My First Therapist

My First Therapist
by Laura Delano at Brownstone Institute

[This is chapter two from Laura Delano’s Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance (Viking, 2025). Brownstone Institute is grateful for permission to reprint.]

Not long after that argument about Maine, my parents brought me to my first therapist. Her name was Emma, and they told me that she worked with families and would be helping us. She happened to live half a mile up the street, but the three of us drove to her home office on a weekend morning for our first session. As I stepped inside the waiting room, the force of shame was so heavy on my shoulders that I nearly collapsed in upon myself. I tightened up to keep from disappearing: shoulders to ears, arms locked, fists and jaw clenched, neck muscles contracted. I sat down and locked my gaze on the carpet until its hard patterns melted into softness. Bewildered by my parents selling me out like this, I was no longer willing to meet their eyes, nor able to.

Emma welcomed us into her office. Her voice had this warm, crackling-embers sound about it—I always think of Judi Dench when I recall her—and I was convinced it was the sound of everything wrong with the world. She had a short mop of white hair, wide hips beneath ankle-length pants, a soft stomach. The sight of her made me want to vomit. The instant her sparkling eyes made contact with mine and she smiled, I hated her.

I carry a faded snapshot of that first session in my mind: My parents, Emma, and I are sitting on chairs in a circle in her cozy office. I’m hunched in my seat, arms crossed tightly over my chest, brow furrowed. To my left, my father is wearing a worn dress shirt tucked into old jeans; he has the body language of someone unselfconscious, relaxed but attentive. To Dad’s left, my mother wears a cashmere sweater, cigarette-cut slacks, and needlepointed slip-on shoes; her arms, like mine, are crossed in front of her; she’s taut and tense, mouth closed.

My most valuable artifact from that day is pure emotion, preserved in me, all these years later, like a prehistoric insect in amber: Shame radiating out from my face, despair surging within me. My throat closed, voice powerless. Panic in my chest as I felt all of their eyes home in on me like laser beams, penetrating my insides against my will.

Emma was only pretending to be kind and really wanted to control me, I felt, so I switched instantly into surveillance mode, scanning the room in self-protective sweeps, sure of what my mind was telling me: They’re lying when they say this lady is going to help all of us. I know they think I’m the problem, not them.

My conviction would be reinforced in the coming days, when my mother would tell me I was to continue therapy with Emma, only moving ahead, I’d walk up the hill to see her by myself.

Not long after I started therapy, I drank alcohol for the first time. From the garage at a slumber party emerged a warm six-pack, this glistening beacon calling me toward rebellion. I watched the first can as it passed from hand to hand, Yes no yes no, do it, you can’t, do it, you can’t pinging about in my head. I knew that saying yes would mean the loss of something, but when I took that first sip, there was only an unfamiliar and comforting warmth in my gut.

None of us ever got anywhere close to drunk that year, but that wasn’t the point. It was the meaning behind the act that mattered: breaking rules we’d been taught to never break, feeling the solidarity that arose from participating in the very things we were sure we’d never partake in. I’d duped myself by thinking that being good would help me feel worthy, but the night in the mirror had proved me wrong. Where else had I duped myself? What else had I been missing?

The quest to dismantle my moral framework continued through the summer. At mountain biking camp, I abandoned my years-long dream of having my first kiss with Harris Fowler, the boy whose heart-covered initials I’d been decorating binders with since playing on rival ice hockey teams in fifth grade. Instead, one night, I found myself outside a tent kissing a boy I barely knew, giving away an experience I now believed I’d tricked myself into thinking should be special. I broke up with him a few days later and had kissed another boy by camp’s end.

That August at tennis camp in Maine, I developed a fierce crush on a boy named Jake. One side of his head was buzzed, and the long wave of blond hair on the other was always carefully swept over the top. He was ruddy-skinned, rosy-cheeked. When we began catching each other’s eyes over the picnic table at lunch and I felt a surge of excitement at the thought of being desired, I was sure I’d fallen for him.

