This post started as a reflection on therapy and the long hours I spent seeking help with my anger and anxiety. But this morning, I realized it was about Peggy and my long and profoundly successful work with her. Yesterday was Peggy Day. It is the day once a month when I talk to the therapist who has helped me return to life and live meaningfully with love and happiness.
I can’t say it was all her doing, but I will say it would have never happened without her perceptiveness, patience, and honesty. She took me on a trip to the deepest parts of me, and I didn’t like what I saw. I resolved to change.
Peggy and I have turned our attention to what we both believe will be my life’s final significant therapy work- my last chance to be the human I want to be and find true peace.
There is no dancing or hiding with Peggy; she gets right to business and can sniff evasion or delusion like a dog sniffing a bone. She guided me to see myself truthfully and then stayed around to help me pick up the pieces. She never failed to help, calm, and encourage me through some of the darkest days of my life.
We live in an age where any adult or child can decide they are the next Sigmund Freud and get away with it. Social Media is drowning in know-it-alls who know nothing, making it difficult, if not impossible, for people to get the help they deserve and need. Countless targets are aching for help. I was one of them. I’ve been fending off amateur wizards, doctors, gurus, vets, and prophets for years.
So, it is inevitable for Peggy to stand out with me for the training, the skills, and the wisdom to put me in my place and to help people rather than intrude upon them and tell them what to do. There is a big difference; we are losing those boundaries if they are not gone already. Social media has already killed off manners and civility.
If you aren’t selling something, Facebook has become useless for communication. (So has social media most of the time.) I rarely go there, and when I do, I see countless people pretending to be happier, wiser, and happier than they and their families are. As a rule, they mostly share everything but truth and replace it with greed and pretense. Peggie would never go near Facebook, especially not to heal anyone she doesn’t know. In online countries, people communicate with one another without ever really talking to them at all.
I sometimes think Facebook is just another mask for people to wear because they don’t care to tell the truth out in the open.
Peggie is a testament to the power of looking someone right in the eye and finding the truth about them and me. We live in a big hurry to disconnect one human from another and leave communications to software. That is a cold and painful world in my eyes. I thank God for Peggy.
She helped me see that my first marriage was over and face reality. She immediately recognized that Maria and I would be happy together. We started talking several times a week, then less, and now once a month.
I am excited about it. She helped me see that I was breaking down and losing all perspective on the world.
I will never forget the day she spoke quietly, leaned toward me, and said, “Jon, you do know that you are not married, don’t you? You haven’t been married for five or six years. You don’t live together…” I heard thousands of shards of glass fall to the floor. I didn’t know, but everyone else did. She said it softly, but it was a big loud bang in my head.
My whole life, I’ve suffered from grievous panic attacks that paralyzed me and often made my life unbearable. Peggy talked me through it, and several explained what they were and how I could deal with them; they are rare now and never at night. This has special meaning for a former bed wetter.
Panic no longer impacts my life. I was a soft target for the sharks who swim online. People have always seen me as strong and composed but never saw the mess inside.
Peggy has been working with me for nearly twenty years. She is not one of those movie star therapists who cries with me in her office (or, now, Zooms or the computer). She is harsh and direct and wastes no time.
Since the Pandemic, I’ve mostly spoken with Peggy on the telephone, which is comfortable for both of us. I know nothing about her life, but I sense she is roughly my age. We just got comfortable on the phone, which has become easier as I get older.
I’ve been in therapy for more than 50 years of my life—first, a Freudian psychoanalyst in New York City. I never would agree to lie on the couch; we often silently smiled at one another for hours. It wasn’t the correct form of therapy for me.
I saw her for four years and began moving around in my publishing days.
I hid my fears and panics and learned how to live with them. When I got upstate, my marriage fell apart, and I suffered a severe breakdown; my doctor recommended Peggy, although she warned me she was a “New York type of feminist.” Which is, I think, accurate, except that she doesn’t live in New York City.
For me, it was a reference, not a reason to run. I never have to worry about what Peggy is thinking. She tells me. I trust her and listen to her in a way that has transformed my life, strengthened my marriage, and given me calm and happiness (not all the time) I have never had before. She taught me that life doesn’t have to be perfect to be perfect.
As many of you know, leaving publishing and starting my blog rattled me. So did the relentless deterioration of my 35-year marriage and the struggle that followed. I wasn’t strong enough to deal with it. So, I ended up a blogger/writer.
