(In the last issue, Sean told about Beth’s leaving after an argument. The story continues:)
SUSPICIONS
When Beth left, even though only for a short time, something snapped inside of me. I had held her with love bonds so tight that she felt smothered. I did not feel that I could live without her; did not want to try. The reality that I may have to live without her helped me to loosen the love bands to give her room - space - freedom. I told her that she was free to go whenever she felt the time was right but that I did not want her to go and that she would always have a place in my heart.
A niece was getting married. Beth could not attend because of her involvement with day camp. So I headed for Los Angeles alone. I stopped in Mesquite, NV to spend the night. That night I was probably the most vulnerable to temptation that I have ever been. I was lonely, dejected, feeling defeated and forlorn. After checking into my room I went down to the casino to get something to eat. Walking through the gambling patrons, I wondered how many others in the room were as lonely and needy as I. Alone in my room, I thought about how this was a trial separation. Even though I would only be gone a few days, I would be single, alone and on my own for those few days. I would find out if I could live without Beth or not.
As the days progressed, I found myself enjoying talking with people, interacting as a single person and not as a couple which was usually the case. By the time I was ready to go home I realized I could do it. As unpleasant as it might be, I could survive on my own. This realization freed me to think of Beth in a different way. I could free her to love me without binding her to my side with love bonds.
That freedom became a significant part of the rest of the story.
Her leaving also caused me so to face some feelings that I had tried to stuff and deny. I became very suspicious that something other that professional counseling was going on in the office between Beth and Bill. While it was hard to be suspicious of my pastor, the one I had helped bring to our church, I was now forced to deal with that possibility.
I was pretty sure transference had taken place and now I began to suspect that counter-transference had also occurred. Transference is the process whereby a counseling client begins to look upon the counselor as a parent/savior/lover/perfect partner, a natural occurrence in the counseling process when a counselor listens, attends, and encourages the client. The counselor may be inattentive, unapproachable and discouraging in real life but in the counseling setting he/she is trained and paid job to do the right things in order to help the client. Counter transference occurs when the counselor begins to return the affections heaped upon them by the client and the counselor begins to fantasize holding, loving, sexualizing the client. This unhappy state is a “fatal attraction” since the client needs a stable, objective, in- control person to be able to work through their problems.
Now I was familiar with transference. As a high school counselor for several years I had observed occasions when a high school girl had obviously become attracted to me as a counselor and had you asked her, she probably would have replied, “I love my counselor.” I knew my job was to maintain a professional conduct throughout my discourse with her. I knew that temptations that came along with the counseling. I knew I must maintain a certain distance of body and soul to make the counseling relationship work and be effective.
So, it was very painful to suspect my pastor of counter-transference, of stepping over the line with my wife but the behaviors were telling me something was going on that was not appropriate. But how to go about finding out what I really did not want to know was the next question.
My first from of investigation involved charting Beth’s behavior. I kept track of her counseling appointments, menstrual cycles and anything else I thought might impact her mood and behavior. I charted our kissing, expressions of love, and conjugal activity. My theory was that there would be a decrease in amorous activity following a counseling appointment. After charting for several months, I found only one pattern of significance: Unless I said, “I love you,” first, Beth never made that statement. I experimented by not making that statement first and we went three months without saying “I love you” to each other. This had not been the case in the first 25 years of our marriage and something I considered important in my investigation.
I considered bugging the pastor’s office. I did enough work around the church that I actually had a key to his office. I knew there was a crawl hole in the ceiling of that office. I thought of crawling up there, planting a listing in device, and finding out what “counseling” was going on there. I was not electronically savvy enough to know how to operate such a device - turn it on, off, adjust the sound and all. So I never got past the dreaming stages of that idea. Besides, I respected the counselor -client relationship and did not want to damage any positive help that Beth was receiving.
I did manage to find a reason to be at the church for one reason or another during several of her counseling session. Her weekly session was a good excuse for me to mow the church lawn, plant flowers, work on music or something. The drapes over the sliding glass doors that opened out onto a little patio were always closed. There were no other windows in the office. The door, of course, was always closed and there were no windows in the door. I tried standing outside the door and trying to hear what was going on inside a few times but I could not hear anything. (Had I known at that point that he was locking the door when she entered, I would have broken it down with my sledge hammer.)
