What do you think of that?
"What do you think of that?" He raised one eyebrow and his full lips formed a subtle smirk. I could feel his eyes scanning me for any sign of discomfort.
He was a challenging case. All my cases were challenging. It's how I built my reputation, how I built my practice, other therapists sent me the cases that made them uncomfortable or that they couldn't make progress with. Sometimes I could help them, Sometimes I couldn't, but for many clients I was the last stop before heading out the door, before my entire profession gave up on them. My strength wasn't that I was particularly smart, or even particularly skilled as a therapist. I was both those things but there are many therapists who are yet those therapists filled my practice with their cast offs. My strength was the ability not to judge, to wrap my mind around a client's issues and see them as if they were mine. It's no surprise that many of my clients came to me with issues of a sexual nature. The United States no matter what people say is a very repressive place if you feel like you want something different than heteronormative sex and lots off it. My fellow therapists were not immune to this and clients could sense their discomfort, which kept them from making progress. My brain for one reason or another was wired differently. I understood shame in a very profound way and I could keep myself from judging my clients no matter how weird their kinks might be.
Not all of my clients had such issues and it was my understanding when I took on Bill that his issues were not of a sexual nature. His last therapists had been a woman I had gone to school with. They had worked together for almost 2 years until it came out she had been having an affair with him. This was the death of her career, as it should be. A therapeutic relationship is a very intimate one, but there are lines that should never be crossed.
Nothing in Bill's file indicated any issues around sexuality. He was a married man with children, well off, the owner of several high end apartment buildings and other real estate which he had inherited from his mother after she died. He was a little anxious, a little depressed, but what concerned me most was the trauma he might be coping with after his last therapist had taken advantage of him.
This was our fifth session and he was finally beginning to trust me and today he shared with me that he frequently had sex with other men. Not just other men. Straight men, or at least men who told the world they were straight and if everything Bill said was to be believed, men who would likely have continued to be "straight" for the rest of their lives had they not for whatever reason had Bill come into their lives.
I had no issue with sex between men. I describe myself as mostly straight or bisexual in theory. I like Bill, was married with children. We live in a wealthy neighborhood in a suburb of Providence, Rhode Island. But I wasn't unknown to sex with men. I had experimented with men. After high school and I turned 18 there had been periodic experiences. Nothing was ever planned. Usually when I was single and horny and couldn't find a willing woman. I was at peace with the fact that I wasn't straight. I certainly wasn't gay, hadn't been with a man since I got married, or at least since shortly after. Still sex between men wasn't offensive to me. In fact I understood it better than most predominantly heterosexual men.
No what made me uncomfortable, and forced me to use all my clinical skills not to show it, was the power Bill held over these men. Bill said they were all adults and had all consented at some point. He had never been sued that I knew of and he spoke as if he was doing these men a favor. Several of them had been employees of Bill at the time, and others he had blackmailed though how he got the material he never said. This was his first personal disclosure, he was testing me, and how I reacted was important.
