From Bachelor trainee, Healers, Teachers, and Spiritual Steppingstones August 8, 2008
Less than a year after I started at ZCLA, I started seeing Pat Sutton on a weekly basis for psychotherapy. My last session was five and a half years later.
I wrote about this experience in two sections of my Antioch Portfolio, Individual Psychotherapy, which took place from June to December 1973 and Group Psychotherapy, which continued from January 1974 through May 1979.
Here’s how I remembered it starting, when I wrote about it in 1976 for the Individual section:
In June of 1973 I had been working as a stagehand for almost a year. I had just started taking drum lessons for the first time in nine years. I had saved up enough money to pay my parents back for the car they had bought me when I first started working. I was interested in a girl who had come to the Zen Center, and was chasing her all over, but she was not interested in me. Finally she got so annoyed she suggested that I would be better off working through my dependency in psychotherapy rather than taking it out on her. I wanted her so much and she was telling me to go into therapy, so maybe it was time to try therapy. I asked two of my friends who were doing graduate work in psychology and had started private counseling practices whom they recommended. Both of them were seeing the same therapist, Pat Sutton, and recommended her very highly.
I went to see Pat at her home in South Pasadena. The first session with her I felt so warm and accepted that I was able to say to her, “I haven’t been able to share any of my most personal thoughts with anyone, ever, but it seems easy with you.” In that first session I shared all of what seemed like my deepest secrets that I had stored up for years. I had felt so isolated when I went in and when I left I felt that I had said everything there was to say and couldn’t imagine where we could go from there except into new areas of pure growth.