When I was nine years old, my mom sat my dad, brother, and me down and told us that her then therapist, Dr. Cathleen Porter, said she couldn’t be a good mother or wife unless she learned to put herself first. “Dr. Porter says it’s time for me to pursue my dreams and discover who I am.”
After mom left us, dad stuck me with my first therapist, a child psychologist with a ballerina bun, who I met with after school to make sure I was all right. I drew pictures, and she’d tell dad what they meant—the dark sky meant I was sad, the house with one window meant I felt trapped.
I only saw my mom two other times in my life. Once when I was a college student at Boulder, she was passing through Colorado to attend a motivational speaker conference. We met for breakfast at a diner near her hotel, where she talked about herself for an hour.
The other time was after I graduated and decided to visit her at her home in Tucson. I had been struggling to hold onto relationships and wanted an apology from the woman that had abandoned me. I thought if I finally got one, I’d be able to move on with my life.
My therapist at the time warned me against it, “Don’t go to the hardware store for milk.” She said I needed to find a way to move on without an apology, something I had heard countless times before from other shrinks.
But I couldn’t. I needed one from my mom, and the problem was there was no apology to be had. When I confronted her, she told me she had saved herself by leaving our family, and she was forever grateful to Dr. Porter.
After she didn’t apologize, I decided the second best thing would be to get one from the woman I despised almost as much as my mom—Dr. Porter. Did this therapist know the wreckage she caused me? How many others had she hurt with her stupid advice?
I knew she was still a practicing psychologist. I had googled her through the years, keeping tabs on the woman responsible for ruining my life. She had never married or had kids, which made sense as to why she told mom to leave us. She had imposed her chosen life on a patient, and I suspected mom wasn’t the only one.
My mom didn’t take my dad’s last name, so Dr. Porter had no idea who I was when I scheduled an appointment with her. In our first session, I told her how damaged I was by my mom’s abandonment and how I’d struggled in my adult life, all because my mom had listened to a depraved therapist who was probably unhappy in her own life.
As I spoke about my heartache, Dr. Porter’s face remained expressionless, unmoved like her stiff, straight black hair. She was completely unfeeling like a sociopath. At one point, she picked up a glass of water on a side table, and her blouse sleeve moved, revealing a small tattoo written in cursive: You are enough.
I went to a few more sessions, continuing to talk about the horrible psychologist that had stolen my mom away from me. I kept waiting for some response or revelation from Dr. Porter, saying she felt guilty because she had once given a patient the same advice and how she was now filled with regret. But nothing ever came.
I finally decided I had had enough and would confront her and get the apology that I deserved. When I got to our next session, I saw her hugging the patient before me goodbye, which was odd because she had made it clear she had a strict no-hug policy due to her “boundaries.” The old lady patient thanked her for the hug and said, “Before, you seemed cold and distant, but something changed today. I felt like you were really there for me.”
When I sat down in her office, I noticed the lighting was a little darker than usual, and she was sitting in the shadow of the window curtain. Even still, I could tell something was different about her. She looked a little younger. Her skin was a bit tighter. I wondered if she had had a chemical peel. But there was something else too that I couldn’t pinpoint. Something was off.
When she opened her mouth, her voice sounded lower than before and a little hoarse. She told me she was getting over a cold. As the session went on, she was like a totally different person, compassionate and kind. She agreed with me that a therapist should never tell a patient what to do, let alone direct them to abandon their family, and told me how awful it must have been to have that happen to me. I was almost going to shout, “It was all because of you!”
But the problem was I wasn’t sure the woman in front of me was Dr. Porter. She looked slightly different and acted entirely differently from the woman I’d been meeting for a month. At the end of the session, when she went to hug me, her shirt sleeve fell to her elbow, and I saw the tattoo was gone!
That’s when I knew this imposter wasn’t Dr. Porter. There was no way she could’ve had the tattoo removed and for it to have healed, leaving no scar in the week since I had last seen her. Although this woman looked almost exactly like Dr. Porter, it wasn’t her. Despite this, as we pulled out of the embrace, I had to admit the imposter’s show of affection moved me.
As soon as I got home, I googled Dr. Porter—did she have a twin that was covering for her? She did not. Did she have an identical secret child that had assumed her identity? Was someone impersonating her and going the extra length to get surgery? I live in LA, and at least a dozen people go to plastic surgeons every day to look like a Kardashian. Who was Dr. Porter 2.0—and where was the real Dr. Cathleen Porter?
Later that night, I decided to return to Dr. Porter’s office. I followed a cleaning crew around, stole their keyring, and got into her office. As a manager of a supermarket, I frequently covertly follow employees around to make sure they’re doing their jobs. This was similar, except for the stealing part. And it wasn’t really stealing. I wasn’t going to keep the keyring forever.
