He sat on the edge of the bed holding his head, looking as he did at the lump lying underneath his flimsy blanket. Oh boy, he thought to himself as he felt a literal pang of sadness in his chest. He had a guest, and he could feel her sadness even in her awkward sleep and heavy breathing. It was going to be a long day thinking about this. How to proceed?

He thought back about the night before, vaguely remembering a bacchanalian evening filled with drinking, dancing, and carousing. How had this happened again, and who was this young lady in his bed?

The entire sequence of events actually began the night before with a feeling. A pending sense of doom that he couldn’t shake and that had made him toss and turn all night. He later reported to his dingy office where he worked as a therapist, knowing from the feeling he had felt that some terrible news was coming today. His feelings were never wrong. Never.

The news came when his third session of the day began with a very poor family from a tough part of town. He had always gotten little rushes of emotion when dealing with this family, but now the feeling was so strong his heart was pounding and he actually felt pain in the upper portion of his chest. Something serious was about to go down.

He and the father were friendly. Coming from a blue-collar background himself, he could relate to the family’s struggles, and had always rooted for them to somehow get back on their feet and right the ship. Still, he knew something was off. The daughter, Kim, who was 13 was having some severe emotional problems, that he knew had their roots in some serious issues he had yet to discover. Today he would discover them.

When they arrived he shook hand with the father and chatted politely for a few minutes about the job market, the Chicago Bears, and some other general chit-chat. Kim sat with her eyes staring straight ahead and her arms folded in obvious anger. When he got close to her he knew it was her. He took in all of her pain and it hit him very sharply.

As they sat down they began to go over the old familiar issues. He was avoiding it, knew he was avoiding it, but couldn’t quite bring himself to say it. Still, he knew she was ready today just by the pangs in his chest. After a half-hour it came spilling out easily enough.

“My dad is fucking me,” she said matter of factly, her tone so old it scared him.

“Ok honey, ok,” he said softly, “he’s not going to be doing that anymore if I have anything to say about it.”

The next hour was one of the most awkward of his life. By the sheer nature of his profession he had a “duty to warn” and particularly when a child tells you they are being sexually molested, there is an immediate duty to protect the child. He was sure her story was true, having felt by her emotionally violent nature that this was most likely the case. He dialed the police and began the very long walk to talk to Kim’s father out in the lobby.

The feeling had been almost too much for him to bear. He felt so much for this little girl he felt like he was going to explode. A drink will not help, he explained to himself, you’re just gonna have to work through it. 3 hours later he was drunk.

What happened next was a little difficult to put together. When he drank he turned into someone else. It wasn’t unusual for him to end the night on top of a bar belting out music to a crowded house. It was in a sense a kind of protective identity he fell into to deal with the feelings when they got too powerful. It wasn’t exactly a perfect solution, but it was one that allowed him to balance his very troubled soul in times of crisis. The feelings had been getting stronger lately, and despite the fact that he was now well into his 30’s, he drifted further and further into a regressive adolescence to deal with the feelings when they threatened to overwhelm him.

All of these things raced through his mind as he continued to look at the lump lying in his bed. He peered under the covers and saw that she was fully clothed. A good sign he thought. Then the bed began to rumble and she looked at him with piercing blue eyes.

“I don’t suppose you have anything to eat around here?” she asked in a surprisingly humorous tone.

So they went out for breakfast and talked. Her name was Stephanie and she was a High School teacher who taught English at a school close to his house. They had apparently talked about his feelings and a number of other intimate topics the night before, and she amazingly recited a great deal of this conversation back to him over breakfast. He liked her. Liked her a lot actually, and felt a wave of nausea in his stomach when she told him she lived with her boyfriend.

Still, they talked and laughed for the next hour over breakfast, and he began to remember all of the fun they had the night before drinking and dancing. From the feeling in his stomach he knew this woman was going to be a part of his life, although in what capacity he still had no idea.

“Do you know what an empath is?” she asked mysteriously.

“An emapth,” she explained, drawing closer to his face. “Someone who has an extremely heightened sense of empathy. My whole life I’ve felt like this but I’m not sure I’ve ever met another one. Until now that is.”

He took a long pause and took this woman in. Who the hell was she? A teacher, yes, he knew that, but clearly also someone who drank too much, would spend the night with a stranger, however platonically, and had absolutely no fear of opening up, at least from what he could see.

“I’m not sure why you’re dropping the y off of the term empathy.” Yes, I feel that I have a lot of empathy for people, it is why I became a therapist. I’m not totally sure what you mean by empath though. How is this different than a person with a great deal of empathy? It sounds kind of like science fiction to me.”

“You’re cute,” she said, slowly patting his cheeks.

And with that she threw a ten dollar bill on the table and got up to leave. He was as startled by this abrupt departure as he was about everything else about this strange and mysterious woman.

“Wait a second,” he said anxiously. “Will I ever see you again?”

“I’m sure you will,” she said as she whirled out of the restaurant. Extremely puzzled, he looked down at his untouched plate of scrambled eggs. Suddenly he wanted to go home and do some reading.

