The day I found out I was first in my law school class, I should have danced in the streets or treated myself to a nice sushi dinner. Instead, I drove around Chicago eating stone fruit, fantasizing about my death. My professional future gleamed so brightly—I’d get a partner track job and spend my future racking up billable hours—but my personal life was a wasteland. I had no close friends, no romantic prospects, and no faith that I could truly attach to other people. I wanted to find a way out of the isolation and loneliness, but I didn’t know how.
Enter Dr. Rosen, an idiosyncratic therapist with Ivy League credentials and Einstein’s hair. He promised he could change my life on two conditions: I had to join one of his psychotherapy groups, and then I had to share every single aspect of my life with the circle of strangers in my group. Part of me balked at the idea of doing therapy with a bunch of messed up, possibly deranged strangers, but I said yes because I was curious. And Dr. Rosen promised that group would get me where I wanted to go: A life filled with intimate relationships.
Early in my treatment with Dr. Rosen, I told him I was pretty sure I was so lost as to be beyond a cure. His response: “You don’t need a cure, you need a witness.” In each session, my group mates were my witnesses, as I learned to share myself. I started with my childhood hang ups and bizarre eating rituals. Soon my feelings about a long-buried trauma bubbled up along with years of grief I’d stuffed deep in my body.
“I grew into a woman who accepted herself with all her magnificent messiness, a woman willing to share her true self with other people.”
My group mates knew all about my dating life because in each session I downloaded what my date and I ordered, who paid, and whether there was any making out at the end of the night. They were appraised about my fantasies and my finances, my blind spots and my blunders. Before them, I grew into a woman who accepted herself with all her magnificent messiness, a woman willing to share her true self with other people.
The people who sat in the circle with me during sessions began as strangers and slowly became my intimates. Some of those sessions were the most painful ninety minutes of my life as my dysfunctional ways of relating to other people came to light. My pouting and withholding, my wishing they would read my mind so I wouldn’t have to speak up and ask for what I wanted. And yet I know now: Those sessions were the most vital. Those sessions and the people in the circle taught me how to honestly appraise myself and do the work of lasting transformation.
My book Group is a love letter to the people who sat in the circle with me and the therapist who presided over us all. Together, they helped me learn the skills I needed to change my life. I also hope that Group is a light for people who, like me before I started group, believe that personal transformation is impossible and feel resigned to a fate of loneliness, isolation, or misfit-ness. For those among us who fear they will die alone and unloved, my story is proof you can have another ending.
