Scared Selfless

by Michelle Stevens, PhD

  I was paired with a therapist in her midfifties. Ethel (Therapist #4) was a second-year student in a master’s program who was starting her second practicum. Despite her grandmotherly looks, she was cold and hard. Like most graduate psychology students, Ethel was probably overworked, undersupervised, and overwhelmed by the serious cases being assigned to her. As an older person, she also seemed to resent being forced to work for free. Ethel clearly lacked knowledge about psychological problems. Her biggest shortcoming, though, was a complete lack of empathy. The ability to be empathetic and nonjudgmental is essential for a good therapist, yet it’s stunning how many I have met who lack these qualities. Ethel was certainly lacking. When I tried to tell her about the awful flashbacks I was having, about my crippling anxiety and dark thoughts, she couldn’t seem to grasp the pain I was in.

  Week after week, as I tried to share the anguish I felt about memories of molestation, she offered dumb platitudes about nothing being as bad as it seems and looking on the bright side of life. One evening, when I told her I was feeling gravely suicidal, she suggested I try knitting to distract myself. (I’m not kidding.) After that, I decided to stop seeing Therapist #4.

  Instead, I started attending a free group for survivors of child sexual abuse. Still shocked and struggling to believe that I was a survivor, I initially found the group comforting. As time wore on, though, it became difficult to relate to most of the other women, who seemed to lead far grittier lives. Many of the unmarried twenty-somethings already had a few kids, and one had an extensive criminal record. None of them had been to college, nor did they seem interested in bettering themselves through education or careers. It was a pessimistic bunch, and, frankly, their lack of ambition and hope scared me to death. I’d joined the group to hone my identity as a survivor, but what I found were people who saw themselves as victims of circumstance.

  At twenty-two, I didn’t have words to describe any of this, but I instinctively understood that this kind of negativity was a dead end. You can’t get well and find happiness if you don’t believe it’s possible.

  One woman in the group did impress me. She was in her forties and married. She’d been steadily working all her life until, in her late thirties, repressed memories of abuse started to emerge. Shaken, the woman had to quit her job and take some time to heal. For the past few years, she’d been seeing an experienced private therapist, and it really showed. Unlike the rest of us, she seemed to accept her past and had real insight into how it had affected her adult life. What’s more, she was able to cry freely when she felt sad, which was something I couldn’t do.

  In the group, this woman eloquently expressed her regret at facing her demons so late in life. In her twenties and thirties, she’d been afraid to deal with her past, choosing instead to distract herself with work and relationships. Lost in self-deception, she’d made some poor choices. One was her husband, whom she’d sought for protection, not love. The two were in the midst of a divorce. The woman’s biggest regret, though, was never having children. Always running from her feelings, she’d never looked inside to realize she wanted to be a mother. Now it was too late, and she cried about it with such anguish that it scared me. At twenty-two, I couldn’t comprehend the finality of menopause. Still, I could see that an unwillingness to face one’s demons in a timely fashion was a recipe for misery.

  —

  STRUCK BY THIS WOMAN’S PROGRESS, I asked for the name and number of her therapist. She was seeing a guy in Altadena, about thirty miles from my house. Despite the distance, I called him. Clinic-style shrink roulette had rarely worked out for me, so I was willing to go out of my way for someone who came recommended and whose good work seemed to be evident by what was in front of me.

  After chatting on the phone, Javier scheduled an initial appointment. A few nights later, I drove east on the 134 with high expectations. Javier’s office was in a small medical building mostly filled with dentists. His waiting room wasn’t plush, but compared to Bellevue and the clinic in Van Nuys, it felt like a palace. After a few minutes, the door opened and a tall, sturdy man stepped in. He was in his late thirties, with a mop of dark hair and a shaggy moustache. His jeans, moccasins, and sweatshirt all gave off the impression of a laid-back dude.

  Javier’s office was an enormous space with vaulted ceilings, beat-up couches, and an oversize desk. On one side, there was a fish tank sitting on a dark wood stand. The whole look reeked of the 1970s. Javier seemed like something out of the 1970s too. He had a relaxed, warm, whatever-goes vibe—another Free to Be . . . You and Me therapist.

