Christie Tate is a Chicago-based writer and essayist. She has been published in The New York Times (Modern Love), The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and elsewhere. Christie has just published her memoir, Group: How One Therapist and a Circle of Strangers Saved My Life, a book which has just become the latest pick for Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club.
Today, Christie’s on the blog to tell us a little bit about her journey with group therapy helped her to find love. Read on …
Christie Tate (Photo by Mary Rafferty Photography).
There were two flights to Buenos Aires, and I wanted the later one. Yes, we could use extra time to pack after our wedding weekend, but I also wanted to go to my group therapy session on Monday morning.
“We’ll take the seven o’clock,” John said, and several clicks later everything was set. It was one of many things I loved about the man I was going to marry: He didn’t flinch when I asked to plan our first 48 hours as a married couple around my group therapy schedule.
Years before I met John, I was a high-achieving law student sinking into a deep depression when a guy I’d gone on five dates with stopped calling. He was just the latest in a lifetime of romantic misses. Before five-date guy ghosted me, there’d been a smattering of blind dates that went nowhere, and a distressing pattern of falling for charismatic alcoholics whose capacity for intimacy topped out at two hours. There had also been sober, stable men who wanted to open the car door for me and hold my hand at the movies, but those steady men made my skin crawl. And I wasn’t faring well in friendships either. “Come visit us in Houston,” girlfriends from college said into my voice mail, and I never returned the calls. Law school classmates invited me to get dim sum or blow off studying to catch a Cubs game or watch the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in downtown Chicago, but I declined. “Yes” wouldn’t come out of my mouth no matter how lonely I was.
When my isolation and depression led me to fantasies about ending my life, I knew I needed help. When a friend recommended her therapist, a doctor who ran groups and was allegedly an “expert” at relationship issues, I was sceptical. How would sharing a therapy session with strangers help me? When I met with the doctor he promised me that group was a route out of isolation. What did I have to lose?
“Top or bottom?” This was the opening salvo lobbed at me by a group mate in my first session. Hazing. Six strangers stared at me, waiting to see how I’d respond. I feigned bravado and offered a mostly theoretical answer to the question about my positional preferences.
“Top,” I said, to sound sexually bold and comfortable with the topic.
Fake answers, I assumed, were frowned upon in therapy, but I was so defensive about my paltry sexual explorations that I couldn’t imagine telling the truth, which would have sounded like, “I wish I knew, buddy.”
“Ahem,” the therapist said, interrupting the exchange. “What are you feeling?”
Feelings? What did they have to do with anything? No way was I telling these people that I felt defensive, annoyed, and slightly violated. I stared at him long and hard, as it slowly dawned on me that I would not reap the promises of group therapy—connection, intimacy, a greater understanding of my dysfunctional relationship patterns—if I lied about who I was. But how could I tell the truth when I didn’t trust any of them? Certainly not the guy in wire-rimmed glasses who initiated my hazing like a frat boy holding court at a kegger. Not the woman sitting to my right in sensible navy shoes who helpfully pointed out that my hands were shaking as I presented my bogus sexual insouciance. I definitely didn’t trust the therapist sitting next to my left who promised transformation if I agreed to bring my whole self to group.
After extensive coaching from the therapist, I reluctantly admitted the truth: “ I feel shame.”
Riding the train to law school after that first session, I felt a mixture of hope and despair. Group might be the perfect place to work on my relationship issues, but could I do it? Would I have to cry in front of those strangers? Would we have arguments? Would I have to tell them all of my secrets, like how I gorged on apples at night and how badly I wanted a boyfriend with good hygiene and a healthy sex drive? In the second session, I asked these questions. Every head around me nodded. “Yes, you will cry. Yes, we will argue. Yes, all of your secrets will come out.”
“Let’s start now,” the guy who asked me about my sex life said. “What’s the thing you least want to tell us?”
My neck muscles tensed as I looked around the circle. How badly did I want to change?
