Unmoored

“You’re sure you don’t know my husband?” Francis Browning asks again.

“Yes, I’m sure,” I reply. “You made it very clear on the phone that your husband is a psychologist in town and I definitely wouldn’t have agreed to see you if I knew him in any way.”

“I’m sorry. It’s just so hard to trust anyone anymore. I can’t even believe I’m willing to see a psychologist myself, but I have to talk to someone or I’ll go crazy. Sometimes I can’t stop crying. Other times I walk around the house screaming. I can’t believe he’d do this. Why drag me all the way here only to dump me?” Francis digs her fingernails into her hands, her face contorted with rage.

I remain silent.

“I’m from Kansas,” she says. “A Kansas farm girl. People in south Florida laugh at me. They don’t think anyone lives in Kansas. And they don’t believe anyone works a farm. I don’t know where they think their meat and produce come from. Just magically appear in the grocery store I suppose. I hate it here. People are incredibly rude, unfriendly. I never wanted to come here. But Richard loved it when we vacationed here, the sun, the manicured lawns, year-round golf. He kept saying as soon as the girls went off to college we’d move. I thought he was just talking. I went on with my life. It wasn’t a very exciting life, but it was my life. I kept busy with my friends and volunteer work. I never finished college. I thought I was so lucky that someone like Richard would want me. Ha! Guess that’s a joke.”




As Francis talks, I think about how painful my move from Ann Arbor, Michigan to south Florida was, how gut-wrenching it felt to leave my friends, my practice and my home, how alien south Florida seemed. I, too, left because of my husband, but we had a warm, loving relationship and although I sometimes felt angry, I knew the move was necessary. Francis’ story obviously has a different trajectory.

“So the girls went off to college,” Francis continues, “and Richard started making plans to move. I kept asking him if he was sure he wanted to start over again in his fifties, but I

guess I never gave him much of an argument.”

“Did you tell him you didn’t want to move?”

“He knew. But I always did what he wanted. He didn’t expect much opposition from me. So we moved and I hated it as much as I thought I would. Moving into a country club community was my idea of a nightmare. I don’t play golf or tennis. I don’t play cards, which kind of eliminates everything women do in those places. Richard was happy as a clam – working hard, I have to give him that – involved in all kinds of stuff at the club. He started watching his weight, coloring his hair. Wanted me to do all that too. Said I looked dowdy. I should have known. I should have realized he’d start looking elsewhere. I should have tried harder, done what he said.”

“You seem to go from being really angry with your husband to blaming yourself.”

“Yeah. Maybe if I’d done the things he’d asked we’d still be together. But too late now. Moved in with another woman. In the same club of course. Talk about being laughed at. I keep asking myself why I don’t move back to Kansas.”

“That’s a good question. Why don’t you?”

“Partly it’s shame. Not too many people back home know what’s happened. The girls of course, but I haven’t wanted to tell my friends. And I don’t know. I guess it’s silly, but I like Richard to know I’m still around, still watching what he’s doing, like I’m here and you can’t get rid of me so easily.”

“You know, Francis, I’m left wondering what you want for your life. What you’ve ever wanted for your life. You’ve spent your life wrapped around your husband and what he wants. What about you?”

Francis glares at me. “Typical career woman! You sit there talking down to me and telling me about my choices.”

I’m taken aback by Francis’ venom. Am I a stand-in for her husband? For the other woman? 

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I just don’t know what to do with my rage.”

“You never have to apologize for your feelings here, Francis.”

“I never wanted to be a career woman. I wanted to be a wife and mother and look where that got me. I’m being punished for getting what I wanted. You’re not supposed to want. You’re just supposed to accept whatever God gives you.”

“It’s hard not to want, Francis.”

“Maybe. But wanting and getting burned is no better.”

Unleashed

“I didn’t want to come today,” Penny says quietly. “I knew I’d have to tell you what I did and I’m not sure I want to. I’m not sure I can.”

Penny’s anxiety is palpable and mine rises along with hers. It’s difficult when patients introduce a topic this way. I always think of something dreadful – she attempted suicide, she started cutting herself, she killed her daughter. I remain silent.

Penny sits looking downward, her dark, straight hair partially covering her face. She makes no attempt to wipe away the tears that fall down her cheeks.

“I beat up Jennifer,” she finally says in a whisper.

Even though my internal list of dreadful possibilities did include Penny having killed her child, I didn’t really expect to hear that Penny had done anything violent, not this petite, delicate woman who sits across from me. And what does she mean by ‘beat up’?  