I wasn’t used to being open to strangers entering my life and telling me what to do or not to do. This experience rattled and confused me; book publishing has no equivalent. Although I always managed to hide it, the sudden mass intrusion of the Internet upset me. I was much too arrogant and delusional to handle it.
Almost every week, someone – usually a woman – would message me, claiming to be a therapist and scolding me for one thing or another. It hurts; these people are dangerous and hurt and mislead many trusting people.
I wrote honestly about my vulnerabilities and took some of these messages to Peggy, and she quietly told me that these people were liars and fakes, something that should have occurred to me. No actual therapist, she said, diagnoses people they have never seen or met online and for free. It’s not even legal.
The false therapist sniffed me out, and they could smell me from across the digital space. I wasn’t strong enough to push them out of my life, which was easy.
I realized this was true: false therapists can’t be genuine, and the same trouble was confirmed with the many false vets who appeared regularly when one of our animals was sick. They always know better than we do. And real vets wanted to get paid, and good for them.
I believe in honesty and openness and won’t quit, but it isn’t easy. I am grateful Peggy and I got to an honest place and taught me who to listen to and ignore.
I was also furious at these phony, dishonest people who scoffed at the hard work and learning that go into being a Peggy and pretending to know what to do. How dare they!
This tension was a significant breakthrough for me. My fragility had turned to anger, and I was eating myself up, hurting innocent people along the way. I had also become a willing target. Step by step, I put my life together. Ignoring cruelty works, and so does deleting it on the spot.
Having Peggy help me through that was a turning point. My anger was not coming from strangers on social media but from myself.
Good therapists gauge their clients carefully. She knew when and how to talk to me. Truthfully, I had been waiting for two things all my life: a Maria and a Peggie. The fact that they both came into my life was nothing less than a miracle. I began the healing with love, determination, and trust.
Peggy has never told me what to do; she offers thoughts and feelings and lets me figure them out as we go along. She never nags or criticizes me or makes me feel stupid or incompetent. She knows how to convey her ideas to me skillfully and healingly.
I trust her now and listen to her in a way I can’t always do, even with Maria, to whom I am closer than anyone else. The Peggies of the world would never pretend to be someone they are not and intrude upon a stranger’s life that way. They know how to talk to pain and fear.
When my sister’s illness finally took her over and made it impossible for me to help her in any way, Peggy explained the disease to me quietly and carefully and waited for me to decide that for her sake and mine, I just had to let her go. It was one of the most challenging and painful decisions, and I could not get to it without Peggy; I couldn’t do it.
Yesterday, I got a message from a blog reader who said she was a therapist and wanted to say she thought I had issues about men that I should take seriously and change. No, I thought, no therapist would do that or say that to me, not a stranger hiding behind a computer.
The fake Peggies online don’t appear often anymore; something scares them off. I have worked with Peggy to become a better human. In a world of anger and lies, there is help. And it helps.
I knew that because I know Peggy. I deleted the reader’s message—I couldn’t even list all the messages about Zip when he came—and my deletion worked. It feels good to remove an evil spirit from my life and spare myself, the people I know, and those who read the blog. It feels so much better than anger.
Peggie and I have been on an extraordinary journey together. We did it together. We could not have done it alone. This meeting was a life-changing one. It altered the course of my life.
She helped me get to a good pace and was a master at teaching me the final area of finding myself: my talents and kindness, my confidence, my sense of self, and my purpose in life.
I sometimes shiver when I think of how many false, lazy, and dishonest people take advantage of the anonymity and ease with which they can target weak and vulnerable people like I was for many years and feed off of them like vampires and ghouls. A thick blanket existed between my visible self and the profound truths inside me. I read Thomas Merton’s books on a mountain for a year and learned to look inside myself and find the truth.
Peggie picked it up from there.
I wish all troubled people could have a Peggy. Knowing she is there has given me a foundation to build my life. There is always someone who has my back.
I talked to Peggy for an hour yesterday. Although our work is almost done, I’m not ready to leave her yet. I have a date to speak with her in February.
Here I am, 77 years old, and I have a list of things I want to discuss. Some of them are painful, but I feel utterly safe. I know I will feel better.
I pray everyone could have a Peggy, someone who knows to keep the dark away but never tells a lie.
