True Story© Psycho Therapy

Indecision is my problem…

I am often at a job and TOTALLY detesting what I am doing while being completely unsure of what it is I would RATHER be doing.
[Note: writing…  I would rather be writing and if you have been around since September 1st you know that]

     Anyway, fuck these intro bars, let’s get right to work.
One day last spring, I hit a fit of boredom and perused the craigslist want ads to see if there was the magic bullet of an employment opportunity there for me.  There was not.  What there WAS, however, was an abundance of people offering services for which they should PROBABLY be licensed and at the same time probably were not appropriately so.

I had a plan.

     I know a lot of people in need of professional help, and by “professional help,” I mean they need to see a fucking therapist.  What stands between this most times is most people are afraid to face their fears of their own reality, and the reality they fear most is that 99.98% of human beings are fucked the fuck up.  Not only are we all fucked up, we are so fucked up that we do not see the benefit in paying someone to assess how fucked up we are to help us deal with our fuckedupedness.  Shit, enough of the world is judging us as it is, why the hell should it cost me money to face that?
That’s right, I put up an ad as a psychotherapist and basically worded it such that I would listen to and help you to a common-sense teamwork solution to underlying issues in the least judgmental manner possible and I'd do it for a fraction of what those other quacks charge.  Naturally, I included some small print about no promises and that I am absolutely NOT a board-certified or licensed professional and all that shit that gets me off the hook when someone takes it all the wrong way.
I hate that I don’t register my ads with craigslist because doing so would have presented a perfect time now to log in and screencap the ad in its entirety and not paraphrase.

     Two days after placing the ad, I gets an email from this young lady who’d been having some long-term issues with her family and internalized it all the wrong way and it led to some stress eating and she didn’t want to go too far down that road and end up on My 600-lb Life.
We exchanged numbers and I brought her into my church (I can always get a key from the sexton without questions asked and I know the alarm code).  I seated her on the chaise and sat back in a recliner in the lounge and she talked out her issue.

“Basically, it started when my parents split.  Dad was a philanderer but mom was too, worse probably.  He got caught but she didn’t, and she blamed him.  We, the kids, knew the truth and loved our daddy but mom had created such a barrier between us with a bitter split and taking him to the cleaners such that he was not much in our lives beyond court-mandated child support.  Mom remarried and continued her bullshit on new guy who was basically just the doting husband-slash-overzealous-proud-stepfather.  Basically, he wanted ALL the respect we would give our natural father, as if we didn’t know full well who he was or the rest of the situation.  To him, he was stepping up and couldn't be bothered with the fact that no one respected him.
Mom – and I don’t know if this was some pseudo-respect for him or to snow him and keep him dumb – was insistent that we cave to this.  He never put hands on us, but he was emotionally destructive in how he spoke at us.  We couldn’t tell our daddy or do anything about it because mom kept us sealed from him.  Meanwhile, I would later learn, he bittered to the whole situation not KNOWING the nature of her shit and he stopped even trying to be in our lives.
Now that I am grown, I have a mother I can’t STAND to talk to, a father who doesn’t know what to trust and a stepfather too busy trying to force children to respect him to notice that his own wife never has or will”

Okay, y’all ready?  Say it with me now…

Ho-Lee-SHIT!!!

     Now in my mind, this girl and her two sisters are the victims.  I mean, dude never touched them, but talking down on someone is as shitty as anything you could do with your hands or anything physical in your formative years.  Lacking the support of THE one tasked with such support is worse, and worse still is watching helpless as your blood is shut out of their chance to even PLAY in the game.
I also hated her mother and stepfather.
I woofed some old bullshit about as an adult now trying to get with her blood father through his own blood family, especially his own mama if possible.  Try to build something, make up for lost time and give him all the love she felt she could give in her adulthood.  Let him feel the love of his baby girl and all that goodness.  I bid her adieu and beckoned her to make another appointment with me as soon as she felt she was ready, and we could work up to a regular schedule.

This was on a Tuesday.

     10 days later, I get a FRANTIC phonecall.

“Mr. Phlip, someone stabbed out my mama’s husband’s tires at his job and when she came to bring his tools from the house to fix it, a man and woman knocked them both out cold and then beat BOTH of them with belts and ran away.  I need to talk as soon as possible!”

[Note: it is right now immediately regrettable that I had not come up with Moe Phillips for this undertaking]
I set up an emergency meeting in which I could BARELY keep a straight face.  She went on and on about how much she appreciated seeing her mother and her stepfather get their comeuppance for their shit.  About how sometimes street justice is about all some people deserve.  She thanked me for talking her down off of the ledge previously before paying me for the last session and leaving me with the “I will call you if I EVER need you again.”

     …  I promptly went to my craigslist ad and pulled that motherfucker from the internet before I did some stupid shit to get myself killed or arrested.
Looking back on it now, I wish I had thought to use the Moe Phillips name for this endeavor.