“I just ended another relationship,” says Brittany settling herself into my chair for the first time. She’s an attractive enough woman probably in her early 40s, simply dressed in black pants and a gray sweater. She didn’t smile when I greeted her in the waiting room, just extended her hand. Her eyes didn’t smile either. She continues.
“I told myself I’d give it a year and I did. We got together last New Year’s Eve and I broke up with him this January 1. He was a nice enough man. But I can’t do it. I can’t be in a relationship. It’s like torture to me.”
Torture, I think to myself. What a strong word.
“I know it’s not normal,” Brittany continues. “That’s why I promised myself I’d go into therapy if I couldn’t handle this relationship. I’ve been in therapy several times, but maybe I’m more ready now. I certainly know this is my problem. Way too many relationships to think it’s the men’s fault. I don’t usually last a year, but that’s what I said I’d do, so I did.”
Questions swirl through my mind: What makes a relationship feel like torture? Do you feel smothered? Are you so terrified of loss that you can’t allow yourself to connect? Did your relationship with your previous therapists feel like torture also? Will you need to escape our relationship as well? I decide on a far more innocuous statement.
“Sounds like when you make up your mind to do something you certainly follow through.”
Brittany’s mouth forms an almost-smile, while her eyes brighten slightly eyes as well. “That’s definitely not my problem. If I decide to do something, I do it. I wouldn’t be where I am today if it weren’t for my determination. I own a chain of yogurt stores and am about to start franchising nationwide. Not bad for an abandoned orphan left by the side of the road.”
“Literally?” I ask, surprised.
“I’m exaggerating about that side of the road bit, but my parents were a piece of work. They were both drug addicts and definitely didn’t know what to do with a baby. At some point they just left me. Social services got involved and I went from one foster home to another until I was 10 when one family finally kept me until I was 16. Then I got myself declared an emancipated minor and went off on my own. And the rest is history.”
“That’s an amazing story, Brittany. A really sad story, but you tell it with no feeling at all.”
“I’ve repeated it a million times.”
“But you still must have feelings about it. About your parents abandoning you, about your going from one home to another, about the family you lived with for six years.”
“They were good-enough people. The family I lived with for six years. But it was the same problem. They wanted something from me I couldn’t give them. They wanted me to love them, to be a part of their family, to remember birthdays and care about Christmas. I don’t have it in me.”
The room feels heavy, steeped in despair, although I suspect I am the only one who feels it. Brittany is removed, protected by a suit of armor she constructed early on to shield her from repeated abandonment and neglect. How could she ever allow herself to care for another person who would likely, yet again, toss her aside? “Left on the side of the road.” That is her metaphor for her life. Brittany cannot allow herself to get any inkling of the scared, vulnerable, needy child who exists inside her. Instead, she prides herself on her truly amazing success, unaware of her underlying hunger for human connection.
“How do you feel about not having it in you?” I ask.
She shrugs. “I know there’s something missing in me. And when I look around and see people, I can tell that relationships add something to their lives. So I guess I’d like to find out what’s missing.”
“I suspect, Brittany, that it’s not so much that something is missing, but that you’ve buried your hurt, neglected childhood feelings deep inside you and that when a potentially close relationship threatens to expose those feelings, you feel you’re being emotionally tortured. Then you bury the feelings even deeper and run away. It’s as though you’re saying, ‘I don’t need anyone and no one can hurt me ever again.’”
“I get the wanting no one to hurt me again, but I don’t know about my being afraid of needing anyone. I don’t think I do need anyone. That’s the problem.”
“Well, I guess that’s something we’ll find out as we go forward,” I say optimistically. In my mind I add, assuming I’m able to keep you in therapy.
“I’ve decided I’m going to break up with Tim,” Allison announces at the beginning of her Monday session.
“Really?” I say, obviously surprised. I see Allison three days a week. On Thursday there was no intimation of her breaking off the relationship. “I thought you and Tim were doing very well.”
“Wow! I finally got to shock you,” she says laughing, passing her fingers through her curly, brown hair. “Yeah, we were. But, I don’t know, I think he’s too boring for me.”
“Too boring,” I repeat.
Allison is a 30 year old drug rep who came into therapy because she made repeatedly poor choices in men. We came to understand that Allison chose men who were similar to her grandiose and narcissistic father, a man who was always too busy and self-involved to attend to Allison. By choosing boyfriends who were like her father, she hoped to win in the present the love she couldn’t achieve in the past. Such a strategy never of course works, since choosing a narcissistic boyfriend will lead yet again to disappointment and pain.
“Yeah. I don’t know, the relationship is just too predictable, maybe too easy.”
“Too easy,” I say.
Allison laughs. “I’ve clearly thrown you for a loop. I love it!”
“So maybe our therapy sessions were also too boring and you’ve just spiced them up.”
“I never thought of that, but maybe,” Allison replies, still gleeful.
“Okay, so here are my questions: What’s wrong with easy? What makes easy uncomfortable? And what happened in the last four days?”
“It’s just not exciting. There’s no spontaneity. He’s always there – trusty, reliable Tim.”
“And you could say the same of me.”
“Yes, that’s true, you’re trusty and reliable, but I kind of like that from you.”
“Except you liked ‘throwing me for a loop.’”
“Yes. But that was like I kind of one upped you, like you know so much and sometimes it seems you can even read my mind and here I am able to surprise you. It makes me feel like I got you!”