Returning home he did some googling and found that there was a wealth of information on empaths and their supposed psychic abilities to read other people. He immediately became discouraged when he read some of the claims people made about being able to read the emotions of animals, as well as the tales of being able to heal people simply by touching them. He had studied psychology for a lot of years, worked very hard, and was skeptical of a number of new age philosophies that tried to offer shortcuts to emotional health through empty promises. He knew from personal experience that human change involved a whole lot more heavy lifting.

Yet a part of him was also highly intrigued by what he read. Scrolling through one particular webpage he found this passage which seemed quite familiar to him; “Empaths are highly sensitive. This is the term commonly used in describing one’s abilities (sensitivity) to another’s emotions and feelings. Empaths have a deep sense of knowing that accompanies empathy and are often compassionate, considerate, and understanding of others.

There are also varying levels of strength in empaths which may be related to the individual’s awareness of self, understanding of the powers of empathy, and/or the acceptance or non-acceptance of empathy by those associated with them, including family and peers. Generally, those who are empathic grow up with these tendencies and do not learn about them until later in life.”

This seemed quite familiar to him, especially the “knowing” part which described something he had been trying to pin down about himself for a number of years. It had gotten especially acute since he had been a therapist, and the final line in this passage about not learning about these tendencies until later in life also seemed interesting to him in light of a number of recent developments in his life.

For the first time in several months he went to the gym that Sunday and worked out. A new emotion was welling up inside oh him that he was not able to identify, and he wanted to exercise to ward off the feeling of anxiety he knew he would experience trying to figure this out. Still, something was new and something had changed. What was it? Did it have something to do with the mysterious new stranger in his life? He wasn’t sure, but he did know the feeling wasn’t altogether unpleasant. He went home and made a call to Dr. Paul Culthbert, his longtime mentor and occasional personal therapist.

The next day he sat in the lobby of Dr. Paul’s old school uptown office. His secretary, a 60ish woman who had been there since John was a student, looked over at him disapprovingly. She didn’t like unplanned interruptions in her schedule, and hadn’t particularly liked John when he was a student of Dr. Pauls’.

“Doctor will be with you shortly,” she said curtly to John as she hurried about the office straightening things up.

He laughed silently to himself at her use of the tem “doctor,” which suggested they were in some kind of medical setting as opposed to a second rate academic lair. She had great reverence for Dr. Paul and the work he did, and her use of the term doctor without his name attached signified her great respect for the great healer she was sure he was.

15 minutes later the great doctor appeared, bleary-eyed and in a rumpled suit that made it look like he may have slept on the very same couch where his patients poured out their souls.

“Come in asshole,” was the response.

Looking around john noticed the familiar stacks of yellowing papers and old books from the 60’s and 70’s. The guy was a classicist, he had to admit, and looking around he hoped to God he wasn’t looking at the ghost of Christmas future. On the other hand he knew the guy was brilliant, and he did kind of admire the mad scientist quality that seemed to permeate every area of his life.

‘What’s on your mind John?” he asked, cutting to the chase.

“Jesus you don’t fuck around, Ok, here’s the thing. I met this woman the other day, and I haven’t been able to get her out of my mind.”

“You mean another chick from a bar? Congratulations asshole. You exploited your limited therapeutic skills to fuck a chick in a tacky lounge. You’ve done us proud.”

“No you judgmental prick, this was something entirely different, not sexual at all actually. She was totally different than any girl I’ve ever met. She had a hyper-sensitive level of insight, kind of mysterious but also kind of odd. Here is the part about her I wanted to talk to you about, She told me I was an empath. I know, it sounds like New Age bullshit, but still, I did some research and I wanted to talk to you. Is there such a thing?”

Dr. Paul took a deep breath and took John in with serious eyes. They knew each other well, and John knew that Dr. Paul’s mentor, the author of one of the most definitive books on teaching therapy, had committed suicide. It had been a subject of heated debate between the two of them, as John had often question the idea that a person could commit suicide and still have relevant things to say about how a therapist should approach empathy and the subject of fostering hope in people.

Dr. Paul had contended that it is always possible to separate the message from the messenger. The history of psychology was filled with men of less than reputable character who had amazingly brilliant things to say about the nature of the human condition. Jung, perhaps the therapist who had influenced John more than any other, was sexually exploitative of his female patients. Freud was an insufferable narcissist who eventually committed suicide. Kohlberg, the gold standard for introducing the idea of moral reasoning in psychology, did as well.

His mentor, Dr. Thomas Mahoney, however had been a different kind of case, dedicating 40 years of rigorous scholarship and personal practice into the study of human empathy. On his 70th birthday he had shot himself in the head, a particularly violent death for a man so gentle that had sent shockwaves though the entire psychological community. His suicide letter read,

“Goodbye to all of you precious people who shared this short, sweet dance with me. I owe you an explanation and I want to assure you that this was not in any way because of you beautiful souls. I have had a secret for most of my life. Being around other people in almost every capacity puts me in intense pain. I have tried to smile through this, but it was a secret I could live with no more. As far as I can understand it, it is some kind of super-heightened sense of empathy, where I actually physically as well as emotionally feel the pain others feel in almost every instance. I know this sounds bizarre, and some may think such a thing has been a curse. It has not. It has allowed me to be what I hope is an effective therapist who made a difference to those brave souls who entrusted me to help, and it has been an honor and a privilege to do so.

