The Underachiever

Tall and thin with a wiry red beard, Daron Wilson sits across from me looking lost and forlorn. “I’ve never done this before. Never thought I would.”

“How can I be of help to you?” I ask.

“I don’t know. I know you can’t make my wife come back to me.” He sighs, shaking his head. “I love her so much. Her and the kids. But she says she wants more, more for the kids, more for her, more for our family. I don’t know how to give that to her.”

“More in what way?”

“Easy answer would be financially, but I know that’s not what she means. Wants me home more? Yeah, that’s true. But that’s not it either. We were high school sweethearts, madly in love almost from the moment we met. I was valedictorian of my class. She wanted to be a psychologist. Like you. Me, I didn’t know what I wanted. We got pregnant, got married right after high school. She was determined to go to college and she did for a while. I became a long distance trucker. Good way to make money to support a family. And then we had two kids and she dropped out of college and I kept driving. Truthfully, I kind of like it. Feeling of freedom on the road. I drove for other people until I had enough money to get my own truck. Big financial commitment, but now I’m my own boss. It’s okay.” He shrugs. “But Chelsea wants more. And I get it. Our kids are nine and seven. Do we really want them to see that driving a truck is all there is to life?”  

“You sound so sad and lost.”

“Yeah, that’s about right. I don’t know what to do. It’s not like I can snap my fingers and suddenly have a college degree and be working as some hot shit IT guy.”

“You said you were valedictorian of your class. Was that important to you? Were you proud of yourself?”

He shrugs. “Yeah, I guess.”

“Were your parents proud of you?”

He scoffs. “My parents? My parents could have cared less. My father was too drunk to come to my graduation. My mother came, looking uncomfortable every minute. They raised five kids. I was the last. They didn’t have much left over for me.”

“That’s very sad.”

“I guess. After a while you just stop caring.”

“So what motivated you to put forth the effort to become valedictorian of your class?”

“I don’t know.”

“Had you met Chelsea by then?”

“Yeah. We met when we were Juniors.” Pause. “I might have wanted to do it for her.”  

“What have your siblings done with their lives?”

“Liz – the only girl - is a wife and mother. My brothers? One’s an alcoholic; one has serious mental problems, can’t hold down a job. Joe – he’s the oldest - has done okay. He worked for GM when you could still make a decent living that way. I guess they all have their problems.”

“So if you had gone to college when you graduated from high school, that would have been a radical departure from the rest of your family?”

“That’s for sure.”

“And did you have feelings about being that different from your family? Even being valedictorian?”

“I don’t know.”

“How did you feel when you studied? How did you feel when you got good grades?”

“It’s too long ago to remember.”

“Daron, I think over the years you worked pretty hard – unknowingly of course – at trying not to know your feelings, your feelings of sadness and anger and disappointment and hurt. You turned yourself off so that now it’s very hard for you to know what you feel either now or in the past. I guess when you met Chelsea you were able to open yourself up to loving her which may have also opened you up to strive and succeed and do well. I’m not saying you don’t do well as a trucker - you obviously do - but it sounds as though a part of you died in the process.”

Daron’s eyes fill with tears. “That’s what Chelsea says. She says I feel dead.” Pause. “I wonder if that’s one of the reasons I like to drive. Always something new. Sort of escaping from myself.”

“That’s a great insight Daron. I guess the question is whether you’re ready to stop escaping and to look at all the painful feelings you have buried inside you.”

“First thing I thought? How long will it take? Can I do it before Chelsea leaves me?”

“I don’t know the answer to that, Daron. You’ve sat on your feelings for a long time. It won’t be a quick or painless fix.”

“But it’s a shot. I don’t have anything else.”

The Mask

Elaine, burying her head in her hands, begins sobbing as soon as she sits down. Struggling to speak she says, “Baxter has cancer. That’s why he hasn’t been eating. I may have to put him down. I can’t believe I’m carrying on like this! I didn’t even shed a tear when my grandparents died.”

Sadness floods me as I feel for both Elaine and myself, thinking immediately of Pippin, the regal black and white cat my late husband and I adopted shortly after we moved to Florida. Putting her down two years after my husband’s death was beyond painful.  “I’m so sorry, Elaine, I know how attached you are to Baxter, how much he’s meant to you.” 

“And this is supposed to be good? Feeling like a wreck, feeling like my heart will break?” she says sarcastically.

I know what Elaine is referring to. I remember when she first walked into my office four years ago. Although attractive with tasteful make-up, Elaine looked like a doll, her face mask-like. Her mother died when she was three, her father when she was seven. She lived with her step-mother until their conflicts became unbearable, then moved to her paternal grandparents, who saw her as an unavoidable inconvenience. Listening to Elaine’s story I felt overwhelmed by sadness, while Elaine seemed devoid of feeling. 

Elaine came into therapy because she couldn’t maintain a relationship. She had no difficulty finding men but the relationships never lasted. The men said she was unconnected, unavailable, that there was no passion. Sex wasn’t the problem, it was something else, but she didn’t know what. I suspected I knew. It’s impossible to connect to a doll. Our job would be getting behind the mask. It wouldn’t be easy. She had spent years fending off the pain of all her losses. The mask would have to be peeled off slowly.

