#35 Rachel and Jon

Pushkin. Hi, John, I am robot Goldstein. I will be your robot medical assistant. Pass me the scalpel to chat. Would you would you really? Would you love to continue to chat with me?

No?

How many people are you able to be that honest with.

Just you?

So?

Well, that's that's kind of special, right, I know that is a good point. Do you see it's a very special bond? Yea from Gimblet Media. I'm Jonathan Goldstein and this is Heavyweight Today episode Rachel and John. Right after the break.

You ready to start? I'm ready to start.

You're sitting down?

Yeah, okay, your eyes closed. Anything you see where there's some feelings, that's what we're looking for.

Okay.

This is a therapist named Alvin in session with a patient named Ted. What are you feeling?

Can you describe it? Like it's happening right now, right now.

The session was recorded as a part of an educational psychotherapy video series. In the session, Alvin is helping Ted relive a memory. The time is domineering father in law was rude to his wife.

Yeah, and he's all dressed up.

Hi, Jenny, Yeah, oh there is and.

He's Yeah, there's a formal thing.

It's like, you know, good to see we have to It's like the meanute. We talk to each other, our voices drop, yeah, hi, how are you? Alvin's eyes are shut tight. His method is to try to will himself into the patient's skin to feel what the patient is feeling.

I can do this better than you.

Watch me. Okay, okay, okay.

I'm gonna put my arms around you.

I'm gonna bring you kind of clothes.

I'm doing better than you. Huh yeah good.

Alvin does voices and role plays, and at times the session feels like avant garde improv It's playful and honestly kind of bizarre. But the point of it all is to help the patient rehearse behavior in the office that he can then apply in real life. Toucher toucher, Oh yeah, Holder.

And Jenny like so much.

By the end of the session, Alvin has turned ted a meek, buttoned up patient into someone capable of expressing himself emotionally. Gonna be this way with Jenny because you rehearsed it, got it.

I'm ready.

We had this ability within us to become a whole new person.

Alvin died in twenty fourteen, but this is Howard, a psychotherapist and one of Alvin's disciples. Howard runs Alvin's website and publishes his books. Are you talking a little hyperbolically when you say a whole new person?

No, it is that radical topathon. It's to become a whole new person the term you use as an optimal person, and to discover that within yourself.

According to Alvin, once you've discovered this optimal personhood, you can shake off what others want and live on your own terms.

It changed my life direction.

And for these kinds of radical results, Alvin was given a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Psychological Association. One psychology textbook even goes so far as to describe Alvin as being quote as important as Freud. But this isn't a story about Alvin's professional life, his life inside the office. This is a story about Alvin's real life.

He insisted, I run away.

This is Rachel, Alvin's daughter, and I.

Did, How old were you? I was in grade five?

The year was nineteen seventy. Alvin and Rachel's mom had been locked in an ugly custody battle for eight years. Rachel's mom was poor and struggled with depression. Rachel really wanted to live with her dad, so when Alvin suggested she run away from Judy in Denver to his house in Ohio, Rachel didn't pack a bag, She didn't say goodbye to anyone. She just left.

Like he set up this whole thing with his lawyer, and I just felt like I needed to do with my dad. And the lawyer told me and this was the right thing. I think, I said, I was going to the lie and somehow, I don't remember how I got to the lawyer's office, and then they took me to the airport and put me on the plane and I left.

Alvin had gotten remarried to a woman with two kids, and Rachel loved feeling like she was a part of this happy family. There were dogs to play with and bikes to ride, and yet this other feeling would often creep in.

I miss my mom, I miss my friends, I miss my cat. But I could never ever ever say that out loud to anybody.

And there was someone else Rachel missed, missed most of all.

She told us she was going to the library, and then she never came back.

This is Rachel's brother John. He's two and a half years younger than Rachel and only has flashes of early childhood memory About Alvin. He recalls doing father's son things that it'd make perfect sense if the son was an adult, things like lifting weights together and smoking.

He was a pipe smoker. He bought me my own little cherrywood pipe, and you know, as a four year old, he actually had me smoking, you know, tobacco in the pipe with him.

