When I arrived in San Francisco in 1980 — a city still gritty, bohemian, and affordable — I somehow landed in an apartment so amazing it felt almost too good to be true.

I found it the way many young arrivals did — by answering a roommate listing — which was how nearly sixty percent of San Franciscans managed to live in the city by the bay.

The apartment was a four-bedroom flat in Pacific Heights, at the corner of Presidio and Jackson, on the third floor. At the far western end of the living room, two oversized picture windows opened onto a view so commanding it felt almost staged: the rolling green breadth of the Presidio, the old military outpost first established by Spain in 1776, later inherited by Mexico upon its independence in 1821, and then claimed by the United States in 1846 during the Mexican-American War. Historians have aptly described it as “a national park that happened to be a military base,” and in 1994 it finally assumed that identity. Beyond the eucalyptus and conifer treetops rose the Golden Gate Bridge, stretching across the strait toward Marin County and the Headlands. It was a view that seemed to renew itself each time you looked at it.

Four of us lived there — strangers before circumstance brought us together in that roommate setup. We had come from all over the map: California, Washington State, Michigan, and New York.

On December 8, 1980, John Lennon was shot and killed outside The Dakota in New York City. The news spread with stunning speed, leaving hundreds of millions around the world shocked and in disbelief.

Two months earlier, through Leah, one of my roommates, I was introduced to Lucy, an English girl — cute, funny, and full of life. We clicked immediately and plunged into a relationship without much thought.

That night Lucy and I found ourselves on San Francisco’s Marina Green, standing along the bay beside a harbor full of sailboats. Across the dark water, Alcatraz sat like a floating jewel, and farther beyond the lights of the Golden Gate Bridge stretched across the strait toward the Marin Headlands. Hundreds of people had gathered there, drawn by the need to share their grief and sadness.

For those of us who grew up in the 1960s, the Beatles were more than a band. They were the soundtrack of our childhood and adolescence.

Now one of them had been ripped away from us by some mentally deranged psycho.

People were gathered on the grass and along the seawall. Hundreds held candles. Others sang softly. Most of us simply stared out at the dark water and fog trying to absorb the senselessness of it.

There was something especially poignant about mourning John Lennon beside Lucy — someone born and raised not far from Liverpool, the same city that had given the world John Lennon. The loss seemed to travel across the Atlantic, as if the grief belonged to her in a way it didn’t to the rest of us.

There was an unusual quiet that permeated San Francisco that night. Lucy slipped her arm into mine and leaned close. The harbor lights reflected across the water, and beyond them the massive Golden Gate Bridge was coming in and out of view as the advancing fog played a game of hide and seek.

That night left its mark on us.

Afterward it felt as though Lucy and I were more than a budding new relationship. Standing on the Marina Green that night, sharing that moment of tragic loss, it seemed as if we were on an accelerated path to something deeper.

As permanent, perhaps, as the bridge stretching across the bay.

Or so I believed.

Not long after that I was shaken to my core.

Another roommate, Bruce, had a friend named Carlos who drifted in and out of the flat from time to time. On one visit he met Lucy when she came by to see Leah.

One particular night I came home expecting to meet Lucy at the apartment.

I climbed the three flights of stairs from the street, pushed open the glass paned front door, and padded down the long, narrow red carpeted hallway toward the kitchen on the right adjacent to the herringbone floored living room.

Leah was sitting alone at the small kitchen table.

“Hey Leah,” I said casually. “Is Lucy here?”

Her face turned red. Something was up!

She didn’t answer right away.

She stared down at the table before speaking.

Lucy, she said quietly, was just down the hall — in Bruce’s room. Bruce was at his girlfriend’s apartment that night.

The door was closed.

Carlos was with her.

The betrayal was almost impossible to process. Only hours earlier I had believed our new relationship was growing into something special.

For a moment everything inside me shut down. Then I actually began shaking.

I stood there suspended in disbelief not wanting to face what I was  momentarily going to have to face and not knowing quite what to do with myself.

I didn’t own Lucy. I couldn’t just march down the hall, throw open the door, and claim her as if she belonged to me.

To preserve what little sanity I had left in that moment, I forced myself to accept the simple truth: Lucy was not mine, and she owed me nothing. She was free to exercise her freedom.

Still, the blow landed like a series of body slams with a boots on my neck and chest constricting my air flow.

In my entire life, I had never experienced a brazen in-your-face betrayal like that.

I knew one thing—I needed help, and I needed it immediately. I grabbed the Yellow Pages and scanned for psychologists.

Then what leapt off the page: Primal Scream Therapy.

The words hit me. Six blocks away—Fillmore and Lombard.

I didn’t hesitate.

I was already screaming on the inside.

I was about to find out what it sounded like on the outside.

I called the therapist’s office the next morning and made a same day appointment for an intake interview. And there I was a few hours later. I was met by psychologist Pat Maybruck and her session facilitator Lil Daniels. I explained my situation and what brought me there. I immediately felt their compassion and empathy which was very comforting. But before I could begin their scream therapy process they had to evaluate my emotional state. After a half hour of questions and probing they deemed that I was a candidate. The fact that I was an emotional wreck and a basket case was not a disqualifier.

Once they finished their evaluation, Pat explained how it all worked.

