In A Quandary

 “It’s kind of weird starting therapy on FaceTime,” my new patient, Leah, begins. “But I’m a therapist myself, getting used to working virtually, so I figured it was time to get myself back into treatment. I certainly could use the help.”

“And how can I help you?”

“I guess the big push for me to start treatment again is my father, but of course like everyone else in the world, I have problems and problems and more problems.” She sighs. “I’m 45. I’m married, my husband, Ed, is an IT guy working from home. I have two kids, girls, 12 and 14, who are in school virtually. So there we all are at home, each in a separate room, learning, seeing patients and solving computer problems. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. It’s a problem if one of my girls doesn’t understand something she’s being taught and thinks she can just interrupt me in a middle of a session. I’ve tried to explain she can’t just do that, but if she goes to Ed, well, he just doesn’t have the patience, so she’ll end up interrupting me anyway. I’ve tried locking my door, but Elisa – she’s my youngest – gets really scared if I do that, so that doesn’t work either.”

“Sounds like you’re being pulled in every direction.”

“That’s for sure. And then there’s my father. My Mom died three years ago and at first I thought my Dad would be okay but now I can see he’s starting on the road to dementia – actually getting worse faster than I would have expected - and I’m worried about him being alone. Sometimes he calls again and again to ask the same question. He told me he’s burned a couple of pots forgetting he had the fire on. He’ll sometimes forget which apartment is his. And, of course, like many people during Covid, he’s lonely and, because he’s who he is, he’s angry. So I’m trying to decide if I should move him into the house with us.”

“Wow! Sounds like you have a tremendous amount on your plate.”

“Yeah. And the added problem is that I don’t like my Dad. I mean I love him – I guess – but I don’t like him. He’s angry, opinionated, narcissistic, dogmatic and intrusive. And that was all my life, not just since my Mom died or since the dementia.”

“So what was it like for you growing up?”

“Well, I’m a therapist, that should give you a big hint,” she says with a small smile. “It was hard. I was the oldest of three girls. My Mom was this really sweet person who didn’t have a backbone. She accepted anything and everything my father did, worshipped him really, and left us to fend for ourselves. Which usually meant I was the one arguing with him. My middle sister was the good girl, kind of like my mother, and my youngest sister just sort of floated through life, which is kind of what she’s still doing. I think she just ended marriage number three and career number … I don’t know. Too many to remember.”

“So what do you think it would be like with your father in the house?”

“Awful. I know it would. My youngest daughter is scared of him, always has been; and my oldest, at 14, she’d probably be arguing with him just like I used to. But I don’t know how they’d do with his dementia.”

“You haven’t said much about your husband.”

“I know,” Leah says sighing. “It’s hard. I mean I love Ed and I know he loves me, but even after all my previous therapy, I still think I married my father. No, that’s not really fair. Ed isn’t an angry bully like my father. But he is self-centered and not inclined to go out of his way to be patient or helpful, like I was saying before about his not helping my youngest with her schoolwork.”

“I notice you keep referring to your children as ‘yours’ rather than ‘ours.’

“That’s true. They’re very much my responsibility. I mean he loves them and he’s great about playing with them as long as it’s something he enjoys. But he’s definitely the fun parent and I’m the one who keeps after them to do their homework, pick of their rooms and so forth.”   

“So you always end up in the role of the responsible one. Any idea why?”

“First response, I was the oldest. Second, it’s the only way I’m sure things will get done.” Pause. “Maybe it’s the only way I feel safe.”

“There’s certainly a lot there for us to explore there.”

“I want to ask you before we stop if I should take my father in, but I know you can’t answer that.”

“Maybe we first need to look at why you only feel safe when you carry all the weight of responsibility.”

Unnamed

I had seen Rhonda briefly six years ago when she first started her ophthalmology practice. She was anxious, unsure of whether she could handle either the patients or the necessary business responsibilities. She described herself as being an anxious person most of her life, but refused to focus much on her past, saying that she wanted to address present day concerns. Soon she found reasons not to come – she had to see a patient, go to a net-working luncheon, attend a meeting. Eventually she dropped out. I was surprised to hear from her again.

“Thanks for seeing me,” she says smiling. “A lot’s happened since I saw you. My practice is going very well, I got married and a little over six weeks ago I had a baby.”

“Congratulations. You’re right. A lot has happened.”

“My husband, Andy - he’s a physician too, an internist - he said I needed to come. He said it wasn’t normal that I haven’t named the baby yet.”

Inadvertently my eyes widen, my eyebrows raise.

“You don’t think it’s normal either,” she says, reading my surprised expression.

“I don’t know about normal, but I can see that it could be a problem. What do you call … Boy or girl?”

“Girl. You know, cutie pie, sweetie, lovey, baby.”

“And what’s your sense of why you haven’t named her?”

“I don’t want to make a mistake. I wouldn’t, for example, want to call her some sweet girlie name, only to have her be a tomboy. Or vice versa.”

“And how would you be able to know?”

“That’s the problem. I can’t. But I figure if I wait just a little longer, I’ll have more of an idea, more of a sense of her personality.”

“Does your husband get a vote?” 

“He’s wanted to name her either Amanda or Kim right from the beginning. But I don’t know, they just don’t seem to fit.”

“How do you feel about your name, Rhonda?”

“I hate it!”

Aha, I think. Perhaps we’re getting someplace. “Because …?”

“My mother gave me the name. It was her mother’s. My father put the name Alexandra on my birth certificate but she crossed it out and put Rhonda. Alexandra is so much more … more regal sounding. I hate Rhonda. In fact, I go by Rho. Not regal sounding either, but not so clunky.”

“Did you know your grandmother, Rhonda, I mean Rho?”

