Beatrice records all of our sessions with a tape recorder. You heard me. Whenever I get skeptical about her psychic powers and assume she must have just looked me up online to get such accurate information, I remember that she still uses a tape recorder. The Luddite who still uses that obsolete a machine probably doesn’t have too strong of a Google Alert game.
Here’s how the session goes down. First, you have to give her a piece of your jewelry, which she cups in her hands during the session the way Gollum held the gold band in The Lord of the Rings. Then you tell her what you want to know about—that is to say, a guy, a job, a guy you wish had a job, whatever. She then closes her eyes and begins talking to your “spirit guides.” From what I gather, these are spirits who guide and protect people, sort of like guardian angels or invisible bouncers. I wasn’t a huge fan of my spirit guides at this point in my life because I felt very lost and like I had no guidance, invisible or otherwise, but Beatrice spoke to them regularly. She’d close her eyes, rock back and forth, then start reacting as if five people were sitting in chairs around her. As they speak to her, she quickly scribbles down notes as she nods and talks to the air. My guides seem to be a real gaggle of weirdos because sometimes she ends up arguing with them; other times it seems like she’s flirting with them. The only thing more insane than someone flirting with ghosts? The fact that I’ve actually gotten jealous.
One time after chatting with the invisible people, Beatrice told me about my “past life regression,” which is basically the idea of why you are the way you are based on who you were in past incarnations. Up to this point in my life, this was the craziest thing I had heard aside from recently learning that we have tons of bugs living in our eyelashes and that Jason Schwartzman is related to Nicolas Cage.
Beatrice told me that in a past life I had fought in the French Revolution and stood up for the proletariat who were starving to death while that selfish biatch Marie Antoinette pounded her pound cake. Apparently back in the day I was a voice for the voiceless, which I still do in other ways now through my stand-up and work with rescue animals. The whole ordeal mostly just made me feel old, but it did make a little more sense that I had dated two broke French guys.
One of the times I went to Beatrice, I was in a particularly sticky situation. I was in a very happy relationship and was blindsided by falling in lust with someone else. It was that instant electric, cellular connection that makes us throw around misleading words like soul mate and love, when it’s probably just a confabulation of a bunch of adrenaline, fear, childhood conditioning, and your lizard brain thinking the person is your father. Beatrice told me the reason we were so magnetically attracted to each other was because we had died together in a volcanic eruption at Pompeii back in the day. As you can probably imagine, when I told my boyfriend I had fallen for someone else, the whole “but we died together in a past life” thing didn’t go over particularly well, but I’m sure it helped him get over me way faster.
Beatrice also told me some pragmatic things, like that I had anemia and candida. I mean, psychic or not, anyone who saw me back then without makeup on could fairly easily ascertain that I was anemic, and I’m pretty sure we all have candida. She also told me I needed new brake pads, which was true, but you didn’t have to be psychic to figure out that one. I was twenty-seven and it was obvious I couldn’t swing the thousand bucks for new brakes, considering the last three checks I had written to her bounced. Back then, I justified not paying her by rationalizing that if she was really psychic, she should have known that I couldn’t afford her services, and if she didn’t know because she wasn’t truly psychic, well, I deserve a refund.
Head Games
In my twenties, I was promiscuous with therapists the way most twenty-somethings are promiscuous with sexual partners. Quite frankly, I was a therapy slut. I tore through therapists with no strings attached, a different one-hour stand a couple days a week. Ultimately, the reason I couldn’t land on one is because I realized I was so triggered by people, especially authority figures, that it was hard for me to be vulnerable with them. I’d go into a therapist’s office and try to charm him or her, and make the therapist think that I didn’t need to be there. I treated meeting new therapists more like a job interview than a time to reveal my struggles. Weirder, if a therapist didn’t see through my performance of pretending to be normal, I’d lose respect for them and never go back.
I know. The whole thing is very dark. But in those days, I truly wasn’t ready to admit I had flaws, much less fix them. I was way too paralyzed by my own denial and survival mechanisms to even know what the truth was, but what I did know was that I was sick of being crazy because, frankly, being crazy isn’t cute once you turn thirty. Tweet it, blog it, retweet it, re-blog it, make it your screensaver, then take a photo of said screensaver and text it to all your friends. I mean, being crazy isn’t particularly attractive in your twenties either, but at least you have an excuse.
One therapist I went to for a while was particularly annoying because he never gave me an opinion or suggestion. This meant he either wasn’t listening or thought I was too fragile to hear the truth. Based on what some ex-boyfriends have yelled at me in fights, it was probably a little of both.
In retrospect, he was probably just trying to keep me dependent on him, which is especially cruel given one of the main reasons I was going to therapy was to stop being dependent on manipulative men. I could tell he’d try to be neutral, telling me what he thought I wanted to hear, which essentially enabled my self-destructive behavior. I was in a very unhealthy relationship and he absolutely should have told me to get out of it ASAP, but every time I would ask for advice, he’d say, “What do you think?” This sort of talk therapy may work for some folks or may have been proven to be effective by very smart people, but it triples my crazy. I hate when psychiatrists ask me what I think I should do, because usually what I think I should do is wildly inappropriate and sometimes illegal. I just wanted someone to tell me what to do, because left to my own devices I was either acting like a sociopath or dating one.
After many Dr. Wrongs, I finally came across a Dr. Right. Someone that I respected enough to go back to a second time. The first sign that we were meant to be was that I could make appointments with her via text. If I have to call and leave a message, then wait for you to call me back, I’m already experiencing the very anxiety a therapist is supposed to be mitigating. I feel a therapist’s job is to make a person feel safe enough to be able to come to terms with their wounds, so if I have to pick up the phone and call you, you’re just creating more emotional wounds we’re gonna need to heal.