  Because Javier seemed so open, it instantly made me want to be open too. Truth be told, I was so overwhelmed that I was dying to pour my heart out to someone who might understand what I was going through. I told Javier about the hard move to California and my sudden flashbacks. I told him about the awful memories, skin-crawling anxiety, debilitating depression, and dark thoughts of suicide. I told him how desperate I was to find a good therapist who could really, truly help.

  During all of this, Javier listened patiently. He nodded at appropriate moments and offered comforting, empathetic comments. He seemed to understand the hell I was going through, and he clearly knew a bit about child abuse and trauma. I silently prayed a thank-you to God for finally sending me the right therapist.

  Then we talked about money.

  When Javier found out I wasn’t working, had no savings and no insurance, he abruptly cut off my monologue. He told me his hourly fee, which I already knew. But I was so desperate that I had decided money shouldn’t be an impediment to getting good help. I asked him about a lowered fee or seeing him on credit until I could find work. Javier’s warm demeanor immediately gave way to a businesslike iciness. He started shuffling papers on his desk; his body language told me it was time to go.

  Distraught, I burst into tears. I rushed over to Javier’s desk and begged him to take me on, promising I’d pay him back when I could.

  Javier sighed, looked me straight in the eyes, and spoke with a weary resolve. “Look, Michelle, healing from sexual abuse is hell. It requires a lot of time and strength to get through it. You’re not in a position to deal with this right now. You’ve got to get your life together.”

  —

  I RETURNED to the free group at the clinic. But shortly after, I got a phone message one day from a member named Amy. While I knew who she was, we’d had no private conversations, no personal relationship of any kind. Amy said she was calling at the behest of her therapist and that she was seeking information. It seemed Amy had something called multiple personality disorder and couldn’t remember parts of her day-to-day life. Amy was calling all the women in the group because she wanted us to tell her what she’d said and done. I didn’t know much about multiple personalities except that it was some crazy, weird shit.

  I didn’t call Amy back. In fact, the whole thing freaked me out so much that I never returned to the group.

  I mean, what could I possibly have in common with a nut job like that?

  Unable to find the help I needed to heal, I did what I’d done many times before: I walled off my feelings and tried get on with life. Pulling myself up by the bootstraps was definitely more difficult now that I remembered some of the sexual abuse. Still, I had to do it. I had to earn money to surivive.

  Finding a job after Days of Our Lives, though, proved difficult. I applied for a playwriting fellowship at the Mark Taper Forum and didn’t even get an interview. An agent suggested I become a sitcom writer, so I penned a Doogie Howser, M.D. script to act as a sample of my work. It was so bad, she refused to send it out.

  Around the same time, a short film I had written the year before finally had its industry screening. Some important people came, which was unfortunate as the film totally sucked. Unable to catch a break in entertainment, I returned to journalism as a theater reviewer for the Los Angeles Reader. But the Reader didn’t pay much. Sorry, did I say “much”?
I meant “nothing”! I was now knocking out six hundred words a week for the privilege of a free ticket.

  Since I couldn’t make money as a writer, I applied for any sort of job I could get. I sent resumes to every appropriate want ad in Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, and the Los Angeles Times. However, on the few occasions when I actually scored interviews, I tanked. This wasn’t like me. In the past, I’d always been able to ace meetings. One of the great things about having multiple personalities is the ability to subconsciously summon whatever identity will do well in a given situation. It’s how I got through life. But once the flashbacks started, everything changed. I lost my mojo.

  —

  THAT’S WHY I was praying hard as I walked back from the grocery store. After much searching and several interviews, I was waiting to hear back about an entry-level clerical job at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. While typing and filing and running packages around town was no dream job, it now felt like one to me. Feeling this was my last shot at a job with any kind of growth potential, I turned to the Almighty for help. “Please, God,” I prayed, as I rounded the corner in front of my building.

