The Inheritance of Shame

by Peter Gajdics

  “Read The Primal Scream by Arthur Janov, and also these papers,” he said, handing me a copy of “The Etiology of Neurosis and the Role of Reparenting in the Healing of the Inner Child,” which he’d had published somewhere in Europe.

  Then he pulled out what appeared to be a prescription pad, scribbled for a few minutes on it, and handed it to me.

  Rivotril and Surmontil.

  “Fill this prescription and follow the directions on how to take the medication. If you decide this isn’t for you, that’s okay. But you’re going to have to stabilize your sleep patterns before embarking on any type of therapy. You can’t do therapy without restorative sleep.”

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  I left Alfonzo’s office and walked straight to a nearby pharmacy. I decided not to fill his two prescriptions until I’d had a chance to read up on each of the drugs, but I wanted to buy more of the skin cream that already hadn’t worked twice before.

  “Sometimes you need more than one application,” the pharmacist explained in a hushed tone at the back counter. “Because of the larva, the eggs.” I left the store with two more bottles, prepared to repeat the procedure as many times as necessary.

  I would have rushed home and smeared my body, but I had to bus up to a second-year poetry workshop at the university. Surrounded by nine other students and my professor, an emaciated older man who seemed to take pleasure out of tearing apart not only the word choices but the entire self-worth of each of his twenty-something-year-old students, not once did I not think about what I could not escape.

  After class I quickly researched the two prescriptions in the school library. Rivotril, or clonazepam, I read in a pharmaceutical directory, belonged to the class of medications called benzodiazepines, generally used as a sedative or to decrease seizures or anxiety. If used over a period of time, the drug was known to become addictive. Surmontil, or trimipramine, on the other hand, was one of many types of tricyclic antidepressants. “Tricyclics,” as they were commonly known, were most often prescribed in cases of clinical depression.

  My choice was not a difficult one to make: I didn’t want to get addicted to anything, and I had never thought of myself as “clinically depressed,” so I decided to skip both medications. Alfonzo would understand, I told myself. After all, he was a doctor, and doctors, I’d always believed, were compassionate and respectful of their patients.

  After the fourth page of his scientific paper, which read to me like gibberish, I still had no idea what to expect from his therapy. But he did reference Alice Miller’s Prisoners of Childhood, a book I’d read repeatedly for years, and still had a highlighted, dog-eared copy in my backpack.

  Instead of busing home, I walked to a nearby stretch of beach flanked, at one end, by jagged cliffs. I wanted my body to be shocked, so in the winter breeze I unzipped my jacket. Seconds later, I heard a voice call out to me from behind.

  “You work at the university.”

  When I turned around, another student from my university, a man of about my age who ate almost every day at the student union cafeteria where I worked part-time as a cook and cashier, picked up his speed to walk alongside me.

  “Yes,” I answered. “You’re a student at the university, right?”

  His face was clear and open, with walnut eyes that looked intently into mine. “Do you live around here?”

  “No, I, no. I live close to the university, actually. I was just out, walking…”

  “Mind if I walk with you?”

  “Sure…”

  “What are you studying?”

  “Creative writing.”

  “An artist. So, are you a sensitive young man?”

  He smiled. I glanced at him, as we continued along the shore. He was smartly dressed in a black turtleneck and pleated brown cords, and his hands, I noticed, remained tucked inside the pockets to his beige, unbuttoned trench coat.

  “And you? I mean, what are you studying?”

  “Engineering.”

  “So, that means you’re not sensitive?”

  “I am, actually.”

  Beneath the flood of a street lamp, we stopped. In the corridor of wind, his scent blew up against me. I couldn’t escape his eyes, his body, what they did to me. I froze.

  “I think there’s a coffee shop around here,” he said, glancing back. “Would you like to grab a coffee or…something?”

  A familiar loss of breath, desire mixed with panic, took hold.

  “Maybe…another time,” I managed to say. “But thanks…”

  I didn’t look back, but felt his eyes on me, behind, as I disappeared into the night.

  6

  I MET WITH ALFONZO a second time a week after our initial consultation.

  “I wouldn’t worry too much about my paper,” he said. “The world of academia can be quite stuffy. All the terminology is necessary for publication, but it can be an Achilles’ heel to the public.”

  I glanced down to a copy of the paper, the sections I’d highlighted throughout. “So, this word you use…‘abreaction.’”

  “Feeling.”

  “Feeling?”

  “Well, feeling at the level of change.”

  Deep, transformational change, Alfonzo explained, occurred only when a person’s inner child was accessed, their “primal pain” experienced, and any lessons learned were integrated. Then they could finally “grow back up” to their “chronological age.”

  “And all of it,” Alfonzo said proudly, “can occur during a single primal session.”

  He stared at me for a moment, searching my eyes for some reaction.

  “No other therapeutic process can claim to do what I’ve perfected in this therapy. The way the patient dips back down into the world of their childhood, their primal world. It’s like peeling an onion, session after session, layer upon layer, until you reach the core. But first you have to find a way of peeling the onion. It’s Alice down the rabbit hole. You’ll see. You’ll experience it for yourself. Then you’ll know exactly what I mean.”