As I have gotten older, this ability, if you would like to call it that, has gotten much more acute. I could no longer even go out in public without being immediately blasted by the sensory information others were sending out, and if they were in any kind of distress I felt it acutely. It was therefore time for me to say goodbye, as I could no longer bear this pain, but also not bear the thought of sharing this experience with all of you who I have loved so much. This little life I have been given has been exceptional.”

The letter had fueled an intense sense of speculation among psychologists as to what this man was actually claiming to have experienced. Was he some sort of psychic? A healer? Did he break from reality and have delusions about seeing and hearing other people’s thoughts? The less kind had suggested he had simply gone crazy, and his suicide detracted greatly from his reputation as one of the finest therapists of his generation.

Dr. Paul had also felt this sting, having embraced Mahoney’s teaching and theories regarding human empathy and passed them on to his students and trainees for many years. He and John had often discussed the perils of being a therapist. Divorce and alcoholism were very common in their circle of friends, and Dr. Paul himself had struggled with both of these things. His often rumpled appearance was usually a sure sign that he had been out too late the night before, and sizing him up, John figured he may very well have been out on a bit of a bender very recently.

So as the thoughts of Mahoney’s suicide drifted slowly out of his mind, Dr. Paul once again took notice of John, this time beckoning him to sit down.

“I’m not sure this is a question you want me to answer John, he replied with a sigh. “But to begin to answer your question, I knew you’d be coming today, and yes, it partially explains why I never made it out of these clothes. Partially,” he said, this time laughing and with a smile.

So John started from the beginning, telling him about the young girl he had been seeing who was being sexually assaulted by her father and ending with a strange woman in a coffee shop. He walked him through all of the feelings that accompanied this journey, including the actual physical sensation of pain when his young patient had been sitting and waiting for him in the waiting room.

Dr. Paul nodded and listened with little interruption. Having practiced psychotherapy for 30 years, he had dealt with more than his share of sexual abuse cases, and was all too familiar with the heartbreak and dejection that hearing this stirs up in a person. Instinctively he knew John had talked for nearly an hour, having honed his sense of therapeutic timing after many years of practice.

“I want to think a bit more about this John,” Dr. Paul replied. “You remember I knew you as a student and I always wondered if this was the right field for you, and now you’re describing going to a place where very few therapist have been. Why now, you have to ask yourself, has this kind of super empathy chose to reveal itself to you? You’re on your way as a therapist and even as a public figure. Your books are selling, you go on TV and feed that itch, so I’m wondering why at this point in your career you are so interested in this?”

“I know, I know, you always thought I wanted to be a celebrity first and a therapist second, and maybe you’re right about that. You also told me to pay attention to how people in therapy make me feel, and all I know is that lately I feel like I am taking in every bit of their pain. Is this familiar to you? Have you lived with this? How do you live with it? That’s why I’m here. I’m genuinely stuck. I need answers,” John replied wearily

“Let me ask you something John. Do you really think I’d be wearing the same suit as I did yesterday if I didn’t know what you’re talking about? Sometimes it pushes me to the brink of madness it hurts so much, but at the end of the day I know what we do matters. I’ve seen it. I see it in you actually. See it in how far you’ve come as a therapist. I live with it and I stand it and most days do so with a smile on my face. It’s very tiresome sometimes. Right now I feel very tired, so I want to give you just one piece of advice before I kick you out.”

“Which is?”

“Find the woman.”

Goddamn, John thought to himself as he got on the elevator. I came in for answers and he leaves me with riddles. I should have expected it, he thought to himself. Dr. Paul never gave anyone the answers to anything. He would point you and lead you and encourage you, but he was an absolute expert in making his patients do the heavy lifting themselves.

Find the woman, what did he mean by that? How was he going to do that? In a city of 3 million people he had met her at a bar and gotten only her first name. What was so special about her anyway? He knew he was trying to talk himself out of something he felt to be true though, and attempting to create this cognitive dissonance had left him a terrific headache. He stopped into a bar and ordered a beer.

He left the bar after leaving a big tip and giving the bartender his card. Jesus his ethics were getting shaky. Although he couldn’t cite the exact ethical code, he was pretty sure it wasn’t kosher to pick up new clients while drinking at a bar. He tried to put it out of his head and think about what problem he was trying to solve, which was another fundamental question he always asked of his patients. Why a woman? Why now?

Taking refuge in a coffee shop later that evening, John thought a lot about the women in his life, and how the question of intimacy affected both his role as a therapist and as a potential life partner. He understood the mother template, every therapist has some understanding of this idea, but exploring his relationship with his own mother didn’t offer any immediate clues. Sure they had had their problems growing up, but now they had a very close relationship where they laughed often and shared a number of insights about where it was they had come from. His mother had some intimacy problems, and he was sure some of that had rubbed off on him, but it was something he had worked on very hard when he was a patient in therapy.

