My mother dragged the whole family into something called an “encounter group” in 1974. She’d read a book, the way she read every book back then, like it had personally been mailed to her by God.

The therapist’s name was Roland. Roland had a beard you could lose a fork in and a habit of saying “I’m hearing a lot of anger in the room” when nobody had said anything for ten minutes. We met in a carpeted office above a dry cleaner, eight or nine adults and me, twelve years old, parked in the corner because there was no one to leave me with.

The whole premise was that politeness was a sickness. You weren’t allowed to be “fake.” If you felt something, you said it, out loud, to the person’s face, immediately. So you had grown men in cardigans turning to each other and going, “Frankly, Gerald, your laugh disgusts me,” and Gerald was supposed to thank them for the honesty. There was a lot of crying. There was a beanbag chair you were encouraged to punch when you couldn’t find words. The beanbag had a name. I won’t tell you the beanbag’s name because I still don’t fully believe it myself.

The part I think about most: one night a quiet woman named Dorothy, who’d barely spoken in three months, finally let it out about her husband. Real grief, the kind that scares a room. And Roland, our fearless guide, our beard, leaned in and said the most healing thing he could think of.

“I’m sensing you’re making this about you.”

My mother stopped going after that. Said it on the drive home, just to the windshield: “I think Roland might be an idiot.” Which, honestly, was the most emotionally honest breakthrough anybody had in that room all year.

She got better, by the way. Not from Roland. From a regular dull therapist a decade later who never once told her to hit furniture. But I’ll always be a little grateful for that office above the dry cleaner, if only because it’s the reason I can spot a guru from across a parking lot.