Area Woman Blows Gasket (10 page)

Ode to Doreen Virtue, Ph.D.

What I respect most about Doreen Virtue, Ph.D., a serene and comely counseling psychologist from Nashville who teaches widely
across North America, is that she is the only living human being, as far as I am aware, who has coauthored a book with the
angelic realm. This ought to be world historic news, and I don't know why it isn't. But her paperback,
Angel Therapy: Healing Messages for Every Area of Your Life
by Doreen Virtue, Ph.D. and the Angelic Realm, is a startling authorial collaboration. According to Doreen Virtue, who presents
seminars at the Learning Annex, among other places, the angelic realm dictates messages to her on everything from "job search"
to "break­ups." They even provide a blurb on the back of the book.

As such, this is an extraordinary development in the annals of modern theological dispute. Even as scholars and clerics debate
in endless papers the number, purpose, meaning, and veracity of the heavenly host, here is the entire angelic realm— HELLO?—
present and accounted for through the mind of Doreen Virtue, just waiting for the faculty at Union Theological Seminary in
New York to stand up and take notice. I like to think that the pope is aware of the angelic realm communicating through Doreen
Virtue or at least that another high Christian official is, perhaps the Archbishop of Canterbury. But it is depressingly common,
these days, for fantastic revelations to remain within their own strict disciplines of academe, where sociologists are unaware
of the data compiled by criminologists and so forth, so perhaps the same blinkered mind-set holds true for Christianity.

I am moved by what the angelic realm says to me about food.

"Earth speaks to you through her offspring, the living plants that you eat," the angelic realm writes. "Think of it this way:
your dinner meal is a meeting in which messages and ideas are exchanged." I had certainly never thought of it that way before,
so now I am in a better position to know that escarole talks to me as I chew it. To be honest, I can't discern the spiritual
import of that, but I realize that I cannot presume.

The angelic realm is very good on dating. "Your essence is charming," they write, "and you needn't worry that you would lapse
into a being that bores or repels others." That is such sweet advice. They then promise to be there for you to check in with
as you hunker down at the Olive Garden or the Rainbow Room or wherever you go, but they add diplomatically: "Granted, we may
come along on your date, but you can also block us out at any time you choose."Thank God, right? Awkward, impulsive, heated
sex without being observed by the entire angelic realm, please.

I know that Doreen Virtue has trained many, many other Americans to be certified angel therapy counselors, bringing the gracious
and gentle advice of the angelic realm to humans, for a moderate fee. I wanted to ask her about this and started hoping that
she would show up on
Larry King Live,
where I could call in for free. Not many people watch as much CNN as I do, given that I have had it on constantly ever since
9/11 just in case I miss something, but certainly some people will have noticed, as I have, that Larry King has a fondness
for interviewing people who pluck answers out of thin air.

This does not bother me, for I understand that these people are tuning in to a frequency I cannot detect. For that matter,
my TV tunes into a frequency I can neither detect, exactly, nor explain to my children with confidence. As far as my household
is concerned, Larry King himself is as much a leap of faith as the talkative deceased relatives of his viewers.

One Good Friday, not long ago, I went down to the Metro Convention Center, where faith ran its consoling current through the
downstairs exhibit hall.

"Oh, look at this," a palm reader murmured, tracing lines on my hand with her pen. "You can communicate with aliens." Her
announcement was certain and full of admiration. She sat back in her chair. We were in a corner booth at the Psychic and Astrology
Expo, where God had been trumped by "personalized healthy balls."

The palm reader, seeking confirmation, gazed into my face with baleful blue eyes that wavered in and out of focus behind smudged
bifocals. I knew of my powers all along, did I not?

"Oh, you're psychic, girl." She squeezed my hand. She nodded. I nodded back. My face must have been utterly blank. I usually
say: "I know what you mean" and contribute some confession to encourage a fledgling connection. But I've never dated an alien,
haven't written them any letters. I'm not going to bother searching my mind. She nodded again, more briefly—" it's true, girl"—
and moved on to warnings from the left side of my palm about impending osteoporosis.

Flipping my hand back and forth like a disembodied object, patting it, drawing on it, she added that I would make lots of
money after I'm forty. I had a "karmic crisis" when I was fourteen, she noted, possibly referring to the night I necked with
Chris Sutherland in Garth Somebody's basement and got labeled a slut at school.

