“Hey, here’s someone from Pacifica, too,” my boyfriend, Will, noted, leafing through a pamphlet of upcoming speakers invited to the Seattle Jung Society.

We were sitting in the back of a Victorian-era dining room that had been converted into a classroom at seven p.m. on a Saturday night. During a whirlwind weekend in December, I was invited to speak about my dissertation topic: Sabina Spielrein. Will and I flew separately to wintry Washington, because I had booked my ticket before we were together.

I flew Alaska Air and landed near the gift shop for Sub Pop Records, where I walked out into the memory of the last time I truly felt free. I belonged in the Pacific Northwest, feeling out of place everywhere else after being forced to leave Eugene. At the Society, I nervously awaited an audience, rubbing my notes raw while the tech man fiddled with his projector to display my PowerPoint. I always preferred to project images on screen, anything to keep other eyes from catching mine. In my anxiety, I half-registered Will’s voice and looked down to his pointed finger on the page. I was instantly sick.

I saw my previous therapist’s picture next to a short bio and description of his upcoming talk on “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

“What’s wrong?” Will asked, noticing my twisted mouth.

“That’s him. The therapist…Damon,” I whispered.

He put his arm around me. “Oh my god, baby, I had no idea. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s OK. I….”

I hadn’t thought about him in a long time. I wasn’t completely unburdened of him, I knew, but the nightmares were fewer and farther between. I had regained enough of myself that I could discern my own likes and dislikes again, as well as what I did and did not consent to doing while he was my therapist.

“What do you need?” he asked.

“I’m fine. You know what? People will always abuse positions of authority, but not everyone has the chance to correct certain rumors,” I said, poised to take the stage. Spielrien and Jung’s intimate relationship had never been more than conjecture. I wasn’t interested in that, apart from its emotional ramifications as depicted in her diaries. But I was interested in why her sexuality overshadowed her other writing, her work, and her genius throughout history. I was interested in why a label like “mistress” was able to stick, but “pioneer” wasn’t. At 7:15, I opened my binder and didn’t look up from the podium until I ran out of words.

However, for a moment before I began to speak, Damon’s image reverberated throughout my body. I was transported to his consulting room three years prior and retreated for an instant into one of the worst days of my life.

“So, I think it’s something we should talk about,” Damon had said, across from me in his office. He was a divorced man in his forties with two young children, engaged to a new woman, with streaks of grey salting his auburn hair. I was an ambitious 25-year-old pursuing my doctorate, processing a history of familial male violence. He was also a professor on campus and was breaking the rules by counseling me at all. He held a big Red Book in his hands like an albatross and was known to seduce students with fairy tales. He looked as though a PhD was plan B after failing as an indie musician.

“I suppose so. It doesn’t seem to be going away,” I said, knowing full well he meant the ongoing discussion of our potential affair. I recently told him that I developed feelings for him over the course of my three-year treatment. I even read him a journal entry or two about the times his visage snuck into my dreams. I looked up the word for it—transference—and thought airing it out was my best way through the embarrassment.

Damon smiled. “I am flattered.”

“What else are you?” I asked, not uninterested in how far I could test his Hippocratic oath. He knew well the depth to which my own boundaries had been repeatedly broken down by men. I trusted him; he knew my wounding better than anyone and I suppose I held out hope that he could help me. He chose a different path.

“I think we need to examine where this is coming from. What you have projected onto me, which I want to say is completely normal, but is more symbolic than literal. I think that’s what we should talk about,” he said.

“And you don’t think that two people could ever be inspired to act on a symbol?” I said.

“And what do you think is going on here?” he asked, with a grin.

“Don’t you think about me?”

He sighed. “I try not to.” He took his glasses off and rubbed the sides of his nose, closed his eyes for a second before continuing. “When you first started seeing me, you were in so much pain, and I felt very protective of you.”

“Is that what you feel now?”

“That’s all I felt at the time.”

“But right now. What do you feel now?”

There was a long pause before he answered. “I don’t know. I’m attracted to you and I’m fascinated by you. You know that it’s not as one-sided as it…obviously there is something between us…a certain kind of eros, but—”

“But what? What about my dreams? What about your dreams?”

“It isn’t that simple,” he stated, anxiously. “There are just too many factors to consider. I could lose my license for one, did you know that? You could turn out to be like those women in New York who went after their therapist after sleeping with him.”

“That wasn’t my question,” I said.

He narrowed his eyes before answering me. “Yes. I’ve thought about it. Sometimes I think it would be pretty great, being with you, and sometimes it can be difficult in here…the wanting.”

There it was. A break in the container.

“But you’re nothing for me in the life I’ve created,” he said. “I mean, in the way of family, children. You’re something totally other. And then you come in here talking about ‘only living once’ and it affects me. You affect me.” He took a breath. “Maybe I’m just lying to myself thinking I can settle for anything less than….”

“Than what?” I asked. “I mean, what should we do?”

“Should, shouldn’t, they don’t really mean anything.”

“Okay, then what do you want to do?”

“Maybe…maybe this is what your psyche needs right now. Maybe we….”

“Maybe we, what?” I said, my hands trembling.

“Maybe it’s time we actually do this.”

