Too Close

 

“I went out with Charles again last night,” Ashley begins. “You know the guy I met on Match who I’ve been out with a few times.”

“I remember,” I say, nodding at the computer screen. “You kind of liked him.”

“I guess, but he was a little too much last night.”

“Meaning?”

“I don’t know. Like he started telling me all about his childhood, which was pretty terrible. He was physically abused by his mother, like really bad. And he wanted to know all about me. I’m not sure I was ready for that.”

“What made you uncomfortable?”

“What if we don’t work out? Why should I tell him all about me? Does he really need to know that my mother died of cancer when I was four and that my father wanted nothing to do with me?”

“I’d say there would be no reason for him not to know.”

“I never understand why you feel I should be blabbing my whole life to anyone and everyone.”

“Well, if you’re not presenting who you are to people it’s kind of impossible to get close to them and it takes a lot of energy to be play acting through a large part of your life.”

“Aren’t you play acting? Isn’t being a therapist all play acting?”

“In what way?”

“You could be in terrible pain right now, physical or emotional, and you wouldn’t tell me about it, right?”

“That’s true. We do all have roles that we inhabit in our lives and…”

“See, I told you! So I’m no different than you or anyone else!”

“We all have roles that we inhabit. Being a therapist is one

role, just as being an attorney is another. And, no, in our professional roles we’re not telling everyone everything about us. You’re not going to be in front of a judge and say, “Your Honor I can’t try this case today because I had to put my dog down yesterday and I’m a total basket case. But yesterday, when you put your dog down – obviously I’m just using that as an example – would you have been able to call a friend and say I need to talk?”

“I don’t have a dog,” Ashley says matter-of-factly. “I don’t want a dog.” Pause. “Actually, dogs are kind of like that guy last night. They want too much. They’re always there, always begging. I guess you’ll say that’s my need to keep my distance.”

“Yes, I would. And there’s the question of why that distance feels so necessary for you.”

“It just popped in my head that we’re back in your office next week. I don’t like that idea either. This is much more convenient. I don’t have to drive to and from your office. I don’t have to waste time sitting in your waiting room. I just turn on my computer screen and here you are.”

“So I assume by bringing that up right now, you’re making the connection that returning to my office feels closer – literally and figuratively - than virtual therapy.”

“Right. And I’d prefer continuing just as we are.”

“So do you have any thoughts about what makes closeness so uncomfortable?”

“It’s messy. People are just so needy. They want so much. Just like a dog.”

“Are you needy, Ashley? Do you want so much?”

“Me? No way! I can take care of myself.”

“I think you learnt that early on. If there’s no one really there for you, you learn that you have to take care of yourself.”

“Right!”

“But there’s a problem with that, Ashley. When you were four years old you couldn’t take care of yourself. You were a helpless, dependent little girl who just lost the most important person in your life. That little girl is still inside you. She still wants and needs and longs for someone to care for her…”

“Ugh! That’s disgusting. I hope that’s not true. And if it is true I want her gone, poof! Like she never existed.”

“I wonder, Ashley, if that’s exactly the reason you didn’t like the man you saw last night and the reason you don’t want to return to in office visits and the reason you don’t want a dog, all of that brings you closer to that dependent, childhood part of yourself.”

“So what should I do about it?”

“Well, first we’ll resume in office visits and we’ll talk about how that feels for you. And when you’re with someone and feel the need to get away, maybe you can try to pay attention to what you’re really trying to get away from. I suspect it might be the needy part of yourself.”

“What if I just avoided people?”

“Well, what do you feel when you avoid people? What did you feel when we were locked down in the pandemic?”

“Lonely. Like something was missing.”

“I guess that’s your answer.”

So Much To Do!

“There’s just so much I have to do. Mom’s sister is coming from LA. Her best friend is coming from New York. I have to get food in the house. The house is such a mess, especially with Mom’s hospital bed in the living room. And there’s Melissa, getting her to school, to swimming, to play dates. I’ve tried to keep her life as normal as possible.”

These words rush from Chelsea the moment she enters my office. She continues:

“I’ve thought about asking Melissa’s father to take her for a while, but I don’t know, I don’t know how she’d feel about being sent away.”

“How do you feel, Chelsea? How do you feel about sending Melissa away? How do you feel about your Mom?” I ask, interrupting the flow.

“I don’t have time to feel. Except for stressed. I’m plenty stressed. There aren’t enough hours in the day. And I don’t want to leave Mom alone. I know the hospice nurse is there, but she’s a stranger. Mom doesn’t know her.”

“Chelsea, can you slow down a bit, can you …”

“I can’t slow down,” Chelsea interrupts. “I don’t have time as it is.”

I’m discomforted by Chelsea’s agitation. I know about anxiety taking over during times of impending loss, being propelled into action to escape the sick feeling in one’s stomach, hoping that doing something, anything will decrease feelings of helplessness.  But it’s possible – in fact, helpful – to remain aware of the ever-present sadness.  Chelsea is using her incessant activity in an attempt to rid herself of her feelings, an impossible task that only increases her anxiety – and mine.

“But you have time here, Chelsea,” I say. “You have time to feel. Your Mom is dying. She’s been living with you for several years. You’ve been her caretaker. You have feelings about losing your Mom.”

“Of course I have feelings,” she replies. “But what’s the point of dwelling on it. And her sister and best friend are coming. I can’t very well tell them not to.”

“Are you saying you’d rather they not come?”

“It doesn’t matter what I want. They want to come see Mom and they certainly have a right to.”

“But you can have a preference, a feeling about their coming, even though you understand their need to say good-bye to your Mom.”