He had always subscribed to the idea in one of his favorite old movies called A Bronx Tale that a person got to have 3 great loves in their life. He had a difficult time counting his number, but upon serious reflection concluded that his number was probably zero. Sure he had been in relationships, even long-term, but a true, intimate, totally honest exchange of feelings? No, not really.

So was that his answer? Find a woman to settle down with and all of these painful feelings would go away? It sounded too easy to him and he knew it was short-sighted. He had a cynical view of love as a result of being a therapist, having heard so many stories of betrayals, heartbreak, and depression, as well as seeing the broken families, and the broken lives. He had never seen a couple in therapy he had felt hopeful about, not one, and like many therapists who treat couples, he had some serious doubts about its efficacy. Even the most optimistic statistics said it worked in only about 50 percent of the cases, and this was a number he personally viewed with a great deal of skepticism.

He regarded his own thoughts with a bit of disappointment, knowing if he kept thinking and talking to himself like this about love, that he was creating a loveless reality for himself. It was the one area of his life where his reason constantly wrestled with his emotions. He wanted to share his life with someone, but saw the ugly flip side of the coin on a daily basis. Who was he to defy the odds? Did anyone? Besides his freedom afforded him a tremendous opportunity to write, travel, and do exactly what he wanted to do with his time. Was he ready to give that up? After an hour of this flip-flopping he began the walk home to what he was sure would be a rather sleepless night.

That night he dreamed of being on a massive lake with water surrounding him in every direction. Tiger Woods was his companion, and eggs were hatching all around him on the water. He woke up confused, and immediately wrote down as many of the details of the dream as he could. Tiger Woods, he laughed to himself. Nice touch. He had been in the news a number of times recently for his various infidelities, and John assumed that this was his subconscious presenting him with the cynical side relationship issues.

Eggs? Water? These were different kinds of images however. Rebirth was the theme, and John woke up feeling he was on the verge of some kind of rebirth, although in what capacity he had no idea. He had always paid attention to the feelings that dreams evoked in him, and in this case the clearest feeling he had was one of hope.

He had a very busy day at work ahead of him dealing with the issue of Kim, his young patient who had been molested, and he took a deep breath and prepared to go into battle, not just with a messy bureaucracy but with himself. Kim was now staying with a foster family in a completely different part of town, and he had arranged to meet her at her new house so he could speak with her foster parents and get a sense of how she was holding up emotionally.

Walking up to the porch he again got a very heavy feeling, and tried to sort out exactly what was going on inside of him. Was he feeling Kim’s pain? Was there something dark about this particular foster family he was picking up on? He didn’t know and didn’t want to get to far ahead of himself, as he knew it would distract him from giving Kim his full attention which he was sure she really needed right now.

He knocked on the door and a rather tired looking Black woman in an apron answered the door and beckoned him inside. He immediately got the sense that she was a good woman, but likely also very overwhelmed by taking care of so many children with serious emotional problems. They sat and chatted politely for a few minutes, and the woman explained to John that Kim had thus far been very unresponsive to her as well as to the other children, which they both knew was not particularly surprising considering everything she had recently been through in her life.

He went into the living room and saw Kim sitting there with her arms folded, and once again felt a sharp twist of pain, this time in his lower back. Kim seemed to literally be in another world at this moment, and he knew he had to deal with her very gently, as she was likely experiencing the effects of dealing with a serious trauma.

“Kim?” he said softly. “It’s me John, honey, your counselor, I wanted to talk to you and see if you could tell me a little a bit about how you’re doing here in your new home.”

She looked up and noticed him for the first time since she had arrived as it slowly dawned on him who he was and what he was doing here.

“Do you mind if we get out of here?” she asked hopefully.

“I know a place that has ice cream right down the street, how does that sound to you?” he answered back.

After checking in with her foster mother they began the walk to the store. She seemed disassociated and lost, and he knew these symptoms of post traumatic stress would only get more severe if she was unable to begin to talk about what had happened to her. It was dangerous to push her right now, he knew, and he reminded himself that he could probably be the most helpful to her right now by being a supportive and trustworthy advocate.

“So how do you like it here?” he asked.

“I miss home,” she said after a long pause. “I know I’m supposed to be really mad at my dad right now but I’m not. He loves me and I love him. I miss my brother and my sister. I don’t know any of these kids here and some of them are mean to me. I want to go back home. Why can’t I just go back?” she asked defiantly.

Careful here. He thought to himself. He didn’t want to ruin the trust he had built up with her by invalidating her feelings, but he knew he also had to somehow make it clear to her that what her father was doing was not alright. He new a large part of her knew that, but as is often the case with victims of molestation, the abuse can actually make someone feel good. It was a troubling issue to sort through with children, but he knew if her could even begin a dialogue with her about the subject that perhaps he could begin to try and help her through this.

“The thing is Kim, family members aren’t allowed to have sex with each other, it’s the law. I know it must be weird for you to have to leave your house and have all this trouble happen over something that you thought was between you and your dad. None of this was your fault honey, none of it. I’ve always admired you so much for being able to be honest with me, so I was wondering, if you didn’t think anything was wrong with what was happening, why did you choose to tell me about it.”

