A counselor describes a difficult client. When clients are presenting with depression, they really don't care about risk to themselves or others. This counselor was able to appeal to this client through his children.
C: It's sort of like the thing that I use with the gentleman that I had, he was sleeping with men, sleeping with women and he was married with three little girls. And he had asked his wife for a divorce, he had been bisexual since he was 18 and then decided that he was gay and he was visiting sex clubs and he was using condoms with no one.
N: Uhm.
C: And that was a very long session because he knew, he knew the risk, and there was like no way I could appeal to him except through his children. And that's how I got him, and that's the one that stopped me in the lobby and told me he had sat down with his wife and talked to her, cause she knew he was gay, she knew he was bisexual when she married him, and she said she could change him, and he was the one who had come in and said that I'm not gonna be gay anymore, for his results, he came in two weeks later said I'm not gonna be gay anymore, and I had a conversation with him about what that meant and that he has been gay since he was eighteen and he was now 39, did he truly think he could turn it off.
N: Is this before or after you give him the results?
C: This was, uhm, after I gave him the results.
N: So he'd been affected by that period of waiting, I guess for those results.
C: No, he went back and he talked to his wife, I mean my session with him, I wish I could have had a more experienced person sit in with me. My session with him was very very long and very very intense because he, you know you just couldn't talk to him, he he knew the statistics and everything and his attitude was like this is where I get my pleasure, and as he started to talk he was very disatisfied at home, he was very disatisfied with the fact that he had compromised by marrying a female to pass as heterosexual at work and that's really not what he really wanted to do. And he was black, married to a Fillipina woman, and the cultural difference was a very big problem so, when he got frustrated that's what he did.
He only slept with uhm, when he was doing gay things, he only slept with black men, cause he felt the black connection, but when he was sleeping with women outside the marriage, he was sleeping with Asian women. And so, and he wasn't using a condom, nowhere. With the women, with the men, with the Glory Holes, and then he was talking about bath houses, but his main thing was he wanted to take his girls; he had asked her for a divorce, he wanted to take his girls with him. So I appealed to him through his children and you know, I talked about how I'm sure his children are very beautiful children, you know with the racial mix, and I talked to him about his responsibility to his wife because he owed it to her because she is the mother of these children and these children deserve their mother, and the exposure that he is putting her to, and then I talked about the children, and what if something happens to him, cause he was talking about a very, (.) something that's a big concern in racial couples, especially black ones, and see this is when I mentioned earlier sometimes [as a counselor] you know too much, and that is my children will be raised to know that they are black and my children will be raised with the black history, and I was like, and if you're gone who'se gonna teach them that?
N: Hmmm.
C: And so, that's the appeal that I made on this very strong minded I know my risk, I don't care, I'm gonna do what I want to do and I'm not gonna use a condom, I don't really care about her cause I don't love her anymore, I don't care about the women I sleep with, I don't care about the men I sleep with, I really don't care that much about myself. So, I said so who do you care about? I care about my children, so that's the approach I took. And two weeks later, he, he took a lot of condoms when he left and uhm, two weeks later he came back, I told him some ways of getting his wife to losen up, we discussed, I told him some books he can get to introduce his wife more to the black community. I told him he may even try braiding his children's hair, one child had very kinky hair, the other children had very straight hair, cause the child had hair like him, told him about maybe getting his child's hair braided so that there's not such this fight with his wife so that he didn't resent her so much and just feel like he can just expose her to anything, and so when he came back two weeks later, he was like, "You know, I did this, I did that, I talked to her for the first time in my life and you know, so a lot of things we talked about he went home and talked to her about and he said, oh and I like these condoms here. So I got him some more of those condoms.
N: That's great.
C: He was difficult in a sense because after all was said and done, I told him this, I'm not asking you not to be gay anymore, I'm not even trying to convince you not to be gay anymore. I said my concern is, and I use the thing of the candy, and he's coming back in April, and he's supposed to ask for me in April, and I just got a feeling that he he has had an encounter, a gay encounter outside the marriage because he was too into it, uhm, and that's the only one that I kind of think about and wonder because I told him, I said you know, it's like having ridden a bicycle, it's like having had a taste of some real good sex and then you say, ok, I'm not going to have sex anymore, and you read things that have sexual overtones to them or you even just look at the television and it has all these sexual overtones and you're like I don't want to have sex, I don't want to have sex, I don't want to have sex. I said, what I would hate to see you do is explode and go out there and have unprotected sex and just go wild, and that's the only thing that everytime I think about him, I think (.) is he doing himself real injustice. You know when we, in the training they say try to get them to buy off on something. My thing when I met him and when I did his results was to try to get him to buy off on using condoms with somebody if not all, somebody. He threw me when he came back and said I'm not gonna be gay anymore and that concerned me because to me that's a thermometer waiting to pop, and when he pops is he gonna go unprotected.
N: Or he'll be real high when he does.
C: Yeah, or is he just gonna go? And that's one that I think of.
Index of test counselor narratives
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