The Pleasure Plan by Laura Zam

Author:Laura Zam
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Health Communications Inc
Published: 2020-05-04T16:00:00+00:00

2. Do you ever use your story to protect yourself?

3. If you wrote a new story, what would happen?

10 The Play

There’s one more practitioner I want to see before I finish a final draft of my play — a trauma therapist. She’s the last person on The Pleasure Plan list. I need her. My play needs her. After spreading my current text on the rug, printing paper stares back at me with single-spaced audacity. I try moving scenes around, hunting for that elusive, curative conclusion. But this hot, dramatic mess is still silly fragments. That’s why I’m glad I have a piece left that might complete this healing puzzle.

I should have contacted Dr. Gregori at the beginning of my odyssey. In my many years of therapy, I never sat down with an expert on childhood sexual abuse. The closest I came was working recently with another type of trauma professional. In keeping with my commitment to all seven practitioners on my list, I had three sessions of EMDR in the last month. It was interesting. But the therapist, Dr. Valansky, wanted to focus on reprocessing my abuse story. I didn’t feel I needed this, especially after my trip to Brooklyn.

I’m hoping Dr. Gregori is different.

The woman I encounter in her waiting room — with short, silver hair and long, tweed shirt — holds promise. She shakes my hand firmly. There’s nary a smile. Leading me to her inner chamber, I feel like I’ve been summoned to the principal’s office. I find her low-pitched voice authoritative as well: “So tell me what brings you here.”

I let it pour out of me, everything I can think of, while this serious pro takes notes. When my vessel is empty and weak, I sip from the bottle of water she gave me before I sat down. The scratch of her pen, the white walls, the glass side table strewn with Psychology Today magazines, they portend a seasoned analysis. Indeed, when Dr. Gregori looks up, she has a proclamation. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you. In fact, there never was.”

“But what about my abuse?” I ask, incredulously. I offer again the highlights of the story I’ve just spent twenty minutes telling her—being molested by three men, on and on. When I get to the phrase haunting me for forty years — Mom saying, “That’s what men are like; don’t go near him” — Dr. Gregori’s mouth turns up for the first time. Light shoots out of her black eyes: “She was right,” the doctor says.

“She was right?”

“Yes!” The doctor nods vigorously, agreeing with my mother’s abandonment. “You needed to know how to protect yourself.” Her cheek-to-cheek smile conveys more friendliness than she’s shown so far. Her teeth are almost white. “This is what survivors need more than anything else — agency. You learned agency.”

Every ounce of me collapses into the gray couch. This therapist’s spin on my history makes my past even heavier than it already is by adding this layer of perplexity. At the very least, I was certain how to contextualize what happened to me. Now, I’m unmoored, and it wears me down.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.