[Disclaimer: I have used aliases to protect the confidentiality and identity of clients or patients. No other names have been changed.]

I knew that something was happening to me. This was different than what I had ever experienced previously in my life. So far, I described the impact of what was happening to Lynn and what that did to me.

I tried to act like things were going to be okay with Lynn. For a while, we might have thought things could return to normal.

I drove back home on Monday knowing that Lynn was going to be in the hospital for a while.

I tried to return to work thinking I could still do my job. I had an appointment to see a woman and her two children. Both parents were asking me to work with their children because they were going through a difficult divorce. I had been working with both clients, the mother, and father for some time.

Play therapy seemed to be just the thing I needed. I had met with each parent as well.

I had a few other clients that didn't seem to present too many challenges. One was an older woman, named Anne, who was dealing with major depression and some addictions - not to alcohol or drugs but to sex. She wasn't really old at fifty-eight.

Something happened on three separate days in August. I was falling asleep on those days.

This is going to sound strange because I have no factual proof of what was happening, what caused the problems I was having, or why.

Alice just happened to come in during the morning on those three days. Alice had come down from Pennsylvania or Virginia with a guy named John Freifeld. He was practicing therapy without a license, without any credentials. He had not even gone to college other than maybe a community college and he had not studied psychotherapy.

He and I had a falling out earlier around issues related to what he was doing. He was diagnosing people with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) and it was really messing with people's minds. I had some of them as clients and they thought they might have DID but I was wondering if that was actually the case.

To this day, I have no recollection of what Alice discussed in any of her sessions or what she looked like. I just know that she came down to Wilmington North Carolina with John Freifeld.

I have told this story many times to different therapists so while I do not recall what Alice looked like or what she discussed, I do know the dates and times when she came to meet with me during the year 2000 when this was happening.

She like a few other clients of mine were getting support or treatment from John.

Now, in the 2000s, it's possible for people to be peer support specialists based on their lived experience. John was not my client but I knew from my clients that he didn't have that training or those credentials, either. Maybe he was jealous of me or he just was obsessed with hurting me.

As an aside, I would later learn that he knew that people like me had between $1 Million and $3 Million in liability insurance. This will be an important fact to know later because while he wasn't my client he was very persuasive and so I wondered if he somehow intended to benefit from a civil suit that my clients might bring against me.

Bear with me while we deal with some events that are and were confusing to me as well as disorienting.

So, as I was saying, I remember having an appointment with Alice on this day, two days after I returned from Chapel Hill having seen Lynn. This is important to know because the "sleepiness" I am about to describe would have been more likely on Monday after driving all night.

It was Tuesday, the 8th of August of 2000 when Alice came in during the morning, at 10 AM. I let her go to the office while I used the restroom. I had a big Coca-Cola that I picked up at the convenience store near my office on Chestnut Street in downtown Wilmington. This was the first time that I noticed something unusual happening to me. I had a 32-ounce cup. I remember this because I needed the caffeine that day.

I was unusually tired from driving back from Chapel Hill where Lynn was in the hospital. But that was late Sunday and now this was Tuesday.

I found myself struggling to stay awake! That's all I remember about what happened after Alice came to the office.

Over time I have found that my mind wanted to fill in details about these sessions with Alice but honestly, there is just a blank spot in my memory around everything related to her other than the sense that I became extremely sleepy after she came to see me.

I have memories of going to the men's room and splashing water on my face during this hour with Alice. I thought pacing or cold water would wake me up, but the feeling lingered for hours.

Rebecca came in at 1 PM and laid down on the couch facing the wall perpendicular to me as she always did. She was tall and attractive. She had been coming to me because she had relationship issues - she had been unfaithful with her husband and she thought she needed help with her sexual addiction.

Today, again, I had to get up again and use the restroom to try to wake myself up.

"How could I help anyone if I could not stay awake?" I couldn't think clearly enough to figure out what I should do at this moment.