“I just want y’all to like me,” I said, and then burst into tears. The group laughed as if they understood the ache inside me. That act of radical honesty was a road map to how to get well in therapy. Say the hard thing, let the armour crack and fall away.
More cracks followed. Eight months into treatment, the therapist announced a two-week hiatus. Anxiety roiled through me as I pictured him gallivanting around Mexico on vacation, while my group mates and I waited for sessions to resume.
“Don’t go,” I wailed. “I need you! I need these sessions.” Two weeks without group felt like two weeks of solitary confinement in the dank, unlit confines of my psyche. When my therapist asked me the inevitable question—“what are you feeling?”—I was ready with an answer: “Sad to miss group and afraid you won’t come back.” And just like that, I got the opportunity to work on my deep abandonment issues in real time with six group mates as my witnesses.
By my second year, I embarked on dating, and group sessions became a forum to dissect each potential suitor.
“How’d your date go?” a group member would ask.
“He ordered a bottle of wine after I mentioned I was sober,” I’d say, hoping for a thumbs’ up because I was tired of being single.
“Red flag, move on,” they’d say. They repeated that refrain about the guy who spent our date discussing his fondness for cocaine, the guy who asked me to pay his rent, and the married guy. I didn’t always follow their guidance at the outset, but they were always right.
When I fell in love, but it didn’t work out, I took my heartache straight to the circle.
“Y’all, he’s gone. He said I’m not ‘the one,’” I reported through tears after my second dumping in eight months. By then, I’d been in treatment over three years and felt devastated the group sessions hadn’t resulted in a healthy relationship. One group mate passed me the tissues, and another offered her me her hand to hold. “Group therapy doesn’t work!” I wailed.
“It works,” they said, “you’ll see.” After the session, the guys in the group insisted I join them for breakfast. “We’ll treat you to scrambled eggs and hot tea.” At the diner around the corner, they gamely let me rehash my broken relationship all over again.
Five years into treatment, it was a group mate who first pronounced John as “the one.” “I’m calling it. It’s him,” he said.
“Why?” I asked. John and I had gone on two above-average dates—one to the opera and one to an Italian place on Grand Avenue. John didn’t seem like a raging alcoholic or commitment phobic, but it was too early to monogram towels.
“You’re different with him. Less crazy.”
As with every other relationship, I kept my group apprised of data I collected about John. He didn’t drink, wasn’t obsessive about working out, and hadn’t asked to borrow money. I could see a future with him, a real future with joint tenancy, kids, and retirement plans. My group mates could see it too.
“I’m in group therapy,” I told John after our fourth date. “I tell my group everything so if you don’t like that, we should stop right now.” John understood. When we designed my engagement ring a year later, we chose a setting that reflected my path to him: one large stone, representing us, flanked on either side by three smaller stones, representing group.
At my wedding reception, my group mates congratulated me and John. One by one, they hugged me and whispered, “I knew you’d end up here.”
The Monday after our wedding snow fell from a gray Chicago sky. In the evening, John and I would board a plane to the southern hemisphere. But first—just as I had every Monday morning for seven years—I stepped onto the El train and headed downtown to take my seat in the circle. I wanted to be there, to express with my presence that I was grateful for all the gifts they’d given me, including a space to sort myself out, to practice vulnerability, and to learn to connect with others.
Something I could never do by myself.
—Group: How One Therapist and a Circle of Strangers Saved My Life by Christie Tate (Simon & Schuster Australia) is out now.
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Group
How One Therapist and a Circle of Strangers Saved My Life
The refreshingly original debut memoir of a guarded, over-achieving, self-lacerating young lawyer who reluctantly agrees to get psychologically and emotionally naked in a room of six complete strangers - her psychotherapy group - and in turn finds human connection, and herself.
Christie Tate had just been named the top student in her law school class and finally had her eating disorder under control. Why then was she driving through Chicago fantasising about her own death? Why was she envisioning putting an end...
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