Thoughts race through my mind. Allison feels she has just won a competition. With her father? More likely her mother. Allison and I have spent so much time dealing with her father, that her mother is a more shadowy figure to me. Still, my sense is that she too was fairly narcissistic and definitely intent on receiving as much of her husband’s meager supplies as possible. And there’s still the question of what changed in four days. Was the weekend break difficult for her? Was I too know-it-all in our last session?
“Did you have a hard time with our weekend break, Allison?” I ask.
“This has nothing to do with you! Why do you always want to make it about you?” she says angrily.
“I guess that makes me feel like your parents.”
“Now that you mention it, yes! I think you just wanted to deflate me because I surprised you.”
I consider Allison’s accusation. “I’m not consciously aware of competing with you or wanting to deflate you, but I am aware of being disappointed in your so easily discarding Tim and what seems like such a good relationship. Perhaps it made me feel you were discarding our work together and perhaps that made me want to reassert my presence.”
“Wow! There’s a lot of stuff in there. You certainly think a lot about why you do what you do.”
“I try to. I think it’s very important that we try to understand as much as we can about ourselves and our motivations. Doesn’t mean we always succeed. We all have an unconscious – including me – and by definition the unconscious is unconscious.”
“I guess you’re saying I should try to understand why I want to break up with Tim.”
I nod. “Yes, I guess that’s what I’m saying.”
“He’s so much not my father. I know, I know, that’s a good thing. But it doesn’t always feel like such a good thing. It feels like I’m giving up so much.”
“You are. You’re giving up hope. You’re giving up the hope of ever getting the father you needed and deserved in both the past and the present and that’s very painful.”
“But you’re saying I should do it?”
“I’m not saying you should stay with Tim, but I am saying that until you mourn the father you never had and give up chasing him in the present, you’re going to face a lot of painful breakups in your life.”
I am sitting with Lila – or L as she insists on being called – in uncomfortable silence. A tall, heavy woman in her mid-twenties, with disheveled hair and wrinkled clothes that look as though they’ve been purchased at a thrift shop, L stares at the floor, occasionally glancing up to glare at me. We have been here many times before. I know I need to say something or L will leave, looking back at me with undisguised contempt.
L doesn’t want to be here. Her father insisted. Despite her obvious intelligence, she barely made through college and has done nothing since she graduated but sit glued to the TV or her computer. Her father, a wealthy businessman, insists that I “fix” his daughter. He travels for his company so isn’t home much, but hears from the servants that his daughter does nothing with her time. His ex-wife, he told me, is entirely out of the picture. She left with another man when L was a baby, leaving him to hire a succession of nannies.
“What are you feeling right now?” I ask lamely.
She sneers at me. “Five minutes of silence and you can’t do better than that?”
Although I agree with L’s assessment, I’m again becoming angry, a feeling that often plagues me in L’s sessions.
“What would you like me to ask?”
Another sneer. “What? So now you want me to do your job for you?”
“Okay,” I say. “Let’s start over. We both know if we continue along this path, we’ll both end up being angry and then you’ll leave.”
“Good guess.”
“Do you like to make me angry, L?”
She shrugs.
Silence.
“I can see that you might want to make me angry, that you might want me to feel what you feel.”
“So I’m angry. So what?”
“I can’t imagine that it feels good to be angry all the time.”
Another shrug.
More silence.
“Can you tell me why you’re angry, L?”
“Why don’t you tell me,” she snaps back.
Trying to keep the conversation going, I reply, “Well, at the very least, you’re angry about being here.”
“Wow what a brilliant insight! Give the lady a gold star! And you’re considered a great therapist because…?”
“You succeeded, L. I’m angry. But I still don’t know what purpose it serves you. Is it a way to keep me away, to make sure we never form a relationship? Is it a way to keep yourself safe?”
“Why don’t you just figure it out,” L says as she starts to leave.
Without thought, I’m up against the door barring her exit. “Stop it, Lila!” “Sit down.”
Towering over me, her eyes fill with fury. I wonder what compelled me to place myself in such a precarious situation.
“Why’d you call me Lila?” she says angrily. “My name’s L.”
Why did I call her Lila? I wonder. “No,” I say, “Your name is Lila and I’d like to know Lila. I’d like to know the person you were before you felt you had to rename yourself. I’d like to know you and I’d like you to stay.”
I watch the fury drain from Lila’s eyes. In its place I see surprise and confusion. She stumbles back to her chair.
“I can’t believe you did that,” she says. “I could have hurt you. Why did you do it?”
“I didn’t think much before I reacted. I know I was angry. And I know I wanted you to stay. And what I said is true. I do want to know you, Lila. I know there’s a sad, lonely kid underneath all that anger.”
“How do you know?” she asks, some of the defiance returning to her voice.
“Well, your mother abandoned you. Your father was never terribly interested in you. And you had a series of nannies who came and went. I can’t see how you could be anything but sad and lonely. And angry, of course.”
“So you think everything’s going to be rosy from now on?”
I smile. “No, I certainly don’t. And even if I did I know you’d show me very quickly I was wrong. No, Lila, I think we have a long road ahead of us. You’ve been hurt again and again and you’ve used your anger to wall yourself off from relationships and any more pain. But maybe we made a small inroad today.”
Lila nods. “It matters that you put yourself in danger because you wanted me to stay.”