It was as though Alvin couldn't distinguish between adults and children, which was why he saw John's closeness with his mom not as a child's natural maternal attachment, but rather as a personal slight and so Alvin ever asked John to run away. John was left behind in Denver with Judy.

I think in his mind, I just, you know, was more a mama's boy and a chip off Judy's block, and I think he sort of gave up on me, and he was really focused on Rachel.

And as the final custody hearing approached, Alvin's focus on Rachel and intensified. He wanted to prove to the court that Rachel was better off with him, So he had about a half dozen social workers and psychologists offtfare assessments, Rachel was interviewed, and Alvin's new family observed. None of

And we never lived together again.

When you have a sibling who is just a critical part of your family and then you're separated from them, it's a wound.

How uncommon was an arrangement like that?

Extreme? Yeah, very very uncommon. Kids are not split up.

We each grew up alone. I missed her through my my whole childhood. I missed her a lot. I mean, we were so close when we were young, and you know, she was the big sister who through all of that was looking out for me growing up from then on, just me and my mom. Grew up as an only child, and my mom just always being in pain, and she never was able to enjoy whatever it is we were

When he turned thirteen, John invited Rachel to his bar Mitzvah, but Alvin wouldn't let her go. Rachel sent a poem instead.

It had to do with a rubber band stretching across the distance and connecting us.

For John, not only did he lose his big sister, he also lost his dad. Year after year, John tried to re enter Alvin's life, but each time he reached out, Alvin rebuked him. One time, as an adolescent, John tried scheduling a visit.

Then he said, well, as long as you guys you know me and my mom required any money, any child support, there be no visit. And I said, well, it sounds like you care more about money than about me, And he said, well, I don't want it to just sound like that. That's how it is.

Nevertheless, a few years later, John asked once again if he could come visit. By this point, Rachel was eighteen and no longer living with Alvin, So when Alvin refused John yet again, Rachel told her brother to come visit her instead. They hadn't seen each other in eight years. Was she the same sister that you remembered?

No? I mean I knew her as a you know, six seven, eight, nine ten year old. Next time I saw her, she was an adult.

In the years since that visit, Rachel and John have made a point of staying in each other's lives. They talk on the phone, celebrate holidays together, and once a year their families all take a trip. But their childhood together that's been lost.

I mean, my daughter certainly watches us and thinks that we're more like cousins. She can see the disconnect because we did not grow up together.

John and Rachel still have questions about their childhood, but now that their parents are both dead, they have no one to ask, so they pass through their separate memories, trying to construct a timeline, comparing moments of overlap and filling in the blanks to this end. One night, while John was visiting Rachel for Thanksgiving, he asked if they could go through Alvin's files. Alvin was an obsessive record keeper,

The script for me was like, oh my God.

The script was a lengthy diatribe written by Alvin from the point of view of a child, Rachel's point of view. In it, Alvin refers to himself as Daddy, Judy, as mother, or Judy or simply she. I later asked Rachel to read some over the phone, two and.

Half pages long and small psychologists, writing, Okay, so here I go. It's in my good, happy dreams. Custody is changed, and I live with Daddy. If I am forced to go back and live with mother, it will only be till the day I'm fourteen, which apparently was when you could de side. When I'm with her, I feel scared that I might get tight and angry and cold like Judy. She's not a mother, she is a keeper. She makes me feel like I'm in a prison. I can't let her touch me.

It was like finding your childhood internal monologue committed to paper and written in your father's handwriting. Rachel didn't remember seeing the script as a kid, but you remembered saying those things, and she remembered thinking them. In one of Alvin's many books, a volume entitled The Manual of Optimal Behavior, He writes that behavior can be rehearsed and modified quote until you are ready and eager to go ahead and

It was so explicit. There was nothing subtle about it. You know, the whole thing was sick.

The second thing discovered among the files was a letter from Rachel to her mom. In it, she begs Judy to let her live with Alvin, but there were two copies, one written in Rachel's hand and one written in Alvin's. Going through the papers, Rachel remembered, other things, how Alvin encouraged her not to smile when she was with her mom, saying if someone photographed her happy, it could be used

That's when I started questioning and started to realize that I was coached or brainwashed.