“She was a witch. She lived with us. My mother waited on her hand and foot. In fact, I’d say Mom often neglected me and my sister because she was so busy catering to my Grandma.”

“Sounds like you feel pretty angry at both of them.”

“I guess that’s true.”

“And how do you feel about your baby?”

“My baby?! I love her, of course. Are you saying I don’t love my baby because I haven’t named her?”

“I’m not saying that, Rho …”

“Oh God! I hope I love my baby. What made you ask that?” Rhonda says interrupting me, giving me no chance to answer her question. “I wasn’t sure I wanted a baby right now, what with my practice and all. But my husband said it was time, that we weren’t getting any younger. Do you really think I don’t love my baby? I couldn’t bear that. It’s like I’d be passing it down the line, the indifference I experienced.”

“Rho, there’s a lot going on here, which doesn’t mean you don’t love your baby. You can love your baby and still have ambivalent feelings about being a mother. You can love your baby and be scared of repeating the experiences of your past in the present. It sounds like you’re aware of all that and that certainly puts way ahead of lots of people.”

Rhonda looks down at her clenched hands. “I can see how not naming my baby could make her feel unimportant. I don’t want to do that,” she says crying.

“I’m sure you don’t, Rho.”

“I’m going to tell Andy he can name her whatever he wants.”

That’s not being any more involved, I think to myself. “What do you want to name her, Rho?”

“I don’t know. I know from what we just said that there’s more to it, but when you ask me the question point blank, I go back to where we stated, I don’t want to make a mistake.”

“Sounds like naming your baby is so intertwined with your mother and grandmother, that it’s become impossible to separate them out.”

“I don’t know what to do. I feel I have to do something and I’m stuck. Do you have another session this week?”

“For sure.”

“Thanks. I guess I’ll go home and discuss it with Andy.”

“Sounds like a plan.” 

Inching Forward

I return in this blog to Kevin, the man who had difficulty feeling much of anything and who angrily rejected my compassionate remark. Consciously he experienced my response as pitying, as an indication of my seeing him as weak. Unconsciously my positive voice threatened the angry, critical voice of the father he carries around in his head, a voice he would have to relinquish and mourn if he was able to take in more positive voices.    

Progress with Kevin has been slow. He remains unemotional, distanced, reserved, and quick to criticize. For my part, I am often overly cautious, carefully weighing what I say, trying to avoid his attack, an attack which expresses the critical voice of the internalized father that both he and I carry in our minds.     

Today, however, Kevin appears quite different. He is unshaven, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt and looks stricken. Even so, I’m reticent, reluctant to ask if he’s all right, preferring to wait to hear what he’ll say.

“I’ve had one hell of a night,” he begins. “My daughter’s appendix burst. She was screaming in pain. We had to rush her to the emergency room.”

“I’m so sorry, Kevin,” I say. “Is she all right?”

“Yeah, they operated on her and they say she’ll be fine.”

“It must have been terrifying,” I say, despite worrying that my expressing too many vulnerable feelings may result in a backlash from Kevin. But he feels so different today, so much more raw, that I’m willing to take the risk.     

I’m still surprised, however, when Kevin starts weeping. “My poor little girl. She was scared and hurting and I couldn’t do anything! I don’t think I’ve ever been so terrified in my entire life!”

Images go through my head: the trauma of my own childhood tonsillectomy, the terror of so many of my late husband’s hospitalizations, the pain of watching my elderly cat become sicker and sicker. All images associated with despair and powerlessness. This is what Kevin is also feeling. But they are feelings quite alien to him and I’m still unsure how far he’ll be willing to go with them. I wait.

“I bet you never expected me to be bawling in here,” Kevin says, his sarcastic edge returning.

Despite the sarcasm, his vulnerability has made me feel less tentative. “How do you feel about your crying in here or, for that matter, crying at all? And how do you feel about the feelings you obviously have for your daughter?”

“I don’t know about the crying in here part, but I’m actually glad that I could feel so much for Tracy,” Kevin says, more softly than usual. “I know I’ve talked about my feelings about my kids, about how I wasn’t sure that I really felt what I should feel about them. Well, last night did away with that concern. I don’t know what I would have done if anything had happened to Tracy. I felt like my heart would break for her last night. And I was glad to be able to feel.” 

“I’m glad you could allow yourself to feel and that the feelings were not only tolerable, but actually felt good.”

“I even felt closer to my wife last night. Beth was stronger than I thought. She didn’t fall apart even though I could see how scared she was and how much she loved Tracy. I don’t think it’ll fix everything between us, but it felt good, if only for last night. 

“I had some other thoughts, too,” Kevin continues. “I thought about my mother. We don’t talk about my mother much. My father always seems to be in the foreground. I remember when I’d get injured playing sports, especially football. Once I even broke my arm. She did what she was supposed to do. She took me to the hospital, gave me my medicine, asked if I was doing all right, but she wasn’t there emotionally. I could tell how different she was from Beth or even from me – if you can believe that! Yeah, I could tell that I felt more on an emotional level for my daughter than my mother felt for me. That was a revelation.”

“So you had an angry, attacking father and an unemotional, distant mother. It’s no wonder that emotional closeness is so difficult for you.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s true. So am I cured, Doc?”

“I’d say that last remark is an indication of your beginning to feel uncomfortable with the closeness between us and your need to pull back.”

“Come on, now. I didn’t mean anything by that.”

“Think about it. What does it sound like to you?”

“I guess you’re right. It’s sort of a smart-ass, off-hand remark.”

“And that’s fine. You can’t expect that one experience, no matter how terrifying, no matter how eye-opening can make everything different. But it obviously has affected you and it will affect you and us as we go forward.”