When Therapists Drive Their Patients Crazy - page 5

THE IDEA WAS TO BUST Riggs. The founders took him on in private sessions all week, then on the night of Tuesday, November 4, 1980, as the insane outside world watched Ronald Reagan be elected president, Jerry Binder followed Riggs into Group One. Only one man began to clap, then stopped in confusion. According to patients, Jerry told the group, "Riggs has been going through a hard time. I'm here to help Riggs because we're trying to make some changes. You can start by saying what you think. What," he added, "you really think."

There was a pause, then Riggs sat, slump-shouldered, while the shouting began. "You upset me when you called me a 'beast!'" one woman screamed.

"You've been running a plantation here!" said another.

"You hit people and throw them against walls because you have no idea how to do therapy!" a man yelled. "All you know how to do is beat people up!"

"You broke up my relationship with my husband! said one woman. "And I really loved him."

The screaming went on and on, and it was not constructive criticism; it was rage. "Things are going to change around here," relieved patients in lower groups were told that night. Riggs had been a little crazy. Rather than doing therapy, he was going to get it; everything was going to be all right. But people in Group One knew better. "It's all over," a friend told Lorraine that night. "It's all over."

By morning everyone had heard what happened in Group One, and a wave of release started to spread through the community. Through the day and into the evening patients poured into the Center to confront the therapists, who began to confess to their own exhaustion and ambivalence. Every morning, Lee Woldenberg told a secretary, he had had to stand in the shower for half an hour before he could face walking into the Center. Jerry Binder -- who had already broken his arm by punching a wall in frustration -- shouted that he hated his diet and tore off his Bijan vest.

The talk turned to money; one of the bookkeepers had seen things she didn't understand. And that afternoon the founders revealed what would be the final blow: some of the money patients had donated to the community gym fund had ended up going to the ranch. (After the Center folded, patients were notified that they were entitled to refunds of gym contributions.) In effect, the clinicians' salaries had also helped pay for the ranch: "That's how we could afford to buy and keep it," the men and women who had been putting in 80-hour weeks were told. "By not paying you."

The news of betrayal spread through the community, and with it went wild rumors: Riggs had Swiss bank accounts; bags of money had been delivered to the compound in the middle of the night. By Thursday night, when the whole community gathered in the big auditorium to confront the therapists, who sat before them on the stage, feelings that ironically had been denied and suppressed for nine years came bursting out: anger about beatings, humiliations, careers lost, babies aborted, love affairs ended, roommates broken up. And "Where's the money?" everyone wanted to know. "Where's the money?"

"Riggs just sat there looking stoned," remembered Lisa. "He'd say something and people would scream at him. It was what we had gotten for years, but he was getting it from everbody all at once." Every now and then his eyes welled up with tears, but few people believed they were real. Out in the hallway someone threw up. One man sat on the floor crying: "Don't take away my Center," he wept, "it's my whole life." The chaos and the intensity of the hostility were frightening, but even more terrifying was the growing realization that something had happened here, something terrible -- something no one had even seen.

"I never wanted a goddamn community!" a patient heart Steve Gold say. "All I ever wanted was to do therapy! Why did I allow it?"

"I want to call a lawyer immediately," Lee Woldenberg told another therapist.

"I can't feel my heart," Riggs's wife, Konnie, said over and over as a friend led her away. "I can't feel my heart."

That night Riggs was sent to his parents' Orange County home for his own protection, and the streets in the Center neighborhood filled with patients screaming at the higher-ups they felt had wronged them, apologizing to each other for all they had done. One die-hard Group One man slugged another, then collapsed in recriminations. "If I'd been in the Third Reich," he told his girlfriend in anguish, "I'd have been a Nazi."

Within days the Center building was padlocked. Communal houses broke up as roommates expelled roommates, couples separated, people moved away as fast as they could. Everyone knew it was over. The bond had snapped. "It wasn't the money itself that was important," remembered a clinician. "It was that the idea of trust had been broken. It shattered the idealism. It was like waking up."

And awake, everything looked different.

"You know," a woman from Group One said later to a therapist, "Riggs really did use me."

"Face it," the therapist told her. "We all had our slaves."

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