And I make someone else do the dishes, "Right?" Nudge, nudge, the sharing of a conspiratorial chuckle.

"Oh! Here's something really good!" She clapped. "You're never gonna have a nervous breakdown, lady!" Well, the definition
slides.

In truth, it doesn't matter what she said. Psychic fairs are like red-light districts for the heart. Lonely people cruise
their aisles, looking for a stranger they can pay to understand them, someone to say "it'll be all right," the way a lover
would. I paid my palm reader thirty-five dollars to make me feel important, and loved, and revealed. "Yes, I can tell what
kind of person you are," a handwriting analyst informed an overweight young man with carroty hair, one of several solitary
young men in the hall. And she'll only fathom the good things. Never that he's a jerk, or a man about to die.

"People take what they need," an off-duty psychic observed to another in the cafeteria upstairs, both of them drawing on cigarettes,
tired from guessing secrets all day. Their potential clients wandered quietly and carefully through the aisles, sizing up
the Renowned British Psychic, the Famous Irish Psychic, the International Psychic, the Aura Photo booth, andYogi Narayana,
Super Psychic, who once predicted that Margaret Trudeau would become an evangelist. All the seers had snared a client. There
must have been eighty lives being sensed all at once here, in a clamorous traffic jam of auras and vibrations. It's curious
that the psychics don't get addled when they work these fairs. They must pick up random frequencies, like crossed conversations
on a cell phone, from one another's clients just a few feet away. Maria Graciette of Hollywood presided over her Tarot in
a leopard-print blouse, facing a woman in a fuchsia pantsuit. Was she "feeling" that this woman wanted her mum to buy her
a horse? Because across the aisle, the gemstone reader Marlene had an adolescent client, shy with braces. I had seen two of
the psychics before on this circuit. I blew one hundred dollars between them one awful November day about five years ago when
I couldn't stand the friendless silence of my flat. Marie Claire was a beautiful French medium from Montreal with a seductively
husky voice.

"There is a man," she told me then. "He is an older man, who is ill. But he will get better!"

It was happy news, except that I didn't know any older men who were ill. I was the one who felt ill with my longing. She watched
me pensively, knowing she'd gotten it wrong. The other one I saw was now a few booths down the aisle, with the same display
of newspaper clips he had had before, showing that he helped the police find drowned children and stolen jewels. I remember
he seduced me with admiring comments about how old my soul was. Then he told me I was allergic to cheese.

I wonder what else I could learn, if I had four thousand dollars to burn and every seer in the hall got their chance to see
right through me. My fortunes would be infinite, my talents manifold, my food aversions legion. I doubt anyone would cough
up a forwarding address for the aliens. But there's always hope. That's a prediction the psychics need to bank on.

You Don't Want to Know What Your
Therapist Is Thinking

I was complaining to a friend the other day that I would sooner crawl through a sewer than fly on a plane, to which she replied,
"How irrational," and I said, "Yes, I
know
that, but so is your phobia of cotton batting." Whereupon we agreed that our fears might merit a little bit of therapy.

So my friend said: I don't know anyone good. Why not shop around?

Excellent idea, I thought, because I'd been hearing about this trend of on-line therapy. Enterprising psychotherapists the
world over have been throwing up Web pages to advertise their skill at plumbing the depths of your soul. All you have to do
is submit credit card information and you can get counseling via live chat, video conferencing, or e-mail without ever leaving
your home.

This is actually perfect, because I hate the traditional process of acquiring a therapist. You have to ask around, which gets
people gossiping, and in exchange they hand over some name on a piece of paper with an extremely vague testimonial, like:
"He's really nice" or "I found hirrl to be quite nice" or "She didn't say one single thing in six months, just stared at me,
but she was nice."

Nice, schmice, what
school
are they from? Freudian, Jungian, Gestaltian, past-lives, or dolphin-assisted? You have to know where these therapists are
getting their theories about you because there isn't one grand therapist perspective on the universe. Some of them are convinced
that you were abused as a child; others think you're governed by electric currents in your brain. I know all about this because
I have been dogged by ridiculous episodes of anxiety throughout my adult life, and this has flung me onto various mysterious
shores. I have collapsed upon the proverbial couches, gasping and sputtering and evincing a terror of getting cancer from
barbecued meat or being creamed by an SUV, and at various times I have been told that it is my mother's fault, that patriarchy
and internalized anger are to blame, that it's a chemical imbalance, or a repressed memory of being sacrificed to Satan.