“I swore I’d never be like that,” she continues. “I swore I’d never be like my mother. I waited years to have a child because I was so afraid of being like her. And then I am. I’m just like her, just as out of control crazy,” says Penny between sobs.

Penny’s mother was an enraged woman with an explosive temper who beat Penny and her sister with straps and belts and anything else at her disposal. Did Penny indeed lose control like her mother? No longer able to contain my own anxiety, I say, “Can you tell me what happened, Penny.”
 
“Bill and I came home earlier than we expected and there was my 15 year old daughter on the couch making out with this… this boy I’ve told her to keep away from. He’s one of those bad boys. I bet he never even finishes high school. I just snapped. I started screaming and screaming. Bill told him to leave, Jennifer started to give her father an argument and I just went over and slapped her across the face. Twice. She looked at me shocked. I stopped. I couldn’t believe what I did. I couldn’t believe I was just like my mother.”

I can feel myself breath again. Although Penny was briefly out of control her behavior was a far cry from her mother’s. In fact, I can remember a time in a somewhat similar situation when I was about Penny’s age when my mother slapped me for the first and only time of my life. It didn’t scare me. Just made me mad, even though I knew I’d been out of line. But Penny is now frightened of herself, beating up on herself not with a belt, but with self-recrimination and guilt.

“I can’t even look at Jennifer without bursting into tears. And yet I’m still mad at her. She knew she shouldn’t bring that boy into the house. I don’t want her near him anyplace let alone in my home. But I shouldn’t have snapped like that. Bill tells me I’m being too hard on myself, but he doesn’t understand.”

Remembering my own musings before Penny told me what actually happened, I ask, “Is it what you did that’s bothering you so much or what you felt?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if we just look at what happened: You come home and find Jennifer with a boy you don’t approve of. You get angry and yell and slap her twice across the face. The facts themselves aren’t so terrible. Maybe that’s what Bill means when he says you’re being too hard on yourself.  But the question might be, what did you feel? Did you feel so out-of-control with rage that you might even have wanted to kill Jennifer? And even if you consciously didn’t feel that, was it the extent of your rage that frightened you so much, made you feel like your mother.”

“I didn’t want to kill her!”  Pause. “At least I don’t think so. But I’ve never been so angry in my life.”

“You know, Penny, you present as this gentle, almost meek, little person who would never want to hurt a fly, who could never, ever feel angry at anyone. And maybe that’s the problem. You’ve been so intent on not being like your mother, in keeping any possible similarity to your mother buried far, far away that when that anger was unleashed it burst out like a volcano.”

“That makes sense. But I don’t know what to do with that.”

“Well, it’s too intellectual right now. But I suspect we’re going to need to spend more time looking back at your childhood and finding the anger you needed to keep buried back then, anger that’s still buried and looking for a way to get out.”

No Sadness

“I saw the stupidest movie this past weekend, ‘Inside Out,’’ says Stu, a patient who came into therapy at his wife’s insistence. “It’s supposed to be a kid’s movie so we took my five year old son. He thought some of it was funny, but I thought it was just dumb. These ridiculous Feelings running around in the brain controlling this girl, Riley I think her name was. Even her name. What kind of name is Riley? Anyway, of course my wife loved it and we got into a huge argument over the stupid thing.”

I loved the movie too, seeing it as an incredibly clever animated film that captured the need for humans to integrate all of their feelings in order to avoid becoming removed from themselves and others. I am not, however, surprised by Stu’s aversion to the movie. I remain silent.

“She just got so upset that I didn’t, as she said, ‘get’ the movie. She saw that as the root of ‘our problems,’ by which she meant ‘my problems.’”

“Can I ask you what you didn’t like about the movie, Stu?”

“It was just dumb.”

“Maybe it would be helpful though if we could figure out what about the movie you thought was ‘dumb.’

“Did you see it?”

I suspected that Stu would ask this question and knew that I would answer. “Yes, I did.”

“You liked it. I can tell.”

“Yes, I liked the movie, but my opinion really doesn’t matter. What matters is that you didn’t like it and that you thought it was important enough to bring it up here.”

“That’s because Brenda and I got into this big thing about it.”

“Okay. So can we look at what you thought was dumb about the movie?”

“It was just silly. All those Feeling characters running around telling the girl how to feel and making her act one way or another.”

“Was there a particular Feeling character you liked more than the others or one you disliked more?”