As this came out of his mouth we wanted to take it back. He winced as she took the statement in, feeling for a second the wave of self blame that swept over her as a result of his question. Still, it was an important point that needed to me made, and he felt himself teetering on the edge between empathy and confrontation with the hope that he wouldn’t fall over the cliff.

“I don’t know why I told you. It just ended up making everything worse,” she responded.

He felt the urge to rush in and defend himself, but then immediately thought better of that idea. He knew she had more to say, and that by allowing for a little silence she would eventually verbalize the conflict that was going on inside of her.

“The thing was,” she went on. “Other kids were starting to tease me in school, saying I was in love with my dad, and it was making me really mad. I only told one person about it and suddenly everybody in the school knew. It used to make me so mad sometimes I would come home screaming, which is why I had to see you I guess. I don’t know what is wrong with my dad loving me, but everyone else seemed to have a problem with it, so I guess there must be something I don’t know.”

He looked at her and felt an intense pang of sadness, a part of him looking into her soul and seeing nothing but heartache in her future as a result of these mistaken beliefs about sexual betrayal. It would be an incredible undertaking to undo the damage that had already been done to her very impressionable young psyche, and he knew that to challenge her feelings at this point may have the very unfortunate side affect of making her feel an intense experience of shame.

The father-daughter relationship is complicated. A strong attachment to the father in youth could be predictive of so many things in a girl’s later romantic choices, yet in Kim’s case this attachment had been poisoned by repeated sexual assault. Would she ever learn to trust a man after this? She was already beginning to wear the scarlet letter of shame from her father’s activities with her classmates, and he knew from experience that this would be something that would continue to get worse.

“It seems like a part of you might not have been ready to have sex yet though,” John said gently. “You’re a really smart girl, I have always been very impressed by the great comments you make about things, but you also should get to enjoy a few more years of being a kid. Don’t you think? Am I wrong about that?”

“Well I never fit in with al the other kids, you know that. I always had the wrong clothes, the wrong house, the wrong toys, the wrong everything. Being the first one to have sex made me feel like there was something just for me. That there was something the other kids couldn’t have yet,” she explained sadly.

“Well let me tell you something honey, there’s a lot you have that the other kids don’t have yet. For one thing you’re one of the brightest kids I’ve ever worked with. I want so bad for you to grow up and do good things. The way you’ve handled all of this tells me you have an amazing ability to survive, I hope we can continue to talk, and maybe one day we can figure some more of this out,” he said resolutely.

With that she began to cry, softly at first and then in sobs. So much pent up emotion flowed out of this little girl, that he could barely contain his own tears, and soon he was crying with her. It wasn’t the best intervention he knew, but somehow he also knew it might be therapeutic for her to see that he was also vulnerable to. His words of encouragement to her had been something she clearly craved very badly. In working with children, John always reminded himself that, in the words of one of his favorite therapists Rudolph Dreikurs, Children “craved encouragement, like plants crave water.” He knew it was true, and it was his default mode not just with children, but with all of his patients.

They began the slow walk back to her knew house saying very little. At one point Kim tried to hold his hand, and he felt awful about having to tell her he didn’t think this was a good idea. She wanted to feel safe very badly, that was clear, but she had also embedded the idea that she had to reward this safety by providing sexual pleasure. It broke his heart.

As they reached her doorway she began to cry again, but this time he knew he had to be strong for her.

“I want you to hang in there my friend. You are one of the toughest girls I know and I am so proud of the way you’ve handled this. By the way I hear you have been going to a new school. How is that going? Have you made any new friends? “He asked curiously.

“Well it’s a relief that no one there knows about me and my dad. There is this one teacher who had been really, really nice to me. She told me a secret that she knows how I feel and that I could talk to her about anything that I wanted.”

John felt a sharp pain as she said this and then thought about what this feeling really was. It wasn’t pain exactly, but more like a murmur in his heart that made him feel short of breath.

“Umm Kim, what is your teacher’s name?” John asked, trying to mask his anticipation.

“Mrs. Corcoran,” she said.

“But she said I could call her Stephanie when we were alone.”

How to proceed? He stayed up half of the night thinking about these new developments in his life, and how he was going to proceed given this new bit of information he had received. He was a strong believer in the power of intuition, but lately the power of the emotions he had been feeling made it a little bit more difficult to follow. There was simply too much interference, and his circuits were being overloaded to the point of exhaustion. Usually a sound sleeper, he had tossed and turned for a week now and once again felt like he was on the verge of an important discovery, although he was dammed if her knew what this was.

His first move the next day was to call Dr. Paul, although he knew he would be annoyed by the second interruption in less than a week. He had found the woman, that was true, but what he was supposed to do with her now was a bit of a mystery to him. Beyond the ethical considerations, he wanted to fully explore the implications of what such a significant new person might due to his life in terms of disruption and chaos. In short, he was afraid, but knew what Dr. Paul’s reaction would be when he sniffed that out, which he inevitably would. He did have some legitimate ethical questions for Dr. Paul about this matter, and it was under this pretense he made an appointment to see him again with his very annoyed receptionist.

“Jesus you need a lot of handholding,” Dr. Paul said with a laugh.

