Guest Blogger: The First Therapist by GP Gottlieb

The First Therapist by GP Gottlieb

One day many years ago, my husband suddenly told me he wanted a divorce. Between the moment he said that he missed his freedom and the slamming of the door when he left, I learned what it meant to watch your life crumble into tiny pieces.

I imagined writing about it one day in the future, but it was the old, “College professor gets tenure and has an affair with his teaching assistant” story, so not a new tale to tell.

I still remember going to a therapist that week and sitting in her dark-paneled, stuffy office. It was just a ten-minute drive from the house I’d soon have to leave. I loved that house, a “painted lady,” built in 1897, and had spent a lot of time choosing paints and wallpapers and furniture. I considered writing about my woes, but who needs another, “Divorced woman forced to leave the home she spent five years fixing up” story?

During my first few weeks of therapy, I told the therapist about my life and my marriage. Of course we had issues, but I thought that we’d work through them together. I wished the therapist could have been more sympathetic, but no matter what I told her, she’d respond with a version of, “How did that make you feel?”

I wanted to say, “I’ve just spent thirty minutes telling you how it made me feel,” but I was raised to be polite, so I answered her with words like “angry”, “abandoned,” and “betrayed.” If I wrote a story about a woman who sat weeping about the end of her marriage, my fictional therapist would say something like, “Oh honey, that must have been so hard,” or, “It sounds like a tragic situation – but I’m going to help you get through it.”

My character would cry and say, “Yeah, it is tragic,” and she’d come away from the appointment feeling a tiny bit better. I never came away from my appointments feeling better, but I couldn’t write about those feeling because who needs another story about a therapist who doesn’t help her patient?

One day, about three months after I started seeing that therapist, I went over for my appointment, and the door to her office was locked. I thought she must have gotten tired of my whining, but slowly, over the next few weeks, stories started to circulate in the small town where we lived.
According to my friend who was a dance teacher, the therapist’s daughters hadn’t come to class for several weeks, and there was gossip about the husband being abusive. One chatty neighbor told me she’d heard something about him having underworld connections. I thought it sounded interesting, but how could I tell that old chestnut about a therapist who disappears under murky circumstances from a military-heavy, fundamentalist town?

According to a friend in my mommy group, the therapist survived her husband’s attempt to murder her and had gone into the federal witness protection program. Why had I been so whacked out just because my husband wanted a divorce? What was I even complaining about? That’s why I could never write about getting divorced – there are so many worse things happening in the world, so many other stories to tell.

I hope the first therapist survived her experience. I turned her into a character in an early draft of my first novel but later took her out because it sounded like the old “husband tried to kill her, and she ended up in witness protection” story.

I moved away from that town and settled in another part of the country but still imagine running into that therapist one day. It would probably turn out that she’d went home to her family in Texas, but I’d still be interested to hear her side of the story. And although it isn’t nice of me, I imagine asking her, “How did the experience make you feel?”

GP Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series (Battered was re-released September 2025 in Paperback, Kindle and Nook). She’s a member of the Blackbird Writers, on the Sisters in Crime Chicagoland Board, and a member of SinC Colorado and SinC Wisconsin. She likes posting on Facebook, reads voraciously, and has interviewed over 260 authors for New Books in Literature, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. Her stories have been published in Pure Slush, Another Chicago Magazine, Grande Dame Literary, and other journals and anthologies. Over 250 of her essays on travel, music, culture, writing, and things that annoy her are available in various publications at Medium.Com.