Search Gay: My First Referral from the Internet

He was my first referral from the Internet. He called, asked if I did body-psychotherapy, which I do and then asked what was the hardest case I'd ever worked with.

That question caught my attention. I had never been asked it on the phone in twenty years of doing therapy. I registered its uniqueness, but chose not to comment upon it. I told him about a client who had been in and out of mental hospitals for ten years before he came to see me. In five years with me he has not been hospitalized, he has gone back to graduate school, and has now quit school for a $70,000 a year job.

This seemed to satisfy him. He made an appointment for the next day.

When he came in I saw a good-looking, swarthy Latin American man who was twenty-six years old and a graduate student at Tufts.

When I asked him why he had come to see me, he told me the following:

For the past few years -- since he has been in the U.S. -- he has been involved in male homosexual life. At the same time he has had an arranged marriage with a woman waiting for him back home. He has just been told that he has a week to decide whether to go through with the marriage.

This was all told in an offhand, unfeeling way as if he were describing how to get from Harvard Square to downtown Boston.

As I was preparing to say "Wow, that would be a tough decision to have to be made so quickly" -- he went right on to Part II of his dilemma. He is sure that one of his fiancée's female relatives has put a hex on him. I was not certain, but this seemed to relate to his homosexual activities. He wanted to know whether I did exorcisms.

By this time I was reeling under the weight of our cultural differences and the time deadline of his requested help.

Suddenly, I found a way to enter what had been thus far a monologue.

-- How did you come to pick me to see?

He smiled -- a broad, warm, wholehearted smile that immediately cut the tension between us.

He told me that he had been on the Internet. He had done a search of the word "gay". One of the items that came up was Gay and Kathleen Hendrick's book, At the Speed of Light. It is a book on body-centered therapy. He read it. He liked it. Through the net he found one body-oriented therapist in Western Mass -- who was a former student of mine. My former student made the referral to me.

I took it in. He was here because the Internet did not know "gay" from "Gay"! Nor did it know that he was looking for a category of activities rather than the name of a co-author of a book! He was here because of some of the peculiarities of the Internet.

I talked to him about how I did not do exorcisms and that we would need some time to work together and so he ought to ask for an "extension" on his arranged marriage. He listened to me, mumbled that I did not understand the situation, paid me and left saying he would set up another appointment.

He never did. I don't blame him. Given the way he saw his difficulties, I doubt that I would have been much help to him. The success rate of Clinical Psychologists with people who want exorcisms is rather dismal.

I am convinced that the Internet will become one an increasingly useful means by which clients and therapists will hook up. It will allow therapy to reach into rural areas and relatively unpopulated locations. (I have already done a phone session with a lovely seventy year-old man from Charred Creek, Utah.) But it will also bring with it problems, peculiarities and idiosyncrasies of its own -- as my "gay" first referral indicates.

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