Discharge! My Guidance Counselor Steered Me Into Cult-Like Activities

I was lonely the first few months of 10th grade. The few (girl) friends I'd had the year before, my first year of high school?friends with whom I'd eat ice cream, take Cosmo quizzes, listen to Dark Side of the Moon or "Tainted Love"?had drifted into other scenes that featured boys and vodka. They'd started wearing lipstick, or dyed their hair two-tone black and blonde, or adopted a Boston accent, and I was left without a group to call my own.

I wasn't a punk, terrified as I was of being called a poser, or a "neo-hippie," a metalhead or a preppie. What this meant, mainly, was that I didn't have a table in the cafeteria or a staircase in the quad to call my own. I was also bored a lot after school got out. I'd end up eating lunch sometimes at the top of a particular flight of stairs, one that led nowhere but to a small landing with its wall covered in graffiti. Most of the graffiti was left by other students who shared my predicament, but that didn't make me feel any better.

So I did something that, in retrospect, was wildly misguided and naive. I went to see my guidance counselor.

She was a faded-looking woman in early middle age?an original hippie, nothing "neo" about her?with lank blonde hair and a moon face. With a lot of difficulty, I told her about the problems I seemed to be having?I didn't fit in, I didn't have friends?and she told me that she knew of a group I might be interested in checking out. A group that met right here in the high school, weekday nights. She'd sent other students to this group, she said, and they seemed to find it really helpful. She gave me info about meeting times and, I think, the names of a few students she'd referred. At any rate, either from that conversation or just from asking around I soon found people I could ask about the group.

One of them was Gillian, a glamorous senior. She was in my philosophy class. (It was an unusual school, we had no bells, and sophomore-senior classes and philosophy and a headmaster, although we were a public school, in fact the town's only high school. It was an unusual town.) I got up the nerve to approach her about the group?it was called Peer Counseling?before class started one day. Gillian was friendly and open and told me that she hadn't stuck with Peer Counseling. "It wasn't for me," she said, brushing back her curly red hair. "But a lot of people are really into it. And it can be good for some things. Like, if you've got a hang-up about people touching you, it can help you get over that."

I did have such a hang-up, as it happened, and I wasn't totally sure I wanted to get over it. But, what the hell. I started going to meetings.

Immediately I found that I knew, or at least knew of, a lot of the kids in Peer Counseling, which was also called, according to the little blue-covered manual we were asked to buy, Re-Evaluation Co-Counseling. (I bought it at the town's new-age store, where it sat alongside candles and Alan Watts and coffee-table-size versions of the Tao Te Ching.) Apparently an awful lot of the kids I envied, who seemed to me to have everything I lacked, well, they had their problems too. I learned that it was possible to get too much attention from boys and that having divorced parents was maybe tougher than having parents like mine who fought a lot. I got to hear other people talk about their "problems" and it gave me some perspective on mine. In other respects, though, Peer Counseling was a bust right from the beginning. I was there because I wanted friends, maybe especially guy friends and a boyfriend, but one of the first rules turned out to be: no friendships or "relationships" with those you met through the group. Bringing friends you already had into the group, though, was fine; in fact it was encouraged.

Some of the other rules seemed pretty odd, too. We weren't supposed to attend meetings drunk or high (okay), but neither were we supposed to consume caffeine or sugar beforehand. People started treating their candy bars like some sort of contraband, getting giggly if they were "naughty" and had one before a session.

The thinking behind Peer Counseling was that there was no need for specialized training for anybody to counsel anybody else. Professional therapists were, essentially, a waste of money. All psychological problems were caused by suppression of emotions, reactions, whatever, so the goal of every counseling interaction was, as the manual rather unfelicitously put it, "discharge."

Crying, laughing, even yawning; all these counted as discharge. (I think someone actually did get up the nerve to ask whether an orgasm was discharge, but I can't remember what the answer was.) The main limit on what you, as a counselor, could do to induce discharge was that it couldn't be physical contact (which mostly took care of the orgasm question). But anything verbal was within bounds.