The advantage to cybertherapy is that the therapists trumpet their perspective on their Web pages. Thus we have, for example,"Reality
Therapy Online Services" based on "choice theory" as taught at the William Glasser Institute in California. "The goal of reality
therapy," states the institute's Web site, "is to help people re-connect." How that works, specifically, is all written out
right there for you to scroll through until your head hurts.

If reconnecting isn't for you, try an e-mail exchange with Dr. Robert F. Sarmiento of Houston, Texas, whose Web site advocates
SMART therapy, which is Self-Management and Recovery Training, "based on Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy."

Alternatively, you can pour your heart out to Alec Gore, a Neuro-Linguistic Programmer who offers "The Road" approach, which
distinguishes itself from other therapies, his Web site argues, by being "solution-oriented." Indeed, the boast on Gore's
site is that: "You have reached one of the most innovative and effective services in accelerated human change." You have also
reached a man who is actually practicing psychotherapy in Hong Kong, and that is one of the most intriguing aspects of online
counseling. Patients are no longer confined to therapists within physical reach, which is a tremendous advantage to people
outside of major cities and also to people who feel culturally and linguistically displaced. A recent immigrant to the United
States, for instance, could perhaps find counseling from her home country on the Net. Write home to France:
"J'ai beaucoup d'ennuiV
(Translation: "I am le tired.")

Of course, the disadvantage to this cross-border fluidity is the truly stunning, frontier-style lack of regulation. With therapists
available from so many different states and nations, well, Buyer Beware.

The first time I launched myself into this world of anonymous therapists I surfed aimlessly, and eventually decided to submit
my neurosis at random to three different therapists. I prattle-typed to each about my phobia of not smoking and, come to think
of it, my phobia of the dentist and of flying, and how I lapsed into this sort of obstinate paralysis when it came to self-improvement
of any kind, really, and was also horrified of diets and Pilates and climate change and. . . .

It eventually occurred to me that successful patients in the world of cyberpsychology really have to know how to type. Ambrose,
for instance, types like a chicken pecking for seeds, bent over his keyboard with two cocked fingers and a focused gleam in
his eye. He pulls off a sentence in the time it takes me to speed-type the entire plot of a dream I've just had about Gwyneth
Paltrow and her baby, Apple, and how for some reason I moved in with them, and then I pulled a one-hundred-year-old hair out
of my mouth that belonged to an ancient mariner. And what if a prospective patient had writer's block? What if the very act
of writing made them feel inadequate and consequently more depressed?

In any event, a couple of days after I sent the e-mail about smoking, I received the following message: "Be a non-smoker in
7 days!!! With Kick-It. Guaranteed." Oh, that perky spam. If you think hucksters aren't monitoring psychotherapy exchanges
along with everything else, you can now put that delusion to rest.

Next, from Adriane St. Clare, a psychologist in Fortuna, California, I received this message in reply to my cry for help:"Your
problem of paralysis and inability to stop smoking may be related to the anisorder you suffered from earlier in your life."
Hmmm. Interesting. Anisorder? What is that? A typo? He concluded: "I would highly recommend a face-to- face treatment, such
as EMDR, to assure the most effective results." Oh, EMDR. Bight. And that would be what?

To decipher babble, please provide credit card info here.

Some weeks later Dr. Rob Sarmiento of Houston, to whom I shelled out forty U.S. dollars, sent me a kind e-mail suggesting
that I do the "reality check" quiz on his site and otherwise try to engage in cognitive-behavioral therapy. "You might also
want to observe what urge-causing thoughts you have when you feel like smoking, such as 'I need a cigarette' or 'I can't quit.'"

Amazing! Those really are the urge-causing thoughts that I have!

"Once you have identified the thoughts," Sarmiento continued, "you can start questioning them, for example, 'How uncomfortable
will it be on a one-to-ten scale, with ten being boiled in oil?'"

That's hard. I don't know. I've never been boiled in oil. Nor have I ever had my head sawed off with a butter knife, which
I suspect would also hurt worse than quitting smoking, but I just don't see them as competing options.

Not to knock Dr. Sarmiento, because he then sent me an envelope full of fridge magnets with reality check lists on them, and
a wallet card proclaiming itself an Official Human Being License.

Let me tell you: I may have been a smoker, but I'm no rodent, or a plant either, and I have the papers to prove it.