Forgive My Father, For He Knows Not What He Does, and the Great Failure of Cognitive Therapy

. I went to a therapists’ house for an informal session. she was going to hook me up; we were acquaintances. She had this deep soft couch i kept flinging myself all over
i was wearing this short chinese silk dress and no panties. i kept getting embarassed, not able to control my body as i was positioning myself on this couch in crazy ways. she seemed to understand and as she was talking to me kept covering me up in a motherly fashion

i don’t really know what i was going into therapy for.. of course, i was never sure of what i was there for when i was enrolled in therapy. it was like brushing your hair?

the therapist turned from understanding earthy female to attractive business-oriented black male, kind of in the vein of my old landlord. he analyzed a dream dave had had last night. i don’t remember which one this was. He had a lot of dreams last night.. we’ve both been storming brains in our sleep lately – lots of sleep, thankfully.

“How did this dream make you feel?” he asked. Instantly my heart began pounding and i started talking even though i had no idea what was coming out of my mouth, a throwback to my old therapy sessions, where i would often dissociate or become bored, instantly blacking out sound when we arrived at a real changing point, or when we got around to the pith of a problem I truly wanted to solve.

The dream in discussion i didn’t seem to mind that much. “At least I wasn’t a giant spider, sucking the life out of him,” I joked. (That’s the one dream I do remember from the previous night. Tried not to read too much into that one!) My heart was still pounding and I was reeling, perhaps it happens when i tell the truth – euphoria of naked speaking.

“See now that’s -------“ I heard ‘cute’ but knew that wasn’t the word he was saying, “When you do that right there, that’s it.” I giggled because i knew he could tell i was bullshitting, or dissociating, or just not able to integrate the sides of my brain when speaking truthfully. Was he flirting with me? A new kind of therapy? This could actually work! But I knew he wasn’t and that perhaps he thought I thought he was. Agh! Fucking cognitive therapy – so boring.

“Repeat after me; ‘F and U’.” Um, ok, like a meditation?

I kept mentally repeating it, but felt too silly to do it outloud. It was surprisingly easy to meditate on this nonsense. His phone rang. “Mind if I take it?” as he answered, “You can sit in the Metaphysical Waiting Room.” He tapes together three Scrabble tiles to give to me; F, U and another I can’t seem to figure out and sends me on my way.

The Metaphysical Waiting Room was through the front door, where “outside” should have been. It looked like a Presbyterian church, lots of white, a balcony. I was in the South! There was a speaker at the podium (not a pulpit):
“F and U. Simple sounds; meaningless and easy. Repeat it everywhere. i do it while i’m waiting for the train. F and U. F and U. Don’t think about the sounds of them together; don’t think at all. Just repeat, over and over.” I look around and there are hundreds of people, some paying attention, others chatting, a few stragglers walking and reciting the letters.

Under the balcony in the center was a VIP section full of high ranking church officials and a lot of apparently very important African Americans, dressed to the nines – church gear was everywhere from robes and stoles to diamond hats and gloves. A man, apparently a proponent of interfaith ministry, walked up with a large sign advertising his new version of the Kaddish in Ebonics. “Why don’t I recite it for everyone here?” he offered.
My father piped up through black teeth, “Yeah, and I’ll get the Hammond out and throw a few chords in from some” -- pause for extra menace—“plantation tunes.”
The African American VIPs silently shuddered.

I walked up to the crowd and called on my dad, half to distract his offended party from his faux pas, half to shock him. I did appear a bit strange, flashing the tattoo and wearing a Chinese minidress. “hey dad, making new friends?” Our public relationship sometimes mimics this exact dynamic: him fucking with people and me having to fuck with him to make it appear that we are all a bunch of assholes and can’t help ourselves; in other words, “Please Forgive My Father, For He Knows Not What He Does.”