AROUND TOWN: Jean Richardson, a local psychotherapist, has seen her fair share of tragedy during her lifetime.
By: Mae Rhine
LAMBERTVILLE The city’s newest psychotherapist, Jean Richardson, is no stranger to pain.
Her 3½-year-old son drowned. She saw her brother mauled and killed by a bear in the wilds of Colorado.
She grew up in a family with alcoholics. She married and subsequently divorced an alcoholic. And she herself is a recovering alcoholic, having been sober now for 28 years.
The pain of her life is visible in her face that still, somehow, at age 65, appears youthful despite the emotional scars. Yet she is a gentle caring woman, eager to help people work through their problems rather than dwell on her own.
She sees herself more of a coach than a therapist. Her clientele has included families, disturbed teens, estranged couples and gay partners.
Her road to therapy took many turns from her years as a child growing up in Chicago in "a family of alcoholics." She went to college for only about a year before she dropped out to get married and have children. She has two, Wendy Walker, 43, of Fairfield, Conn., who has two boys of her own and is a therapist herself, and a son, Rick, 36, who lives in Colorado.
Ms. Richardson was married for 23 years to her first husband, who she says was an alcoholic like herself. It was during that time she lost her other son in a tragic accident.
Her little boy, she recalls, was jealous of a cat that had been given to her daughter.
"He took the cat and slipped out (of the house) and got over the fence, a rather high fence" surrounding a nearby pool, Ms. Richardson says. "He and the cat drowned."
Somehow her life went on with the help of alcohol until nearly 30 years ago when it took yet another dramatic turn. Ms. Richardson and her husband were visiting her brother in Colorado. Her brother and his fiancé were proudly showing them their home in the mountains; they planned to be married a week later.
While Ms. Richardson and her husband were in the cabin, the fiancé came running to the door, covered with blood and screaming "Johnny had been attacked by a bear."
Ms. Richardson recalls, "My husband ran out of the door with a frying pan. He took three swipes at the bear; it was huge. There were gashes in the bear’s head."
The three brought her brother back to the camper.
"I kept giving him CPR," Ms. Richardson recalls. "I thought he was breathing. Little did I know it was my own breath" she was hearing.
The bear was tracked down days later and killed. But it had left its mark on more than her brother.
It was about a year later Ms. Richardson quit drinking for good and developed her interest in helping others with their emotional pain.
While her husband was in treatment, she was working with alcoholics at the Johnson Institute for Chemical Dependency.
Her interest was obvious, she says, having grown up in a family of alcoholics and harboring the fear the same thing could happen to her children. She soon learned, to her relief, "Children of alcoholics need not become alcoholics."
As her marriage ended, her interest in therapy deepened. But the road was bumpy at first.
"I was divorced and had never worked in my life," Ms. Richardson recalls. "I didn’t have much money. I didn’t ask for much because I felt bad about leaving him."
She came to the East Coast and cleaned houses for 2½ years to survive as well as work her way through college.
"That I was good at," she says with a gentle smile. "I was a good WASP."
It was during that time she met Nate Goldfarb, her husband for the past 16 years.
It was his emotional support, she says, that gave her the courage to earn a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Connecticut and a master’s degree in marriage and family therapy from the University of Bridgeport.
"He was so enormously helpful emotionally," she says of her husband, who encouraged her to clean houses if that’s what she had to do to survive. "His emotional support was so important to me."
She was 50 years old when she proudly received that master’s degree. She also was working at the former Family Therapy Program in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., eventually becoming its director.
When she received her master’s, she also opened a private practice in her home in Connecticut.
"I had a rather large practice," she recalls, when she suddenly got the urge 12 years ago to move to Manhattan.
"I’ve always been attracted to towns with gay people in them," she says. And if she wanted to make the move, it was time as "I wasn’t getting any younger."
Those were the same reasons she uprooted herself again just a few weeks ago to come to Lambertville.
Her half-brother, Will Richardson, lives in Stockton and introduced her to the area. Her husband, 75, a retired court reporter who also is a sculptor, "loves the fact there’s a lot of art."
She still has clients in New York with whom she has phone sessions. And she is getting the word out that her door at 67 Coryell St. is now open.
Usually gay people come to see her, she speculates, because of their prior experiences with gay male therapists.
"They feel like (these) therapists don’t want them to have any negative feelings about being gay; a kind of militancy in the gay therapist community," Ms. Richardson says. "They see me as an understanding, good mom figure with a sense of humor."
Couples primarily seek help in communication.
"That’s the first thing," she says. And the problem develops "because we’re all so individual and so different with different backgrounds so how anyone gets along is a miracle."
Most people, she says, end up marrying someone similar "to the parent they had the most trouble with."
That pattern will continue, she says, if it isn’t dealt with.
"I deal with an awful lot of depressed people," too, Ms. Richardson says. But with new medications able to treat the medical aspect, she is able to concentrate "on the stuff underneath."
One thing she firmly believes in is "pre-commitment counseling; it’s the best thing possible." That is something all couples need, she says, whether married or living together.
"It works very well," she says.
And while most people don’t change their basic character, "They can grow if they’re willing. But they both have to want to get better, not point a finger at the other. We eventually find where the buttons are, but if he keeps pushing those buttons," the relationship won’t work.
Finding those buttons and learning not to push them, she points out, is "the major way to grow."
She adds, "You learn to respect and really care about the person."
Her counseling also includes, naturally, work with substance abuse and domestic violence. And her son, Rick, is dyslexic, so she does a lot of work with that as well.
"I try to help people grow, in whatever way they want, and to make decisions on their own," Ms. Richardson says. "I do more coaching, counseling and therapy; psychotherapist sounds so heavy duty."
Ms. Richardson gives a free consultation for first-time patients. Call (609) 773-1168 for information.