Cook the Books

that had to be tested. The recipes didn’t exactly need supervision, but should there happen to be any volunteers...
    “So, Chloe, tell us about this week’s session with Ms. A.” Professor Ruiz adjusted his nearly invisible glasses and crossed his legs, raising his pant legs to reveal mismatched socks.
    We never used clients’ real names. Instead, we referred to a client by the first letter of the person’s first name, or we made up a name. Julie always named her clients after celebrities. We’d spent last week’s class hearing all about “Bono’s” struggle to find a loving foster family to take him in. The week before it had been “Mark Wahlberg’s” suspension from high school for smoking pot in the girls’ room. My professor had cut Julie off when she’d launched into a speech about how poor “Colin Powell” had caught gonorrhea from “Bruce Springsteen.” I just stuck to letter names.
    I scanned my notes. “Well, Ms. A continues to remain unsatisfied in her current relationship with T. She claims he is dull and unexciting, and she now has her sights set on a professor who is more than twice her age. It’s my impression that she may have concocted his attraction to her and that she has created a romantic connection between herself and the professor as a way to escape her reality. Her current boyfriend actually sounds like a really decent guy who adores her, and I wonder if she has fabricated a relationship with this new man as a way to avoid intimacy.” I paused. “As a way to protect herself from getting hurt.” The picture I was painting suddenly started to sound all too familiar. I hadn’t deluded myself into believing that I had a romantic relationship with Kyle, but there was, I had to admit, a genuine possibility that, in fantasizing about him, I was avoiding real intimacy. “Um, let me move on to D, whose father continues to put unreasonable demands on him leading D to push himself further and further to impress his father. An impossible task, if you ask me. I cannot get D to see that he needs to recognize his own wishes and goals and not to live his life according to this asshole’s... er, excuse me... the unreasonable paternal expectations.” When I shared Danny’s hand injury with the class, everyone was as visibly horrified as I was. Shared. In supervision, we were encouraged not simply to describe or report or tell things; rather, we were supposed to share them. “And yet, even with incidents like that, D continues to want to please his father.”
    Julie whipped out a pencil, stood up, and paced the floor in front of me. “I think there is an important angle to look at here. Let me take a guess. The more this father pushes his son, the more the son screws up, correct?”
    “Yes, actually, that’s true.” I nodded emphatically.
    “Okay, so D’s image of his father is one of an important, successful, almighty power, essentially. That only serves to increase the son’s sense of incompetence, thereby making him genuinely incompetent. Like the accident with his hand? Probably a result of his nerves and his fear of failure. He’ll never feel whole and develop positive self-esteem until he stops believing everything his father says.” Julie sat back down, clearly pleased with her insight.
    “You’re right,” I said. “But how in the world do I help him see what’s so obvious to us?”
    Professor Ruiz leaned forward, intertwined his fingers, and looked thoughtfully at me. “If I were D, I would be pretty angry at my father. But it sounds like your client has turned that anger onto himself. See if you can get him to acknowledge that feeling. It’s okay to love someone and also hate some of the person’s behavior and words. That’s a tough dichotomy to balance, but we are allowed to have mixed feelings about the important people in our lives.”
    There’s a fine line between love and hate. I thought of Josh. I was furious with him for leaving me, of course, but Adrianna had been right when she’d said that I still loved him. Damn. Why couldn’t I just be done with him and let that relationship go? There were other men in the world, right?
    But there was only one Josh.
    “Oh, while I’m here,” I said as nonchalantly as possible, “and since I really appreciate all the help the group has given me this semester, I thought of a way to thank everybody. I’m working on a cookbook with a very famous chef, and I’ve brought some of the secret recipes that will