Andrea again calls me from home.
“I’m sorry,” she says, her voice hardly above a whisper. “I know I said I’d try to come today but I can’t. I can hardly get myself out of bed. I can’t leave the house. I keep calling in sick to work. I hope I don’t get fired. I just can’t function. I’m so scared,” she adds crying.
Those of you who follow my blog will have met Andrea a few weeks ago, the woman who had been sexually abused by her father and felt herself more endangered after the Boston Marathon bombings. And now there’s the case in Cleveland, the shocking imprisonment for over ten years of three young women who were finally able to escape.
“It’s all right, Andrea,” I say gently. “I understand. You know I always say that you can only do what you can do. We’ll do whatever we need to do to help you through this.”
“I don’t think I will get through this. I’m back there. I’m back in that horrible house. I keep seeing those disgusting green walls. And the closet. I’m locked in that closet. I feel like huddling in a corner, folded over on myself, just like I was as a child, hoping that he’d leave me alone, but not wanting to be left in that closet for hours or days at a time. So did I wish he’d come back? That’s disgusting. I’m disgusting.”
“I bet you don’t think those three women are disgusting, Andrea.”
“No, of course not, they’re heroes. I don’t know how they endured for all those years. And that child! That child has never seen the outside world. That seems impossible to take in!”
“Notice how caring and compassionate you are towards those women and the child,” I say. “I wish you were able to have even a tiny bit of that compassion for yourself.”
“It’s not the same.”
“In what way isn’t it the same, Andrea?”
“They were imprisoned. They had no choice. I could have told. Why didn’t I tell?’ she asks plaintively, crying. “Why didn’t I run away?”
Although Andrea and I have covered this ground many times, her self-loathing and need to blame herself remains very difficult to change. To emotionally accept that she was an abused, helpless, dependent child without any options, is to accept her total vulnerability. And as awful as the guilt and self-hatred is, it is preferable to feeling completely powerless.
“You were a child, Andrea. And he was your father. There was no place for you to go. These women are adults now and they all went back to the embrace of their families. I’m not minimizing the horror of their story in any way. But I don’t want you to minimize the horror of yours either. You were as helpless and powerless as they were.”
“But that doesn’t make me feel better!” Andrea wails.
“I understand that Andrea. I understand that hating yourself, thinking you could have done something, anything, in many ways feels better than experiencing your total helpless. But, and this is an important but, you’re no longer that helpless child. You’re a competent, capable adult. It doesn’t mean bad things can’t happen, but today you have many more options than you had as a child.”
“But why didn’t I tell?”
“Because you were afraid, because you were ashamed, because you didn’t know what would happen if you told.” Suddenly I have a thought. “I wonder Andrea, if in addition to these women’s story making you more frightened, whether it also made you even madder at yourself for not figuring out a way to tell. Here you see how supportive and welcoming and thrilled complete strangers are of these women and I wonder if that made you almost envious, like you’re still in hiding and no one ever got to applaud you.”
Andrea mumbles something on the other end of the phone.
“I’m sorry, Andrea, I didn’t hear you.”
“I said you’re right. I found myself almost wishing I were those women. And then I got furious at myself for that thought. Disgusting! How could I want to be them? What’s wrong with me? I must be sick, sick, sick.”
“I think it makes complete sense, Andrea. So maybe you should try to stop beating up on you. And maybe, just maybe that might help you to feel less scared, like the person you’re really scared of these days is you.”
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.
