“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.”
Emma is uncharacteristically late for her first session after my vacation. Usually a psychologically aware woman, she has now spent 20 minutes talking about the plans for her daughter’s high school graduation party, chatting about the guest list and the menu.
I interrupt her. “How did you feel coming today?” I ask.
“Oh,” she says. “Well, I didn’t want to come. I did very well in your absence. In fact, I was thinking that this should be our last session.”
I groan inwardly. I have seen Emma for four years and there is no question she has come a long way – more able to stand up for herself, more self-confident, less intimidated by her husband. But she is a patient who has been in therapy with several therapists over the years, a patient who knows that her more long-standing issues of desire for and fear of intimacy remain stubbornly unchanged. In fact, she is enacting that issue at this moment – feeling abandoned during my vacation she has closed off the needy part of herself and now seeks to reject me just as she felt rejected.
And, it’s worked. I do feel rejected. I feel hurt that she should want to leave me, hurt that she could discard me so easily after the relationship we’ve built up over time. And whose feelings are these? Always a complicated question. Yes, I do believe that she is rejecting me just as she felt rejected by me and, earlier in her life, by a too-busy, self-involved mother. But I have my feelings too. I do go on vacation. I do have my own life. But my patients matter to me. I care about them. Besides, I don’t like good-byes.
“So why do you think you would decide this today?” I ask.
“I told you. I did very well in your absence.”
“I’m sure you did. You’ve never been someone who can’t function without me. But you know yourself well enough to question what affect my vacation would have had on this sudden decision.”
“I knew you’d bring that up,” she says, sighing theatrically.
I remain silent.
“What?” she says.
I gesture with my hand for her to continue.
“Why is it that everything I do gets to be analyzed while nothing you do gets put on the table?”
Surprised by her question, I ask, “What don’t I put on the table?”
“Like how do you just get to go on vacation, entirely arbitrarily? You get to decide when you go, for how long, and regardless of what’s happening in my life or any of your patients’. You’ve always telling me I cut myself off from my feelings, well it seems you’d have to cut yourself from your feelings as well.”
Alternate responses flit through my mind. I could pursue her anger which is quite apparent and might well be fruitful. But I worry she would experience that as evasive and defensive. Or I could respond directly to the issue she raised.
“You make a good point, Emma,” I say thoughtfully. “I am the one who arbitrarily decides when I go on vacation and I do put my patients’ lives aside during that time – I put your life aside, just as you often experienced your mother doing. But it doesn’t mean I stop caring about you and it certainly doesn’t mean I feel closed off to you when I return. Quite the contrary, I’m eager to hear about you and what’s been going on in your life and in your mind. And just as you feel hurt and discarded when I go on vacation, I feel hurt and discarded when you announce that you’re unilaterally going to end our four year relationship in one session.”
“You do?” Emma asks incredulously.
“I’m sorry that surprise you so much, Emma. It’s so hard for you to take in my caring. I suspect you’re afraid that if you acknowledge you’re loveable, you’d have to give up hope that your mother would ever love you as you needed and wanted to be loved.”
Emma’s eyes fill with tears. “This might sound silly, but right that moment when you said that, I felt my heart melt, like something opened in me; something opened, but something made me very sad too.”
“So maybe right at that moment you did feel my caring, but also felt the sadness of your mother’s inability to cherish you as the loveable child you were and are.”
I’ve been working with Marvin, a 72 year old depressed widower for nine months. His sessions – like his life - are boring and repetitive. He refuses to discuss the past – says he’s too old for that – and complains bitterly about the emptiness in his life. “Nothing’s better,” he says today. “I still sit alone in my apartment staring at the beautiful weather and wondering why I can’t get myself out there, even to take a walk. There’s no place to go. I’m just lost. When Esther was around, even if we did fight all the time, at least there was someone there. Now there’s nothing.”
I ask myself, not for the first time, why I don’t feel more empathy for this man. After all, I too am a widow. I know the pain of loss, the feeling of aloneness. It’s his passivity that I find difficult. I want to shake him, tell him to find some hobby, some activity, a friend, a girl-friend. But I do none of that, knowing full well that he would find reason to rebuff any suggestion I might make. Today, I take a different track.
“How do you feel about coming here?” I ask.
“I come,” he says, averting his eyes.
Although his answer is the typical passive, uninvolved response, I sense a certain discomfort and wonder if more is going on than he’s saying.
