Therapy exaggerated my existing tendency to show my weakest side. I was meek, enthralled, deferential at my therapists' feet, though not quite that obeisant outside the consulting room. (I'd made some career progress and had a modest house.) My servility seemed red meat to therapists serving their most extreme savior fantasies. They convinced themselves about my divine improvement anointed with their celestial auras. One labeled a ill-advised romance as great progress; another deemed my cry about mean mommy a forever-more metamorphosis. She even sent me for a beauty make-over to signify my heavenly rebirth she created.

I gullibly trusted all of this. In fact, I needed less externalized authority, more self sufficiency. I needed less emphasis on my defects and unhappy past. Instead I got superparents, subordination and more self-deprecation.

It wasn't until much later I realized the folie à deux, the grand manipulation. I don't see the therapists as melodrama villains. I'm sure they thoroughly believed their own legends.