When Therapists Drive Their Patients Crazy - page 2

PERHAPS IT WAS TRUE, AS Lisa said later, that at first "the therapists seemed to think they'd found some secret -- that they had the potential for developing perfect lives for people." Yet almost from the start it seemed clear that the founders had their eyes on something bigger than the transformation of individual lives. The release of Going Sane in 1975 was heralded with buttons and bumper stickers, and later the Center had its own public relations firm, Phoenix Associates. "The image you want to convey (not say) about them," ordered its manual, "is that Dr. Richard Corriere and Dr. Joseph Hart are the Freuds of today. They are future Nobel Prize winners."

Patient-staffed Phoenix Associates was tireless in its promotional efforts, and the media were happy to cooperate. Joe and Riggs, billed as the Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid of psychology, were perfect talk show guests, serious professionals who were not afraid to joke. Popular Los Angeles host Michael Jackson would later recall Riggs as "charismatic" and "charming." The newspaper feature stories about the Center were unfailingly positive -- replete with glowing images of a new community united in an idealistic quest, of the Gardner Street compound where dogs lazed in the sun, patients dropped by to shoot baskets and bare their souls and therapists talked in quiet intimacy on back porches.

Lost in all the hyper were hard questions about exactly what went on at the Center. What was not mentioned was that many Center therapists were not initially licensed clinical psychologists. And what no reporter, talk show host or book publisher ever learned was the extent of the disjunction between relatively innocuous theories the Center founders discussed in public and the daily reality of those who lived feeling therapy. "We think therapy should be fun," said Riggs. In truth it was more often filled with dread and fear. The standards for living "from feeling" were so endless and so inflexible -- always be honest, always be expressive, always be thin -- that they almost guaranteed constant failure. And the Center's whole social system was set up to ferret out and punish that failure. Friends and housemates were expected to monitor and "bust" each other for falling into old, unfeeling ways, and patients even learned to police themselves: "negative" thoughts -- like "I hate this therapy and want to leave" -- had to be admitted to others for correction.

"All I can think of is the word fucked," says Lisa. "There was always this severe, severe personality flaw -- you were 'fucked' in some area. You were almost gone. You were seriously ill. It was real serious."

Severe flaws required severe corrective measures, according to the testimony of former patients. For example, having roommates who were too accepting could mean being assigned to others more inclined to confront and bust. Not having "proper" amounts of sex could mean being ordered to have more. Who it was with wasn't important; bodies were "biologically wired for sex," and having it was "like shaking hands." Getting pregnant and believing yourself ready to have a child required firm correction of your "misconceptions" of motherhood. Buy a doll, strap weights to it, carry it around and change its diapers, one woman was instructed. That pregnancy ended in abortion, as did all pregnancies (no one knows for sure how many) during the Center's nine-year history.

In the early years at the Center "socko therapy" was considered a good way to get someone out of his head and "in his body." Donna remembers "a period of time when I was getting beat up in every session. I'd go in there terrified of what was going to happen. One night my therapist kicked my whole right side, my ribs. My face was black and blue." And leaving the group was not a reasonable option. When Lorraine, who had been assigned for five weeks to a boyfriend she didn't like, told her group she was leaving therapy, she was tackled on the Center steps and dragged back into the building. "You're trying to kill yourself!" the group berated her. "You might as well commit suicide."

Not all therapists were as hard on patients as others, but none hesitated to give orders. They may have believed they were helping their patients -- although later it would be hard to see how that included having someone put her head in a toilet bowl, as one patient alleged, and telling her this was where she belonged. But it was clear that the mixture of worship and fear with which the therapists were regarded brought an ever-mounting grandiosity of self-perception to all who lived in the compound. While most therapists understand their patients' idealization of them to be transference and a temporary part of the therapeutic process, feeling therapy took it for truth. "Once when I was dating Dominic and we were having trouble," recalls Lisa, "he said, ' I don't understand why you don't want to be with me. I'm one of the eminent therapists in the country.'"

The literature the Center had first sent out to prospective patients talked of a therapy that would last from six months to a year. But as the founders' dependence on the community deepened -- dependence on the low-cost and volunteer labor, financial support and legitimacy it provided -- all talk of completing therapy stopped. "I want you to know," Riggs told a Center gathering, "that we expect you to be with us for the rest of your lives."

Patients didn't argue. "God, we were so arrogant," recalls one woman. "It was like being a super-race. We knew what life was all about. We would talk about how lucky we were to be in a place where we could express our feelings. And Riggs and Joe had become public figures, so there was a certain identification that allowed you to feel terrific. At the same time, we all felt like shit inside because we were busted all the time. It keeps you in such a state of turmoil and fragmentation that you act like a crazy person. And then they say, 'See how crazy you are? You can't leave therapy, you're too crazy.'"

"[I keep] reminding myself," one patient wrote in his diary, describing what had been most remarkable about his day, "that if I don't make it in therapy, my life is ruined."

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