“But how do you feel about coming?” I ask again, more persistently.
“What do you mean?” he says, even more flustered.
“How does it feel for you to come here?” I repeat. “To see me?”
“I…I don’t know,” he says, squirming in the chair.
I remain silent.
“Maybe I shouldn’t come. Is that what you’re telling me?” he says petulantly.
“I didn’t hear myself say that.”
He sighs. “Everyone gets tired of me. Even my children tell me if I don’t stop complaining they won’t call any more. Not that they call that much.” He pauses. “You think I complain too much, don’t you?”
“Well,” I say, trying to be diplomatic, “I understand you’re feeling miserable and unhappy and wanting to talk about your feelings. But you don’t really talk about your feelings. Instead you present as a forlorn, helpless person stuck in your misery. Yes, Esther died and you’re alone and you can’t bring her back. But you can try, ever so slowly to make a life for yourself.”
“I love you,” he blurts out.
I’m stunned. And speechless. I flash on the story a well-known psychoanalyst, Dr. Glen Gabbard, told about himself when he was first starting out in the field. When a female patient told him she loved him, he responded first by saying, “No you don’t” and then by trying to convince her that what she felt was not “real” love, but transference from earlier loved figures in her life. I knew what not to do. What to do was more difficult.
“I’m flattered…” I say.
He interrupts, more animated than I’ve ever seen him. “You mean you love me too?” he asks hopefully.
Oh dear, I think. “I’m flattered that you think that much of me,” I continue. “And I’m really glad you’re able to feel so alive.”
“You don’t love me,” he says, immediately deflated.
“I care about you, but I don’t love you as you want and need to be loved.”
“Nobody ever loved me,” he says. “What a fool to think someone like you could love me.”
“I don’t think you’re a fool at all. I’m glad you’re able to engage in life sufficiently to feel love for me. Now we have to help you find someone who can love you back.”
He shakes his head. “That’s impossible. No one ever loved me, no one ever will.”
“I would really like to understand why you feel so unlovable.”
“Why don’t you love me?” he asks challengingly.
“I’m impressed,” I say truthfully. “You can be assertive when you want to be. But by looking to me for love, which I suspect you know wouldn’t be appropriate, I’d guess that you tend to look for love from people who can’t love you back, probably like the people who couldn’t love you in the past.”
Marvin slumps further down in the chair.
“You know,” I say, “now that I know you can have that spark, I’m going to be more insistent that you engage with me in therapy. We need to talk about the past. We need to talk about how you feel right this minute. We need to reintroduce you to life or perhaps introduce you to life for the first time.”
“You think that’s possible?” he asks.
“I detected a bit a hope in that question. I say we go with that hope.”
This is the beginning of Marjorie’s fourth month of therapy. She’s a reserved 45 year old woman who finds little meaning in her life as the third wife of a rich, older man who was born into money. Her days are spent attending luncheons, galas, and fundraisers.
She hands me a check for last month’s payment, then reaches into her Gucci purse and pulls out a small oblong package wrapped in stripped red and gold paper, tied with a gold bow. I groan inwardly.
“Marjorie …” I begin.
“I know, I know,” she interrupts. “I’m not supposed to give you gifts. I’m supposed to talk about why I want to give you gifts. But I know why I want to give you gifts. I don’t want to just give you your check. I want to give you more. You’re finally someone I can talk to, someone I can really talk to as opposed to all the ridiculous chatter I do every day.”
Marjorie and I have been discussing the issue of gifts since her second session. That day, when I went to greet her in the waiting room, she had placed a flowering plant in the middle of the coffee table, carefully rearranging the magazines to either side. I was taken aback and suggested we go to my office and discuss the plant.
“I just thought the waiting room needed a plant. I felt more alive after our first session than I had for years and thought a living plant was the perfect thank you.”
“That’s a lovely sentiment, Marjorie. And saying just that without actually bringing the plant would have been more than gift enough. That’s what we do here, we talk about our feelings, we don’t act on them.”
Many thoughts and feelings went through my mind: What if I can’t keep the plant alive? I remembered years ago when I practiced in Ann Arbor a patient saw the plant in my office as one or the other of us and how that plant fared took on huge significance. I also felt intruded upon. Was that a feeling born from the present interaction with Marjorie or was the feeling tainted by my childhood feelings about my parent’s intrusiveness? What if I didn’t want a plant in my waiting room?