We didn't do too much actual counseling or being counseled for the first few weeks, though. We just sat around in a group in a room on the top floor of the high school and introduced ourselves and talked about what was troubling us. It was mostly 10th- and 11th-graders, but there were a couple of adults who didn't seem to have any connection to the high school and one 11-year-old brother of a high-schooler who was in another Peer Counseling group (there were several groups, with different leaders, meeting at different times). Our leader was a perky blonde 22-year-old student from a college maybe an hour and a half's drive away. Someone asked her once how long she'd been going to Peer Counseling. "Eleven years," she replied.

PC was never what you'd call gripping, and I was uncomfortable with the dramatic displays of emotion?the crying, the hysterical laughter, the super-long embraces?that some of the more seasoned members did. I kept going to meetings, though, because I did get to meet people even if the setting was bizarre. And though officially we couldn't become "friends," we'd all say hi and nod when we ran into each other in the halls. And then I wasn't doing much else.

The real hook, though, was the presence in the group of my crush?one of them anyway?a guy I'll call Hat and Glasses. Besides these accouterments he also had the same bookbag as I did and smoked, a lot. We were neighbors and I used to see him often while I walked to school. Clearly, he was an intellectual. I held out the hope that when we were all split into cocounseling pairs, as we'd been told we would be, he and I would become a pair in the truest sense. Then we could both quit the group.

Of course, it didn't work out quite that way. I'd noticed that my crush seemed suspiciously responsive to another of the girls in the group, Hannah, an attractive preppie. The night we got our partners I watched in horror as a clearly overjoyed H and G accepted Hannah's invitation to become her cocounselor. Our leader, Gail, called on people in turn to make their choices; none of them wanted me. It was worse than being picked last for kickball. When I was finally allowed to make a choice, it was either one of the adults, a sad-sack-looking 40-year-old man, or the 11-year-old, Pete. I picked Pete.

We got along surprisingly well, considering the four-year age difference. Pete was sophisticated?he got drunk more than I did?and funny and basically a good kid. We didn't do much counseling when we went off together (later I found out this wasn't unusual). On one occasion, though, Pete had to give a speech at school, something he was genuinely afraid of, and we decided we'd give it a try. He got up behind a lectern that we found in the corner of the classroom and read the draft of his speech. Even just in front of me, he was uncomfortable and kept stammering and giving up. Ruthlessly, I made him start over, and over, until he got teary and red in the face. Discharge! Only we didn't seem to have accomplished anything, and I felt like an asshole.

A short time later we started doing one-on-one sessions in front of the larger group (we were now meeting twice a week, once with our partners and once with everyone). More experienced PCers from other groups took part. One night it was my turn to get up in front of the group and be laid into by one of the senior folk. As luck would have it, Lisa was the older sister of one of my friends from grade school, someone whose house I'd played at often as a kid. The way this part worked was that the counselee would admit to some kind of insecurity and the counselor would run with it.

I don't remember too much of what happened after I got up there. I don't even remember what my "issue" was. I remember Lisa yelling at me and calling me a slut, which now seems ironic. Things escalated and I became genuinely upset and cried and was rewarded with hugs. Discharge!

"This is really stupid," I thought.

After that, it didn't take long. We were all supposed to shell out 40 bucks to go on some kind of retreat, and I was putting off asking my parents (who'd been skeptical about the project all along) for the money. One night I went out for a stroll and ran into Hat and Glasses walking his family's dog. We started talking and before I knew it I was telling him how stupid I thought Peer Counseling was and he was agreeing with me wholeheartedly. All my misgivings about the group seemed so obvious and reasonable once I was telling them to someone else.

When we parted I knew I wouldn't be going on the retreat. I called up Gail and told her I was dropping out. Hat and Glasses quit a month later, but a lot of others?in various of the little cells?stuck with it through the rest of high school and maybe beyond.

I changed guidance counselors and started hanging out with another girl from philosophy class who worked in the town head shop, knew a lot of boys and had a car and a driver's license. Soon my parents were on my back about how I stayed out too late and they didn't like my friends. Life had started.