Exits and Entrances - A Journey Through Many Landscapes: by Dave Jaffe . Chapter Six - Part Two

    Chapter Six. Part Two


        When I started to do primal therapy with Eric, I ended up growling, beating my fists against the therapy room's padded walls, and then crying for minutes on end. And yes from time to time I did scream. All the pains of my life and the grieving for dead members of my family came out of my shaking body.
    By now I didn't trust some psychiatrists. One psychiatrist I went to, told me he could cure my addiction to valium. He gave me a pill that nearly gave me a nervous breakdown after taking it, for a few weeks.  Back then I trusted Eric and once a week I set aside an hour for primal sessions.
   "I feel clear," Eric  and I tell each other again and again. And this was true. My massive fits of anger shrink. The primals sweep away my waves of sadness. And I stop abusing women. Yet I should point out, that when I stopped abusing women, some women started abusing me. "Mister," one artist said to me after I took up drawing and painting, "All you do is copy. You don't have an original bone in your body." Another woman who worked at the Vancouver Art Gallery said to my face, "You are one of the most pompous and derivative artists I've ever met."
     A few years after doing primal therapy I worked with a severely disabled woman who abused me day after day. Finally one day after she accused me of making mistakes, I told her, "You're a mistake." Then I left the job I was working at, and found another. In the middle of an argument with another woman, this female told me, "You are crazy and your life is crazy." And finally a neighbour of mine told me that I was one of the weirdest men she had ever known. Much of what these women said about me and to me was probably true. Yet I could have insulted them too but after doing primal therapy I rarely did this.
     Now up to this stage of my memoir I haven't mentioned any women I went out with. The reason for this is simple: Up until the age off 33 I had only hung out with one woman for any stretch of time. In my teens and 20's I did go out with a few women. But none of this dating - as it was called in my youth - went anywhere.
     I'm a fetishist who's turned on by frilly blouses and white scarves wrapped around women's necks. I ended up going to female prostitutes in my twenties and after, making love to these women who wore the frilly clothes and scarves that I brought  to them.
   Over time, some women did turn me on, especially if they were dark or brown-haired, well-dressed and reasonably intelligent. But with one or two exceptions, a long enduring love affair was out of the question. My erections would only come when making love to a woman wearing my fetishes