  “Please, God,” I begged, as I entered my building and climbed the stairs.

  “Please, God,” I pleaded in desperation, as I entered my apartment and homed in on the answering machine. There was no blinking light. No job offer had miraculously appeared. As usual, my prayers went unanswered. God hated me; that much was obvious.

  I was just starting to drown my sorrows in a cup of ramen noodles when the phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “Michelle! Hi! It’s Lynne from the Theatre Center. Congratulations! You got the job!”

  I was ecstatic and thought God was finally coming around . . . until I heard the salary. But beggars can’t be choosers, so I accepted enthusiastically. I was genuinely excited to get a job at a theater. I just had to figure out how to make ends meet.

  As luck would have it, the Broadway musical City of Angels was about to start an open-ended run at the Shubert Theater in Century City. I managed to get a minimum-wage job as an usher. Suddenly, I was commuting an hour every morning to downtown LA, working nine to five at the Theatre Center, driving an hour and a half across town at rush hour, and working six thirty to ten at the Shubert. On weekends, City of Angels ran twice a day, so I worked from about noon to ten.

  With such a hectic schedule, there was no time to focus on the past. The constant barrage of flashbacks and feelings that had plagued me since moving to LA blessedly stopped. This would become a pattern for years to come. In times of extreme stress, usually brought on by life changes, my psyche would unleash a storm of new memories, throwing me into emotional instability. Then, as I pulled my life back together, the memories would stop coming, allowing time to process and integrate the new things I’d learned about myself.

  The new jobs made denial easy; I was too busy to think about the past. The Los Angeles Theatre Center turned out to be both boring and stressful. I spent my days at the office doing mind-numbing tasks like answering phones and stuffing envelopes. The other part of my job involved delivering packages all over LA, which, in the age before GPS, involved the use of a three-hundred page map. (Again, not kidding.)

  The biggest problem with LATC, though, was not the work. It was the lack of pay. Literally. Just a few months into the gig, I stopped receiving paychecks. I worked for more than a month without pay before the theater finally announced it was bankrupt. Just like that, I was out of work again. The job hadn’t even lasted long enough to qualify me for unemployment.

  Unaware of the theater’s financial woes, I had already signed a lease on a more expensive apartment. My ushering gig had already ended, leaving me broker than broke once again. Any peace I had made with God got flushed down the toilet with my job made in heaven. To offer up a blessing only to take it away was cruel. God was an asshole, and I hated Him for it.

  But that was the feeling of a young girl who had yet to see the bigger picture. I now understand that the Lord really does work in mysterious ways. Looking back now, I can see that losing my job at LATC was a blessing. It turned out to be the thing that led to the thing that eventually fixed my whole life.

  —

  AT THE TIME, though, I couldn’t see the silver lining. I needed money, so the morning after the theater closed, I bought a newspaper and vowed to find a new job. In the want ads, I found a job that seemed strangely alluring. It offered a high hourly rate and an immediate start date. The good news: It was walking distance from my apartment. The disturbing news: It involved phone sex.

  In my head, this didn’t seem like a big deal. You get on the phone. You talk to guys. You say dirty things. Blah. Blah. Blah. I have no moral objection to it, nor did I then. On the contrary, I held a weird fascination for sex work and assumed I might become a prostitute someday. On the surface, such thoughts were strange coming from a good girl like me. Underneath, though, my fascination with the sex trade made perfect sense. Unfortunately, I had not yet remembered my history as a child prostitute, so I had no idea why I was so keen to be a phone-sex worker.

  I don’t remember much about my first night on the job except walking into an office space filled with cubicles and seeing lots of women in sweats and jeans with phones in their hands. As I was ushered through the room, I overheard one woman saying, “Oooo, baby, you making me so hot, I gotta get off.” Then, she picked up an electric toothbrush, turned it on, and let the vibrating sound entice the listener.

  After filling out my W-2 forms and getting an education on how to physically work the buttons on the phone, I was shown to my cubicle. Since it was my first night, I was assigned to a “chat” line—meaning I was to flirt with guys, not get them off. When a button on my phone lit up, I grabbed the receiver.

