Too Good to Be True: A Memoir by Benjamin Anastas

Author:Benjamin Anastas [Anastas, Benjamin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AmazonEncore
Published: 2012-10-16T04:00:00+00:00

I used to fantasize about the lawsuit I would file against the ponytailed sign-hangers who treated us that summer for endangering our welfare and searing an experience so clearly wrong and clinically misguided into our memories, even if it’s turned out to be more of a curiosity—an indictment of a time and place—than a shattering event. I imagined going to law school, honing my chops on some smaller cases, strictly pro bono, then coming after the freaks behind Freedom to Be for seven figures, maybe eight, in a storm of outraged publicity. I wanted to make them suffer public humiliation just like we had, and, at the same time, I could carry the mantle of justice high, like Atticus Finch.

Sadly, there were several problems with this fantasy, the most serious being that I would have had to go to law school. Beyond that, I had another issue: who could I serve with papers? By the time I was dreaming of a show trial in the civil courts of Massachusetts, the practice had disbanded, the founding ponytail had run into some issues involving female patients and the use of sex surrogates in “therapy,” and the rest of the group had drifted off into other lives, different states. My aunt remembers running into a therapist from the group years later (she also stayed at Freedom to Be that summer), and he reported that he had left psychotherapy and had changed his name to Jeremiah—just Jeremiah. I would have changed my name to an untraceable alias too, given how badly they mishandled the three small children in their care. If they had hung those signs on us in any other decade than the 1970s, I expect that my lawsuit would have been more than an idle daydream. They would have paid for their trespasses, every one of them.

Still, I have to admit something. And it’s hard for me to do. As much as the signs we had to wear at Freedom to Be were a symbol of all that was not free in their practice, all that was coercive, cruel, and wrongheaded, here’s the thing: they nailed us. On that drab and faraway campus off the highway, in the common rooms and in the dangerous privacy of stifling summer offices, the therapist team in charge of our punishment practiced a spooky, clairvoyant art. They saw me. They saw all three of us. They knew how I would turn out. Could it be that a diagnosis scrawled in Magic Marker all those years ago by an anonymous Dr. Feelbad gives the explanation for how I wandered so far off track in life? Have I found my way back to that original condition, powerless and scared, in some kind of autosuggestive trance? If I am lost and broke because I have tried to be TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE too often, will being TRUE instead reverse the losing trend and set me free? Will my son find his own way, immune to my mistakes, or

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