The "Anonymous" Counseling Session that Ended up in ELLE Magazine 

The Story Behind the Story...

I guarantee all my clients absolute confidentiality.  As you may know, however, I also take it one step farther:  Any of my clients who wishes may remain anonymous.  

I have found that this frees my clients to deal with the deepest issues of their lives in a way that many of them would never feel able to do under their own names.  

This rare offer of anonymity has also permitted my prominent clients in the political, corporate, sports and entertainment worlds to rely on me for counseling, without fear that some detail of what they disclose to me will end up as a New York Times headline, or on "Entertainment Tonight."

Little did I realize, however, that the tables might be turned on me!

This past June 23rd, a man who identified himself only as "Steve," E-mailed me and requested a professional counseling session.  The case contained several unusual elements, but I must admit that after years of online counseling, I've come close to having heard it all.  Very little surprises me anymore.

Here, then, is the case "Steve" sent me:

Dear Dr. Judith,

I�m a 37-year-old, married real estate agent in Bergen County, New Jersey. My office has an extremely competitive softball team which has evolved into the locus of office culture (attendance at games is mandatory for every employee, as are post-game revels, etc.).

I�m the team�s second baseman. And I�ve developed what one might call �Chuck Knoblauch Syndrome.� I cannot make the throw to first base. I�m double-clutching, shooting the ball over the first baseman�s head, throwing wide and pulling him off the bag, producing every mortifyingly errant trajectory possible.

I�ve cost the team at least three games already, which, given the feral jingoism of the office, is simply unacceptable. Our coach, David Ng (who�s also the office manager and played semi-pro fast-pitch ball in Vancouver back when he was technical consultant for the local Lubavitcher cable channel out there) has insinuated that he might have to bench me.

I�m taking all this inordinately hard. And my wife is worried that I�m reverting to coping tactics I haven�t used since my father passed away several years ago. My Dad died of anaphylactic shock after being stung by a Portuguese man-of-war while vacationing in Aruba (on the very same day that actor Fred Gwynne passed away�I know, what are the odds of that, right?).

My father and I were extremely close. He looked a bit like Roy Orbison, but slightly Asiatic�imagine Roy Orbison with a sort of epicanthic fold. He was a sweet, generous, ethical and remarkably capable human being. And a day doesn�t go by when I don�t miss his friendship. . . anyway, the coping tactics.

After my Dad died, I used to go down to the laundry room and run this one particular flannel shirt of his in the dryer until it was really hot. Then I�d roll a corner of the shirttail, until it was like a long screw or spiral conch, and I�d insert this hot cylindrical piece of fabric into one of my nostrils.

And I�d just sit there and . . . meditate. Maybe the material from my father�s shirt restored him to me in some way (it smelled like him and it was warm in the way it would�ve been had he just taken it off). I was spending more and more time down in the laundry room, until finally my wife (a decisive, interventionist kind of woman) confiscated the shirt and, I think, cut it into rags.  

That�s about when I began working with dough. Nothing particularly ambitious�we�re not talking scones�just that sort of pre-packaged dinner roll dough from the supermarket. I�d tear off strips and roll them into those long spiral conches. And then when they were hot out of the oven, I�d insert one into each nostril.

I�d do this four times in each nostril�to commemorate my father�s birthday, which is April 4�4/4. Now you might find it interesting that my dough compulsion seemed to abate at about the time I developed a deep interest�you might call it an obsession�in North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.

I became an aficionado of the Democratic People�s Republic of Korea web sites, started clipping photos from all the papers etc. But I started to wonder why I�d become so fascinated by this leader who�s routinely denounced as a kidnapper, a playboy, a heavy drinker, a crackpot, an enigmatic hermit presiding over a famine, which has claimed the lives of two million of his own people.

And then I took a close look at one of the photos . . . Kim Jong Il looks like my Dad! He really does. He�s a gnomic Korean version of Roy Orbison right down to the pompadour, and paunch! 

I guess this is when the anxiety as to whether my fascination with Kim Jong Il had some homoerotic component to it began. And the question crossed my mind: Am I gay?

I�ve broached this with my wife (your basic common-sense, do-it-yourselfer, Bob Vila devotee, who glazes over when the conversation gets too psychosexual). She pooh-poohed the whole homoerotic thing, and suggested that my affinity for this leader of a �pariah state� is evidence of some sense of disaffection or not-really-being-�n� sync-with-everyone-else (excuse the teeny-bopper spelling there�I�m typing fast).

And then she said something that really hit me. She said she thought my throwing problem may have something to do with the death of Herbalife founder, Mark Hughes.

(My wife and I met when we were both selling Herbalife products. This was back in the day when the English new romantic /synth pop was all the rage: Duran Duran, Bronski Beat, A Flock of Seagulls, Frankie goes To Hollywood, etc. I mention this only because I think every courtship has its soundtrack, and you might find the information significant.)

Anyway, she hunted down the obituary, and get this: he was 44. 4/4. April 4�my Dad�s birthday. I wonder sometimes what malicious hand is out there reshuffling the seemingly arbitrary detritus, the obsolete, sloughed off statistics of vanished lives (the dates, the addresses, the ATM PIN codes, etc.) into such painful reminders of irretrievable loss. 

I discussed this recently with Dave Ng, but in that offhanded, uncomfortably jocular, beer-commercial sort of way in which guys typically discuss insoluble ontological conundrums, and he basically told me to �just hang in there,� and then he gave me a long hug and looked at me with such tender solicitude that, I have to admit, I was a bit taken aback.