For the moment, Marjorie and I agreed to disagree.
Following a particularly difficult session when Marjorie told me her life-long secret, namely that she had been molested by her uncle as a child, she brought me a crystal blue paperweight. “I know I’m not supposed to give gifts, but there was no other way I could thank you for allowing me to unburden myself from my lifetime of shame, for your accepting me, when I was sure no one ever could.”
That time I felt more compassion for Marjorie, experiencing her gift as an expression of her feeling that she herself wasn’t enough, that she had to offer more than herself to express her gratitude. “I appreciate your kindness, Marjorie, but I want you to realize that you, yourself are enough. I don’t need a gift. Your presence, your trust in me, your thank you is gift enough.”
“But I don’t feel that,” Marjorie said.
“I understand that,” I said. “We’ll work on it. But no more gifts.”
So this time, when Marjorie extends the red and gold package towards me, I feel my anger rise. Shaking my head, I say, “I’m not taking the gift this time, Marjorie. My understanding was that we were going to work on you and your words being enough.”
Marjorie looks stricken. “You’re not going accept my gift?”
“I’m not rejecting you, Marjorie. I’m rejecting your insistence on devaluing yourself.” I hear my choice of the word ‘insistence’ and realize that I’m not being completely honest, I’m not dealing with my feeling of Marjorie thrusting her gifts on me. And then I understand.
“Marjorie, I’m going to say something that might be hard for you to hear, but I do think it’s important. I know you give me gifts because you don’t think enough of yourself. But I think there’s something else as well. Your uncle. He presented himself as if he was giving you a gift, giving you something pleasurable.”
Marjorie gasps, covers her mouth with her hands, “You think I’m molesting you?” she says in horror.
“What I think is that you’re helping me to feel how you felt as a little girl. Your uncle was literally intruding on you, abusing you, but he was also giving you pleasure and that’s always what’s most difficult for childhood sexual abuse victims.”
“I feel so dirty,” Marjorie says. “I never wanted it to feel good.”
“I know,” I say, compassionately, “but it’s hard not to crave the attention and your body can’t help but react.”
Barely audible, she adds, “And, each time, he brought me a gift.”
“I’m such a mess,” Janette says. “And a coward. I hate myself. He does it again and again and I do nothing. I couldn’t believe it when I asked him last week where our tax returns were and he said he asked our accountant for an extension. My stomach dropped through the floor. He tried playing innocent, like he just didn’t have the time to get all the paperwork together and our tax guy was swamped anyway, etc., etc. But I knew better. I was so mad I started hitting him with my fists. He kept trying to worm out of it, but he knew I knew.
“So then he got all apologetic. Sorry! As if that could fix everything! I’m so mad. He goes to his Gamblers Anonymous meetings, he has a sponsor – supposedly anyway – but he keeps betting on those damn games and losing more and more of our money. It’s our money I remind him, but I’m just talking to myself. I know, he’s an addict, but that’s not an explanation. Besides, it doesn’t matter anymore why he does what he does, the problem is that I stay.”
I remain silent. Janette and I have been here many times and she indeed knows the problem.
She sighs. “I know, I’m reliving my childhood, my father an alcoholic, my mother a gambler. You would have thought I’d know better, but here I am, stuck in it all over again. I do hate myself. I’m furious at Joe, but I despise myself for my inability to get out. I know, I should feel more compassion for myself – that’s what you always say – but how can I feel compassionate when I’m so stupid.”
I feel Janette’s frustration, as well as my own, not so much at her inability to leave her husband, but at her unmerciless attacks on herself. “I doubt it’s that you’re stupid, Janette, but rather that you can’t give up hope. When you started this session you said you couldn’t believe it when you realized Joe had been gambling again. I think you couldn’t believe it because you keep hoping Joe will change, just as you hoped that your mother would change and your father would change.”
“Well,” Janette, asks defiantly, “Isn’t that proof that I’m stupid. If you keep hitting your head on the same brick wall, hoping that it will stop hurting, you must be stupid.”
Janette’s response intrigues me. “That’s an interesting response, you didn’t say hoping the wall would break, you said hoping it would stop hurting.”
“So, what’s that supposed to mean?”
“I’m not sure, but can you talk about your anger at me?”
“I’m just mad. Mad at me. Mad at Joe. Mad at you. We’ve been going round and round on this for a long time, and I’m still here.”