It made sense. For most of her adult life, Rachel had had no memory of loving her mom. It was only after her mother's death when she found mother's day and birthday card she'd written to Judy when she was very small that Rachel realized she had I love you, mommy. She'd written I love you so much, but with Al's constant coaching, it had all been stamped out. The final thing John and Rachel found that night were those psychological reports Alvin at Rachel submit to just before the final

Clearly ed.

Edited it and then she rewrote it with the edits and submitted that rewrite.

Is that ethical as a social work?

No no, no, no, no, no no no no it's not no oh no no no. No one should ever let anybody else, especially their client, edit their reports. No, it's it's really bad.

The report was written by a social worker named Joyce. Alvin's edits to Joyce's report made the language more emphatic. For example, where Joyce had written that Rachel was hesitant when it came to judy, Alvin changed it to say she was fearful. In another spot, he added that Rachel wanted to blot out any memory of ever having been away from him.

Honestly, I mean it was horrifying, you know, just to see the detailed notes, to see the edited drafts, the crossouts and his handwriting, and then the final version that was submitted to the courts with his edits in there, like there's no question in what happened.

The report concludes with a recommendation, the strongest one of any report and the only recommendation of its kind.

She recommended that I live with him, and that my brother lived with my mom.

John and Rachel's separation came down to a decision dictated by Alvin and signed off on by Joyce. How was Alvin able to exert this kind of power over a social worker, someone who was supposed to be an impartial outsider. John and Rachel couldn't understand it. But that night, when Rachel googled Joyce, she was shocked to realize that Joyce had been an impartial outsider at all. Joyce was a family friend. Rachel recognized Joyce as the kind, dark haired

She was like the one person in my life as a kid who could have said, Hey, I think you're coaching her and this isn't right. Why are we going to try and split these kids up? She was the one who could have said something.

In nineteen seventy Joyce recommended that my sister go with my father and that I go with my mother. And that's what happened, and that dictated the course of my life. What happened?

This is the question that's been nagging at John and Rachel since they found the report. How could this have happened? And so John and Rachel want to find Joyce and ask her. What I don't fully understand, though, is what I have to offer. Rachel and John are both practicing therapists themselves. They're more than capable of posing difficult questions and Although I play a mental health semi professional, semi convincingly on a podcast, I'm not actually one at all.

What can I do well?

So?

I have had to advocate for myself my entire life from a very young age, and nobody advocated for me or my brother, and so if you could help me with this, it would be a healing piece for me that somebody else advocated for me.

After the break in search of Joyce, I find Joyce the social workers facebook and email address right away, and I message to ask if she'd be willing to speak with John and Rachel about their parents' custody battle. I don't hear back for several weeks, and during this time, my thoughts keep returning to Alvin and the video of his session with Ted, the meek, buttoned up patient.

Toucher toucher oh Jack.

Throughout, Alvin tries to help Ted release his bottled up feelings.

I can do this better than you.

Watch me.

Okay, right, okay, okay.

What's happening inside me?

Right now?

Over my chest?

I'm having a who It felt like a brand of extreme empathy in the first viewing, now feels like something else. I'm gonna put my arms around you.

I'm doing better than you. Huh yeah.

Now it feels as though Alvin is scripting the outcome.

If you want to cry, go ahead, good, it's okay, go on.

At one point, Alvin tells Ted to cry.

Ted, it's okay, go ahead, cry, go it's all right.

Ted is not anywhere close to crying.

Ted, you're starting to cry.

Go ahead, let yourself, let yourself go on. It's all right, go on, do it. Ted is not starting to cry, but Alvin insists, Ted, you're on the verge of crying.

Do it.

No, cry, go.

Ahead, And then a tear appears in the corner of Ted's eye. It rolls down his cheek. It's as though Alvin has conjured it into being through sheer force of his own will.

Good for you, Good for you, great, great, okay now.

The video is a part of a series produced by the American Psychological Association intended to showcase prestigious psychologists in session. The way the series works is that, for privacy reasons, the patients are portrayed by actors. As the credits were, I learned that while Alvin the therapist is Alvin the therapist, Ted the patient is actually Bob the actor.

It was a quick shoot. There wasn't a rehearsal per se. We just kind of went in and improvised.

This is Bob, and performance wise, Bob is done at all.