Vanessa came in the next day. She was one of my clients with DID who had been coming from the Myrtle Beach area. She had just been released from the hospital for treatment related to her condition – DID. Her psychiatrist had made those arrangements.

She had been suicidal, though, for a person with DID, it manifested as a plan by one personality to harm "the others." Yeah, to her or them, they were a system with different people, and the fact that they all shared the same body could be forgotten by one personality or another.

Vanessa, after being released from the hospital, now was frightened that something nefarious had happened to her while she was at the hospital.

She was talking about how some cousins had raped her repeatedly at some point in the past. Sodomized her. Held her down. Again, this was that same day August 8, 2000. It was 3 PM.

One of her personalities, inside, was a teenage boy who went by the name Victor. He liked to cut the body and now he was threatening to kill the body with a gun. I wondered why she had been released if she was still in this state. I was feeling like I was responsible for finding a solution to prevent her from acting on her plans to end her life.

She showed me cuts that Victor had made on her arms and legs. She seemed amused as she described this.

Again, Vanessa spoke about her husband sodomizing her. Ironically, this was what seemed to startle me enough to feel awake finally. The way she described it made it sound like it was a brutal and sadistic form of torture.

"Sodomized," she had said. It echoed in my mind like a sharp, cutting blow to her motionless body.

She said she could not move as her husband did this. She froze. But again, her husband did this despite the fact that she had said it triggered reminders of her trauma.

Yesterday's session with Patricia came rushing back. Patricia had started therapy at the same time as another client with DID had started seeing me. They both had reported that they had known for some time that they had different personalities. Those clients found me in a newspaper advertisement.

That seemed like a lifetime ago – about 18 months had passed.

I would think during this time that it was a good thing that Patricia had never met a few of the other clients that I had with this particular disorder of DID or who reported that this was their disorder. This distinction is important because John who wasn't a mental health professional was diagnosing people with this disorder.

Patricia had no contact with any of my other clients and I knew that John Freifeld didn't know about her.

I had set up a support/therapy group for people with DID but Patricia never attended that group. So, she didn't have the same problems. I would learn that those who attended the group had exchanged phone numbers and were spending time together.

Anyway, Patricia, on Monday, had described how her father had done something disgusting for reasons that were hard to understand it was so offensive. She described an abusive scenario in which he had defecated into the toilet and then pushed her face into the toilet bowl.

This event which she was describing had occurred years ago.

This might be a lot to consider and my reactions at this time were confusing.

We have one character, John Freifeld, doing therapy and diagnosing people with DID. Some of them were clients of mine. And Alice was one of those clients that were sent to me by John.

At the risk of sounding crazy, I wondered if there was a connection between my unusual experiences and John Freifeld seeking to hurt me or, as I will explain later, he would encourage my clients to file a medical malpractice claim against me and to file grievances with my licensure board.

On Monday, August 14th, after spending the weekend with Lynn in the hospital, I was back in the office and Alice came in at 11 AM and Rebecca came in at 1 PM.

I began to wonder if I was somehow experiencing the symptoms of my clients. Was I trying to escape in my mind from the reality of what was happening to Lynn? I mean at the time I was wondering if there was a purpose to what I was experiencing. It was one of those existential questions about suffering.

During the rest of this past week, I was so stressed about what was happening to Lynn. I couldn't sit still. I couldn't sleep. I was tossing and turning. My heart was racing. My stomach was upset almost all the time.

I knew about dissociative disorders. If I was going to zone out in response to something there would have to be a trigger of some sort.

Nothing stood out about last Tuesday and now today, Monday.

This was just nothing like I had ever experienced. There was nothing to which I could compare this experience.

Anyway, the day dragged on and I couldn't shake the feeling.

My thinking and my perceptions were foggy, like looking at the world through a fog.

What is strange is that this was different than the metaphorical fog I felt described the experience of dealing with what was happening to Lynn. My reaction to the experiences of what was happening to Lynn was that I was agitated, anxious, my heart was racing, and I would have trouble sleeping.

Now, today, Monday, I was struggling to stay awake all day.