  “So, what’s at the core of the onion?”

  He smiled. “Nothing. Everything.”

  “And this other word you use…‘introject’?”

  “Your internalized parents.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it. Like I said, I wouldn’t worry about the paper. You’ll learn how to do the therapy yourself. I’ll teach you, then you’ll feel it for yourself.”

  We were nearing the end of the session when I realized I’d never seen any diplomas or certificates anywhere in his office, not on the walls or on his desk.

  “Can I ask you about your background?” I asked. “Where did you go to school?”

  “Are you implying that I don’t know what I’m talking about?”

  “I was just wondering where you studied.”

  “You were just wondering where I studied,” he repeated, singing my own words back to me. He ignored my question but continued writing notes. “How are you finding the medications?” he asked.

  “I decided not to fill the prescriptions.”

  He stopped writing, placed his pen on the desk, and stood up.

  “Are you questioning my authority?” He turned and paced toward the window, three steps ahead, then back and stopping only because he’d reached the foot of my chair. “You think you know more than me? Is that it? Listen here, sonny boy, I was a doctor before you were born.”

  His eyes narrowed, his finger was pointed in my face. I was speechless.

  After a moment he lowered his hand, returned to his seat, finished his notes, then said something about making another appointment for the following week. But I was holding my breath and only thought about getting out the door before the tears came again. This time I wasn’t sure I’d be able, or even want, to turn them off.

  The next day I returned to the general practitioner who’d referred me.

  “What sort of issues are you struggling with?” he said. “I don’t think you told me this before.” He glanced
at my chart.

  “Issues?”

  He sat back on his swivel stool in the pristine examination room and waited.

  “Well…I moved to Victoria to go to school, but…that was really an excuse to escape my family. We’ve been fighting for months. I can’t sleep. Sometimes I have these…episodes.”

  “What kind of episodes?”

  “Like I’m looking through a tunnel. I can’t breathe. It feels like I’m going to die.”

  “You wouldn’t rather see a clinical psychologist?”

  “I can’t afford a psychologist. I know psychiatry is covered under my provincial health plan, though, right?”

  “Dr. Alfonzo is the only psychiatrist in this city who’s accepting new patients. If you want another referral, you may end up waiting another two years.”

  “Two years? I can’t wait two years…”

  I didn’t leave.

  “Was there something else?”

  “Well, yes…actually.”

  He waited.

  “I had…I mean, I’ve had…crabs…body lice. I’ve tried twice to get rid of them, but I think they’re coming back. I feel like I’m being eaten alive.”

  Through his thick bifocals, the doctor’s eyes swelled. “If the cream doesn’t work, you need to try it again. Wait one week and reapply as the directions instruct. Meanwhile, you may want to limit your sexual partners.”

  My only wish, as I lay in bed that night with twice the recommended remedy searing my flesh, was that I could get at the roots, kill the eggs. No matter how I tried, it seemed there was always something left inside of me I couldn’t quite clean.

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  Alfonzo called me at home the next day.

  “I was just wondering how you’re doing. Have you decided about my therapy?”

  “Not really,” I said, knowing I could always hang up and never go back if he attacked me on the phone. “I still have some concerns.”

  “What would they be?”

  “Well, the medications, for one. I don’t really want to take medication.”

  “Okay,” he said, calmly, “that’s your choice.” All his patients started off on at least one of the tricyclics, he explained—to ensure their sleep patterns stabilized before treatment began. “But if you’re not comfortable with medication, then we won’t use any medication. Anything else?”

  “Your scientific paper is still confusing to me. I’m trying to wrap my head around your form of treatment. What exactly happens during a therapy session?”

  “Have you read The Primal Scream yet?”

  “I started…”

  What I’d read, in fact, had intrigued me. In the 1960s, American psychologist and psychiatric worker Arthur Janov claimed to have “discovered” primal therapy as a “cure” for all psychological neurosis. His actual treatment seemed to involve a two-phase process. In the first phase, patients experienced intense bouts of crying and screaming, known as “primal regressions” or “primals,” through controlled acts of breathing while lying on their backs. The second involved vivid, psychological insights into a particular historical event of trauma. Janov’s fame grew when the Beatle John Lennon took his treatment and incorporated screaming into one of his songs.

  “I don’t like to call my therapy ‘Primal Therapy,’” Alfonzo continued on the phone, “especially since Janov trademarked the phrase back in the sixties. He used to sue people who violated the copyright. But the idea behind our therapy’s the same: regressions. Of course, Janov never provided reparenting, like I will.”

  “What do you mean by ‘reparenting’?”

  Alfonzo’s plan, as he continued to explain, was to hire a woman in the next six months—“to act as a surrogate parent” following all my primal sessions in the office. “Nurturing the child is what’s most important,” he said. “You won’t find anyone else offering this type of experiential therapy, Peter. Not anywhere in the city, perhaps not anywhere in the world. You won’t find the nurturing, that’s for sure. But my patient list is filling up fast, so…if you’re interested, you better make up your mind soon.”