“I guess I’d rather they not come. But they’re still coming.”

I feel myself becoming increasingly sad, although I don’t know why. Is Chelsea becoming more aware of her own sadness? Is she less aware and projecting her sadness onto me?

“Do you know why you’d rather they not come?” I ask.

“It’d be a lot less work.”

“Any other reason?” I persist.

Suddenly Chelsea is still. Her blue eyes fill with tears. “I know this is silly, but I’d rather have my Mom all to myself. I hadn’t thought of it, but I wonder if that’s why I considered sending Melissa to her father. I want it to be just Mom and me, just like it was when I was little. Oh God! I knew I didn’t want to go here! I can’t stand it! I’m not sure I’ll make it without Mom!” Tears stream down her cheeks. She buries her head in her hands, her body wracked with sobs.

My eyes well up. I remain silent, giving Chelsea her time.

After several minutes she reaches for the tissue box, blows her nose and wipes her eyes. “I’m sure I look like a mess.” She pauses. “But I actually feel calmer. Isn’t that weird?”

“No, Chelsea, not weird at all. You spend a lot of energy running in circles, trying to avoid your sadness. But when you stop and feel the sadness, although it’s very intense, you feel grounded again and you don’t have to be frantically worrying about things that don’t matter much at all.”

“But sometimes I’m not sure I will survive without Mommy,” she says in a whisper.

“I understand that’s your fear.”

“We were so close. It’s even been hard these last few months when she’s really not with me anymore. But I can pretend. I can pretend she knows who I am, that she hears me, that she responds to my voice. And maybe she does. But soon I won’t even have that. I don’t want to start crying again. I have to go soon anyway. Oh, I can begin to feel myself starting to rev up.”

“Good that you recognized that.”

“But better to be running around like a whirling dervish, than to be afraid I won’t survive without Mom.”

“Well, hopefully we can help you feel less like a helpless child who can’t survive without your mother. I’m sure you’ll miss her and grieve a lot. But you will survive.”   

Near Death

I open the door to my waiting room and see Ben sitting there, perhaps a little thinner, perhaps a bit more gaunt, but basically looking like his old self. I blink back tears. He’s alive. He looks up and smiles at me. “I made it,” he says, echoing my own thoughts.

“I want to start by saying how much it meant to me that you came to see me at the hospital.”

A near fatal heart attack. Quadruple by-pass. Multiple infections and his first words are about my visiting him at the hospital. “Of course I’d come to see you.”

“It didn’t feel like an ‘of course’ to me. It felt like you cared about me. That I wasn’t just a patient.”

I think about Ben’s angry, rejecting mother and reflect on how difficult it is for people who weren’t cherished by a parent to take in that they’re cared about. “Ben, we’ve known each other for a long time. I’ve watched you become so much more of a feeling, related person, but it’s still hard for you to believe that I – or others - care about you.”

“This experience did show me how many people care about me. And my wife, she was amazing. I know it’s impossible, but it felt like she never left my side, that every time I opened my eyes she was there looking at me, squeezing my hand, smiling at me.”

Suddenly I’m besieged by images of my late husband lying in a hospital room with me sitting beside him. Many years, many images. Waiting for the results of his angiogram; the terror of his first angioplasties; the pain of a double knee replacement; the horror of discovering he had undiagnosed heart damage perhaps fatally complicating a minor heart attack after his first chemotherapy; his miraculous survival; his deterioration …  

My patient interrupts my reverie. “You look sad. I’m sorry. You must be thinking about your husband. “

Ben began working with me about a year before my husband’s death, now over seven years ago. It was an agonizing and vulnerable time for me, a time I revealed more about myself than was typical of me.

I say, “You’ve just demonstrated to yourself how much our patient-therapist relationship is a human relationship, how two people who have known year other for years, come to understand and care about each other. And you’re right, I was thinking about my husband, but I apologize for distracting you from your appreciation of your relationship with your wife.”

“Do you think being near death brings people closer?”

“What do you think?”

“I think it does. It makes you appreciate what you have when you see how it can all be gone in a second.  I actually thought about you when I saw how attentive and scared my wife was. I knew you would have been like that.”

“Ben, when you comment on your wife’s love and caring, when you reflect on your sense of me, I hope you can see how much you’ve changed, how much easier it is for you to genuinely connect to your wife, to me, and I’m sure to others as well.”

Ben nods his head, “Definitely. I feel like I’m a different person than the one who first came here.”

“And yet you’re still surprised by my coming to visit you in the hospital.”

“Yes. I don’t know. Is it because I feel I don’t deserve it?”

“Well, why wouldn’t you deserve it?”

“Because …,” he shakes his head. “I don’t know. I’m a pretty good person. And I do know …” Ben hesitates. “I do know you care about me.”

“Sounds like that was hard to say.”

“It was.”

Silence.

“I suddenly feel sad. You’d think it would make me happy to feel you cared about me.”

I remain silent, giving him a chance to reflect.

He continues. “I just got this picture we’ve talked about many times, when my mother beat me in front of my friends because I didn’t take the garbage out the minute she asked. It’s like I don’t know how to reconcile the two. How could she treat me like that if you and my wife care about me?”

“I think what you’re saying, Ben, is that if you’re deserving of love and caring today, you were deserving of it then, but your mother couldn’t give it to you. And if you realize that was her shortcoming, not yours, you have to give up hope that you could ever have gotten her love, regardless of what you did.”

Ben rubs tears from his eyes. “I think that’s right. But I am grateful for the love I have today.”

“I’m really glad to hear that,” I say as the hour ends.