I had not discussed this with Lynn because I felt she had enough to deal with.

For months and years after this, I would have a powerful sensation - a memory or flashback - where I would see myself walking down a hallway and I would be thinking that the observing me wanted to shout at the vision of myself during this time, "wake up, wake up."

"What are you doing?"

Returning to this Monday in August, after returning from spending time with Lynn in the hospital...

I found myself in the men's room several times trying to wake up and squeezing my hands against my forehead and my face trying to figure out what is happening and to stay awake. I couldn't even focus on a plan as to what I should do about these experiences.

I just walked about like some zombie or a robot. How was it that no one was noticing anything?

Yeah, looking back, I would think I should have stayed home or called someone to get myself "grounded" ... just as I had helped others. My mind wasn't clear enough to do even that when it was happening.

Then the next day would come and I would be so confused about events the prior day. I wasn't sure I had dreamed what happened or if it really happened.

On Thursday, August 17, beginning late in the day it started to happen again. The fog hung over me into Friday. I wanted to say that I couldn't sleep that night, but I actually got home at 6 PM and fell onto the bed asleep.

I had vivid dreams that night. I remembered that snakes were appearing in the dreams... Sinister-looking - a diamondback rattlesnake with an expression that seemed to embody evil itself. That's just what was going through my mind. It was like I was in the presence of something evil because while the face of the snake was not distorted in any way, it had a human expression. I remembered thinking this is what evil would look like.

This was the third incident when my mind was not acting like it normally does.

As I write this, I have a degree of clarity, but it is still foggy. There are some things that I cannot recall.

As an aside, I did write a collection of poems called "Puncture Wounds" with another poet friend of mine in the late 2000s. It was inspired by my experiences with Freifeld and a few others.

My poet friend Jean had said, "maybe you did find yourself in the presence of evil." He was Episcopalian like Celta had been – it's very much like the Catholic faith. He invited me to receive some blessing at Church one day years ago.

I remember Jean had said, "if you believe in one you have to believe in the other." He meant belief in God, who is good implies a belief in Satan and evil itself. Yeah, Freifeld seemed soulless. Like a vampire. The collection "Puncture Wounds" is partially based on the themes and symbolism that go along with the vampire legend.

These events, whatever they were, and my behavior during this time have never been explained. I have to live with that knowledge. I wanted to know like everyone else who is in an emotional crisis wants to know what happened and why. These experiences seemed to happen after I had met with Alice but I cannot be certain.

I have NEVER had experiences like this previously or since then. More than two decades have passed and I have no answers.

It wasn't a dissociative disorder because in those cases the experiences must last longer than one month. I had never heard of someone saying that they had a dissociative disorder just one time in their life.

It wasn't a psychotic break because I have never heard of anyone saying that it happened once during a brief period of their life and never again. Usually, a psychotic break is the first of a series of episodes and medication is required.

I've never been on medications for either of these conditions nor have I been diagnosed with a psychotic disorder or a dissociative disorder.

We always have to rule out the influence of mind-altering substances. I am going to qualify my statements in this regard by saying that I have never knowingly used mind-altering illicit drugs or street drugs. I also have no evidence to support the belief that I had been drugged. I cannot say why it would have been done.

At times I have declared this idea that I was drugged, and some people have accepted it as if it were a fact. I merely stated that Alice had the opportunity to put something into my open soda cup.

The limited nature of these episodes also would have been something I would ask clients about to rule out the influence of a mind-altering drug.

There were other ways in which I was acting irrational and confused... making bad decisions. Some of this happened later. But things were never so overwhelmingly strange and bizarre as on three occasions in August of 2000.

This is all I can offer in terms of what I remember and what is lacking from my memory. The lack of any memory of Alice, what she looked like, or what she discussed is also strange and inconsistent with the rest of my experiences.

The only other person I cannot form an image of is Tracy. I recall her sessions with me as I described earlier. She had come to Wilmington with John Freifeld. I only met with her on two occasions.