After I let myself into Dr. Porter’s office, I opened the top desk drawer and found an empty box of black hair dye—a sign but not definitive in establishing this woman was an imposter. I’m not sure what I was looking for or what I thought I’d find, but I guess I wanted proof that I wasn’t going crazy and that the woman who had hugged me earlier that day wasn’t Dr. Porter.
Suddenly a cleaning guy with a double chin and a vacuum barged in. “What are you doing here?” he asked me. I immediately acted like it was my office and explained I had a patient emergency.
After he left, I kept sifting through desk drawers. I found a couple of dozen notecards with patient names and their details, including mine: Stella Theo—adjustment disorder, stalking history, high-functioning. Whoever this imposter was, she was trying to stay on top of her game, keeping notecards handy about Dr. Porter’s patients so she could assume her identity and treat them.
I wanted to go to the police, but I couldn’t prove this woman wasn’t Dr. Porter with a missing tattoo and notecards. And I didn’t think they’d believe me because whoever the imposter was looked enough like Dr. Porter that they’d probably assume she had minor cosmetic surgery.
The other issue was my dropped stalking charge. It wasn’t a big deal until my ex turned it into one. After we broke up, I was just trying to get my AirPods back, but I almost got put on a 5150 hold because of it. I was worried if I got the cops involved with Dr. Porter and they found out I had gone through her stuff, they’d accuse me of stalking again and, this time, put me on a hold.
Dr. Porter didn’t have a family, so it’s not like she had anyone close to her who would notice she was gone. And based on the exchange I had seen between the imposter and one of Dr. Porter’s patients, it didn’t seem like Dr. Porter’s patients were bothered by the new woman. They preferred her because Dr. Porter 2.0 wasn’t a bitch like the real one.
In the next session, I told Dr. Porter 2.0 that she had hugged me, and I saw her hug another one of her patients and how she had made it explicitly clear hugging patients went against her policies. I wanted to give her a not-so-subtle hint that I knew she wasn’t the real Dr. Porter to see how she’d react. She didn’t flinch and plainly explained that she was trying a different therapeutic approach to better align with her patients.
She then excused herself to go to the restroom, and I walked over to her briefcase, looking inside for any clues. At the bottom, I found a small before and after polaroid—a picture of a woman who looked a lot like Dr. Porter alongside an after shot of her looking almost exactly like her. I stuffed it in my pocket right as she opened the door.
She saw me next to the desk, and I quickly dropped down to the ground, pretending I was looking for an earring backing that had dropped. She got down on her knees next to me, helping me look until she noticed my ears.
“Your backings are still on,” she said.
“Uh, I thought one dropped,” I stammered.
She stood up and picked up a letter opener from the top of the desk that had a stainless steel razor-sharp knife-edge blade. It looked better suited to kill a small animal than opening a gas bill. She picked up an envelope, used the opener to slice through it like a melted butter stick, and smiled at me.
I ran out of the office and nervously drove home, wondering if I should call the police since I now had concrete proof this woman was an imposter. I was still scared they’d accuse me of stalking and put me on a 5150 hold, so I called from a burner phone that I kept as a backup at home for emergencies like an earthquake. That way, the police couldn’t trace me.
As soon as the dispatcher answered and asked me how I got the picture, I knew the call wouldn’t go well. She said the photograph I found didn’t prove anything other than I had trespassed into my psychologist’s office. She also questioned my mental stability and wondered if I needed a PET team sent out for delusional thoughts to assess for a possible 5150 hold.
I immediately hung up, shaking, thinking about Dr. Porter 2.0 smiling at me while holding that letter opener. It was only a matter of time before she noticed the picture was missing. What if she figured out it was me? And what had she done with the real Dr. Porter?
I tried to calm down and remind myself that I was underneath her desk, and she never saw me going through her briefcase. But I still put a chair up against my front door underneath the knob as a measure of protection.
After listening to a mediation app on loop, I somehow managed to fall asleep until my phone woke me up at 2:13 am. It was a text from an unknown number: You’re a thief.
I started freaking out. Dr. Porter 2.0 knew I knew she wasn’t the real one! I imagined her using the letter opener to slice my neck.
The next morning, I waited until I heard my neighbor leave his apartment before leaving mine so I could ride in the elevator with him to our parking garage. I didn’t want to be alone. I got in my car and headed to my job, sitting on the freeway in bumper-to-bumper LA rush hour traffic when I looked out my window at the car next to me. It was Dr. Porter 2.0 behind the wheel, smiling right at me! I quickly locked the car doors. Traffic started moving again, and I immediately changed lanes.
As soon as I got to work, I ran into my office in the supermarket and locked myself inside. I couldn’t focus the entire day, terrified of her barging in with the letter opener. The hours went by slowly, and when the workday was over, I rushed back to my car and drove straight home.
