“Yeah, but, TFCBT—does it work? Like, which of these things that you do actually works the best? What’s the answer?” I asked, a bit stupidly. This led to another tangent of kind-of-maybe-depends abstract noodling about various modalities.
Forty-five minutes of confusion later, I looked down at my list of questions hopelessly, feeling lost. Maybe this interview would just be a wash. In a final bid, I asked, “Is there a question I should ask that would help me help you give advice to people with C-PTSD?”
Ham focused in on me, his eyes narrowing behind his glasses. I recoiled instinctively at the intensity. Then he said, “So whenever we are thinking about big-picture stuff and it’s leading us nowhere, it makes me want to focus on what’s happening right now. So, right now, this makes me want to understand the quality of your despair. You keep asking this big question of can things change? But why are you in this state? You said earlier that you’ve been striving for ten years and you’ve been doing all this research…but the research isn’t helpful to you. And in my mind, what remains a curiosity is: What’s your suffering? What makes it intolerable? What do you still want to change?”
“Um, hmm. What is my suffering like? Um…uh…” I was completely unused to my interview subject turning the mic around on me. I took a deep breath.
“I think…my default is to be distrustful and fearful and to be in a state of…bleh. And that bleh-ness ranges from being very depressed to walking around in a sort of dissociated state. It gets in the way of things like, you know, sitting in a meeting where I’m supposed to—it’s…” I sighed. “It still feels like a constant barrage of doubts and beliefs that everyone hates me.”
“And why do you do that?”
I tried to redirect the conversation back to the abstract: to charter schools, to intergenerational trauma, to something else, something larger than me. But over and over, he latched on to me with eerie, homed-in eye contact and volleyed my questions back to me: Why did I ask? What had I tried before? When I failed, did I forgive myself? It was like no other interview I’d ever sat through, and it was utterly perplexing. At the end of our hour and a half, I still had no idea whether I learned or understood anything, and I couldn’t figure out how or why I divulged so much about myself.
As I was packing my kit to go, Ham gave me a hesitant look and said, “I’m going to ask you something. I don’t even know if it’s ethical—I’ll have to ask my colleagues to check. But I’m curious. Would you let me treat you? For free?”
“What?!”
“I’ll treat you for free, in exchange for us recording our sessions. And then at the end, maybe you can do something with the audio.” He explained that he’d been really fascinated by audio storytelling and had been interested for a long time in playing around with it. He’d recorded sessions with patients before, with their permission, and people had found listening to these sessions helpful. He liked that I seemed so eager and willing to heal and that I was an audio professional who could try to teach others with my work. But, of course, only if I was open to putting my therapy sessions out there.
“We’ll try it for four months. If it doesn’t work for you, you can stop anytime. You can leave, no questions asked. It’s no pressure, no obligation. You also would have one hundred percent ownership of the audio. Anything you want to use, you can use. Anything you don’t feel comfortable with, you can leave out. You’re in complete control. And if at the end you decide you don’t like it, you don’t have to do anything with it. I just think it has the potential to be an interesting experiment,” he said.
From the moment he offered, I was already on board. I needed a great therapist. Ham was kind of a weirdo, for sure. But at the same time, he gave me trustworthy, kind, and appealing vibes from the get-go. He did seem like a disturbingly good listener. And I didn’t have a problem putting my therapy sessions out there. I’d actually asked therapists before if I could record our sessions, thinking they’d be interesting, but they’d always denied me the opportunity. Were there any reasons why I shouldn’t do this? I couldn’t think of a single one.
“Sure!” I said, eventually. “Sure! I want to try this out. Out of curiosity, though…how much do your sessions usually cost?”
“Four hundred dollars an hour,” he said sheepishly.
“FOUR HUNDRED DOLLARS AN HOUR!” I shouted back at him.
“I have a full-time job doing director stuff,” Ham explained. “So I have a really limited amount of hours to do therapy.” Forty-plus hours of his week were already going toward creating trauma and substance abuse programs for youth at Mount Sinai, creating trauma centers for Black men in Harlem and LGBTQ+ communities in the city, and training postdocs and staff at the hospital.
The next day, Dr. Ham got back to me and said he’d spoken to his colleagues and his boss. They said that as long as there was absolutely no pressure or manipulation for me to use my work in a way that made me feel uncomfortable, it was okay for him to take me on pro bono.
This was a rare and unbelievably lucky opportunity. A real, in-demand expert would actually be taking me on. FOR FREE. I did the math—this would be $6,500 worth of therapy! I hesitated. I worried about the ethics of it and my immense privilege. How many people could afford to invest in their mental health in this way? But these doubts were quelled by the singeing pain under my skin—I was desperate for relief.
“You’ve got a deal,” I said.
* * *
—
Some therapists believe that you can learn everything there is to learn about how to heal in the first session. The rest of the time spent with your therapist is just theme and variation, practicing fractals of your first conversation, repeating the lessons until they finally ingrain themselves in you as fundamental beliefs. That was certainly the case with my first session with Dr. Ham, which was unlike any first session I’d ever had. (Most of his patients call him Jacob, but from the very beginning, I facetiously called him “Doc,” or “Dr. Ham,” and it stuck.)
I’d seen so many therapists at this point—almost ten—that I knew the dance of the first session well. You tell the therapist what you want from this experience. Then you tell them some abridged version of your life story to let them know how broken you are, while they nod sympathetically. Finally, you talk a little about your modern-day challenges and you save any real work for the next session.
The beginning of my first session with Dr. Ham seemed to follow protocol. He asked me if I had an agenda. I did. Of course I did. I came prepared with a whole document of therapy goals.
“In terms of overall need, I think my diagnosis has made me extra self-loathing, insecure, and less social because I’m afraid of imposing it upon people,” I said, just like I’d rehearsed. “I want to change my relationship to the diagnosis and how it makes me understand myself.”