I tell Wendell about the time I was in college on the East Coast, missing home and unsure if I wanted to stay there. My father heard the pain in my voice and got on a plane and flew three thousand miles to sit with me on a park bench across from my dorm, in the cold winter weather, and just listen. He listened to me for two more days, and I felt better, and he went home. I haven’t thought about this in years.
I also recount what happened this past weekend after my son’s basketball game. As the boys ran off to celebrate their victory, my father took me aside and told me that he’d just been at a friend’s funeral the day before. After the funeral, he explained, he’d gone up to the friend’s daughter, now in her thirties, and said, “Your father was so proud of you. Every conversation we had, he’d say, ‘I’m so proud of Christina,’ and he’d tell me about all you were doing!” This was absolutely true, but Christina was shocked.
“He never told me that,” she said, bursting into tears. My father was floored until he realized that he wasn’t sure if he’d told me how he felt about me. Had he done it at all—or enough?
“So,” my father said outside the gym, “I want to make sure that I’ve told you how proud of you I am. I want to make sure you know.” He said it in such a shy way, obviously uncomfortable having this kind of interaction; he was used to listening to others but keeping his emotional world to himself.
“I know,” I said, because my father had communicated his pride to me in countless ways, though I wasn’t always listening as well as I should have been. But that day I couldn’t help hearing the subtext: I’m going to die sooner rather than later. We stood there, the two of us, hugging and crying as people passing by tried not to stare, because we both knew that this was the beginning of my father’s goodbye.
“As your eyes are opening, his are beginning to close,” Wendell says now, and I think about how bittersweet but true that is. My awakening is happening at an opportune moment.
“I’m so glad I have this time with him and that it can be so meaningful,” I say. “I wouldn’t want him to abruptly die one day and feel like it’s too late, that I waited too long for us to really see each other.”
Wendell nods, and I feel queasy. All of a sudden I remember that Wendell’s father had died ten years ago very unexpectedly. In my Google search, I’d come across his father’s obituary after I read the story of his death in his mother’s family interview. Apparently, Wendell’s father had been in seemingly perfect health when he’d collapsed at dinner. I wonder if my talking about my father this way might be painful for him. I also worry that if I say any more, I’ll give away how much I know. So I pull back, ignoring the fact that therapists are trained to listen for what patients aren’t saying.
A few weeks later, Wendell comments that for the past couple of sessions, I seem to have been editing myself—ever since, he adds, I sent him the Viktor Frankl quote and he’d mentioned his wife. He wonders (what would we therapists do without the word wonder to broach a sensitive topic?) how the mention of his wife has affected me.
“I haven’t really thought about that,” I say. It’s true—I’ve been focused on hiding my internet search.
I look at my feet, then at Wendell’s. Today’s socks are a blue chevron pattern. When I lift my head, I see that Wendell is looking at me with his right eyebrow raised.
And then I realize what Wendell is getting at. He thinks that I’m jealous of his wife, that I want him all to myself! This is called romantic transference, a common reaction patients have to their therapists. But the idea that I have a crush on Wendell strikes me as hilarious.
I look at Wendell, in his beige cardigan and khakis and funky socks, his green eyes staring back at me. For a second, I imagine what it must be like to be married to Wendell. In a photo I’d found of him and his wife, they were at a charity event, arm in arm and all dressed up, Wendell smiling at the camera and his wife looking at him adoringly. I remember feeling a twinge of envy when I saw that photo, not because I was envious of his wife but because they seemed to have the kind of relationship I wanted for myself—with someone else. But the more I deny the romantic transference, the less Wendell will believe me. The lady doth protest too much.
There are about twenty minutes left in the session—even as a patient, I can feel the rhythm of the hour—and I know that this façade can’t last forever. There’s only one thing to do.
“I Googled you,” I say, looking away. “I stopped stalking Boyfriend, and I ended up stalking you. When you mentioned your wife, I already knew all about her. And your mother.” I pause, especially mortified by this last part. “I read that long interview with your mom.”
I get ready for . . . I don’t know what. Something bad to happen. A tornado to enter the room and alter our connection in some intangible but irreparable way. I wait for everything to feel distant, different, changed between us. But instead, the opposite happens. It feels as though the storm came in, passed through the room, and left not ruins but a clearing in its wake.
I feel lighter, relieved of a burden. Sharing difficult truths might come with a cost—the need to face them—but there’s also a reward: freedom. The truth releases us from shame.
Wendell nods, and we sit there in a wordless conversation. Me: I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that. That was so invasive. Him: It’s okay. I understand. It’s natural to be curious. Me: I’m happy for you—for the loving family that you have. Him: Thank you. I hope you will have this one day too.
And then we have a version of that conversation aloud. We also talk about my curiosity. Why I kept it a secret. What it was like to hold that secret and also know so much about him. What I imagined would happen between us if I revealed it—and how it feels now that I have. And because I’m a therapist—or maybe because I’m a patient and I just need to know—I ask him what it’s like to learn that I stalked him. Is there anything I found that he wishes I didn’t know? Does he feel different about me, about us?