“Nice to see you too Doctor,’ John replied, brushing past Dr. Paul and inviting himself to sit down.

John launched into the whole story about Stephanie being Kim’s teacher and all of the events and conversation that led up to this revelation. Dr. Paul listened quietly, and then slowly began to shake his head in disappointment.

“Let me ask you something pal, are you more worried about this woman, or about the little girl whose head is so fucked up right now she may never make it back?” D. Paul asked with more venom than he had intended.

“Jesus Paul, where is that coming from? As strange as it might seem, the two seem completely intertwined to me, and I can’t really figure out why. I was hoping you might have some thoughts on the subject.”

Dr. Paul did indeed have a lot of thoughts on the subject, and knew that his strong reaction to John’s dilemma was in part because he had been down the same difficult road. His first wife had been the great love of his life, and together they had lived and worked in Africa for several years as Peace Corps volunteers. When she had died his life was thrown into a tailspin he had never fully recovered from, and his romantic interludes had been the subject of much gossip and whispering in the psychological community since that time.

“I’m sorry John, that was a little of my own baggage acting up there. I just wanted to remind you that in this case you’re a therapist first. Tell me what you mean by intertwined; what made you use that word and what are you basing this feeling on? “

By looking at John’s face, Dr. Paul knew that this question had hit its mark. What he was trying to convey to John was that there was a relationship between empathy in his personal life, including empathy for himself, and the way he conducted himself as a therapist on a daily basis. He had been in John’s shoes, feeling every pain and shedding every tear with his patients as a young therapist. Meeting his wife Susan as a young man had changed everything for him, as all of the pain he felt for people was in part neutralized by the intense emotional bond he had with the woman he considered his soul mate. He wanted John to make this connection himself though, and so far he was a bit to confused and self-absorbed.

“Well doc I guess I just feel like life is leading me somewhere, but I’m not sure where right now. I understand the synchronicity I guess, and yes I want very much to help Kim in any way I can , but I can’t help but think this woman is somehow related to helping Kim.”

“Let me ask you something John, if you had to pick one word, just one, that you think of when you hear the word empathy, what would it be? Don’t think too much, just answer.”

“Wow, what a question, compassion, I guess.”

“Compassion is good John,” Dr. Paul said carefully, ‘but I think you can do a little better.”

“What does that mean?” John asked, somewhat offended that he had failed the test.

“Think about it Pal. Now if you’ll excuse me I have other people to see,” Dr. Paul said firmly as he motioned John towards the door.

Damn this guy, John thought to himself. Why did everything have to be such a goddamnn riddle with him? What the hell was wrong with compassion? He thought it was a pretty good answer, but it was clearly not what Dr. Paul was fishing for. He stopped off at the bar downstairs and ordered a beer, thinking about the cryptic conversation he had just had. He sat there in silence for a while, not wanting to talk to any more bartenders and inadvertently recruit any more patients.

3 beers later he found himself getting angrier and angrier at Dr. Paul, but also knew that it was probably because he had struck an appropriate nerve. He decided to play some music and walked over to the jukebox, looking at his watch as he did. It was 6 P.M. and it was December 8th. Why did that day stick in his head? As he flipped through the screens on the jukebox he stopped on a page with some John Lennon songs. That was it!! Today was the day John had been shot. He scrolled down to the song that he was looking for as a huge smile broke across his face, he selected “Real Love” and walked knowingly back to his seat.

So he left his message, feeling vaguely unsatisfied and disappointed that he hadn’t gotten to talk to her. In between sessions that day, he kept thinking about the movie the Wizard of Oz. His whole life he had gotten repetitive messages that popped into his head for weeks and even years at a time, and he was very curious as to why this movie would present itself to him right now.

He spent most of the afternoon thinking about the movie. It was actually one of his favorite metaphors to use in therapy, as it said so much about people’s interpersonal journeys. Often we have the answers to our problems, that was the easy part. The tough part was getting to the point where we took action in pursuit of these answers. Like Dorothy in the movie, we often have to stumble and stagger and fall down before we understand that there really is no magical destination, but rather a place inside ourselves of acceptance and understanding.

He thought even more about the characters in the story and what they were missing. More importantly he thought about what he was missing. He thought about what usually made him the most defensive, and realized this usually occurred when people pestered him about why he wasn’t married. Just the fact that the word “pestered” occurred to him in this capacity was revealing, and he was once again mindful of his own conflictual feelings about commitment.

Was he missing a heart? In some sense the tin man was the character that rang the truest for him. He gave every ounce of himself as a therapist, but somehow had an undeveloped sense of his own ability to give and receive love when the therapeutic day came to an end. Why was this? It was a question he had explored endlessly, and he knew the basic answers about being a child of divorce, attachment issues, etc.

Later that day another phrase came into his head, an old Buddhist proverb; ‘When the student is ready the teacher appears.” He thought about it all the time with regard to his relationship with Dr. Paul, who was an astute enough therapist to know that giving people answers was essentially a useless exercise. John himself felt the same way about therapy, but had a much more supportive and encouraging style, which he knew was at least in part because of his fear of confrontation. He always rationalized that this was just what he was comfortable with, but lately something had been nagging at him. What if being confrontational was in fact the empathic thing to do?