One night at a friend’s house, we drank beer and Jake led me through the dark to a trampoline. We lay down to look up at the clear night sky, and then he leaned over and began kissing me, deep, like he was trying to recover something he’d dropped at the bottom of my throat. I wondered if this was love. When he went to touch my butt, I let him. When he slipped his hands around my back to push up my training bra, I let him, too, despite the deep-down part of me calling out, What are you doing? This isn’t who you are. The trampoline was taut and smooth beneath my palms; as he covered my stomach with his hands and mouth, I looked up at the stars and pictured myself far away.

As I lay in bed that night, I thought about how different I felt, how I’d left something behind that I couldn’t exactly define. A new and wondrous thought dawned on me: Maybe being bad will make everyone stop believing in you.

Jake gave me a bunch of handpicked flowers the next week and called hours later to say he had something to tell me. I was staring out the window over the fields that made their way to the sea as I heard the words “I love you.” It was fear I felt at first, and then disgust, and then numbness. How easy it was, I remarked to myself, to go from feeling so much to feeling nothing at all.

I sensed that even more freedom awaited me if I could only muster the courage to slack off in school that fall. Once ninth grade was underway, I disappointed myself by clicking right back into the pursuit of good grades, active class participation. At home, I quickly shed the facade, letting all the resentment I’d held in at school surge forth through the evening. Requests to help out with dishes or join the family at dinner made me lash out like a trapped animal. My perplexed mother couldn’t understand what had happened to me, or how this seething menace of a daughter could possibly be the same one she was hearing such glowing reports about from teachers, coaches, and other parents: “She’s such a leader.” “She’s so polite.” “She’s kind to everyone.” “She did such a fantastic job as president last year.”

In sessions with Emma, which continued against my will, I vented anger into the otherwise awkward silence: School was a scam! Being trapped at home every night was my idea of hell! I’m so mad, I could just punch a wall! And then the hour would be over, and Emma would gently escort me out into the dusk, and I’d walk home, disoriented and vulnerable.

For all my confusion, I was sure of one thing: I wasn’t the problem. It was everyone around me who was, in my newly judgmental estimation, from the many classmates who didn’t seem to realize that we were all puppets to my teachers for their ongoing compliments about my academic prowess and my squash coach for suggesting I add another weekly clinic to my calendar because he could see my potential as a top national contender. The biggest problem needing intervention, as I saw it, was my parents, who insisted that I stay at Greenwich Academy. It was clear to me that they had no plans to change themselves, which I took as further confirmation that they saw me as the only defective part of our family.

To make matters worse, my mother requested that I not tell anyone I was in therapy. Who did she think she was, making me see this therapist I didn’t want to see while also telling me I had to keep it a secret? I assumed she’d made this request because she was ashamed of me, unable to bear the thought of her friends hearing that Laura Delano, once this promising young role model, was actually a dysfunctional failure. It didn’t occur to me that her fixation on maintaining a veneer of normalcy was actually fueled by her desire to insulate me from harm.

A group of us were at a friend’s house for a sleepover one Saturday night that fall. Among us was my new friend, Rose, whose boyfriend, Pete, was staying at a house in the same gated community. Rose had a bad reputation among parents and teachers (I’d recently smoked my first cigarette with her). She was equal parts accomplished and rebellious, which gave her a miraculous aura of competency and chaos. She didn’t seem to care what anyone thought about her but still got straight As. She had what I wanted: the ability to mock the game we were stuck playing while also winning it.

Rose begged me to go along with her to see Pete; I felt honored that she’d picked me as her companion. It was nearly eleven o’clock when we readied ourselves to walk the ten minutes it’d take to get there. We ignored our friends’ protests that it was too late to go out, padded quietly down the stairs, and left them staring down at us nervously as we headed out the door.

Pete welcomed us in at the back door of John’s house. We walked into a finished basement with a giant TV, sofa, pool table. I’d never met John before; he was a quiet sophomore who always seemed to be standing on his tiptoes behind his popular classmates at the all-boys school that sat across the street from our all-girls academy.

