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Seeing Samuel was a huge ego boost for me. After years of no support
and harassment at the hands of medical doctors and other psychology
professionals, he was completely supportive of my 'situation' and my
desire to look into and resolve it.
During our first sessions, he asked about my previous experiences
with psychological professionals and I told him of the psychologist
who'd I first seen during my four day hospital stay in Nineteen
Eighty-Seven, which was a good experience, and then the times with
the mental health social worker 'Stella Hernandez' who had spent the
sessions telling me about her life and problems rather than the other
way around, my experiences with the Vocational Rehabilitation
psychologist and his bizarre technique & findings, and my brief
time with the counselor whose office was at the other hospital in
town who denied I had even had a sister and who desperately wanted to
find records of a nonexistent time I was in a mental institution.
Samuel noted that often times people go into the psychological field
to learn about their own issues rather than with the goal of helping
others in mind and as a result they will often spend their time using
patients as blank slates for their own use.
In my case Samuel felt I made the perfect blank slate given my
ambiguous racial background as well as my biologically ambiguous sex
and tendency to be initially quiet when meeting people given my
stuttering. He could see many people filling in that initial
question mark of who and what I was with what was going on in their
own minds rather than taking me as I truly was. I noted the many
times I had people see me and blow up about things I knew nothing
about but they thought I was guilty of; and also of the times when
people would see me and suddenly feel I was the right person to
unburden themselves about dark matters in their lives.
Samuel agreed that these occurrences fit into his 'blank slate'
theory. Some people saw me as a way to externalize their own
neuroses, in the case of things people didn't like about themselves
they would paint them onto me. In the case of people who needed to
unburden themselves, they could imagine me as the person they needed
to confess to as there was nothing definitive about me to dissuade
them and also, seeming to appear outside of the social norm, I wasn't
perceived as a threat that would, or socially could, judge them for
their confession. He noted that often times people of any particular
majority would often feel more comfortable telling secret things to
people of a perceived minority as 'if it ever got out' they could use
the person's minority status as a reason why that information
shouldn't be given credence.
I mentioned a time when someone said they believed I could 'read
peoples souls', Samuel returned that it was people's reactions to me
that gave me the insight into other peoples' souls. In many ways I
was like a walking-taking Rorschach Test for some people.
As part of coming up to speed about me, Samuel requested to get the
records of my neuropsychological evaluation from 'Dr. Maverick'. I
agreed though pointed out my past experiences that doctors would use
those contacts to verbally pass on B.S. about me to other
professionals. He said we could give it a try and see what happens.
I signed the paperwork and he sent off for the records. When they
arrived he told me that while she might have told me verbally that my
pain in the left side of my head and subsequent permanent deficit in
February of Nineteen Eighty-Nine 'might have been a stroke' she had
noted it affirmatively in her records, so the diagnosis stood. He
then told me a few sessions later that 'Dr. Maverick' was having to
move her practice out of town and she was now disavowing that
diagnosis in order to avoid further trouble with the Colorado Medical
community.
Still, from her records Samuel confirmed my genius I.Q. level and
explained to me that my score meant I was 'at or above the doctorate
level in most subject areas'. He clarified that it was
'at or above' as the tests were standardized to the doctorate level
and since I had maxed out in so many areas, for all we knew I was
above the doctorate level and they simply couldn't detect that
with the test. I joking asked him if that was why I had so many
problems with medical doctors, since the saying was 'doctors make the
worst patients' and I was 'at the doctorate level'. We laughed at
that and then he confirmed it might be the case as I was sharp enough
to sometimes see through the doctors' actions and realize they
weren't making logical sense in what they were doing or saying.
He asked if I wouldn't mind taking one of his own favored
psychological tests and I agreed. When the results came back, it
found me to be normal BUT that it flagged that I seemed to be hiding
negative information about myself. When we discussed what that might
mean I noted the handful of questions it had asked about presumed
past sexual partners and resulting problems with them. As I had
never had any sexual partners I therefore reported never having
problems with them. Just to see, we picked one of those questions
and changed the answer to 'have had a problem with' and reran the
results. The following meeting he affirmed that the test now found
me to be normal without any reservations. We concluded the test
should be updated not to assume everyone taking it had been sexually
active beforehand.
When the topic reached to my mixed-sex 'situation' it ultimately came
down to first making sure I was fully aware of the social pluses &
minuses of each gender role, and helping me deal with other people
who were uncomfortable with me given my ambiguity and possible future
choices. In the case of gender roles he felt I had a pretty good
handle on them as I had started to observe and consider the
differences since my surprise puberty at age thirteen. In the case
of helping people it was more of the same sort of 'unofficial
psychological counseling pointers' that Jude had given me for dealing
with medical doctors, to first calm any situation down as much as
possible and then spend time asking questions to bring into the open
the source of the other person's discomfort and discuss it.
When it came to what choice I would make, as Dr. 'Czarniecki'
concluded that I couldn't be biologically any more 'a man' than I
already was, and the trial estrogen injections had made the sudden
fevers I had been experiencing during the previous decade of my life
go away, it seemed a simple choice to me to consider normalizing as
female. That decision would have been much harder for me if we had
still been in nineteen fifties America with its strict and confining
life choices women had in that day and age, but by the nineteen
nineties women had made huge strides toward equality in America.
What level of discrimination that was left seemed little different to
what I had already faced with my mixed-race background and life long
stuttering. When it came to seeing medical doctors, I couldn't
imagine things being worse than what I had already experienced with
them while being intersexed. On that point, Samuel agreed.
As women more often than not had longer hair than men, Samuel
recommended I grow out my hair and see if I liked having it that
way...
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