curiosities of a healthy child. Nowhere is there any overt sign of the parent’s love to reassure the child that he or she is wanted or cared for. I feel a deep sadness whenever I look into the faces of these children and see the expressions of pain and bewilderment. Their eyes seem to search for an answer to the question, “Am I loved? Am I worthwhile? Do my parents really want me?” I often want to say some- thing to them, to comfort them, but I usually feel powerless.

What is this gesture that parents can make in order to spare their children such pain? Well, if my father had sat down with me when I was a child and said the following words, I would be a different man today: “Rick, I’m sorry if I haven’t been the perfect father to you. I’m sorry if I haven’t given you all the things that you’ve needed from me. My own life has been hard. When I was growing up, my parents didn’t give me any sign that they loved me, and in fact they made me feel that I wasn’t even worthwhile, and that I would never amount to anything. I hope I haven’t done this to you; I’ll love you no matter what you do or who you are. And to me you’re worthwhile just because you’re my son. I care about you very much and I want to be a good father to you. Help me find the strength and courage to grow beyond my own frustrations and inadequacies; help me to be a good father. Let’s work together and help each other find happiness and fulfillment in our lives. Will you do this with me, Rick?” What would you have said? I would have flung myself into his arms and cried. I would have said yes a thousand times. If my mother had said these same words to me, it would have made all the difference in the world. Maybe I’m hoping that this is what she will say at our next session together.