Only one of his answers shocks me: He has never seen the interview with his mother! He didn’t know it existed online. He knew that his mother had done an interview for that organization, but he thought it was for their internal archives. I ask if he worries that other patients might come across it and he sits back and takes a breath. For the first time, I see his forehead scrunch up.
“I don’t know,” he says after a beat. “I’ll have to think about it.”
Frankl’s quote pops into my mind again. He’s making space between stimulus and response in order to choose his freedom.
Our time is up, so Wendell gives his legs the usual two pats and stands. We head for the exit, but at the threshold, I stop.
“I’m sorry about your father,” I say. After all, the jig is up. He knows I know the whole story.
Wendell smiles. “Thank you.”
“Do you miss him?” I ask.
“Every day,” he says. “Not a day goes by that I don’t miss him.”
“Not a day will go by that I won’t miss my father either,” I say.
He nods, and we stand there, thinking about our fathers together. When he steps back to open the door for me, I see a hint of moisture in his eyes.
There’s so much more I want to ask him. Is he at peace with where things were left when his father collapsed? I think about the ways in which sons and fathers can get tangled up in expectations and yearnings for approval. Did his father ever tell him he was proud of him, not despite his rejecting the family business and carving out his own path but because of it?
I won’t learn more about Wendell’s father, but we’ll have many discussions in the coming weeks and months about mine. And through these discussions, it will become clear that by seeking a male therapist, I had hoped to get an objective opinion on the breakup, but instead, I got a version of my father.
Because my father, too, shows me how it feels to be exquisitely seen.
41
Integrity Versus Despair
Rita is sitting across from me in her smart slac
ks and sensible shoes giving a detailed commentary on why her life is hopeless. Her session, like most of her sessions, feels like a dirge, which is all the more confounding because between bouts of insisting that nothing will ever change, she has been making changes both minute and monumental.
Back when she and Myron were friends, pre-Randie, Myron had made Rita a website so that she could catalog her art online. This way, he said, she could keep her pieces organized and also share them with others. But Rita didn’t think she needed a website. “Who’s going to look at it?” she asked.
“I will,” Myron said. Three weeks later, Rita had a website with exactly one visitor. Well, two, if you counted Rita who, truth be told, loved it. It looked so professional. Those first weeks, she spent hours each day clicking around on her site, coming up with ideas for new projects, imagining them on display. But her excitement waned when Myron started dating Randie. Why bother posting anything new now? She didn’t know how to work the darn thing anyway.
Then one afternoon, Rita ran into Myron and Randie holding hands in the lobby, and, to make herself feel better, she hightailed it to the art-supply store and splurged on materials. Carrying the goods up to her apartment, she tripped over a couple of kids who darted out from nowhere. The bags of brushes, acrylics, and gouaches, the canvases and cartons of clay—all of it came tumbling down, along with Rita, who was caught at the last second by a strong pair of hands.
The hands belonged to the kids’ father, Kyle, whom Rita had seen many times through her peephole but had never met. He was the dad from the “Hello, family” apartment across from hers, and he’d saved his neighbor from a potential broken hip.
After Kyle asked the kids to apologize for not looking where they were going, they all gathered up Rita’s supplies and carried them into her apartment. There, in her living room turned art studio, they saw Rita’s work covering the entire space—portraits and abstracts on easels, ceramics near a potter’s wheel, charcoals in progress hanging from a board on the wall. The kids were in heaven. And Kyle was stunned. You have talent, he said. Real talent. You should sell these.
They went back to their apartment, and shortly after, when Kyle’s wife, Anna, arrived home (“Hello, family!”), the kids begged their mom to go across the hall with them to see “the art lady’s” living room. Rita was stationed, as usual, at the peephole, and the knock came before Rita had a chance to back away. She counted to five, asked, “Who is it?” and greeted them with mock surprise.
Soon Rita was teaching art to Sophia and Alice, ages five and seven, and often joined the “Hello, family” for, well, family dinner. One afternoon, Anna came home and yelled, “Hello, family!” to Sophia and Alice, who were painting in Rita’s living room. The kids called back, “Hello!” and then Alice turned to Rita and asked why she didn’t answer when their mom said hello.
“I’m not family,” Rita said matter-of-factly, to which Alice replied, “Yes, you are. You’re our California grandma!” The girls’ grandparents lived in Charleston and Portland. They visited often, but it was Rita who saw them nearly every day.
Anna, meanwhile, had hung one of Rita’s paintings over the sofa in the family’s living room. Rita also painted two custom pieces for the kids’ room—a dancer for Sophia and a unicorn for Alice. The girls were elated. Anna tried to pay Rita for her work, but Rita refused, insisting they were gifts. Finally, Kyle, a computer programmer, convinced Rita to let him add a feature to her website, an online store. He sent out an email to the parents of Sophia’s and Alice’s classmates, and soon Rita was taking orders for children’s custom portraits. One parent also purchased ceramics for her dining room.