Chuggled swords, cracked whips, eaten fire. I've done for ten years. I did a stage hypnosis show.

Bob is a regular renaissance man in that he also worked at a renaissance fair. When Bob showed up to film that day, he was asked to improvise some sort of marital problem that Alvin could help solve by bringing his method to bear. I asked Bob if he found Alvin's behavior domineering, but Bob doesn't recall much. There is one thing, though, that Bob does still recall, even thirteen years later. It seems Bob wasn't Alvin's first choice of patient.

He had had someone else do it before. I think it was an African American lady and it didn't go the way it needed to do.

You know what I mean?

Can you elaborate?

He showed it to me briefly.

Bob describes the video Alvin showed him before they started filming that day. In it, the setup was the same as it was for Bob shoot. Alvin was in an armchair, his legs up on an ottoman, except this time in the armchair beside him was the actress. Like Bob, the actress in the video had been asked to come up with a marriage problem, but in doing so, the actress went to a darker place than Alvin anticipated, describing a husband who was vicious and cruel. Nonetheless, Alvin tried to offer counsel.

He was saying things like when he behaves in this way, can you be playful about it? And the actress said things like when he calls me names, suggesting that he might be in some ways borderline, at the very least verbally abusive.

It seemed there was the way the actress was given to talking about an abusive relationship, and then there was the way that Alvin preferred her to talk about one. And so the actress was replaced and Bob shown her video to illustrate what Alvin did not want.

It's you know. I got the message, I guess.

Still, not having received a response from Joyce, I decide to mail a letter, and just a few days later I find an email in my inbox. In it, Joyce tells me She's not sure how much help she can be. She reminds me that it has been fifty years, but she says she's willing to try. She concludes the email by saying, please feel free to contact me if you wish. Joyce, Hello, Hello, I think your sister's here too.

Here we are well.

The last time John and Rachel saw Joyce they were children. They're now in their fifties and sixties. Because of the pandemic, the meeting between Rachel, John, and Joyce will have to take place over Zoom. John and Rachel joined first from their respective homes. So how are you guys feeling today?

Uh?

Quite anxious? Actually, what about your brother John?

I'm more nervous than I thought I would be.

John is seated in a chair, his posture upright. Rachel is sitting back on a couch. Go ahead and talk a little bit. What did you have for breakfast?

I had yogurt and blueberries.

Yeah, me too.

I can see the Joyce is in the Zoom waiting room waiting. Back in my day, a waiting room had all kinds of stuff to keep you occupied, like lukewarm water you could drink from a paper cup or a twenty year old copy of Oat. But now waiting rooms are so metaphysical there's nothing to do with them. I suggest we let Joyce in. Okay, Yeah, okay, okay, yeah, let's do it. Joyce appears on the screen wearing a bright blue sweater and a colorful ascot that gives her

Hello.

Hello, Joyce and her son frown at the computer. It seems they're having sound issues. There's a long moment in which we all look at each other in silence, and then hello, Hi. Joyce settles into an armchair. Well do you all look familiar to each other?

No, well it's been a long time. I'm Rachel.

Hi Joyce, Hi, Rachel.

Hi, I am John.

You're John, So Joyce, do you uh?

I know?

John and Rachel are curious about just how much you remember, maybe maybe virtually nothing.

So I wasn't clear what what I can do for you. I'm certainly willing to try. So.

I think what we're remembering from that time, or what we know, is that my dad and my mom were in a very I don't know if you remember a bitter custody battle, and there were so many court battles, and one of the reports was done by you, So we wanted to talk to you about that and find out what you remembered about that.

Joyce inhales to clenched teeth, shakes her head.

Oh, I really don't know what happened.

We wanna we think. I think our father influenced kind of everybody he met in a very heavy handed way.

Yes, I would certainly agree with that. You know, saying al was heavy handed is an understatement.

Joyce's husband at the time was a colleague of Alvin's. That's how she first came to know Alvin. He and her husband both taught in the local university psychology department. Joyce says her husband would always come home with al Stories.

Acting out at meetings and shouting out inappropriate stuff. So he was very, very controlling. He took control of any situation, any social situation. One party at my house, he was a guest along with the other members of the psych department, and he just took control of the whole evening. And of course the more people drank, the more intense that God I think the focus was on people's dreams and dream analysis.

