I sat on the soft comfy couch; all around me, on tables & shelves were various scary things, staring at me with frank condemnation.
I was in my customary place on the comfy therapist couch, the armrest just beside my right arm. Normally, my wife sat to my left, beside me – I chose that spot so my “good ear” could pick her soft voice out from the ambient white noise. If the couch were a boat, she was the life preserver protecting me from scary things. Today, for the very first time, I sat on the couch alone.
I was trembling – a deep primordial shudder in my soul that began a few days prior. Each night the panic waited for me in the dark shadows of our bedroom, taking my hand as I fell asleep before turning me over to the nightmares. The restless tossing and turning melting into an early morning of racing anxiety that greeted me intimately like an abusive lover.
Across from me sat my therapist – or rather OUR therapist, as she worked with my wife and me.
Our Sex Therapist.
“Are you ok?”
As awkward silence fell like snow, a voice inside my head reminded me that I most certainly was NOT “ok”. If there was some small patch of ground that was the furthest possible point on Earth from this place called “ok”, I was there, curled in a fetal position.
Meeting with her alone, in one-on-one sessions? It was all her idea! Hadn’t she ever heard of the Billy Graham Rule!? Without my wife beside me on the couch, I was vulnerable and painfully aware of her absence. Normally if things got too overwhelming, I could always count on Megan to speak up and fill the heavy silence. It was her gift to humanity: like a carbon atom, she had the uncanny ability to bond with everyone she met. Without her, there was no one to save me from the next 50 minutes.
Suddenly aware of the silence, I muttered something to the effect that I was NOT ok – this was incredibly terrifying for me.
“Why?” She asked, simply stated, with a hint of curiosity.
Incredulous, I wondered why she didn’t she understand what happened when a man and a woman were alone together? And in this case, alone to talk about the big dark S – dash – dash word!? Billy Graham rolled over in his grave, a deep scowl of disapproval on his decomposing face. Talk about a recipe for absolute moral failing! I half expected her to leap from her therapist chair, leathery succubus wings unfolding as she did so, to sink fiendish fangs deep into my neck and gorge on my fragile soul.
Instead she asked, softly and kindly, if I would feel more comfortable if I held one of the poofy pillows from the therapist couch. I pulled the nearest one to my chest; I was Rose clinging desperately to the wooden raft as the Titanic sank to the darkest depths. The pillow made me feel slightly better; Perhaps when (not if) she threw herself at me, I could fend her off with a pillow. I imagined the irony of the great and final battle for my soul, waged as a pillow fight.
Thick, heavy silence settled over the room.
I was never good at looking into eyes – my rather obvious Autism Spectrum Disorder remains to this day undiagnosed. But eyes burn me – they hurt to look at. I can handle short, brief glances at a stranger’s face that usually then settle just to the right of their head. Eyes? No thanks: Their left ear is always safer. I chanced a glance at her eyes, her face – and the look of sincere empathy and compassion left me suddenly self-conscious. I must really look like a total nut job, I thought to myself.
But it was empathy and compassion that spilled into her voice when she asked me if I wanted to talk about what was going on inside my head.
Once I started talking, it was hard to stop – and as the dam inside me burst, she listened. I imagine she did not grow up in American Evangelical Christianity; she probably had never heard of Billy Graham and his stupid rule. And Purity Culture? I don’t think she had a purity ring or ever kissed dating goodbye. But as a licensed professional sex therapist, she knew all about the root issue – shame – that rooted me to the couch like a small trembling rabbit.
As we walked through my shame, it became obvious that I had been lied to. The Billy Graham Rule, as it’s often known within Evangelical circles, was a lie. It was constructed from fear of a monster under the bed that didn’t actually exist. I didn’t want to be unfaithful. I was not unfaithful. But the lie told me I would have to be unfaithful if I was alone with another woman – that we had no choice. Or, to use a word that was at that time completely foreign to me, it was built without knowledge of CONSENT.
CONSENT: the only cure for the relational disease called Purity Culture.
At this point, the Billy Graham Rule joined the growing list of lies I had been sold within Evangelical Christianity. Over time, this list coagulated into a collective name: The Big Lie.
Slowly, with kindness and empathy, I healed. The large ball of inter-tangled fishing line that was the summation of my wife and my sexuality slowly began to separate and straighten out, become my own. Of course there were challenges – we had spent over 25 years of learning how to enmesh ourselves in each other. Undoing that damage did not happen overnight, as our sex therapist often reminded us. To quote Yoda, we had to unlearn that which we had learned. It was slow, messy business. But there was no going back – once out, the toothpaste could never go back into the tube.
Over time, I discovered that couch was a safe place: A place to heal. A place where the chains of my deepest shame could be scooped up and emptied out, before being disassembled link by link. A place where I could finally find my way to freedom.