  “Hello?” I said, in a voice I barely recognized.

  The voice on the other end sounded like a young man in his twenties. He had a southern accent and was shy and polite. I can’t say what we talked about because I wasn’t really there. Some other part of me had taken over the conversation while I listened passively from a far-off distance.

  The voice—my voice—was flirtatious and giggly with a slight drawl, which delighted the young man. She spoke of her riding lessons, her love of horses, and the grand farm where she lived. The details suggested a life in the southern aristocracy.

  The customer was so charmed by this girl that he stayed on the phone for the full half hour allowed by his credit card preauthorization. When the phone cut him off, he called back again then again. He did this for my entire five-hour shift.

  During those hours, the young man remained polite. He was flirty but not overtly sexual, as that was beyond the scope of the “chat” service. He did, however, seem obsessed with figuring out where his new love interest lived. He asked over and over, offering to drive or fly anywhere to meet her—me—in person.

  It was harmless enough. There was no way the man could ever figure out where I lived; we used fake names on the phone. Still, when I went to bed that night, I had horrible nightmares that he was after me, abducted me, and held me as a sexual hostage.

  The next day, I quit my job as a phone-sex worker. The dreams were too terrifying and, though I didn’t yet realize it, too close to real life. The part where I wasn’t really me was weird too, but I didn’t think much about it. My mind had a way of letting me see things about myself without wholly allowing me to be conscious of them. That’s the nature of denial and dissociation.

  —

  A FEW DAYS LATER, out of the blue, I got a call from Center Theatre Group, the biggest and richest theater company in LA. They got my name from a former LATC colleague who had recently started working there. Without so much as an interview, I was offered a job in the fund-raising department. Lucky for me, it paid just as well as phone sex.

  The next morning, I began working for one of the country’s most importa
nt theaters. CTG ran both the Mark Taper Forum and the Ahmanson Theater, and routinely sent its plays to Broadway. Every day, the halls were filled with notable actors, directors, and playwrights. Within a few months, I’d set eyes on many of my idols, including Stephen Sondheim, Neil Simon, and Marvin Hamlisch. If I couldn’t be in New York, this was definitely the next best thing.

  So was I finally happy? Of course not!

  Although the job offered financial stability, free theater tickets, lavish opening-night parties, and a chance to hang with world-renowned artists, it didn’t require me to be artistic at all. I spent my days in a windowless cubicle typing donor names into a computer. It was soul-crushingly boring. It didn’t help that in my free time I wasn’t writing. Since leaving Days, I’d been blocked, and I lacked both the drive and the hope to change.

  Lacking is actually an apt term to describe this period in my life. Although I had a job that could’ve led to greater things, I lacked the self-confidence to take full advantage of my luck. I also lacked friends but lacked the social skills to make them. It’s not that coworkers didn’t try to befriend me. In the beginning, people invited me to lunch. But I was so awkward and self-conscious that I rarely got a second invitation.

  I could also be downright rude. After a few days on the job, for instance, the woman who had put me up for the position invited me to lunch. We had worked together before, so I knew her a little. I certainly knew that she’d done me a big favor, so the proper thing to do was invite her to a nice lunch, foot the bill, and thank her profusely for her kindness. Instead, we went dutch. I talked very little and asked her nothing about herself. Worst of all, I don’t think I ever thanked her for getting me a job!

  My bad behavior frequently led to self-sabotage. A few months after starting my job at CTG, I was accepted into the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop. In New York, this well-respected training ground for musical theater writers includes alumni who wrote A Chorus Line, Little Shop of Horrors, and The Book of Mormon. While the LA group wasn’t quite as venerable, getting in was still a coup and gave me a solid shot at getting my writing career off the ground. In the workshop, lyricists like me are paired with composers to write a series of assigned songs. I got paired with Rob, a recent USC grad who worked as a reporter for the Los Angeles Downtown News. Right from the start, we were a good match. Our first few assignments garnered high praise, and Rob and I began to form a friendship.