I wonder whether the “here” means with me or with Joe, but I ask, “How does it feel to feel mad at me?”
“Pointless. Just as it feels with Joe. You’re not going to change.”
“How would you like me to change?”
“Tell me how to get out of this damn marriage.”
The response that goes through my head – hire an attorney, file for divorce and don’t go back – shows me I’m more annoyed than I realize. “And if I can’t tell you how to get out of your damn marriage, what do you feel?”
“Angry.”
“I believe that you’re angry, but I wonder if you also feel scared and powerless?”
“I’m scared that he’s going to go through all our money. But I’m not powerless. All I have to do is be brave enough to leave.”
“What about when you were a child, Janette, when your father was drinking and your mother had gambled away your school lunch money?”
Her eyes fill with tears. “Why’d you have to bring that up?” She pauses. “Yeah, I was powerless then and I hated it. But if I started “sniveling” – that’s what my father called it – he’d just start screaming at me for being such a baby.”
“So that’s what you’re doing, Janette, you’re screaming at yourself just like your father screamed at you. And you keep hoping, not only that Joe and your parents will change, but that you can endure their repeated disappointments without feeling any pain. It’s an impossible task. But if you can acknowledge your own powerlessness and mourn both the husband and the parents you never had, you’ll be more able to make the break.”
“Doesn’t sound easy.”
“No, it’s not. Definitely not easy.”
“I’m afraid I’m going to be fired,” Tricia says.
I’m surprised. I’ve worked with Tricia over a year and she has given me only glowing reports about her success as a graphic designer.
“They think I stole Charlotte’s idea.”
“Did you?” I ask. Tricia has never spoken well of Charlotte. My sense is that Tricia is envious of Charlotte - her senior status, her looks, her ease in social situations.
“Of course not,” she replies indignantly.
“Then why should they think you did?”
“I just do.”
I wait.
“What, you don’t believe me? You think I’m lying?”
I knit my brows and look at Tricia, both perplexed and concerned. There’s a paranoid feel to this discussion that is making me anxious. “What’s going on, Tricia?”
“What? What do you mean?” she asks, raising her voice.
“I don’t understand why you’d think I thought you were lying or why you’re afraid you’ll be accused of stealing Charlotte’s idea and be fired.”
She stares at me defiantly and then deflates before my ideas, dissolving into tears.
“I’m bad. I’m bad and I’m going to be punished.”
I feel as though I am in the room with a child who’s been caught … Caught doing what? What comes to mind is caught with her pants down. I file away my internal meanderings and wait to hear what Tricia will say. But Tricia, looking frightened, says nothing.
Very gently, I ask, “Can you say what makes you bad, Tricia?”
She shakes her head, still not speaking.
Fantasies go through my head. She had sex with Charlotte. She beat Charlotte up. She hit someone with her car. She molested a child. She … I bring myself back to reality. Tricia’s anxiety is obviously contagious, but these are fantasies, not realistic possibilities.
“I had sex with Peter,” she blurts out.
Aha, I think, her boss - and Charlotte’s. She had sex with a male authority figure, a stand-in for her father and is afraid of the punishment from both inside her head and in the real world. Clearly she’s already punishing herself, branding herself as bad. She also fears retaliation from Charlotte, from me, from her mother, and from the powers that be at work.
Suddenly I flash on a patient I saw many years ago. She had been a teacher, but could no longer work. She had an affair with a married principal and felt so guilty that she became convinced everyone in the school system talked about her. She was tormented by her thoughts, but unable to move beyond them. I don’t work well with paranoid people. They remind me too much of my father, I’m too easily sucked into unfruitful and untherapeutic attempts to convince them of the wrongness of their thinking. I must tread lightly with Tricia.
“Sounds like you feel pretty guilty.”
“How could I be so stupid?” she asks, hitting her thigh with her fist. “Not only my boss, but Charlotte’s too. And I know Charlotte has a crush on him. Besides, he’s only toying with me. He tries to get in every woman’s pants. Now he’ll want to get rid of me.”
“So you feel you ‘stole’ Charlotte’s ‘man’ and that now he’ll get rid of you and choose Charlotte instead. That, you feel, would be your just punishment.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tricia says loudly.
“Tricia, why do you feel what you did was bad? And why are you so frightened?”
“I told you! It was stupid!!”
“Let’s say you decide it was stupid, that doesn’t seem enough of a reason to conclude that you’re bad and that you’re going to get fired. I do believe you do feel terribly guilty, but I suspect the origin of that guilt stems a lot further back.”
