TRANSCRIPT
Back in my second or third year as a psychotherapist, I was working at an outpatient mental health clinic, a psychotherapy clinic in New York City. One of the directors was a woman who was a therapist who was not very kind. She was actually kind of snotty; she was kind of rude. I ended up getting along with her okay, but there was something about her that I just didn’t gel with her on a deeper level. I could see she was quite arrogant.
I also got some of her referrals. She actually liked me enough to want to send me clients, and I saw what she wrote about them, diagnosing them with not very kind diagnoses. I remember one guy she sent me; she diagnosed him with narcissistic personality disorder. I realized she diagnosed him with that not in any way to help him, but because she didn’t like him. I saw the way she talked about people a lot. There was something about her that was abrasive. She didn’t like a lot of the clients; she didn’t like a lot of the therapists. I know whenever I would meet with her in private, she would talk nasty about people a lot—clients and other therapists—like putting them down, like there was something inherently lesser about them.
I realized she had enemies at this clinic, and I realized some of the clients who I was working with, who had had their psychotherapy intake done by her, they didn’t like her. They said, “Who was that lady? She was kind of nasty. She kind of made me feel like there was something wrong or bad about me.”
Well, the reason I bring this up is one morning I came into the clinic, and I was sitting in my office, which was just down the hall from hers. I heard a really loud sound coming from down the hall, and I realized it was her voice. It was something like this: “Oh!” And I was like, something really odd just happened. So I didn’t have a client; I was just writing notes. I went out and peeked out, and I heard “Oh!” again. I went down, and it was coming from her office. She was just standing there right next to her desk, next to her chair, which was a lovely soft chair because she had a permanent office. Me, I was one of the workers. I was the one who made money for the clinic by seeing lots and lots and lots of clients. This was considered a Medicaid mill in a lot of ways. They saw tons and tons of Medicaid clients, and the therapist got a pretty small percentage of the fee that Medicaid would pay for each session.
Well, I would move from different offices. I always had hard-backed chairs, not like this nice soft chair I’m sitting in now. Her chair actually was a lot like this—a soft chair with a nice cushion. But she was standing next to it with a look of just abject disgust and horror and frustration and rage and shame on her face all at once. I was like, “Are you okay?” And she looked at me and she said, “No.” I said, “What happened?” And she said, “Somebody peed on my chair.” Then she turned around, and I could see the whole back of her pants, the whole butt area, was soaking wet. She had sat in urine. She’d come in in the morning, and it was cold urine. She’d sat in it. Someone had snuck into her office and urinated on her chair.
She goes, “Some [ __ ] patient just peed on my chair.” I remember thinking, “Oh, I felt sorry for her.” But then there was another part of me that thought, “You know, there is karma in this life because you’ve been pissing on people the whole year that I’ve been working here. You piss on them with your attitude, and someone got even.” Then I said, “Is there anything I can do?” She said, “No, no.” And then she felt so ashamed; she just closed the door. She probably, I don’t know what she was gonna do—had to go out and buy a new set of clothes. No one carries extra clothes to their office, and she closed her—she just wanted to be alone.
Other therapists were coming out, “Is everything okay?” And I told a couple what had happened. They’re like, a couple of them thought she kind of deserved it. But I went back to my office, and I sat down and I closed the door. I started thinking about it. I was like, “What client would do that to her?” And that takes a lot of guts to sneak into her office and pee. They could get caught; they could get kicked out of the clinic. And then I thought, “Maybe it was a therapist who did that.” And then I thought about it more. I was like, “Who could have done that?” And I never did find out. If the clinic did find out, they never told me. At least I never heard about it; it was never mentioned again. But I thought about it for the two further years that I worked there, and I thought about it in the—well, now it’s 16 years since I quit working there. Who did that? And I really wondered.
Well, I saw some weird things when I worked at this clinic. I remember one thing that happened is it happened for about six months in the bathroom. It was the therapist’s bathroom, the clinician’s bathroom. Someone was drawing dirty little cartoon pictures of women with big boobs, big boobs, and you could see their genitals. It was like really clumsy scratched-out drawings, these cartoons, and it was always above the toilet. It was like, “Who is doing this? There’s a weird pervy clinician doing it here.” Well, it actually came to light who did it. It was one of the psychiatrists on staff, actually. I remember saying, “This guy’s working with clients. This is disturbed. There’s something really off about that.” There’s something weird about a person who—and I remember a couple of the therapists said, “Don’t judge him. Come on, he’s just having fun.” And then I remember thinking, “They’re defending this guy.” I mean, that’s like four-year-old, five-year-old, maybe ten-year-old level of sort of humor. That’s like weird humor. I thought, “Ah, don’t send any of my clients to this guy for referrals,” because sometimes I had to send them for Medicaid psychiatric evaluations. Like, I don’t want them seeing him. But I thought maybe he did it. I have no idea, but was it a client? I don’t know. But it’s a curious thing, and I think there’s something true about it in this world. There’s sort of a karmic justice to the way that the world works.