“Yeah. I hated that fat, blue Sadness, always moping around, seeing the worst in everything, having to be dragged around by Joy. But Joy was kind of stupid too, constantly seeing the world through rose-colored glasses. I didn’t like Fear because he was too much of a nerd and Disgust didn’t make any sense to me. So I guess I liked Anger the best, at least he was willing to do something.”

Stu has beautifully captured his own personality in his reaction to the various Feeling characters. But I need to be cautious in my response so that I don’t further heighten his defensiveness.

After a brief pause I say, “Anger was very helpful when he burned a hole in the glass and allowed Joy and Sadness back into the control tower to help Riley. That struck me as a good illustration of how anger or assertion can be used to motivate a person to take necessary action, to impel them forward in life. It’s one of the things you’ve definitely been able to do, use your aggression to become a successful businessman.”

“I didn’t think of that, but yeah, that makes sense,” Stu replies more thoughtfully than he’s been all session.

“But Anger could also have gotten Riley in lots of trouble,” I continue.

“You mean when she starts to run away?”

I nod. “And when she starts to run away, did you notice how she was shutting down? To leave, she has to remove herself from her feelings, to not care, for example, that she’s leaving her parents.”

“I get what you’re saying. Anger alone can spell trouble.” 

“Yes. And you notice what Joy does when she and Sadness get back in the control tower, she has Sadness take over. Riley needs to get back in touch with her sadness in order to feel that she’ll miss her parents, that she doesn’t want to leave them.”

“Good point.” Pause. “I guess the movie was deeper than I thought.”

Now that Stu seems less defensive, I’m comfortable being more direct. “Sadness – or fear for that matter – aren’t emotions you’re comfortable with. They make you feel vulnerable, weak. But unless you can feel the whole range of emotions, it’s hard to live a full life, with meaningful connections to others. You notice in the movie, it’s also Sadness who’s the most empathic character.”  

“Are you saying I have no empathy?” Stu asks, more harshly.

“I think you’re starting to put Anger back up, Stu, because even thinking about feeling sad or scared is in itself pretty scary.”

“Maybe,” he says. “I’ll have to think about it.”

“Okay,” I reply, as the hour ends. Stu and I still have lots of work to do.

Saying Good-bye

“Well,” Arlene begins, “We have three sessions left including today.”

“How do you feel about that?” I ask.

“Good. I’m happy. I never thought I’d be able to say that. When I started with you three years ago I was totally miserable. I’m sure part of it is being on medication, but you’ve been so helpful to me.”

I’ve been seeing 65 year old Arlene in therapy for three years. And she’s right. She’s made excellent progress. She’s no longer depressed, can speak up for herself with her husband, and is more accepting of her grown children’s need for their own lives.

She continues. “Even last night, Larry took the remote and started flipping channels when I was right in the middle of watching ‘Madame Secretary.’ For a second I sat there and said nothing, but I could feel myself shutting down and I knew – because of you – that’s the first step to my becoming depressed. So I told him that wasn’t considerate of him and that I wanted to finish watching my program. I could see he wanted to give me an argument, but he didn’t and he did put my show back on.”

“And how did you feel about that?”

“Good.”

“Only good? Didn’t it feel like a victory, like you wanted to jump up and shout for joy?”

“I wouldn’t go that far. But I did give myself a kind of pat on the back.”

“Good for you!”

Silence.

“I don’t know what else to talk about. I’m happy.”

“I glad you’re happy but can I ask you again how you feel about ending?”

“Like I said, good. I feel that I’ve accomplished a lot and that we’ve talked about my big issues - my fear of my father and my dependency on my mother - and that we’ve been mostly rehashing for months and that I don’t need to be here anymore.”

“I agree with you, Arlene, that you don’t need to be here, but I still wonder, we’ve had a long relationship. Do you feel any sadness about leaving?”

“No. I don’t feel I need to be here.”

I’m taken aback by Arlene’s response. I know that she has been quite attached to me during the time we’ve worked together. I also know that I almost always feel some sadness at the ending of a treatment. How is it possible she’d feel no sadness? I persevere.

“I agree you don’t need to be here. And you can feel a terrific sense of accomplishment and satisfaction about being ready to leave. But you can still feel sad about saying good-bye. I do. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t leave. Let me ask you this, will you miss me?”

“No. I hope I’m not hurting your feelings, but I don’t think I’ll miss you and I don’t feel sad. I feel too happy to be depressed. Maybe the medicine keeps me from feeling sad.”

“I wonder if you’re saying you’re afraid to feel sad for fear of becoming depressed again.”

“I just don’t feel sad.”

Increasing confident that Arlene is defending against her sadness I ask, “What does make you sad?”