I remember the four of us played pool, drank beer. I remember Pete nuzzling Rose’s neck, and how she told him girlishly to stop it. I remember John’s eyes on my face as the television flickered on low in the background, and how I eventually looked back at him, held his gaze for two seconds, and then five, and then ten. I remember how the tipsier I got, the easier it felt to trick myself into thinking that maybe this was a guy I could like. With time, I got woozy. At one point, I lay down on the couch, looked sideways at the screen, savored how slow-motion life felt there, the way the air seemed to roll like waves of water.

When Rose and Pete eventually disappeared, John sat next to me. We didn’t talk much as the television beamed on us. He asked if I wanted to go upstairs, and I said okay. I felt dizzy when I stood, the floor pulling at my left side, and he offered me his hand. He asked if he could carry me, and I nodded, wondering if it might be romantic. I felt so light in his arms as he took each step. I’d never been carried by a boy before.

He laid me down on a bed. Climbed on top of me. Began kissing me, me letting him. His hand pushed my shirt up, slowly at first, then faster, impatient, fumbling about with my bra strap. I was in and out of presence, participating while also a separate observer of the scene. The silent something deep in me that screamed stop was far less powerful than the need to feel wanted. The room was spinning, the pressure of his lips on mine, that tongue down my throat, the sound of his heavy breath, the weight of his torso, the heat off his skin.

I don’t know how long we were on that bed. There was the feeling of being devoured, my confusion about whether this was a sensation to be excited about or terrified by, the strangeness in realizing I felt nothing.

At some point, John moved his hands down and went for the button of my pants. A voice in me, from where I didn’t know, said, “Stop stop stop, please stop.”

I pushed my palms against his chest. He sat back, out of breath, respectful of my request. I fixed my bra and shirt and steadied myself as best I could on my feet. Downstairs, as I waited for Rose to return, we said nothing to each other. I wasn’t angry. I didn’t feel violated. I was confused.

As we stumbled back to our friend’s house, Rose jabbed my arm with her elbow. “So, John, huh?” She threw me a sideways smile before getting back to puffing her cigarette. I forced a giggle.

I’d actively participated in this encounter with John but couldn’t shake the feeling that the girl back there had been someone else. Was I a slut now? I’d heard this word from mothers before, mine included, and knew it would be terrible to get called one. I thought about the likelihood of rumors spreading to my classmates, to their mothers, to my mother. I made a vow to pretend the experience with John had never happened and to never share a word of it with anyone else, but the image of that girl on her back on the bed, shirt pushed up, that square-headed boy with buzzed hair on top of her, panting: it was frozen on the backs of my eyelids.

“Please don’t tell anyone, okay?”

Rose looked over with a playful smirk. “Maybe.”

“Please, I’m serious, okay? Swear you won’t tell anyone?” Sensing my growing panic, she promised.

The house was unlocked when we returned. We snuck quietly up the stairs.

“Oh my God, you’re back!” someone whispered loudly. A friend’s gaze zeroed in on me, followed by her voice. “Wait . . . what is that, Laura?”

The way she emphasized is made me wonder if I smelled bad. She walked toward me, hinging at the waist to peer closely at my neck. I froze.

“Laura . . . is that a . . . a hickey?”

I wasn’t even sure what a hickey was. I pushed past the girls and locked myself in the bathroom. There were soft knocks, my name whispered urgently. Pinching my eyes shut, I braced myself for whatever I was about to see in the mirror. Two purply red circles the size of walnuts plastered across the side of my neck. Lips had been on me. Now everyone knew it.

In an instant, control of my life’s narrative was ripped from my grasp. After a childhood fueled by an abiding commitment to honesty, I walked numbly to unlock the door and face their concerned looks. A response surged up in me, and out slurred a voice I didn’t recognize. “Idunno whatchyour talkin’about.”

I let my friends run with the story from there: I was totally blacked out, not partway blurry. At some point, “blacked out” morphed into “passed out,” which I didn’t correct. Ten minutes later, I was sitting clothed in the shower as water streamed down on me and I cried. I wasn’t crying about what had happened with John, but my friends took the tears as a victim’s reckoning with what had been done to me. They got me out of the shower and helped me change into my pajamas and they held me and comforted me until we all fell asleep. I let them do all of this, for how long it had been since I’d felt taken care of.