For Alvin a Freudian, this meant exploring each partygoer's dream for hidden sexual desires that he Alvin could then expound upon in a room full of colleagues. Joyce relates the anecdote to illustrate the kind of guy Alvin was, but John hears something else in the story, So you all socialized well. John is trying to remind Joyce that she was Alvin's friend, that writing the report wasn't appropriate, but the implication goes over Joyce's head.

The department wasn't a big one, and it was close knit, and everybody got together. They you know, Friday, what do you do? You hang out with the people that you know best, and that was in the department. What kinds of questions did you have that I can help with or that I might answer or speculate about.

You don't remember evaluating us, You don't remember having that role.

No, I guess I'm curious if you remember, because I would have said also, like I want to live with my dad and I love living here. But I was coached like don't smile if someone takes a picture of you with your mother.

Oh, Rachel, Oh, Rachel, could you see that at all? No, I I this is all news to me.

Did you do other custody evaluations? Was that a part of your practice?

That may have been one of the first ones, And it was at his requests that I did that.

Initially, it was at Al's request saying, oh, yeah, yeah, do you remember any thoughts or feelings that you know, maybe it's not appropriate for me to evaluate someone that I socialize.

No, no, not really, because this was in the beginning of our arrival, and so we weren't really socializing at that point.

At that point, Joyce and her husband had just arrived in town. While her husband taught at the university, Joyce did not. She hoped to someday, but she was still fairly young, and at the time the only women in the psych department were grad students and secretaries. So in Alvin, this larger than life figure came asking for a favor, it felt hard to say no.

He was chair of that program, and you know, I was new in town. I'm a people pleaser, so I think that that added to my vulnerability to Al.

Well.

I want to make sure that you know that your report recommends that we're split up.

Joyce takes off her glasses. She places them in her lap.

Oh wow, I am sorry. I am I never would have done something like that, and hearing that I did makes makes me feel terrible.

So that's a that's a surprise to you.

It's total surprise, and it's totally against everything I believe. It's horrifying. I don't know what prompted it or what precipitated it. I don't know. I'm sorry.

But of course there's more.

You know, we can see al crossing out words and phrases that you wrote and then rewriting them in stronger language, and then it's that stronger language that's in the final report.

I'm appalled by that. I hate to keep repeating myself, but I am truly sorry that that happened and had terrible consequences. I have a stomach ache. I feel terrible that it turned out that way. I feel awful that I had a pardon that or that I'm perceived to have had it. Well, I did, I mean, I can't say I didn't if I wrote it.

This is something Joyce does a few times. She'll start to say something like if I did this, but then she'll correct herself. Rachel has the report standing by to hold to the camera so Joyce can see it for herself see her own signature, but that never becomes necessary. Even though she doesn't remember, Joyce believes John and Rachel, and so she doesn't cop out or quivocate.

If I if I did something like that, or because I did something like that, I'm so sorry you guys. There's anything I can do to mitigate in some small way.

And it means a lot that you say that.

Oh yeah, yeah, And it's not just words, it's it's heartfelt. It's really heartfelt.

Do you do you have any idea why he might have turned to you well.

To control the outcome. I think he was more comfortable with women because he could push them around.

Did you feel used by him?

Well, I guess he was using me, so yeah.

Joyce says. The relationship with Alvin was short lived. The end came soon after Joyce invited Alvin and a few of his psychologist friends to join her private practice. They accepted and all began working out of her office.

And we did that for a while, and then they decided that it wasn't appropriate to have a social worker in the practice. So they asked me to leave, and it was at Elsin's instigation. What he said to me was, it's not that you're incompetent. It's just that I don't know that you're competent. And you know, for me to remember this fifty years later, that's a lot, doesn't it.

So this was him kicking you out of the practice, My practice, my practice, your practice.

I hear you like, very very very fondly.

Well, you're kind, you're kind, you're kind.

You are a nice lady. You're a good person. And I see that now too. I mean, I had every reason to feel that way.

Rachel will later tell me that because of the way her dad brainwashed her, she often can trust her memories. So it feels good that her memory of Joyce is correct. Joyce is nice, but Rachel is nice too, and consent so badly Joyce is feeling.