“We’ll start slowly,” she said. “Most people have never really allowed themselves to express to the full extent what they’re really feeling.”

That seemed like an understatement.

Lil led me down a short hallway into a room that looked more like a cross between a padded gymnasium and a dance studio. Thick mats covered the floor. There were large cushions and pillows stacked along the walls. It felt less like a psychologist’s office and more like a place where something physical took place.

Which, as it turned out, it was.

They asked me to lie down on one of the mats and begin talking about what had brought me there. At first I felt a little ridiculous. I had never done anything remotely like this before. Talking about heartbreak to strangers while lying on a mat in a room full of pillows was not exactly something they had covered in my upbringing in Grosse Pointe.

But Pat and Lil had a way of gently guiding the conversation.

“Tell us what happened,” Pat said.

So I did.

Pat occasionally interrupted.

“Where do you feel that in your body?”

It was a strange question.

But the more I talked, the more I realized the answer was obvious. My chest felt tight. My stomach was in knots. My throat felt like it was holding something back.

“Don’t hold it in,” she said quietly.

That’s when it started.

At first it wasn’t really a scream — more like a strained shout. Something halfway between anger and disbelief. But Pat kept encouraging me.

“Let it out,” she said.

What came out of me next was something I didn’t know I was capable of producing — a raw, full-throated scream that seemed to come from somewhere much deeper than my throat. It felt as if months — maybe years — of bottled-up emotion had suddenly found an exit.

I screamed again.

And again.

At some point I realized tears were streaming down my face.

For the first time since the night before in my apartment, I felt something begin to loosen inside me.

When it was over I lay there on the mat breathing heavily, staring up at the ceiling amazed.

Pat walked over and sat beside me.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

I thought about it for a moment.

“Better,” I said.

She smiled.

And just like that, I had entered the strange, healing world of primal scream therapy.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that I had just wandered into one of the more unusual corners of San Francisco’s psychological landscape.

Primal Scream Therapy had grown out of the work of psychologist Arthur Janov in the late 1960s. The idea was simple, if a little startling: many of our deepest emotional wounds begin early in life, and those feelings remain buried inside us, shaping our behavior in ways we don’t even realize. The theory held that the only way to truly release those buried emotions was to allow them to surface — sometimes very loudly. And in my case I had a catalyst – Lucy. It is ironic that John Lennon had deeply immersed himself in primal scream therapy with its creator Arthur Janov in 1970 which was reflected in the musical expression of his 1970 Plastic Ono Band album. 

San Francisco in 1980 was fertile ground for that kind of experimentation.

That day we proceeded and I more deeply connected with my rage about Lucy—the shock of discovering she was down the hall, in Bruce’s room, with Carlos. I raged on about the humiliation, the anger, the confusion.

And somewhere in that torrent, something deeper surfaced: Lucy’s betrayal hadn’t just wounded me in the present—it had reopened something far older, and orders of magnitude more painful. It led me through a doorway back to my father. That was where the real work began.

For the next several months in private and group sessions, I cried, screamed, and raged over the painful, dysfunctional relationship I had with him. And with Pat and Lil’s guidance, something began to shift—almost miraculously.

As the pain surfaced and moved through me, it loosened its grip. In its place came something I had never known for my father: empathy. I began to see my father differently—not as the source of my wounds, but as a man shaped by his own. I was just the collateral damage.

Somehow, I came to meet him as an equal. Someone I could love without fear. Without resentment. Someone who I could actually begin to love unconditionally. Near the end of his life, I found myself teaching him something he had never learned—how to give a proper hug, and how to say, “I love you.”

It was a profound shift in my life, and I was immensely grateful. I had carried that emotional baggage for way too long. I was freed.

I wish my brother David had found that same road to healing.

Instead, years before he went looking for a different kind of answer.

He had turned his life over to a man who presented himself as a surrogate spiritual father—a holy man who promised understanding, nurturing, and a way out of the ravages of a painful, dysfunctional father–son relationship.

That man would go on to devastate the life of my brother and hundreds of others at a religious commune called Mount Hope.

In the weeks and months that followed, I began attending both group sessions and individual ones. The people who showed up came from every imaginable walk of life—nurses, executives, waiters, writers, even therapists themselves.

Over time, something unexpected happened. Many of us became like family, bound together by the experience of sharing our deepest emotions with one another.

Everyone had a story.

And everyone had something they needed to scream about.

The sessions were intense. People cried and sobbed as they pushed into reservoirs of pain—wounds inflicted by the people in their lives, past and present.

They shouted and raged at the top of their lungs, directing their fury at those who had hurt them—whether thousands of miles away or long dead. Some pounded pillows.

Each person carried their own distinct language of pain—an unmistakable suite of sounds.

For someone raised in the polite, genteel decorum of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, it was like stepping into the atmosphere of another planet.

But not surprisingly, it felt honest – as honest as I had ever felt with myself and others.

There was no pretending in that room. No polite conversation about the weather. No carefully managed social facades. Whatever people were carrying around inside them eventually made its way to the surface.

And for the first time since Lucy’s betrayal, I began to feel like I might actually survive the extreme, emotional turbulence I found myself in.

Lucy never intended to set me on a path toward healing—but she did. That single rupture altered the course of my life.

And sometimes—although rare—what breaks you can also set you free.