“You mean some dumb Oedipal thing? I never wanted to sleep with my father!”
“But I suspect you did want your father to prefer you to your sisters and perhaps even your mother.”
“He did prefer me,” Tricia says quietly looking down. “That’s why my mother hated me so much.”
I don’t know if Tricia’s assessment is accurate, but I suspect it is why Tricia feels so guilty and also why she’s convinced retribution must follow.
“It’s important that we try to understand your feelings about the relationship between you and your parents, but right now I wonder what you’re thinking about being fired.”
“It still think Peter might try and get rid of me and that Charlotte hates me, but I’m not feeling quite as scared as before.”
“Maybe that’s because you’re not beating up on yourself quite as much.”
Diana beams at me as I open the door to the waiting room, walks rapidly to my consulting room, and starts talking before I have a chance to sit.
“I couldn’t wait to tell you,” she says excitedly. “I left my apartment today without checking the door three times to see if it was locked.”
“Wow! That’s great,” I reply. “Quite an accomplishment.”
“I know. I’m proud of myself. But that doesn’t mean I’ll do it next time,” she adds, wanting to be sure that neither she nor I expect too much of her.
“But you did it this time. Any idea what made it possible?”
“Well, we’ve been talking about it a lot. I’ve been trying to tell myself what you always say, that checking the doors or the windows or whatever, doesn’t make me safe, it only gives me the illusion of safety.”
“So by telling yourself what I tell you, it’s like having me with you, which might also make you feel safer.”
“That’s definitely true. I always feel safe when I’m here.”
Twenty-seven year old Diana and I have been working together for several years. She’s very attached to me and does often see me as a safe haven in an otherwise unsafe world.
Diana has good reason to feel unsafe. The youngest of six children in a strict, religious household, Diana became her mother’s scapegoat, enduring vicious beatings and days of frigid silence. Her father was mostly absent and certainly not a protector. She couldn’t wait to leave for college but, much to her surprise, she felt frightened being away from home, became riddled with almost paralyzing obsessions and returned to the unsafe safety of her abusive family. She stayed at home through her Master’s degree in Marketing, performed at the top of her class, got an excellent job and moved into her own apartment. It was then she began treatment with me. We formed an almost instantaneous connection, I as the good mother, and she as the seemingly competent, capable adult, hiding a scared, vulnerable child underneath, a combination that invariably hooks me.
“I know you’d never hurt me,” Diana continues. “There’s no one else I can say that about.”
“There’s your black and white thinking again,” I admonish. “You know that I have hurt you, Diana, like when I misunderstand you or, worse still, when I go on vacation.”
“That’s for sure!”
“And there are other people you trust Diana, your brother Thomas, some of your friends.”
“You’re right. But now that you reminded me for the umpteenth time that the world is not all black and white, I feel scared that I didn’t check my door, like I need to rush home and check or someone will break in and be waiting for me.”
“I wonder if you’re saying that if I’m not all good, then I can’t magically protect you from the bad in the world and that makes you feel both angry with me for reminding you of that reality, as well as more vulnerable, like there is no magic that can keep you safe, that neither you nor I are omnipotent.”
Diana sighs. “It’s always about that, isn’t it, anger and vulnerability. I’m scared of everyone’s anger – including my own – and I’m afraid if there’s no magical protection I’m going to be hurt.”
“I’d say you summed that up very well.”
“So what do I do about it?”
“You try to remember that just because you’re not omnipotent – that checking the doors three times isn’t magic – doesn’t mean that you’re powerless. It doesn’t mean you’re the helpless, dependent child at the mercy of your mother. It means that your power is limited, just like every other person in the world.”
Diana continues for me. “And just because I’m angry doesn’t mean I’m so powerful that my anger can destroy.”
I nod.
After a brief pause Diana says, “I’m trying to decide how I feel about not checking my door.”
I remain silent.
“I guess I’d say I feel sort of in the middle, not as happy as I was when I first came in, but not as scared as I was a few minutes ago. I think I can go to work rather than rushing home, but I might feel more scared going home tonight.”
“What might you do to help yourself be less scared?”
She smiles. “Think about being here. Or even better, imagine you’re coming to see my apartment.” She pauses. “But maybe I’ll ask Barb to come over. She doesn’t have your magic, but she’s a more likely visitor.”