Then a thaw began to occur. Beth and I started out on a vacation that ended up being just the two of us. The older children were working to pay for college. Jessica was away at camp in Missouri. Beth and I had two weeks with nothing to do but travel and had no destination in mind for the first 10 days. Our relationship by this time was so strained that I felt as though I were traveling with a complete stranger As we drove north out of Denver toward Cheyenne, Beth was working on a crossword puzzle. Suddenly she asked me for an answer to one of the word problems. This was the first time in months that she had asked me for any kind of help, advice, or opinion. I was taken aback at first but tried to come up with an answer to her query. We spent the night in a nice hotel in Cheyenne and the next morning, as we leisurely lounged about the grounds of the hotel, Beth said “I wish we could be the way we were.”
That simple statement gave me hope and began a renewal of our relationship. We drove north ending up in Vancouver, B. C. enjoying the days and nights together. We became reacquainted with each other in a new, refreshing way. As the vacation came to a close, I dreaded returning to life at home and the counseling and all that went with it. But, return we did and the counseling resumed.
What I know now but did not know then was that the main topic of discussion over the third year of “counseling” was how to get out of this mess. Beth told him she wanted to tell her husband about all that had happened. He advised her that the worst thing that she could do was to reveal the truth. He said it would destroy the church, his marriage and her marriage. It must remain their secret. She then asked how it was possible to keep such a secret and they spent many sessions on that subject.
During that year, I was not able to gather any concrete evidence that inappropriate activity was taking place during their sessions. I found no notes. There was no e-mail in 1984 so I did not find any cyber trail. But the need to investigate was diminishing because Beth and I were beginning to renew our relationship.
THE THAW
For our 25th Anniversary we took a trip to Europe. It so happened that Bill and his family were going to Europe too. Our first stop was London where we were booked to stay in the same bed and breakfast. Together we saw the Queen’s palace then went out to eat hamburgers at an American style restaurant. We heard talk that the Queen was in town and could possibly be sighted at the Palace later that evening. I was very tired from travel and wanted some time alone so I said I was going back to our room and get some sleep. Beth went with me, but Jessica and her traveling friend, both of whom were sharing our room with us, went to see the Queen. I was in a bad mood because I did not want to be there with Bill anyway, so even though we had some time alone, there was no thaw in the relationship in England.
The next day we boarded a train and headed for the English Channel and Bill and his family headed off to other parts of the world. I felt relieved and free. Beth felt she was losing her counselor and therefore felt trapped and insecure. We crossed the English Channel by boat, rented a car in Belgium and spent the first night there. We found a small hotel where Beth and I had a little room all to ourselves and Jessica and her friend, Wendy, had a room of their own nearby.
As soon as we got settled into the room, Beth wanted me to hold her and began telling me about her feelings of insecurity being separated from her counselor and wondering how she would be able to cope for the next few weeks. She then went on to say that she had been emotionally attracted to Bill. She took all of the blame saying she had let the counseling relationship decline into a flirtation with Bill, along with fantasies of them being together. She began to tell me about their counselor/client relationship and about some of its dynamics. She asked me to forgive her for pulling away and expressed an interest in becoming close again.
As we talked, I reassured there that I understood what had happened. I admitted to her that I had found myself attracted to some women over the 25 years of our marriage but had managed, with the help of God, to work through the feelings that plagued me and had learned to deal with the women as friends. I thought she could do the same. As we talked into the night we became more honest than ever with each other about several things. I finally said, “I forgive you,” and we went to sleep. The next night found us just over the border into Germany. We found a cozy little hotel to protect us from the cold and rain and again we and the girls had separate rooms. Beth and I snuggled together under a thick duvet and talked for hours. By now we discovered that small hotels in Europe have rooms for only two people so we and the girls would nearly always have separate rooms. For the several nights we spent in Germany we talked about the counseling situation and about how we could improve our own relationship. During each conversation some new bit of information came out, and it seemed she wanted to tell me more but kept hitting a wall preventing her from telling me the whole story.
We had a quarrel in Austria because she wanted to see the hills that were shown in the movie “The Sound of Music” and I wanted to get back into Germany and find a room before it got too late. That incident cooled the thaw for a day or two. We crossed over into Holland, met some of my Dad’s cousins, saw Kinderdijk and the windmills, the Delta Works that prevent flooding of the land below sea level and then back to Belgium. We crossed over into England, visited Oxford, Brighton, shopped at Harrods and then flew home. We had traveled and enjoyed sights by day, but had spent many hours talking at night, often until the wee hours of the morning. As a result, I was sure things were not right in the counselor/client relationship between Beth and her counselor, but it was still being referred to as an ’emotional affair.” There had been no mention of a physical relationship.