It wasn’t a new question in the field of psychology. In a ranking of the most influential therapist of the twentieth century, two names that were at the very top of the list were Albert Ellis and Carl Rogers, who had drastically different approaches to human change. John had gravitated towards Rogers, whose emphasis on empathy, active listening, encouragement, and the relationship between the client and the therapist influenced thousands of future therapists, and set the gold standard for how a therapist should conduct himself in a session.

Ellis’s style on the other hand was in your face, attacking people’s self-sabotaging ways of thinking and not allowing people for a second to make a victim of themselves. He was highly effective with this approach, and also influenced thousands of therapists and was in a large part responsible for giving birth to the cognitive-behavioral paradigm that was currently the most popular approach to therapy all around the United States.

John had used Roger’s approach to therapy for his entire career, and had established himself as a very successful therapist who had an excellent rate of client retention. This was a bit of a paradox however, as the goal of therapy was essentially to make it so your clients no longer need to come to therapy, although there was considerable debate as to the amount of time that such a process should take.

What John was actually debating however, was confrontation as it related to the scrutiny of his own behavior. He thought back to one of his favorite books on human behavior, M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled. In it the author makes the point that discipline in personal behavior, although exceedingly difficult, was at the core of a happy human experience. The entire book was full of amazing insights into human behavior, and john had read the book several times. The rub of the story was that the author turned out to be a hard-drinking womanizer who betrayed his wife who he had written such glowing things about. Many people felt these actions nullified the points he made in his book, as he couldn’t live up to the standard he outlined for others in his widely influential book. John disagreed.

It was the end of a long week and John found himself very tired of thinking about all of these issues in his own life.  It all seemed rather self-absorbed, and he needed a little break from his own thoughts for a while. Way against his better judgment, he headed across the street to the dingy bar and ordered a drink. It was going to be a long night.

Over the years he had learned a lot about his own drinking. One of the great lessons he had learned from talking to a lot of people that drank heavily, was that getting drunk was often an antidote to anxiety, which at its core was a future-oriented fear. That was the tack that he took with people who came to him with a drinking problem. What was the fear? What were they avoiding? At this moment John was wondering what he was avoiding, as he scanned his own body looking for signs of anxiety. His heart was beating way too fast. He was fidgeting around in his chair, and clearly knew that something in his system was on high alert. The proper thing to do would be to try and figure this out.

But that’s not what John did.

Waking up the next day he reached over with a sense of pending doom. He saw a dark mane of hair peaking out from under his blanket and felt a great rush of disappointment rise up inside of him. He had been raised Catholic, and sex always came with a hint of shame attached to it. There was more to this feeling though he was sure. He felt something very sharp hit his side, and winced at the realization of the chain of events he was sure he had just put in motion.

He looked up and noticed it was already 11 O’clock. He sat up and tried to figure out his next move. He looked at the snoring unclothed woman laying there and wondered what she needed. He wasn’t a believer that people could have casual, meaningless sex, as he had seen way too much evidence to the contrary. Maybe she was just lonely and needed to feel close to someone. He certainly felt like that sometimes, and reasoned that as long as they were both consenting adults that perhaps this wasn’t that big of a thing to feel so guilty about it. These thoughts were interrupted however by a loud banging on the door. Thinking it was his nosy landlady he slowly ambled over to the door to see what the commotion was all about. He wasn’t remotely prepared for what was at the door. It was Stephanie, holding a carton with coffee and bagels and looking even better then he remembered. Damn.

“Can I come in?”

“Uh, wow, it’s kind of amazing to see you,” was John’s reply.

“Uh yea, you too buddy, that’s why I asked to come in, I’ve been thinking about you.”

Before John could respond to this, he heard a noise in the background, and he felt a familiar feeling of dread rise up inside of him. Soon his worst fears were confirmed, when his houseguest appeared behind him scrambling around looking for her clothes.

“Hey guys,” she said shyly, “sorry to interrupt, but I have to get to work today.”

Stephanie took a long look at John and slowly turned to walk away.

“Wait, I, I wanted to talk to you, can I call you?” he asked pleadingly.

“You don’t seem to be ready for me today John,” she said sharply.

“And by the way doctor, there’s a person in there with you who might also need a little bit of your time.”

Despite being in a big hurry to get back to work, it turned out she did in fact want to talk. Her name was Kristin and she had recently lost her father. She had been drinking a lot, staying out late, and had been with a lot more men then usual lately in an attempt to feel closer to people and to forget for a while the pain that came from losing her father, who she had a great deal of unresolved issues with.

The whole thing made sense from a psychological standpoint. He was an older man, emotionally expressive, and likely said all of the right things at 2 in the morning to get this woman to agree to come home with him. There was a psychological precedent here that went all the way back to Freud called the “repetition compulsion” which explains how a person will repeat a problem from childhood over and over again trying to achieve a different result.

All of these thoughts were John’s attempt to intellectualize however. In this case John had at least on some level used his knowledge of psychology for his own personal gain, and now he wanted to do his best to deal with what he had done. After talking for nearly an hour, John gave her a recommendation for a female therapist he knew who he thought would be a good fit. He also informed her she could call him if she wanted to talk about this more, and even be friends moving forward. It was what he had to give right now.