Given all of these developments, I had expected Rita’s mood to improve. She was coming alive, leading a less constricted life. She had people to talk to every day. She was sharing her artistic talent with others who admired it. She wasn’t invisible in the same way she’d been when she first came to see me. But still, her pleasure or joy or whatever she felt (“It’s nice, I suppose,” was the most she would say) lived beneath a dark cloud, a running litany of how if Myron really meant what he’d said in the parking lot at the Y, he would have dated Rita instead of that disgusting Randie in the first place, how no matter how kind they were, the hello-family weren’t really her family, and how she would still die alone.
She seemed to be stuck in what the psychologist Erik Erikson termed despair.
In the mid-1900s, Erikson came up with eight stages of psychosocial development that still guide therapists in their thinking today. Unlike Freud’s stages of psychosexual development, which end at puberty and focus on the id, Erikson’s psychosocial stages focus on personality development in a social context (such as how infants develop a sense of trust in others). Most important, Erikson’s stages continue throughout the entire lifespan, and each interrelated stage involves a crisis that we need to get through to move on to the next. They look like this:
Infant (hope)—trust versus mistrust
Toddler (will)—autonomy versus shame
Preschooler (purpose)—initiative versus guilt
School-age child (competence)—industry versus inferiority
Adolescent (fidelity)—identity versus role confusion
Young adult (love)—intimacy versus isolation
Middle-aged adult (care)—generativity versus stagnation
Older adult (wisdom)—integrity versus despair
The eighth stage is where people Rita’s age generally find themselves. Erikson maintained that, in later years, we experience a sense of integrity if we believe we have lived meaningful lives. This sense of integrity gives us a feeling of completeness so that we can better accept our approaching deaths. But if we have unresolved regrets about the past—if we think that we made poor choices or failed to accomplish important goals—we feel depressed and hopeless, which leads us to despair.
It seemed to me that Rita’s current despair about Myron was tied to an old despair, and that was why it was hard for her to enjoy any of the ways her life had expanded. She was used to viewing the world from a place of deficit, and as a result, joy felt foreign to her. If you’re used to feeling abandoned, if you already know what it’s like for people to disappoint or reject you—well, it may not feel good, but at least there are no surprises; you know the customs in your own homeland. Once you step into foreign territory, though—if you spend time with reliable people who find you appealing and interesting—you might feel anxious and disoriented. All of a sudden, nothing’s familiar. You have no landmarks, nothing to go by, and all of the predictability of the world you’re used to is gone. The place you came from may not be great—it might, in fact, be pretty awful—but you knew exactly what you’d get there (disappointment, chaos, isolation, criticism).
I’ve talked about this with Rita, about how for so much of her life she wanted not to be invisible, to be seen, and now this was happening—in her relationship with her neighbors, in the people who bought her art, and in Myron’s declaration of his romantic interest. These people enjoyed her company, admired her, desired her, saw her—and yet she seemed unable to acknowledge that anything positive was happening.
“Are you waiting for the other shoe to drop?” I ask. There’s a term for this irrational fear of joy: cherophobia (chero is the Greek word for “rejoice”). People with cherophobia are like Teflon pans in terms of pleasure—it doesn’t stick (though pain cakes on them as if to an ungreased surface). It’s common for people with traumatic histories to expect disaster just around the corner. Instead of leaning into the goodness that comes their way, they become hypervigilant, always waiting for something to go wrong. That might be why Rita still fumbled for tissues in her purse even though she knew a fresh box was beside her on the table. Better not to get used to a full box of tissues, or a surrogate family next door, or people purchasing your art, or the man you’re dreaming about giving you a big fat kiss in the parking lot. Don’t delude yourself, sister! The second you get too comfortable—whoosh!—it
will all go away. For Rita, joy isn’t pleasure; it’s anticipatory pain.
Rita looks up at me, nodding. “Exactly,” she says. “The other shoe always drops.” It did when she got to college, when she married an alcoholic, when she had two more chances at love and those went out the window too. It did when her father died and she finally—finally!—started to have a relationship with her mother, only to have her mother diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, after which Rita had to care for this woman who no longer recognized her for twelve long years.
Of course, Rita didn’t have to bring her mother into her apartment during those years—she chose to because somehow her misery served her. At the time it never occurred to her to ask if she had an obligation to take care of her mother when her mother hadn’t taken care of her while she was growing up. She didn’t grapple with that toughest of tough questions: What do I owe my parents, and what do they owe me? She could have gotten outside help for her mother. Rita considers this as we talk, but then she says that if she had to do it over, she’d do it all the same.
“I got what I deserved,” she explains. She deserves this misery for all of her crimes—ruining her kids’ lives, lacking compassion for her second husband’s grief, never getting her own life together. What feels horrible to her are her recent glimmers of happiness. She feels like a fraud, like somebody who won the lottery but stole the ticket. If the people who have come into her life lately really knew her, they would be disgusted. They would run for the hills! She’s disgusted. And even if she were to somehow fool them for a time, a few months, a year, who knows, how can she be happy when her kids are so sad—and because of her? That doesn’t seem fair, does it? How can someone have done something so awful and still be asking for love?
This, she says, is why there’s no hope for her. She balls up a tissue in her hand. Too much has happened. Too many mistakes were made.
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone_A Therapist, HER Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed Page 31