Soon after we got home, school started and we were both busy and did not have the same quality time together we had enjoyed in Europe. We decided to enroll in a dance class at the junior college. One night after class Beth was very quiet and withdrawn. I thought it was because I had danced once with another woman so I was feeling guilty. As we drove home, I parked the car near the Platte River and asked what was troubling her.
She said. “There are some things I would like to tell you but I can not do it.” I suspected there was more to the counseling thing than just an emotional affair. I tried to get her to tell me the rest of the story, but she could not get the words out. I drove on home, went to bed and went to sleep, but she found herself into another sleepless night. About midnight she awakened me and said she needed to talk. I said, “Talk,” but then she fell silent again. Finally I said, “I know you cannot bring yourself to tell me what happened. Let me just describe what I think may have happened and then you can tell me whether or not that is what took place.”
She agreed, so I began. I pictured myself in the situation and began to describe what I was pretty sure would take place if a counselor were to push a healthy counseling situation over the line into an abusive one. Being a high school counselor, I knew the boundaries and how they could be crossed.
“Did he hug you?” I started.
“Yes. Many times.”
“Did he …” I took her step by step into an inappropriate relationship between a pastor/counselor and client and in this way she was able to confess what had taken place.
As she continued to answer in the affirmative, I knew that my greatest nightmares were now true. I had been betrayed by my pastor. He had not been professional in his dealings with my wife. Hurt and anger surged through me as we talked into the night. By two in the morning we had been through and over the situation enough that Beth felt relief that everything was finally in the open. I was exhausted and finally fell asleep. When I awoke, I was full of emotions, but anger was at the top. Beth too was emotional, but she had to deal with the regrets of betrayal that came over her. She had shared what she promised not to tell. Her perpetrator had stressed over and over that she could not tell what transpired between them. Now she had unleashed a tornado and it was about to touch ground.
I showered, dressed and told Beth I had to get away for a while but that I would be back. I just wanted to get away from her, from the house, from it all. Work was a welcome distraction at that point and, as I traveled the three miles to work, each mile seemed a friend of space that I needed for a while.
I struggled with what I have heard the night before. One of the things that bothered me most was the fact that the last two years of “counseling” had been spent trying to deal with the inappropriateness of the relationship. So much time and energy spent trying to cover up.
I knew Beth was really upset and thought she might be suicidal. At first I was not sure I really cared. My hurt was so deep that I was not sure what I felt at times. As the morning passed, I began to cool down and became very concerned about Beth. I called about 11:00 AM hoping she would answer.
She did answer. She had taken the day off from work. I could tell by her voice that she had been crying. She said she was afraid I would never come back. I told her I would pick her up at lunch. I took her with me to the meeting I had to attend that afternoon. I was afraid to leave her alone because she expressed that she just wanted to die.
The Aftermath
By the end of the day I was clear about some things. One was that I would have to confront Bill about his unprofessional behavior in counseling with my wife. Another was that I needed to reassure my wife that my love was unconditional and that I would be there for her no matter what had happened or what was about to happen. A third understanding was that it was imperative that I get some quality, safe, effective counseling for my wife.
I was not so clear about several other issues. Take the unconditional love issue for example. How was it possible to unconditionally love my wife and still deal with the feelings of betrayal that swept over me.
I struggled with how to confront Bill. No matter what she did, it was his job to professionally deal with the problem and refrain from sexualizing the client/counselor relationship. I knew I could whip him in a fist fight but I was not sure I could hang with him in a word fight.
I was also ambivalent about some other things. I was not sure how to deal with my questions. One was, “God, how could you have let this happen?” Another was, “How could my pastor have betrayed me like this?” Number three was, “How could my wife have gotten caught up in this mess?” Number four was, “How did I not see this three years ago and do something about it?” Then there was number five. “Should he resign and leave the church?”
I decided confronting Bill was the first order of business. When I called the church office to get an appointment, his secretary informed me that his schedule was full for the next few days.