After she left he thought all day about the situation he had created, and what he could learn from the way he had behaved. He had always considered guilt an essentially useless emotion, but also believed that people had to take personal responsibility for their actions. More importantly, he wanted to think about what it was that made him keep repeating this behavior over and over, and what problem he was trying to solve from his own past life. It was certainly not a new question, and he was pretty familiar with the answers, but now he had to figure out what he was going to do about it. Something deep inside of him told him he had the chance at something spectacular in his life if he could somehow begin to put some of his own demons to bed.

His first instinct was to call Dr. Paul, but he knew he was taking advantage of that relationship, and wanted to think outside the box this time. Besides, he had followed his advice last time. He had “found the girl” whatever the hell that really meant, but clearly that didn’t solve any of his immediate problems. On the other hand he knew and believed that there was no such thing as chance encounters, and that perhaps this latest sequence of events in his life would make more sense when he had the luxury of looking back on them and seeing how they fit into his personal narrative.

He thought back to one of the first things Stephanie ever asked him. What was an empath exactly? He had spent his whole career dating back to his time as a student thinking about the idea of empathy, but the term “empath” had a bit of a different connotation. He decided he wanted to find out more about what it is this term exactly meant, and decided to do a little more research on the subject at the local bookstore.

John read the passage with a sense of heightened curiosity. Was that him? A large part of him always hated talking about his own feelings, and he was resistant to the idea of therapy for many years because of this personality trait. One of his mentors had always told him that a therapist’s best tool was his own feelings and experiences, and he knew this was true, to a point. He had himself written extensively on the subject of countertransference, which refers to the feelings patients stir up in the therapists who they chose to tell their stories to.

John had always felt a little different about this subject though, and wondered if he wasn’t in a sense missing something that most of his colleagues seemed to get. He usually had a pretty good idea how a therapy session was going to go, simply by picking up on cues his patients were giving off in the initial moments. Often he had to wait for a person to find words to describe emotions that he already knew they were feeling, and part of his success as a therapist was in intuiting these feelings and then helping people find the words to describe them.

Conducting therapy didn’t take the toll on John that it did on many therapists. Many of his friends and colleagues in the field found it exceedingly difficult to deal with the way they felt after multiple sessions in a day, but this wasn’t the case with John. What if he was wrong about this though? What if his drinking, his depression, and his lack of intimacy were all some kind of symptom of feeling things too deeply? Was this possible? If it was it rocked the foundation of everything he believed about himself as a therapist.

Although he was often very wild and undisciplined in his personal life, John was the model of a calm, compassionate therapist in session. He attributed this to many year of working through personal issues, which allowed him to go into the sessions a rationale yet empathic voice of reason no matter what his clients chose to bring into therapy. But part of him knew this was bullshit. No one can really hear about other’s misery and suffering day after day and not have it take a toll, it simply wasn’t possible. John thought about this in his own life and realized that where he was concerned, this idea may go well beyond what happened in the confines in therapy. Thinking about this, he felt he was perhaps on the cusp of a significant discovery.

What if it was John’s relationship with the world that had been the source of so may of his difficulties and personal demons and challenges? It wasn’t a totally new thought to him, but knowing that there were people that had actually researched and written books on this subject was exciting to him. He thought back to his childhood, and how he had always felt things very deeply but also very privately as a way of avoiding being mocked for this heightened sensitivity that he felt.

As he was searching through his memory bank, he thought back to something he had seen when he was about 15. He had been visiting his dad when he was a kid and they had gone to the river for the day for a picnic. It had been a fun day hanging with his brothers and sisters, and at one point he had wandered over to a part of the river where the current was extremely fast. He looked up and saw a kid about his age standing on a rock near the river, and then was hit with an amazing pain in his stomach that nearly doubled him over.

He screamed out in pain and a few people looked over. The boy standing on the rock looked over at him, and the two of them locked eyes for what seemed to John like hours. That was the first time John had felt it. He knew. He felt everything the boy on the rock was feeling, and for that moment the two seemed to be transmitting a powerful unspoken understanding about life, pain, and loss. He could feel that the boy on the rock didn’t want to live anymore, and felt a great sense of urgency to do something to help save him.

But it was too late. The boy hurled himself into the current and was quickly swept away. He watched the boy flail in the water, and literally lost his own breath watching him gasp for air.

The boy had changed his mind about wanting to die, he could fell that too. He thrashed and flailed and tried to swim, and dozens of people in the park had now rushed into the water to try and help him. The boy eventually made it back to the shore with the help of these people, but he was unconscious and not responding to CPR. Eventually an ambulance came and took the boy away, but John knew the boy would never be the same again.

As he sat remembering this story he noticed he was crying, and was surprised at how powerful this memory was for him. He hadn’t thought about the boy in a long time, but now looking back wondered if that wasn’t a significant turning point in his life. He had started drinking shortly after that incident, and hadn’t really stopped since. Why had he blocked this out? What was it about this incident that seemed to propel him into the life he had now inhibited?  He wanted to read more.