By Laura Delano at Brownstone dot org.

[This is chapter two from Laura Delano's Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance (Viking, 2025). Brownstone Institute is grateful for permission to reprint.]

Not long after that argument about Maine, my parents brought me to my first therapist. Her name was Emma, and they told me that she worked with families and would be helping us. She happened to live half a mile up the street, but the three of us drove to her home office on a weekend morning for our first session. As I stepped inside the waiting room, the force of shame was so heavy on my shoulders that I nearly collapsed in upon myself.

I tightened up to keep from disappearing: shoulders to ears, arms locked, fists and jaw clenched, neck muscles contracted. I sat down and locked my gaze on the carpet until its hard patterns melted into softness. Bewildered by my parents selling me out like this, I was no longer willing to meet their eyes, nor able to.

Emma welcomed us into her office. Her voice had this warm, crackling-embers sound about it - I always think of Judi Dench when I recall her - and I was convinced it was the sound of everything wrong with the world. She had a short mop of white hair, wide hips beneath ankle-length pants, a soft stomach. The sight of her made me want to vomit. The instant her sparkling eyes made contact with mine and she smiled, I hated her.

I carry a faded snapshot of that first session in my mind: My parents, Emma, and I are sitting on chairs in a circle in her cozy office. I'm hunched in my seat, arms crossed tightly over my chest, brow furrowed. To my left, my father is wearing a worn dress shirt tucked into old jeans; he has the body language of someone unselfconscious, relaxed but attentive.

To Dad's left, my mother wears a cashmere sweater, cigarette-cut slacks, and needlepointed slip-on shoes; her arms, like mine, are crossed in front of her; she's taut and tense, mouth closed.

My most valuable artifact from that day is pure emotion, preserved in me, all these years later, like a prehistoric insect in amber: Shame radiating out from my face, despair surging within me. My throat closed, voice powerless. Panic in my chest as I felt all of their eyes home in on me like laser beams, penetrating my insides against my will.

Emma was only pretending to be kind and really wanted to control me, I felt, so I switched instantly into surveillance mode, scanning the room in self-protective sweeps, sure of what my mind was telling me: They're lying when they say this lady is going to help all of us. I know they think I'm the problem, not them.

My conviction would be reinforced in the coming days, when my mother would tell me I was to continue therapy with Emma, only moving ahead, I'd walk up the hill to see her by myself.

Not long after I started therapy, I drank alcohol for the first time. From the garage at a slumber party emerged a warm six-pack, this glistening beacon calling me toward rebellion. I watched the first can as it passed from hand to hand, Yes no yes no, do it, you can't, do it, you can't pinging about in my head. I knew that saying yes would mean the loss of something, but when I took that first sip, there was only an unfamiliar and comforting warmth in my gut.

None of us ever got anywhere close to drunk that year, but that wasn't the point. It was the meaning behind the act that mattered: breaking rules we'd been taught to never break, feeling the solidarity that arose from participating in the very things we were sure we'd never partake in. I'd duped myself by thinking that being good would help me feel worthy, but the night in the mirror had proved me wrong. Where else had I duped myself? What else had I been missing?

The quest to dismantle my moral framework continued through the summer. At mountain biking camp, I abandoned my years-long dream of having my first kiss with Harris Fowler, the boy whose heart-covered initials I'd been decorating binders with since playing on r...