Inspirational Stories from In Treatment:

Over the course of In Treatment and many weeks and months beyond, the forum participants would often share their painful or inspirational true stories.  I had become acquainted with one of the participants and had volunteered to write her story which appears below. Many of the other women on the thread really responded to this woman's deeply moving story and wanted to comment on it and also wanted to post their own.  As a result, the Inspirational Stories Thread was born.  The original post appears below. 

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I was recently contacted by a woman who’s been watching and reading these boards for some time.  Her story, so personal, so painful, remained tucked away during our first few emailed conversations. She was obviously interested in the show and Gabriel Byrne but her questions and observations seemed to spring from a distant place, as if she wanted to skinny dip in these wanton waters with the rest of us but preferred to stay safely on dry land for now.  She seemed kind and reserved but there was a hidden sadness in her sentences, ghosts in her paragraphs, so after trading a few emails, I asked her about her story. 

What she told me is an amazing testament to the power of this series, this actor and more importantly, the human spirit.  She told me she had suffered severe sexual abuse in her childhood and she was still battling with very deep and debilitating fears of men, not just a few men, but all men.  Her fear ran so deep that she struggled to look any man in the eye and became physically ill if one showed sexual interest in her. She had sought therapy for many years, always with a female therapist, but had never been able to reach a level of comfort with the opposite sex. But this is changing now, miraculously, In Treatment, Paul Weston and Gabriel Byrne have touched a place in this woman’s heart that professional therapy could not.

This isn’t a story about an instant catharsis.  Like any other therapy, the healing progressed over time. But from the first few minutes of the first night’s show, she was riveted by the stories unfolding in the safety of her living room, drawn in by the characters with demons like her own. Watching these episodes, she’d find herself sobbing uncontrollably, impossible to hold closed the door to her own hidden places. But over time, watching became easier and she felt a tenuous flicker of hope enkindled. She developed a particular fondness for the Sophie episodes, identifying so profoundly with the character. She was often moved to tears as she watched Paul work his magic with the girl, soothing away her damaged self-image, restoring her confidence in the world around her. She found herself growing comfortable with the television image of Dr. Weston, but wasn’t yet ready to trust the on-screen persona. If she was going to reclaim her hope in the truth of kindness and caring based on a television doctor, she needed to know more about the man that breathed him to life.

And, that’s when she set about researching Gabriel Byrne.

Like the rest of us, she wanted to believe that Byrne couldn’t inhabit the soul of Paul Weston so convincingly if he weren’t a kind, caring, trustworthy man in real life.  But she needed proof.  After some months of reading his life story, his interviews, his articles, she began to think he might be that poet, that understanding caring man we all hope he is. But it wasn’t until she discovered that Gabriel Byrne had also been abused as a child, that she let herself truly believe. And now, for her as for many of us, Gabriel Byrne has become difficult to separate from the empathic doctor we’ve all come to love or at least she believed he has revealed a part of himself in Dr. Weston.

For the first time in her life, this woman who has suffered so greatly at the hands of men, who has extreme difficulty trusting men, who has been working for decades just to be comfortable in the presence of men, feels hope because of this man.

 I asked her to describe her feelings for Gabriel Byrne to me. “It’s a feeling of profound appreciation, it’s a feeling of affinity and well”, she admitted shyly, “It’s also a crush. There is definitely a crush in there too”. She now hopes to get the chance to do the thing she once feared the most, she hopes to meet the man in person and see if she can look into his eyes, straight into his eyes. “If I do this” she told me, “I will know, I will finally know”.  She will prove to herself that she can believe a man can be kind, gentle and good. She will finally be able to answer the question she’s been asking all her life, Can one man be trusted? And if the answer is yes, then some men can be trusted and if that is true, then the hope of healing becomes a very real and possible dream.

Thanks to the show, the woman in this story has gone back to therapy and this time with a man.  She can look him in the eye on occasion and sit through the entire session without throwing up, although sometimes, she still thinks she might.  I don’t want to leave without giving her credit for her own courage and would feel a little awkward attributing so much of her recent progress to Gabriel Byrne if she hadn’t told me point blank what an incredible impact he has had.  She feels so strongly about this, that she asked me to post this story. She hopes that it will encourage more people to seek help, share their pain as well as their triumphs.

So I close by saying that perhaps for some women, Gabriel Byrne’s appeal reaches beyond his beauty, stretches past his talent; even surpasses his inexplicable mojo.  For some women, this man is a tourniquet around a deeply wounded spirit, a bandage on a punctured heart.

For some women, this man is medicine.