Once inside my apartment, I locked and latched the door and put a chair underneath the doorknob again. I realized I had no food but was too scared to go to the supermarket. I imagined her in the produce section with the letter opener, stabbing a pear and watching the juice dribble out, smiling at me.
So I ordered Mexican on Doordash and waited. After I saw on the app that it had been delivered, I went downstairs to get it. But when I got to the lobby, I saw Dr. Porter 2.0 smiling outside, holding my burrito, so I ran back up to my apartment and locked myself inside again.
I decided I wouldn’t have contact with the outside world and try to let this whole thing blow over. If I didn’t leave my place, she couldn’t get to me, and if she showed up at my apartment, I would have a reason to call the cops on her for trespassing.
I went on Instagram to search for Dr. Cathleen Porter to see if the imposter had posted any recent pictures of herself, ones where she might look different enough that I could point the police to her. But when I logged on, I saw my account had a new story—one I had never posted. It was a picture of me with the word THIEF written on my head in bold red letters. How did she hack into my account!? I quickly deleted it.
A week passed, and I didn’t leave my place. I called in sick to work, only ordered food in, and asked my neighbors to bring it to me. I told them I had hurt my leg and couldn’t walk. Dr. Porter 2.0 made no additional contact with me.
But on the seventh night, desperate for something sweet to eat and with nothing at home, I ate an old Lemonhead and cracked my tooth on it. The pain was excruciating, and I knew I’d have to go to the dentist in the am.
When I got to the dental office the next day, my dentist told me that an assistant would numb me up and he’d be back soon. After he left, a woman came in, but it wasn’t his assistant—it was Dr. Porter 2.0! She had followed me there!
She stood before me, smiling, and rested her hand on a metal tray filled with dental instruments. Before she had the chance to use any of them on me, I jumped up from the chair and ran out of the office.
When I returned to my apartment, I wondered if I was really seeing her or if she was driving me to madness so she could have me committed and do away with me at the hospital, or whether she was trying to get me alone so she could stab me with the letter opener.
Over the next couple of weeks, I stayed at home but couldn’t sleep and kept calling in sick for work. My boss was threatening to fire me. I was worried I was going to lose my job. I had no savings and was going to be on the street if I couldn’t work.
The stress was killing me. My hair started to fall out. I couldn’t even feel the tooth pain anymore because I was in some other reality. I was talking to myself in my apartment like a crazy person. I finally decided I had no choice but to meet with Dr. Porter 2.0 and try to reason with her, so I set up an appointment.
When I got to her office, she shut the door behind me, and I noticed the prominently displayed letter opener on her desk, wondering if I’d made a grave mistake.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” she said, smiling.
I told her that even though she was an imposter, I wouldn’t tell anyone because I was sure she was better than the old Dr. Porter. I explained that I wasn’t even a real patient of Dr. Porter’s and had planned to confront her because my mom abandoned me and Dr. Porter was the one responsible.
“I know,” she said.
I was totally confused. “What do you mean?” I asked.
“I read your file and connected the dots.” And then she said something that stopped me in my tracks: “It happened to me too.”
She told me she had also been abandoned by her mother when she was a teenager because Dr. Porter told her mom to leave her family. And like me, she had started seeing Dr. Porter as a patient, hoping for an apology that never came.
That’s when she decided she needed to get rid of Dr. Porter to stop her from hurting any more families. As I already knew from the picture, she had looked a lot like Dr. Porter, to begin with, so she only needed minor cosmetic surgery to look more like her. After having surgery, she pretended to show up for an appointment where she killed Dr. Porter with the letter opener. She had a friend that worked at a crematorium that helped her with the body.
She had previously worked as a professional white hat hacker, hired by companies to compromise their networks to test their security systems, which allowed for a seamless transition to take over Dr. Porter’s digital life and also allowed her to hack into my Instagram account.
She said that at first, she tried to scare me to keep me away from the police. But after she read all of Dr. Porter’s notes about me, she just wanted to talk, so she could explain that she had no intention of harming me because, like her, I was just another one of Dr. Porter’s victims.
I took in the stunning news but still had one unanswered question. “Killing her wasn’t enough revenge?” I asked.
“I needed to become her to fix all of her patients that she hurt,” she explained.
Dr. Porter 2.0 was the best therapist I ever had. Turns out all of the shrinks who told me I’d never be able to have a relationship until I made peace with what my mom did to me were wrong. Revenge isn’t just sweet. It’s healing. Dr. Porter 2.0 and I celebrated seven years of marriage last year. We gave each guest a party favor at our wedding—a letter opener with our initials inscribed on it.
As for my mom, I’m still waiting for her to return to LA one day and pay a visit to her old psychologist, Dr. Porter.