Free Get Me Out of Here by Rachel Reiland

nonetheless. And he was telling me, much to my astonishment, that it was okay. I wasn't sure if he was a liar, a fool, or a masochist.
    We then discussed my psychological profile and its revelations about the darkest side of my character. They were truths of which I was mortally ashamed, but truths nonetheless. The darkness of my soul revealed in all its ugly nakedness. Dr. Padgett surprised me once again.
    “I don't place much stock in psychological profiles,” he said. He explained they served a limited purpose, perhaps, but they were just a series of oversimplified labels that could not come close to encompassing the complexities of an individual's character, including mine. By design, such profile tests sought to uncover the most unhealthy aspects of a person's nature, seeking to identify pathologies. He had wanted me to see it so that I would know just how serious the situation was, to know what we—the two of us—would be facing together. Still, the report had not touched on the many good qualities within me, the ones he saw in that very first meeting. The ones that prompted him to “choose” me as a patient.
    Choose me . A part of me was slightly stuck by the arguably arrogant implications of such a statement. After all, I was paying him —$120 a session to be exact. I was the one doing the choosing. Yet the notion of being chosen because of what he saw in me was too comforting a thought to dismiss. Why did everything have to be so confusing?
    “You are like a diamond,” he said to me. “A rough diamond. Only covered in dirt so you can't see it for yourself. And I am like the one who discovered you. My role is to help you slowly scrape away the caked-on dirt until we get to the diamond itself. If you know anything about diamonds, though, you know that they don't have much value in rough form. Diamonds gain their value according to how skillfully they're cut.
    “Your parents never recognized the possible value. You were never finely cut, and you never got the chance to see the value and the beauty you possessed. So you covered yourself in mud and buried and hid yourself there because that is what you thought you were. Dirt.
    “Well, once we remove the soil, we will work together to cut that diamond and give it more value, beauty, and shining brilliance than you ever could have believed. You don't see the potential yet. You don't see the inherent value and beauty you have. But I do. And that's why I chose you. Someday you'll see it too, and believe it, just as much as I do.”
    There he goes again, the “choosing me” thing. He's bringing my parents into it again. What is this obsession with my parents? What do they have to do with anything? He doesn't even know them. And yet … a diamond, not just any stone, but a diamond .
    Once again Dr. Padgett had somehow burrowed through my massive fortress of walls and gently touched me. There was an inherent poetry in the man, words and feelings that lured and lulled me. Only he could find a way to turn “dirt” into poetry. Only he could find a way, for however brief a moment, to make me feel good about myself.

    Soon we'd agreed to increase the frequency of sessions to three times a week, which still did not seem like enough. Much of our discussion focused on the issues of trust, my fear of abandonment, and the therapy relationship. I would delve into some of the painful events of my life, nearly all of them from adolescence and early adulthood.
    Dr. Padgett tried to bring the focus to my early childhood. I would respond with vehement resistance and terse reminders to Dr. Padgett that I was the one who screwed up. These were my problems, my character flaws. My parents had been good ones and should be left out of it. Discussing my early childhood was an invasion of my family's privacy. It was tantamount to a betrayal that I felt, in all of their generosity, my parents did not deserve.
    Often the mere mention of this issue would provoke me into a tirade of