The Psychologist

B and I did see a psychologist in Turramurra for a little while as a form of emotional rehabilitation therapy after I left the hospital.  He was a tall, gangly man with light silver-greyish hair which made him look older than he actually would have been. He was the softest-spoken man I had ever met; his voice was hypnotic in its balanced and muted tones. B and I saw him separately, and while we were there primarily to discuss our eating disorders, we were both open with him about our working history. With me, he seemed much more interested in discussing my working history than anything else. As I sat opposite him he would ask me to close my eyes and imagine that I was in an old, dimly lit attic – filled with lots of dusty pieces of furniture; knick-knacks; paintings; mirrors and so forth. He wanted me to walk slowly and lightly through this room; to take in my surroundings and look at each piece around me and to study them separately. He used this as a metaphor for observing my memories – to look at them like detached objects and review them from a slight distance as though they were entirely separate from me. He made me feel calm when he spoke this way, to the point that I could have fallen asleep as he described the scene to me. When I was in this state – this attic – I felt that I could tell him anything without becoming upset by emotions that welled up inside me. He used this method of relaxation to calm and centre me – to almost entrance me – every time that I saw him. While he never referred to it as hypnosis as such, it was the closest I’ve been to being in an hypnotic state.

I trusted him with my story. However, as my trust in him deepened, so did his questioning. Over the course of several sessions, he became more and more focused and fixated on what the men at work did to me. He became more sexually explicit overall. He didn’t only want to know what sexual positions that I had been in; he wanted to know specifically how and where the men touched me, and how I felt when they had touched me. When he began discussing my breasts and clitoris and whether I liked being touched and kissed in those places by the men at work, I knew that something was wrong. Even the way he looked at me felt wrong. After all, I knew what a man looked like when he was sexually aroused. I wanted to walk out, but I didn’t. I sat there – answering his questions – feeling sexually harassed and emotionally molested.

Afterwards, as my sister and I sat on the grass outside in the sun – waiting to be picked up by my parents – I spoke to her about my experience. She said that it had been exactly the same in her sessions: the attic; the hypnotic feel to his voice; the gradual build-up to asking very sexual questions relating to her body. He had queried her about being touched and kissed on the clitoris too. We just looked at each other, stunned. Although I could understand him setting the scene for her in the same manner as a method of inducing an hypnotic-like state, I could not see a valid reason for his overt sexual focus – which effectively traumatised us both and triggered unwanted memories. We did not go back after that session. While we were called to ask why we were no longer attending sessions, neither of us wanted to raise the issue that had caused us to stop therapy. It also made us wary of seeing another therapist due to the trust that was necessary between a therapist and client. I couldn’t see myself opening up like that to anyone again – being so naked, exposed and vulnerable in my emotions relating to my past. Therefore, neither of us attended further therapy for our eating disorders or for our time at work. We thought we might be better off, safer even, dealing with it ourselves in our own ways.