“I have no memory of my mother or my father,” she told me. “Just pictures I’ve seen and what my step-mother was willing to tell me, which wasn’t much since she preferred not to talk to me. Of course my grandparents didn’t like to talk to me much either. Besides, they were old, they didn’t want to be reminded of their son’s death. I can imagine that would be painful for them.”

“And you don’t think it would be painful for a three year old, for a six year old?”

“I can’t feel what I can’t remember.”

Finding Elaine’s memories would be crucial to her growth. 

While we focused mostly on Elaine’s difficulties with relationships in both her personal and professional life, over the years I asked questions about the past: “Do you remember your first day of school? Who took you? Do you have an image of the house you lived in with your father? Do you remember moving from your step-mother’s to your grandparent’s? Did you have to change schools? Leave friends?”

One session when Elaine came in she looked different. There was a crack in the mask. “I had a dream,” she began. “There was a child standing in an empty field. She was holding someone’s hand, a man’s. They were looking down. When I woke up I felt incredibly sad. I didn’t think the child was me. But then I wondered if it was me with my father standing at my mother’s grave. Could I possibly remember that? I was only three.”  

“Let’s stay with your feeling, Elaine,” I say softly. “What is it like to feel that sadness? What does it bring up for you?” 

“I don’t know,” she says starting to cry. “I guess I’m sad for that little girl. Standing by her mother’s grave, not knowing that in three more years her father will be dead too. It’s really awful. I guess I never thought of it like that. I guess I never thought about it at all.”

“You didn’t want to think of it, Elaine. You didn’t want to deal with your pent up sadness. But today you’ve taken a big step forward.”

Two years separates the session of Elaine’s dream and her telling me she might need to put down Baxter.   

Returning to the present session I say, “I know you’re feeling tremendous pain, Elaine, not only for your beloved Baxter, but for all the losses you’ve endured in your life.”

She sobs. “Please tell me this pain is worth it.”

“It’s worth it, Elaine. If you can’t allow yourself to feel your sadness, you can’t feel joy either and, most importantly, you can’t be truly alive.” 

Shunned

The trial of the dissident Amish sect convicted last month of conspiracy and hate crimes, brought to mind the experience I once had of being shunned. No, it wasn’t connected to the Amish or to any religious group at all. I was shunned by a patient. And it felt awful, worse than feeling invisible, it was as though I was dead.

Donald was very removed and distanced. He could sit in my office week after week and say nothing. At times I made interpretations about his silence, at other times I joined him in the silence. My sense was that he found the sessions tortuous, but he would neither confirm nor deny my perception. He never missed a session; he was always on time. 

There were times Donald would speak, but never about his silence or his feelings about me and our sessions. He told me a little about himself – he was thirty-five, had never been married, had a few friends, worked as an accountant, like to read and attend concerts. His parents divorced when he was little. They never paid much attention to him before the divorce and even less after it. He wanted more out of life. That’s why he came into therapy. But he couldn’t engage with me on any meaningful level. I talked with him about his difficulty in connecting beyond a surface level, but he didn’t respond to that either.

Working with him was both sad and frustrating. When I felt sad, I’d see him as an extremely damaged man who wanted desperately to connect, but was unable to do so. When I felt frustrated, I saw his withdrawal as hostile, as if he were saying either, “You can’t make me play by your rules” or “I’m not giving you what you want.” Interpreting either or both of my reactions got us nowhere. 

One day while standing in line at the grocery store, I looked around and saw my patient behind me. I knew he saw me. There was no way he couldn’t have. I started to smile and nod at him when I realized that he was most definitely not going to acknowledge me. It wasn’t that he looked away. It was as though he was looking through me, as though I wasn’t there, as though I were dead. I remembering thinking immediately that this must be what the Amish feel like if they’re being shunned – cut off from the community, dead to all friends and family.

I found the experience extremely unsettling. And also enlightening. This must be what my patient had felt as a child, so ignored by his parents that he felt he wasn’t there, that he didn’t matter, that he might as well be dead. And this was the experience he was unconsciously trying to convey to me when he sat totally unresponsive in my office. He wanted me to feel completely ignored and unimportant, just as he had as a child. No wonder I felt him to be both damaged and angry. He was. I was eager for our next session. Now that I understood, I could finally help him. 

I glance at my watch. It’s five o’clock. He’s usually a bit early. Five after five. Donald’s never late. I start pacing my office. Ten after five. I reach for the phone and call him. No answer. I leave a message. The entire session passes. I haven’t heard from him.

And I don’t. Despite several phone calls and a letter, I get no response. I send yet another note with my final bill. He sends a check. He writes nothing.

I am again shunned. 

I have my own thoughts about what happened here, although of course they can never be confirmed. I think that even that brief non-connection in the grocery store was both too exposing and too intimate for Donald. If only for a moment, Donald would have had to perceive me as a person and personhood was not something that Donald could grant me when he had never experienced it himself. To open himself up to real human connection, Donald would have to feel all the pain and rage of being an ignored, neglected child. He couldn’t take the risk.