  Alfonzo’s words rang through me throughout Christmas season—during the two-hour ferry back to Vancouver and the ensuing festivities with my family that had brought me joy as a child, but which now left me cold, resentful, and detached. I thought of nothing but my need to talk to someone, anyone, about my parents who’d said they loved their son but rejected his homosexuality. How they could separate the two, me from my sexuality, I did not know, and only knew I could no longer do that in myself. Maybe Alfonzo would decide not to use a surrogate parent; maybe he’d decide that this sort of nurturing was not the best idea, not for me, because even the thought of it made me anxious.

  In the background on several television sets, I saw newscasts about the Berlin Wall, the fall of communism, the end of the Cold War. Walls were coming down as others, between my parents and I, went up. When my parents asked that I attend Christmas Mass with them at Our Lady of Perpetual Help, I wanted to say, Why would I go to church after everything the church has told me about who I am? Why would I do that to myself?

  But I went.

  My parents and I sat in the same third pew from the front as my whole family had when my siblings and I were children: me next to my mother, my father next to her. I looked around but recognized no one from my past. All the families with their ten, twelve, thirteen children were replaced with families of three, maybe four. As the congregation started singing, and I didn’t, I thought about the last time I sang at church. I was eleven.

  My mother and I had been sitting side by side, as usual, holding hands, the rest of my family lined up next to us. The priest began his sermon. He praised our Lord God, Creator of life and the Universe, and his only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, Savior of mankind. But then he started talking about purgatory, damnation, the fires of Hell, that we were sinners, every last one of us, and that judgment day was growing ever nearer. When he mentioned “all the homosexuals, the lot of them condemned to Satan,” my palms began to sweat, my throat constricted. His eyes, which seemed to be burrowing into me, my soul, burned with all the hatred I imagined lay waiting for me at judgment. I tried to uncurl my fingers from around my mother’s, but she squeezed them tighter, pulled me into her.

  The sermon ended. The congregation stood to sing. But when I opened my mouth to join in, nothing came out: no sound, no music.

  My mother noticed my silence, a paleness that had washed over me, and bent down and whispered. “What’s wrong with you? Why aren’t you singing?”

  I couldn’t sing. Music was no longer in me to sing.

  There was never any choice but to line up behind my parents, along with all the other parishioners, for Holy Communion. Step by step, I approached the altar, could not even hear the hymn above the pounding of my heart.

  Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…

  As I stepped forward I neared a cliff; to turn back would have drawn undue attention to myself, contravened all duty to my parents, my faith, the Church; to step forward and receive Christ’s Body in my mouth would be to drop unrepentantly into my own damned soul, after which there would be no forgiveness, forever.

  I shall fear no evil…

  I received the Body of Christ. But as I returned to our pew, a faint resignation of hope shuddered through me, like a cold, quiet sweat.

  …for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

  The start of damnation.

  Sitting now in the same third pew during Christmas Mass, I still didn’t sing. During all the hymns I stood beside my parents, closed-mouthed. My mother glanced over at me, but said nothing. I also had not lined up for Communion in years, but my parents had long since stopped asking me why not. They received the Body of Christ as I waited for Mass to end.

  After the Christmas season, on the last day of the year at the end of the decade, I said goodbye to my parents and returned once again by ferry to my new life as a un
iversity student. For the first time in weeks, my skin was calm, uninfested, but a hole inside my heart had become like a crater in my soul. Standing in a cold winter fog on the outside deck, I knew that sex was what I’d used to kill my pain, and sex was what was causing me pain, and that if I did not talk to someone, fast, sex would kill me.

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  Three weeks later, I followed Alfonzo through the inner chamber, “the workroom,” as he called it, and into his adjoining private office. Slits of light streamed through the shutters. There were leafy plants and overcrowded bookshelves. He sat on a black leather recliner in front of his L-shaped desk and motioned for me to sit in the chair across from him.

  “I’m placing you in a group of heterosexual men and women,” he said.

  Tears flooded my eyes. “But…I thought…you said something about a group with other…men.”

  “That’s not going to happen.” To supplement my groups, he explained, I would have to begin individual sessions with him. Except he didn’t want me to talk. “Not yet. First you need to learn how to do the therapy. Then you can talk. Your thoughts are still far too disorganized.”

  He stood and told me to follow him back into the workroom. Since my previous visit, all the walls had been constructed, with the framed quote from A Course in Miracles hanging above a blacked-out window at one end of the room. He dimmed the lights and plopped himself into a squat chair, similar to a waiting-room chair but with its aluminum legs sawed off, positioned in the middle of one side of the room, back up against the wall, so that he was at eye level to a large sheeted mattress in the middle of the floor.

  “Lie down,” he said.

  I lay down, now mere inches from him.

  “First, close your eyes and breathe in deeply through your nose, then exhale with a grunt through your mouth. In through your nose, out with a grunt. Keep doing that. And start moving your arms and legs, like you’re walking down the street. Don’t stop.”

  I did as I was told: closed my eyes, breathed as he’d instructed, moved my arms and legs on the mattress.

  “Next I want you to think about a person or event from your past. Something that’s troubling to you. Keep vocalizing your breaths while thinking about that event, and continue moving your arms and legs like you’re walking.”