Doctor / Patient Confidentiality

I stated before that Mike encouraged all of his students to visit him privately in addition to attending the weekly Ba Gua practice. I related how I had avoided this because of the expense and because I do not believe in psychiatry.

Mike had a degree in psychiatry. His office was a combination chinese medicine / psychiatric practice. I always felt there was a stigma attached to seeing a psychiatrist. A person seeing a psychiatrist was crazy, or they were unable to do things for themselves.

I also violently distrusted psychiatrists. What a psychiatrist does basically is encourage people to tell them secrets. These secrets give the psychiatrist power over the person who hands them over. I think it is not a good idea to be telling strangers your secrets.

I described how I had avoided going to Mike's office by saying I was broke and could not afford it. Then I finally gave in after a year or so because I felt that Mike was treating the other students who did pay him to go privately better than he treated me. I thought maybe if I paid him for the office visits, then I would become his buddy and be treated like everyone else.

Because of my attitude towards psychiatrist in general, the office visits did not go well. Mike wanted me to talk about myself. I was not there to talk about myself. I was there to learn about Ba Gua and how to become a superior kung fu man.

Mike assured me that it was necessary to talk to me as a person, find out who I was, etc etc in order to best teach me. I grudgingly accepted this and told him a few things. Things I felt were private, but harmless. I wanted to test Mike to see what happened.

I told Mike I did not like my mother and I didn't really get along with my family. Mike said I need to tell my mother that I loved her and reconcile with my family. I took this very literally. I went home, got on the phone, told my mother I loved her, then I waited.

And I waited and I waited and I waited. I didn't feel any different. I didn't feel any difference in power. I didn't feel like my Ba Gua got better or my kung fu practice in general got better. I felt like I had acted on Mike's instruction, and it was a waste of time.

That naturally made me even less willing to talk about myself. I went to Mike's office to learn about Ba Gua and Kung fu. Every time I went there, Mike would ask me what I wanted and my response was invariably something I wanted to know about kung fu.

Mike even told me once at the office, "Every time I am around you I find myself talking about kung fu". Looking back now, it was probably a rebuke. At the time I thought it was a stupid thing to say. I hoped he would be talking about kung fu. I wasn't paying money and driving an hour to his office to talk about anything else but kung fu.

Most of my time was spent in the office quietly resisting. Mike would talk about this and that and I mostly refused to participate. I did not want to talk about all these other pointless subjects. Plus I did not trust him. I did not trust psychiatrists in general, and I did not trust his judgement after the situation with my mother.

Later on, I came to thank the gods that I was untrusting.

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One day we were practicing at the school playground. I don't know if the narrative to this point has talked about the move to the school playground for Sunday practice. Well. Now you know. ;)

We are all standing around taking a break after doing something and talking about nothing in general. I do not know what the subject was.

Whatever the subject was, at some point in time Mike says "Steve told me he had sex 10 times in one day".

My mouth dropped open in shock. I turned to look at Steve and he was bright red. Obviously the statement was true.

Apparently, Steve was a male prostitute at some point in his life. While Steve was at Mike's office for a visit, at some point in time Steve thought it would be a good idea to tell Mike that story. I don't know if Steve cared or not that Mike said that to all of us. He did not act angry. He kind of hung his head like "Yes I did it".

Of course Steve could not act angry if he knew what was good for him. If he wanted to stay in the class and remain Mike's buddy, he knew he should smile and laugh.

I never knew Steve was a prostitute. I don't think anyone else did. I was in such shock maybe my judgement was impaired. I remember most of the others looking away or looking at the ground after Mike said that.

After I got over my shock, I was stunned. Mike had taken something that Steve had told him in the confidentiality of his psychiatric office, and told a group of other people.

If Mike told us, who else was he telling about Steve the male prostitute?

It was like a concrete seal was poured around me. At that instant I knew that I would never, ever, ever, confide anything to Mike. I realized that I had been right to distrust him all those years.

This event occurred towards the end of my time with Mike. This event along with other events that showed Mike to be not the dignified kung fu man with integrity that he talked about in class, but just some guy that was no better than anyone else, and possibly was worse than other people, changed my feelings towards him at such a basic level that my respect for him would never be the same.