"I can't do this."
I was in Brunder's lake office.
I had woken very early from a fitful sleep, tormented by erotic dreams in which various men, some known to me and some not, touched Lisa sexually in my presence. In my dream, we were just going through our typical Saturday routine. A man fucked her on the grass in front of the bench on which I sat in the little park we like to sit in and have coffee. I watched, my coffee cooling in my hands. She had spilled hers.
I had left Lisa a note that I had gone for a walk and left it on the night stand beside her. It had still been dark as I found my way to the building Brunder used for her office and residence while at the lake. No lights were on when I arrived, and I intended just sit and think while I waited, taking in the view of the lake and the grounds. A light had come on and the door opened. The little mousy assistant from the barbeque eyed me and then asked me if I'd like to wait in her office. She made coffee in the adjoining kitchenette and brought me a cup.
Brunder had entered after 15 or 20 minutes of waiting, and displayed no signs of irritation at having her sleep interrupted.
"I can't," I repeated. "I can't do it."
Brunder put her coffee on her desk, and leaned forward on her arms, her eyes on me.
"Yes, you can, John. You'll be fine. I'll be here anytime you need me. I'll help you get through this."
I stared at her.
"Yes, I can
what
? You'll help me get through
what
?"
Brunder leaned back, and took a sip of coffee as she regarded me.
"John, you came in here to tell me you can't do it, but now you're going to sit there and pretend that you don't know what we're talking about?"
"I want to know that we're both talking about the same thing."
Brunder studied me a moment.
"We're talking about the same thing," she said.
She took another sip of coffee, watching me.
"Breathe, John. Recognize your feelings of anxiety and - "
"You said the outcome could be as mild as some role-playing supplemented by pornography," I said, interrupting her.
She wiped some sleep from her eyes. Her hair was in a rough ponytail. In the back of my mind, I couldn't help but wonder what her bedroom looked like. Did she sleep alone? Or with a man? What kind of man did Brunder take as a lover? Did she dominate him in bed? Or show a tender side she mostly hid from her patients? Maybe she enjoyed letting herself play a submissive role in bed and
be
dominated after being the one in control all day.
She put her coffee down.
"That was the outcome of a case that was similar to yours in some respects, but not all."
"Then make that happen here. You need to make clear to Lisa that that is our direction. She's.... I think she has other ideas."
"Tell me everything that happened after you left here," Brunder said.
I told her everything that happened at the barbeque, and what Lisa and I said and did in bed as we watched the stroke film that Barbaroja and his wife had made. About Lisa begging my permission to let Lewis into our bed.
Brunder thought for a while, sipping her coffee and looking off thoughtfully.
Maybe Brunder preferred women? I toyed with the idea while I waited for her to speak. No, I decided. Not women. Or not primarily - maybe occasionally. But, no, Brunder was primarily hetero. She liked men. And she wouldn't be dominated, but she'd need men who could keep up.
Her eyes returned to me. Could she see my thoughts?
"John... You know, half of what I do is to tell people what they already know. You say you want the 'mild' outcome. Have you envisioned your future life with Lisa under that scenario? Do you foresee any problems with it?"
"You can help us achieve it."
"What problems do you see with that scenario?"
She watched me. I struggled to answer.
"She doesn't have to... She can accept that... " I stopped and tried again. "She'll listen to you. If you tell her that's the way it has to be."
"I'm not her boss, John. It's not my job to give orders to people about how to live their lives. I diagnose what possible strategies people can use, given the circumstances of their psychology, their history, their relationships, to find a way to the most satisfactory and healthy outcomes. It would be irresponsible of me, it would even be a violation of ethics, to tell them to do things they cannot do, to set them up for failure."
"You don't know she'd... fail."
"John," she said sternly. "Look at it. You need to face it.
You
know she'd fail. No matter how hard she tried. Eventually, she would slip. I'm not going to put her in a position to feel shameful about doing something she can't help doing."
"People do it," I protested. "There's no reason she can't. Lot's of people manage."
"Fewer than you'd think, John. And she's already promised to and failed. Isn't that how you both understood the commitment you made when you got married? You swore to be faithful to each other and she failed to live up to that."
"Once."
"It was a lot more than once, John."
"I mean, just one... lover. She slipped up, yeah, that doesn't mean she can't resolve to never do it again and stick to that. I mean, if she loves me, she can do it. She has free will, she can make her own fucking choices. If I'm not enough, than what the fuck are we doing? Should I just divorce her?"