You know, I think my dad was so controlling, and I have to think that my dad coerced you and really pressured you to do that.

Thank you.

You know, hopefully you can tell Rachel and I are okay.

We're really good parents. We're close to our children. We did not replicate any of this.

Oh, that's wonderful. I'm so glad to hear that.

And I've been with my wife thirty seven years and thankfully now you know, Rachel and I came back together on our own and I'm very close with my sister.

Oh, I'm so glad. I'm so glad.

Damage done to us can often become damage we do to others, and on it goes. But watching John and Rachel, I'm struck by the way they're breaking that cycle, not just in their lives, but right here in the room. Well zoom room.

Just to be clear, Joyce, I really appreciate what you're saying, and really really important to me that others just own and acknowledge their role in any dynamic, in any interaction. If they do that, I'm good. And al never I tried in different ways, he would never own any culpability, responsibility, anything.

When John first became a psychologist, he'd see Alvin at various conferences, where Alvin was received as a star. For John, it always occasioned a weird mix of pride in his father's career and bitterness over his personal rejection. At one conference, John attended Alvin's lecture in the hope of forcing his father to talk to him. Alvin saw John in the audience, but afterwards made him wait on along with all his adoring fans. Eventually, John grew frustrated and left.

It's one of the mysteries of my life how he justified or rationalized to himself, you know, having a son and supposedly loving him and then just cutting him off and rejecting him for the rest of your life. I don't I can't fathom that at all. There was an email exchange over seven or eight months where I endeavored to answer that question, that lifelong question of you know why, and he just kept trying to sell me his books, and you know it became this refrain, have you read

In his emails to John, Alvin wrote that it was a sophomoric myth that a parent should seek relationships with one's child. I do not accept silly pop psychology truisms, he wrote. Near the end of Alvin's life, John wanted to make one last effort to see his father so Alvin could meet his grandkids, but Rachel counseled John not to go. She said that Alvin would refuse to see him and was still so full of anger that he

Back.

When I spoke to Al's disciple, Howard, he told me that al was bedridden at the end of his life, yet he was still focused on his therapeutic method just before he passed away.

When I visited him, he said, Howard, I'm working on becoming more of an optimal person. I'm just doing it now. And he was like so.

Energetic, and do you from your perspective, I mean, did he achieve that kind of like optimal personhood?

She said he had.

When I raised the subject of Alvin's relationship with his kids and how that connected to his optimal self, Howard says he can't really speak to that. Alvin didn't bring up his kids much.

There's a lot of stuff that goes on, sometimes good and bad, and you know, that's just what happens in life. We live, and we adjust and do what we have to do. But I don't think whatever happens at a certain point in someone's life should define them for who they are as a person overall.

Can you come back in a little bit, honey.

A little girl barge's into Joyce's room. She's wearing a lacy blue dress that's either a nightgown or a Cinderella costume.

I'll be with you in a little bit. Thank you. That's my six year old granddaughter.

Thank you.

We're sheltering in place together.

Yeah, that's nice.

I'm very lucky, Joyce. I'm so appreciative. Thank you, Yeah, thank you.

One can believe one is optimal, just as one can believe one is fluent in French, a talented singer, a good therapist. But the only way to really know is through one's relationship with others, the ones who love us, who guide us, who let us know when we wandered astray. For some realizing your optimal self does not occur in spite of other people, but because of them.

My son is getting married in the backyard. I'm looking at a few.

Weeks and congratulations, thank you.

It'll be a very small, socially distanced.

Now that the furnitures returning to it's goodwill home, now that the last month's rent is skiming with the damaged po take this moment to the so.

If we meant to flee.

To from the last.

Accident and clean.

This episode of Heavyweight was produced by senior producer Khalila Holt along with Stevie Lane and me Jonathan Goldstein. Special thanks to Emily Condon, Alex Bloomberg, PJ Vote, Mohemy mcgaucher, Nabil Cholimpot, and Jackie Cohen. Bobby Lord mixed the episode with original music by Christine Fellows, John K. Samson and Bobby Lord. Additional music credits can be found on our website, Gimbletmedia dot com slash Heavyweight. Our theme song is by

Oh Son in an empty, Son in an out deal