When I told Beth that I had made an appointment to talk with Bill, she was upset. She felt she must talk to him first. She called the office and was able to get an immediate appointment and walked right over. While I found it amusing that she was able to get an immediate appointment, I was troubled that her loyalty to him was so strong. I knew she felt she had betrayed her promise to never tell anybody about their secrets but I also wanted to feel that her loyalty had shifted. I tried to be understanding as she did what she felt she needed to do.
She had been gone about thirty minutes when she called from the church and told me Bill could see me right then. I wanted him to sweat at least one a day before we met so I said I would meet him the next afternoon..
When Beth got home, she told me Bill was very upset when she told him she had told me everything. Beth also seemed relieved that she no longer carried the onus of keeping the secret. Her relief was tempered by a concern that she had now lost her counselor for good. She was still struggling with obsessive thoughts that had caused her to see him in the first place. Only now she was also dealing with new fear, guilt and depression.
Bill was pretty much speechless when I walked into his office. He ordinarily was never at a loss for words but on this occasion, he could barely mumble a greeting.
“I guess you know you messed up,” I started. “I trusted you to care for my wife and help her to deal with her problems. Instead you have violated her person and taken advantage of her needs.”
He responded, “You are right. I am very sorry.
“Didn’t you have any training as to what professional boundaries were all about?”
“Some.,.. But it just got carried away.”
“So it was more powerful and insidious than you ever imagined?” I pressed.
“Yeah, I guess so,” he conceded.
“I also want you to know that you will never counsel Beth again.“
I told him, “I do not know how you are going to deal with your wife over this matter. I see it as a matter between us and our wives. I will not tell her. That is up to you.
Then we discussed his role as pastor. At that point I was not willing to make his actions a public issue in an effort to protect my wife. “Whether you resign or not is also up to you. I will have trouble believing anything you say from now on, but that will have to be your call.”
He said he would not tell his Pat because that would just complicate things.
As I rose to leave, he looked like a whipped puppy. He looked so pitiful and forlorn as he mumbled. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say.”
There was a Marriage and Family Counselor in our church that we thought might be able to help. Bill did not like him but I did. We called Hal and arranged for him to meet in my office at school.
The next day Hal and Beth arrived about the same time. After brief pleasantries, I told him Beth needed to tell him what had been going on under the guise of counseling with Bill. As Beth told her account of their counseling sessions, Hal stated, “You sound like an abused child.” Hal confirmed what I had already told her. He stated, “It is the counselor’s job to maintain a professional atmosphere in counseling.” Hearing it from an M.F.C.C. seemed to reassure her more than hearing it from her husband.
Hal agreed to take Beth on as a client and tried to reassure her that he could help her deal with the aftermath of a bad counseling situation as well as the obsessive problems that took her into counseling in the first place.
****
The next Sunday morning was tense! I led the music while sharing the platform with Bill. When I took my seat next to Beth in the congregation, she whispered, “Edie knows!”
“Bill and Pat and Edie and Sam were scheduled to be together at the lake yesterday,” Beth told me as we walked the two blocks from the church to our home. “Somehow Edie found out”
I called Bill when we got home. “We believe Edie knows.”
“Yes she knows,” he confessed. “We spent the day with them yesterday. I told Pat and then she told Edie and Sam.”
Bill had told Pat while sitting in the Target parking lot, “I must tell you that there has been some inappropriate stuff between me and Beth. During our counseling there was some hugging and kissing that was no big deal but was not appropriate. Beth told Sean and he met with me this week.” As he continued his story, anger welled up within her. Pat had just told him a couple of weeks before about temptations she was having with a man at work and he had said nothing about any struggles of his own.
“I want to talk with Edie,” she demanded.
“What good would that do?” he queried.
“I don’t care if it would do any good or not, I want someone to talk to other that you.” By now she was screaming and crying hysterically.
Edie came right over when called, listened as Pat poured out her story, tried to console her and the finally returned home with the promise they would discuss it further the next day at the lake.
So by Sunday morning, Pat knew, Edie and Sam knew. Sam’s parents knew. The word was out. Beth felt dirty, condemned and guilty. Furthermore she responsible for the havoc this was creating within the church. She was so overwhelmed by her feelings
that she wanted to die.
During the next week Bill called to tell me of his decision to resign as pastor. He had decided he would devote his full time to his doctoral studies in counseling since Pat had a good job,