That Monday morning, the bruises taunted me in the mirror. I fiddled with the concealer I’d snatched surreptitiously from my mother’s dressing table, dabbing at my neck desperately as layer after layer of cakey substance did nothing to hide the monstrous purple. A turtleneck would be my only option. I ran to my closet and slipped one on.

Later, in English class, there was a knock on the door. My teacher stepped out for a moment before returning and looking at me.

“Laura, you’re needed in the office.” I stood up and walked robotically down the hall to the office of the headmistress, where I was told that Danielle, the upper school counselor, would like to see me.

Danielle had gray-flecked hair cut close to her head. One of her ears was lined with gold studs. She wore Puma sneakers and casually cuffed pants and insisted on being called by her first name. You could reliably find at least two girls shooting the breeze with her between classes; focused as I was on compartmentalizing the humiliation I felt before the gaze of a therapist, I’d always reassured myself I’d never be one of them. It was hard enough to survive each session with Emma, who skillfully kept the focus on my anger and its destructive by-products: the screaming, pushing, threats of hitting, and cruel, hateful words.

“How can we help you feel happier?” she’d ask. “How can we help you stop feeling so angry?” Murderous rage overtook me at her presumptuousness that she and I were a “we,” which most certainly was not the case. The true “we,” I knew, was Emma and my parents, who discussed the content of our sessions in phone calls. I knew that I had no power to free myself from these oppressive adults, and with my put-together performance at school already difficult enough to maintain, I felt sure that I’d disintegrate if I showed even an ounce of that powerlessness to my teachers. I’d successfully convinced myself that the humiliating walks to and from each session with Emma were the tragic fate of some other girl, but now these two disparate realities seemed to be smacking hard into each other.

Danielle was sitting at her desk facing the open door when I arrived, and gave me an austere smile. “Hi, Laura. I’m Danielle.” She gestured toward a chair. I walked in cautiously, smoothed out my kilt behind me, sat down.

“So, I wanted to invite you here in case there was anything you wanted to talk about.”

I shook my head, willing my eyes to keep contact with hers. “Laura, I get that you’re not wanting to talk, so I’ll just . . . Listen, I’ll just come out with it. I heard some concerning rumors this morning. I just wanted to check in with you, see if you’re okay, see if there’s anything you want to get off your mind.”

There was a surge of rage, the urge to cry, and a tamping down of it all. Who told on me?

“Anything about the weekend you’d like to share? C’mon, Laura. Your friends are worried. People care about you.”

“I’m fine.”

“You know you can say anything in here. That’s what I’m here for. What you share won’t leave this office. You know that, right?”

I didn’t trust her, but I knew I wouldn’t get out of there unless I talked, and so I told her about John—not what actually happened but the story I’d let my friends believe.

Later that morning, I was called back to the headmistress’s office. My mother was on her way to pick me up, the secretary said. What does she mean, my mother’s coming to pick me up? And then it hit me: Danielle had betrayed my trust.

I was waiting outside a few minutes later when my mother’s car pulled up. I slid into the passenger seat and buckled myself in, hugging my backpack and pressing my face into its creases. The corner of a binder pressed on my eye socket, and I kept it there, eyes closed, fantasizing about pushing it all the way through.

“Do I need to take you to the hospital?” Her voice wavered. We didn’t look at each other. I shook my head silently. “Well, I’m taking you there.”

“No, don’t, Mom, please. I don’t need to go there. I just want to go home.” Unable to bear the silence, I added with a wince, “We didn’t go that far.”

“How could you let this happen?” She shook her head and smacked her hands on the steering wheel before pulling out with a jerk. I sank down into the leather, wishing she couldn’t see me anymore, that the whole world would just forget I ever existed. I hated her for asking me this question, unable to recognize that her anger was a disguise for terror. I wished I had an answer for her as I stared out the window and said nothing.

My First Therapist
by Laura Delano at Brownstone Institute – Daily Economics, Policy, Public Health, Society