I tensed, not completely sure we weren’t still playing our game. I was also unaware that he had been manipulating the game since its inception.

We sat in silence, staring at each other. Moonlight shone into the office through little white-painted slits in the window; I sat on the blue velvet couch and he sat in his brown leather chair across from me. I had put on makeup earlier that at that moment felt superfluous. I had curled my hair for volume, but it withered under sweat from my scalp. I was used to this, our danse macabre, but I wasn’t used to it spilling out of the imagination. I tried to recalibrate, to learn the new rules quickly.

 

“I know the first thing that would change,” he said, and stood up. He took the check I left for him on the table and threw it in my face.

“You would want to stop our sessions?” I asked, confused, staring at the dollar amount I had written on the little piece of beige paper. Even though he offered a sliding scale, I still had to use student loan money to pay for his services.

“Well, I think we would have to,” he said. “Or not. I don’t know.” He ran a hand through his hair and began to pace around the room.

“But you’re still taking this for today, aren’t you?” I held the check out to him.

“Yes,” he said, and stashed it in his slacks’ left pocket. “But even on a practical level, what about logistics? Where would we go? A hotel?”

I laughed. “Like you would ever even touch me,” I said, as much a dare as a warning. I thought he was calling my bluff, that this was my breakthrough.

“Why do you say that? How do you know I wouldn’t?”

“I just know,” I said.

“How?”

“Because it’s just a silly fantasy.”

“Maybe it is.” He looked at and through me, determined, before glancing down at his watch. “Look, I know there are a lot of unanswered questions, but our time is up, and I have a class I need to teach.”

I stood and motioned to leave but struggled with my backpack.

“Here, let me help you with that,” he said. He lifted the strap of my bag around my shoulder and let his finger linger on my skin, exposed through a fishnet texture. He moved to touch me again before catching me in an embrace. He slowly traced the muscles in my lower back and I tightened my grip into fists, standing motionless. His hand roamed underneath my blouse and he felt cool against warm skin that was slick with anxious sweat. He pulled the fabric up and explored me. Finally, when I returned to my body and caught my breath, I was able to speak.

“I have to go,” I said, rather blankly, and walked out of his office. I sat in my car and attempted to turn the key for ten minutes while tears doused my cheeks. Our sessions continued like that for a few more weeks until I extricated myself and refused to return. His emails continued intermittently for a few years; he sent poems, dreams, and pleas to see him. He had an uncanny knack for reaching out in my weakest moments.

For the next two years, as I finished writing my dissertation, nothing tasted right on my tongue. I couldn’t tell anyone; he and my dissertation chair were good friends and I didn’t want to jeopardize my degree. I began to pick at my face, an old habit: the skin just below my ears at first, then underneath my chin. I scarred the area above my eyebrows a bruised purple. I picked until I bled, until I felt relief. I swallowed the information until the statute of limitations made my decision for me.

At night, I was haunted by images of the antique memento mori photographs with which I had become obsessed, showing a deceased family member propped up and colored in by siblings or parents. It was always in the eyes that made it obvious which one was “missing.” I couldn’t sleep for fear of little hands strangling me in my sleep. Dreams were nothing but children turning into ash. I was afraid of becoming another statistic, one more broken brown body.

I began binging Ingmar Bergman movies and listening to Bob Ross say “happy little trees” on a recording to ease me to sleep. On a break from my relationship, I moved back into my parents’ condo in the Central Valley; at the time I told myself that it would be a blessing to live without the distractions of city life. But old family dynamics resurfaced and settled into previous patterns of horror.

Getting back together with my boyfriend helped. Moving to Northern California helped, though my family soon followed. Finding a new, female therapist helped. Graduating helped. But it would be another two years until my shame subsided and I could stop retching at the mere sight of Damon’s name in my inbox. It would be longer still before I could access my anger and accept that there would be no confession, no apology.

Will stood and clapped at the end of my lecture (and endured the “most lively Q&A the Society had ever seen”) and we celebrated with neighborhood karaoke and tequila. He sang The Toadies and I cheered him on over a plate of greasy chili-cheese nachos. The bar was crowded and warm, with black leather swivel chairs and a giant blue wheel on the building’s roof. Green floating dots covered each singer, each a different shade and singing in an inebriated pitch. As happened every time I visited Seattle, I was reminded by the locals not to move there; some tried to scare us off by quoting housing prices, others with fabricated stories about ceaseless drive-by shootings. But it was the land of Thunderpussy, those fearsome women whose identities were secured before I could even say my name aloud with self-assurance—the axe-wielding, tango-trotting, future rock-’n’-roll hall-of-faming, Wonderbra-wearing, ball-busting, glitter-splitting icons.

Will and I made love in a sweaty haze until morning and explored the Chihuly glass gardens before catching our separate flights home. I was given my first check as a visiting scholar, and though it hardly offset the cost of travel which I charged to my credit card, I was thrilled. I could smile.

Dr. Angela Sells lives in Seattle, Washington and teaches women’s studies at the local community college. Her book, Sabina Spielrein: The Woman and the Myth, was published by SUNY Press in 2017 and won gold in Adult Nonfiction by Foreword Reviews. She is currently working on her next book and is busy playing drums in the all-female rock band Atrocity Girl.