Do everything I say for a year and you’ll be smoke-free and find a publisher,” Dr. W promised.
He had to be kidding. As a broke, chain-smoking, 40-year-old Manhattan journalist mired in book rejections, a bad marriage and mythic midlife crisis, I’d entered his office ready to ditch my spouse and teaching gig, finding them both too draining. Instead Dr. W—a 50-year-old, dashing, brilliant addiction specialist—insisted I put on the nicotine patch, increase my class load and cease all criticism of my husband. I wanted to bash him in the head.
But he’d come highly recommended. I hated my 27-year, two-pack-a-day habit, and everything else I’d tried to stem my addictive personality had failed. I was desperate. When he revealed he was a former smoker himself whose mother was an alcoholic, I decided to trust him. Each week he scrawled odd haiku-sounding mandates on the backs of his business cards: “Lead the least secretive life you can.” “Don’t stop yourself from crying.” “Have your mate hold you one hour nightly, no speaking.” Over the next year, I embraced his blunt behavioral approach, centered on “suffering well.” He weaned me off cigarettes, then marijuana, alcohol, gum, junk food, all bread products. I did the substance shuffle until my main compulsion was him. He became my higher power.
Without my long-term crutches, I was raw, vulnerable, defenseless, “like a burn victim with no skin so when you go outside, even the air hurts,” he said. In deprivation overload, I regressed, a raging feminist following this sexist eccentric like a three-year-old clinging to daddy. He deemed it healthy, saying addicts depended on substances, not people. I was skeptical.
But soon my marriage thrived. So did work. I sold seven books in seven years, two about a swashbuckling “James Bond of Psychotherapy.” I tripled my income, along with my reliance on him. A financial whiz, he advised refinancing our mortgage to pay off debts, buying the apartment next door and creating a 2,300 square foot dream house/office. Grateful, I bought him a Waterman pen and rare Freud first editions and publicized his psychoanalytic institute. He treated so many colleagues and students I referred, I wanted a card, like Korean nail salons, where ten punches gets a freebie. I was sure “the transference cure,” where a patient gets fixed by sheer devotion to their therapist, described us. Indeed my best friend from childhood asked if we were sleeping together. Out of thousands of inappropriate aspects of our relationship, that wasn’t one.
Still, he was a boundary breaker who was always late, switched appointments constantly, and also treated my husband, whose career heated up too. No blank slate, Dr. W answered my personal questions with surprising frankness, making me feel special. Until I learned that during my decade of treatment, his world had taken difficult twists, the polar opposite of mine, starting with the destruction of his Battery Park townhouse in the 9/11 attacks. His wife and daughter were traumatized witnessing their home’s destruction. His wife left her job. When he admitted drinking more, I was alarmed he was suffering poorly, worried that ten drinks a week was too much for someone with alcoholism in his family, which amused him. I helped edit his academic addiction book, partly as an excuse to see him more, sometimes daily. I was psychoanalyzing his substance intake while he was becoming an author, as if we’d switched roles. The next impulse disorder I had to quit was him, I joked. Then he quit me.
He moved away three years ago, building a new house and practice in the South. He recommended his New York protégé, whom I saw weekly. Yet Dr. W and I kept emailing, sometimes obsessively. When his wife became ill, he seemed stressed and less available. On his Manhattan trips, I scheduled multiple sessions in five days, a junkie craving a bigger fix.
I irrationally feared the wisdom and kindness he’d shown me had somehow reversed his good fortune. I overanalyzed my Jewish guilt towards my WASP shrink. Had I Oedipally surpassed my father figure, greedily grabbing too much, causing a karmic imbalance? Megalomania made me think I had power over his fate, he responded, scoffing at my fantasy that he needed my assistance or connections. Our destinies weren’t connected. But a Jungian astrologist said directing my male angst at Dr. W increased my wedded bliss, my obsession with him fueled my creativity, and astrologically he was “the poison that cures me.” I wanted to be the poison curing him back.
“Susan, you don’t honestly think the world is that symmetrical?” Dr. W asked. But I did.
This past April I mistakenly had a referral contact his protégé directly instead of going through Dr. W, as was the protocol. Our usual arguing turned volatile and ugly. He accused me of trying to control his institute, which I thought was absurd. The fight escalated, with him threatening to cancel our upcoming sessions. When he stopped returning my emails and phone messages, I was devastated, unable to eat or sleep for two weeks. I felt sick, paranoid, kicked in the gut. It was worse than all my other withdrawal symptoms combined.
In a panic, I called a therapist friend who labeled it “Abandonment 101,” chronicling her profound love dance with her psychoanalytic guru of 14 years. “He was my omnipotent magic parent,” she recalled. “I was the good daughter, publicizing his work.” I laughed at the parallels. But then he rejected her outright, causing a serious meltdown. Ultimately she detached, leaning on her spouse and “owning her own power,” advising I do the same.
But I couldn’t. When Dr. W apologized, I ran back. Afraid to lose my lucky charm, I negotiated insane deals with myself: If I stayed smoke-free, thin, hot with my husband and published, it was worth the rollercoaster. Forever the rebel, the next face-to-face time he offered me was in the middle of August, when all the other shrinks will be away. I said yes, still paying, begging for his help to get me unhooked from him.
Susan Shapiro is the author of the new novel Speed Shrinking (St. Martin’s Press), which comes out this week. She will host a “speed shrinking” party for charity at Housing Works on Aug. 26 from 7-8:30 p.m. Visit www.susanshapiro.net for other book-related events.