"Okay. That's a lot you said there. Let's start at the end. Should you just divorce her? Obviously that's an option. But you have put a lot of work, and even suffering, into avoiding that, into saving your marriage. You love her. You know she loves you. So you're trying to find a way to make it work. I suggest you see this through to the end and see if our current path will lead you to a place that you both can live with. I think it will. I know it will, if you will stay committed and invested in it, and the therapy. You can both come out of this with an
uncommonly
happy marriage, John. That's my promise to you.
"Now, you talk about free will, and about how she can just make certain choices. I won't get into a philosophical debate about free will, beyond saying that it is by no means certain or agreed that free will is not just an illusion. But what you said reminds me of how people sometimes talk about people with addictions. Why don't they just make better decisions? Why don't they stop being irresponsible and hurting the people they love and just stop? If the addict really loved their loved ones, wouldn't they stop? It's not that simple, John."
"You think she's... addicted?"
"No, that's not my diagnosis - I'm just saying that it's a very useful analogy, John. But people do develop sex addictions. And one of things about sex addictions that sets it apart from other addictions, like alcohol or drugs or smoking, is that sex is not something you can or should just stop entirely. It's like eating - it's something that healthy people do regularly. So, that makes it more difficult to find the right path. And it is even quite different from food addiction in that you can do it a lot with no adverse health effects as long as you do it safely."
"Fine," I said. "Let's treat it like an addiction then. She can recover."
"Addiction is a mental illness, John. She doesn't have a mental illness and it would be flat-out malpractice for me to treat her as if she did. And, even if I did, recovering addicts almost always have relapses - several of them. A 'relapse' of that sort would cause a lot of damage to your relationship, maybe even end it, if we don't do the work to prepare
you
for that. It's one thing for someone with a food addiction to slip up and relapse once in a while. Imagine a 'relapse' with Lisa - if, in a month, or a year, you catch Lisa cheating again. How are you going to react?"
I tensed. My heart began beating hard.
Brunder nodded.
"Exactly. That's what we're dealing with, John." She leaned forward. "Recall how easy it was for Mark to pick her up, John. He basically just communicated that he was sexually available to her, and then half an hour later he was fucking her in the back of his car in an underground parking lot."
Ouch. Fuck.
"John, when someone who is actually adept at seduction tempts her, what do you suppose is going to happen?"
"So it's impossible to stop her from cheating again?"
"No. That's not what I'm saying. This is precisely what we are working on, John. Under the initial rules of your marriage contract with Lisa, she was set up to fail. You didn't know it, she didn't know it, but now we know it. We need to accommodate Lisa's needs so that she is no longer set up for failure. That means renegotiating what the rules are, renegotiating the contract."
I put my coffee on the table beside me and leaned forward, my elbows on my knees, my head in my hands, overwhelmed.
"Count ten breaths in your head, John, taking them slowly. Focus on your breathing. And then count back from ten. Now recognize that feeling of anxiety. Accept it as something external to you. Do you feel it fading?"
After a moment, I leaned back again.
"Just, fucking, spell it out," I said.
Brunder studied me a moment.
"You know the main thing. You're going to have to let her take lovers."
I sighed.
"Why? If I'm not enough for her, I can... I mean, I get her off, I know I do. She doesn't fake her orgasms with me. What does she need that...."
"John, this is the other point that you brought up that we need to address. Almost all men have anxiety about 'not being enough' sexually. The cultural narrative about masculine sexuality gets deeply internalized in men's psyche, in their superegos. It's just a narrative, a story. You don't have to be enough. Let go of that demand. Rebel against the false authority of it.
"Let's do a thought experiment. Imagine that all your life, you had a certain type of orgasm that you thought was the only kind. Lisa gave you those. You achieved them through masturbation also. One day, in a weak moment, you engage sexually with another woman. You discover that this woman, through some accident of biology, was capable of giving you an orgasm that was many times more powerful and satisfying than the sort that Lisa could give you or that you could give yourself. Imagine that for the first time in your life, you
ejaculated
in response to this woman's body. You had never ejaculated before. This woman, this
type
of woman, is capable of making your body do things that Lisa cannot, no matter how hard she tries. Do you think less of Lisa? No. It's not her fault. She loves you, and she does everything she can to please you."