“Nothing.”

“I know that’s not true, Arlene. You were certainly sad when your granddaughter went into the hospital or when your friend Miriam died.”

“That’s different. That was about death. I was scared for Haley and Miriam’s death was a big loss.”

“You look a little sad now, thinking about Miriam’s death.”

She nods.

Silence.

“Maybe we shouldn’t terminate,” she says suddenly.”

“You know, Arlene, it is all right to feel sad and still terminate.”

“There’s no reason we have to end.”

“I think what you’re saying, Arlene, is that you don’t want to feel sad. If you’re going to say good-bye you have to keep yourself from feeling sad and if you start to feel sad you have to keep yourself from leaving.”

Arlene shakes her head. “If I feel sad maybe it just means I’m not ready to leave.”

“I wonder, Arlene, if you’re feeling with me as you did with your mother. In order to be your own person you felt you had to cut off your feelings about her, to feel nothing, or separating from her would have been too painful. And that’s what you’re doing with me as well.”
 
“Well, if I’m still doing that maybe I’m not ready to terminate.”

“Or maybe in our two remaining sessions we need to deal with your allowing yourself to feel sad and still say good-bye.”

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.

      

In Search of a Self

“I can’t believe it,” Janice says throwing her hands in the air. “Why does she feel she has the right to tell me what I should wear to my child’s graduation? I’m 42 years old. Shouldn’t I know what’s appropriate to wear and what isn’t?”

Janice is talking about her mother’s intrusiveness, a situation that has only worsened since her family moved to Florida a little over a year ago.

“Well,” I ask, “what does give her the impression that it’s all right for her to tell you what to do?”

“She’s always done it. That’s how she was when we were kids – especially with me as the only girl – and that’s how she is now. ”

“What did you say to her when she was telling you what to wear?”

“I said, ‘Ma, I’m a big girl now, remember?’”

“So you don’t confront her; you kind of make light of it.”

“I don’t scream at her if that’s what you mean.”

“No, I wasn’t talking about screaming at her. I was talking about having a genuine conversation about how you’re a grown woman who doesn’t need her mother to tell her what to wear and how it doesn’t feel good to have her invading every aspect of your life.”

Janice pauses and then asks, seemingly puzzled, “What’s the alternative?” 

Similarly confused, I say, “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean.”

“Well, when you just said it doesn’t feel good having her invade every aspect of my life, it suddenly felt scary to me, like if she wasn’t invading every aspect of my life would I feel, I don’t know, would I feel lost, abandoned?”

“That’s a very insightful question,” I say, thinking back on my own relationship with my intrusive mother. Early in my life I experienced her hovering as protective and safe, but I grew to chafe against it and needed to set my own boundaries. Perhaps Janice isn’t there yet. “So you’re saying that as much as you protest about your mother’s intrusiveness, perhaps there’s a part of you that still longs for it.” 

Janice looks at me, looks over at the clock, looks back at me and says, almost mournfully, “Ten minutes left.” 

So Janice longs for me as well, I think. I remain silent giving her the chance to pursue her own thoughts.  

“It’s so easy to me to feel lost, empty. Even when I’m with my kids, even when the house is bursting with noise, I often feel alone. I feel alone right now. You’re not saying anything and the session is almost over and I feel scared. And when I feel scared like this at home I call my mother. I sometimes fantasize calling you, but I wouldn’t do that – unless there was really some kind of emergency.”

I wonder how it is possible that I haven’t seen this side of Janice before today, how I accepted her protests against her mother’s intrusiveness at face value and didn’t see the scared little girl underneath. Was it because of my own experience with my mother? Perhaps. But I have an alternative thought. With her mother, Janice is the obedient child who accepts – and perhaps even welcomes - her mother’s intrusion into her life. With me, she is still the obedient child, but she knows – consciously or unconsciously - that I want her to be separate and independent, so she’s being as I want her to be. But as long as she’s being how I want her to be, she’s still not being her own separate person.

“I was just thinking, Janice, that you’re always trying to be the person the mothers in your life want you to be, whether that mother is your biological mother or me or perhaps other people as well. I think in the process of trying to please us all so you don’t have to feel scared and alone, you’ve kind of lost who you really are.”

“That feels really scary. Truthfully I’m not sure I’ve ever known who I am. I was my mother’s child and my husband’s wife and my children’s mother, and my brother’s sister, and your patient. I think all those people are different. I don’t think I have one me.”

“I can understand how that feels really scary, Janice. So I guess we know what we need to do. We need to find out who Janice really is.”