So I guess what I�m asking is this: Is the trouble I�m having throwing to first base related to my unresolved and possibly homoerotic (as filtered through Kim Jong Il) grief for my father which has perhaps been exacerbated by the numerologically �significant� death of Mark Hughes and�as a corollary�is there anything wrong with the seemingly (to me at least) benign act of putting pieces of warm dough up my nose if that provides some solace?

Or might it all have something to do with the fact that I�m selling real estate instead of doing what I really want and SHOULD be doing, which is writing dance criticism?�

Steve
_________

How would YOU have replied to "Steve?"  

Here is the reply I E-mailed to him two days later, on June 25th:

Dear Steve,

What a delightful, fascinating, well-read, brilliant mind you have! If I were you, I�d sell real estate AND write dance criticism . . . and perhaps pen a novel or two on the side, as well.

I considered taking your throwing dilemma to former Yankee captain Don Mattingly, who also lives in Evansville and is a friend. But Donnie played first base, not second. 

I know he�d have an opinion about the �Chuck Knoblauch Syndrome,� since he would have been the one to catch (or not catch, as the case may be) the in-between throw, but I�m not sure he�d have much to say about the Mark Hughes connection with the onset of your second base woes.

Perhaps a couple of observations . . . I agree with your wife�s take on the homoerotic theory concerning your obsession with Kim Jong Il: Not likely.

In all likelihood, his similarity in appearance to your deceased father is the long and short of it � coupled with the fact that at first, his Korean nationality obscured your recognition of his Roy Orbison/father look-alike features. It sneaked up on you before you made the connection, thus catching you off guard with unexpected feelings of affection before you recognized why.

Observation number two . . . the 4/4 numerology is not all that uncommon. Nor is 3/3 or 5/5 . . . or 8/8. Then why don�t those last three show up as often in your life? They do. You�re just not sensitized to them.

I call it the �New Car Syndrome.� You walk into an automobile showroom, become smitten by a new car and buy it. On the very first day you drive it to work, you�re stunned to see another car just like it parked in the company lot.

Did the other man just buy his, too? No, he bought it two months ago. He�s driven it to work every weekday since. Then why didn�t you notice it? Simple. You weren�t sensitized to it until you became the owner of the same car. Without a doubt, the same principle is functioning with 4/4.

Observation number three . . . if you can obtain your wife�s blessing, I�d say enjoy the warm dough . . . in private. Every perfectly sane person permits himself just a touch of benign insanity. Just be sure to indulge yourself with a wry sense of perspective � and don�t risk getting it lodged in such a way that a trip to the emergency room would be called for. Might be traumatic.

Final observation (from a non-second baseman) . . . you�re blowing your first-base throw because you�re stepping outside the experience and thinking ABOUT it instead of staying inside the experience and exulting in the joy of the throw. Quit analyzing it. You already know more than most second basemen ever knew about that throw.

Make a video of a dozen perfect major league throws to first and watch them until they sink into your muscle memory and you can play them at will in your mind�s eye, while feeling them in your body. Then, when the situation arises in a game, block out everything else and exult in the joy of the throw.

Hope this helps.

Warmly,

Dr. Judith
_________

And that was that...until four days later, when I received the following E-mail: 

"Dear Dr. Judith,

"One of our writers, Mark Leyner, is preparing a story on "e-therapy" for the September issue of ELLE. As he is a novelist (one with a vivid imagination), his idea was to write an inquiry from the point of view of a fictitious character and gather a variety of responses from Web therapists.

"As you can see, he liked your response a great deal. We at ELLE would, with your permission, love to publish all or part of your response."

Can you imagine my surprise?  Such are the risks of anonymity.  I've always wondered what people do with the sessions I send them.  Now, I know.  They turn them into magazine articles!

After thinking about it a bit, however, I gave my permission for Elle Magazine to let their readers peer into my online counseling session with Mr. Leyner.  Obviously, he had no objection...and I was certainly willing to stand behind the counsel I gave - even to a fictitious character!

Still, as the publication date drew near, I must admit to wrestling with just a bit of anxiety. Since Mr. Leyner is known as a satirist, I had to wonder just what angle Mr. Leyner's article might take.

Sure enough, when the September issue of Elle Magazine appeared on the newsstands, my concerns were realized. The take-away from the article, "The Doctor is On," is that Mr. Leyner doesn't care very much for e-therapy. 

He couldn't resist complaining about how long it takes to get most e-therapists to respond (even though I wish he had mentioned he only had to wait two days for the counseling session I sent him!).

Still, I am thankful for Mr. Leyner's surprisingly generous words about our session together. When he introduced to his magazine audience my session with him, he wrote:

"If, however, you're a patient person (i.e. you're not certifiably manic or suffering from Intermittent Explosive Disorder) and you're willing to wade through a variety of sites, you may be fortunate enough to get a response as sincere, conscientious, sensible and open-hearted as this from Dr. Judith."

Now, that was sweet!  After Elle Magazine reprinted my entire session with Mr. Leyner, he concluded my portion of the article by saying:

"I'd gladly pay to see her several times a week for the next fifteen years."

What could I say, after that?  Very little...except to breathe a deep sigh of relief and remind myself to reply to each and every client as though my words will be displayed for all the world to see...because they just might!  :-)

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15 REASONS TO TRY ONLINE COUNSELING

PROFESSIONAL COUNSELING SESSION

FOR LOVERS ONLY

WHY DID I SAY I DO?

DEVOTION EXPLOSION

WHY YOU WON'T GO TO HEAVEN

COUNSELING INTRODUCTION

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