I was a lifelong atheist… until I saw proof God is real. I came face to face with him on a sleepless night of ‘possession’ after a devastating diagnosis: Celebrity shrink BARRY MICHELS

My mother had always been a difficult person.

Early on, I learned to keep my thoughts and feelings boxed away from her. The way she hovered near me and my friends – coy, amused, sometimes bordering on cringeworthy flirtatiousness – all of it made my skin crawl.

Then, one night, when I was about 15 years old, her intrusiveness stopped being subtle. It unfolded around a moment I’ve come to think of simply as ‘the incident.’

It happened around the dinner table. I suddenly noticed that my mother had grown quiet and was looking at me with a strange, seductive light in her eyes.

I smiled nervously and looked down, afraid that if I looked her in the eye, it might convey permission for her to cross some sort of line I myself was only barely aware of.

I could feel her wanting something. I quickly finished eating, cleared my plate and said I had homework to do.

I closed the door to my bedroom with a sense of relief, thinking I’d escaped something awful.

A while later, I heard her knocking.

‘Barry,’ she sang, low and throaty. She let herself in and sat down on my bed. She crossed her bare legs and said: ‘You know, Barry, you’re a very attractive, intelligent young man. You know that, don’t you?’

I felt my entire body clam up. Her tone was like nails raking a blackboard. I didn’t know where this was going, but I felt like a trapped animal.

‘You do know that, Barry, right?’ she said, insistent.

I glanced up, nodded.

‘Well, I am pretty sure that at some point women are going to be interested in you. Older women, women far beyond an age that is appropriate for you. You’re going to have to learn to say no to them. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

Imagine this moment. I was an adolescent boy, filled with hormonal urges. At that age, boys are willing to entertain a come-on from almost any woman – except their mother.

As she prodded at my boundaries with this insane line of conversation, I felt what can only be described as a cocktail of revulsion and dread.

Suddenly, all the guardrails of propriety between mothers and sons were off. The dread was this deep-seated awareness that something life-changing was about to happen to me.

She slid closer. ‘I think you need to practice what it means to turn an older woman down. Let’s role-play, to make sure you’re prepared when the time comes.’

My heart was pounding, my throat tight. I could feign illness. Or say I had to go to the bathroom, then scramble out the window and run away from home and never return. Why did I have to endure a mother like this? My friends’ mothers weren’t perfect, but they were clearly not as messed up as this.

‘OK, so we’re going to pretend that this is a bar and I’ll be an older woman ordering a drink and you’ll be right over there,’ my mother said. ‘I’m going to try to seduce you, and you practice turning me down. OK?’

No, not OK. Every part of me wanted to shriek it at the top of my lungs. But I had no way of saying no, especially to her. It wasn’t part of my vocabulary.

And had the idea even crossed my mind, I was certain that the punishment would have been swift and merciless. My mother would have transformed on a dime, going from seductress to vicious punisher in a terrifying instant.

So, I said: ‘Sure. OK, Mom.’

To this day I don’t know how I made it through the next half hour. I remember very little of the words or details; I dissociated.

Years later, as a therapist treating patients who’d been sexually abused, who’d told me they’d felt so much shame that they felt as if they had left their bodies, I understood. I remember only the revulsion, the nausea.

I never trusted her again. I became scrupulously careful about anything I said to her, the tone of voice with which I said it, the way I held my body around her.

Prior to the incident, as a little boy, I used to pray and commune with God regularly. But the incident crushed my soul and sealed my atheism, turned me once and for all away from God. I wanted no part of him.

I was crystal clear about my situation. I was alone, and no one was on my side. My days of dabbling in prayer were over. There was no one to turn to.

After that night, I drew inward. I felt it happen, like a blossom closing in the evening. Throughout my adolescence, I felt myself shutting down, but now I was determined to build walls, to make sure no one had access to my heart.

And that’s the way I lived for many decades.

Many years later, in 2023, I received a devastating diagnosis. I had something called ‘Mixed Dementia,’ a potent combination of Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy Body dementia (LBD).

Most sufferers die within five to seven years of being diagnosed, and in the meantime, they suffer memory loss, hallucinations and delusions. The same disease killed my father. Robin Williams had it too – his wife thinks that’s why he committed suicide.

Initially after my diagnosis, grief came like a tsunami. My body shook with sobs that made my ribs feel like they were splintering under the weight of loss. My brain, the instrument that had given me every gift, was no longer on my team. It was slipping away.

I didn’t need to be instructed in the devastation of LBD. I’d watched that same disease undo my father, strip him to bits, layer by layer until there was nothing left.

Once it starts, there is no mercy. Life expectancy: five to seven years.

I was 69 and already struggling with memory loss. I would not make it to 79. And long before that, I would lose everything that made me who I was – my ability to speak, to write, to work with patients – everything that had given my life meaning, all of it would vanish into the fog.

I would cease to recognize my friends, my children, my wife. I would spend the rest of my life surrounded by strangers who seemed to know me when I had no idea who they were.

But less than a week after I was diagnosed, something extraordinary happened.

An avowed atheist since the incident, I suddenly came face to face with God. Not as metaphor, not as an impersonal energy field, but a consciousness with will and presence.

God came to me, not in a church or synagogue, but on a sleepless moonlit night when, without a plan, I opened my laptop and started typing. What came out was raw, straight from my broken heart.

This is what I wrote:

DEATH DANCE WITH THE DIVINE

It’s always the same question: ‘What did you do when you found out you had LBD?

‘How did you cope with a death sentence?’

The answer isn’t what you’d expect.

There were the normal reactions: crying; regret for things I failed to accomplish.

But overriding that was a single image that kept coming back to me – the image injected itself into my consciousness without my choosing to picture it.

The image was of a solitary dance; a dance in the middle of the night, a candle flickering in the background.

My heart was on fire –

Burning with poetry so sublime I could hear the angels cry.

It was a dance where I gave my heart.

I held nothing back.

And the dance was with God.

It was a dance where my fists exploded and I revealed myself nakedly to Him.

And I swear to you… God smiled.

Proud of his beloved son.

And that moment was everything.

Everything.

Take it from someone who’s dying.

God doesn’t really care what you choose to do with your life.

What God cares about is not what you choose to do – but how you do it.

God wants to see you pursuing life with your blood and your guts – with the all-consuming divine fire inside you.

So when people ask me: ‘What did you do when you found out you were living under a death sentence…?’

My answer is: ‘I gave it all away.’

All of it.

Every last drop.

And I danced with the divine.

Poetry allowed me to describe how real, how alive, this interaction with God was. I started writing as if the keyboard was possessed, as if some deeper force had finally found a crack in me and was rushing through. 

Poetry gave me the means of deepening my relationship with God. It was an outpouring from my soul.

And that boy kneeling beside his bed, aching for an all-encompassing, radiating warmth that seemed to know every part of me, has at last found what he was yearning for.

Barry Michels is a celebrated Hollywood psychotherapist, whose clients include Drew Barrymore, and is co-author of The Tools with Phil Stutz. 

This essay is excerpted from AHEAD OF ALL PARTING copyright © 2026 by Barry Michels. Used by permission of Spiegel & Grau. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.