Memoirs of A Healer/Clinical Social Worker: Autobiography of Bruce Whealton

Section Seven: A Living Nightmare: Losing Lynn And Feeling Dead

This section of my book describes events that are dark and horrifying. This marks a radical change in the narrative of the book. Nothing that happened prior to now could have prepared me for the horrors that await.

At the end of the last chapter, I was on top of the world. I certainly would not have wanted anything to change. I would have done anything imaginable to hold onto the life I had with Lynn. I was crazy in love.

My career that I had spent the past sixteen years building was about to come to a sudden, crashing end.

Most of the events described within the chapters of this entire section occurred within one month - August of 2000.

John Freifeld became obsessed with destroying my credibility and my career. He had moved from Virginia to Wilmington and moved in with the first person he referred to me for treatment. He would brainwash some of my clients into thinking that I was the cause for all their problems and why they weren't getting better. That included one client, Sadie, who had successfully completed therapy with me and previously had said she was very satisfied with the care that I had provided.

Freifeld composed a complaint letter to the North Carolina Social Work Certification and Licensure Board (NCSWCLB) on behalf of five of my clients, including the client who had been satisfied with my care when I last met with her for therapy. The complaints were the same, verbatim.

One of the complaints was that I planted false memories of Satanic Ritual Abuse. I had previously looked into how it was that two of my clients had begun to believe that these bizarre things happened to them as children.

Everything that mattered to me was under assault. Lynn's disease suddenly took a turn for the worse. This more than anything was terrifying to me. She was my whole life. I was madly in love with Lynn. She was part of me. We were one body. We were husband and wife.

How do you cope without the one person that connects you to the world and everything meaningful in the world? Whatever success I had found in life was made all the more beautiful and amazing because I could share it with Lynn. Now her life was in jeopardy.

The issues that clients presented to me could be addressed with rational reasoning. That had worked for a while. However, there was no similar way to cope with the loss of the entire life I had built with Lynn. Again, most of the chapters in this section occur within one month of 2000. So, there wasn't time to go ask a therapist for advice or guidance.

Previously, I would ask my colleagues, therapists, psychologists, or my psychoanalyst how I might handle complicated matters that might have an impact on my success as a psychotherapist. Now things were changing too fast - literally from one day to the next. It wasn't clear to me when I should have canceled all appointments with every client.

It would have been easier if I caught a serious illness like a virus in August of 2000. Then I would have known to cancel all appointments for as long as necessary. It's easier to tell when we have something physical happen to us.